- Everett, Barbara. "Macbeth: Succeeding."
- Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare's Tragedies. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. 83-105.
Thesis: Everett's general thesis is the "truth to ordinary experience" (1) of Shakespeare's tragedies. In Macbeth that ordinary experience is the pursuit of success. Commenting on Macbeth's realization that he will never have "Honor, Love, Obedience, Troops of Friends," Everett writes,
This is the Macbeth whom Shakespeare has created as the human creature in pursuit of success, and who feels the deepening intensities of the pain of true human failure. We see here, as at moments everywhere through the tragedy, the larger human life that Macbeth and his "poore heart" might have enjoyed, but which he has failed to understand. This experience Shakespeare sums up in one of the last lines Macbeth speaks before he is swallowed up by his last battle -- a line of extraordinary power in its simplicity, and indeed it seems to me one of the very great lines of literature: "I 'ginne to be a-weary of the Sun." Murder and tyranny are transmuted into altogether other human simplicities. (105)
Evaluation: Everett's main point is persuasive, but her style is rather rambling, so that you often wonder where she's going with a thought.
Bottom Line: Rewarding for the patient.