Macbeth and Criminology

This article—really a series of three essays—addresses the dynamic and mutually beneficial relationship between Shakespeare studies and criminology. In the scant scholarship considering this connection, the play Macbeth has emerged—with its murders and madnesses and crises of masculinity—as a source of fascination for criminologists (as well as criminals themselves).¹ Building out from this historical curiosity, my take is both more textual and more theoretical. I use the example of Macbeth to illustrate, first, how criminological theories can help us improve our understanding of Shakespeare’s plays and, second, how Shakespeare’s plays can help us improve our criminological theories. I contend that Shakespeare was doing an early version of what we now call “criminology”—understood as the formal study of crime, criminals, criminal law, criminal justice, and social ills that could or should be criminalized—when he wrote tragedies such as Macbeth.² Understanding criminology as such, I have avoided saying that it is a “modern” and “scientific” discipline, which might ruffle some criminologists’ feathers, but I have done so because criminologists have at times acknowledged conceptual precedents for their theories in Shakespeare’s plays and used his plays as evidence for their ideas, calling into question the notion that criminology is a purely scientific enterprise associated with the modern age.³

Shakespeare’s humanistic and early-modern criminology in Macbeth, conducted through the resources of dramatic expression provided by the genre of tragedy, taps into the question that really drives all criminology: Who is to blame, the individual or the society? Like modern criminology, Macbeth’s multiple responses to this question are circumstantial, complex, and qualified. The first section below, “Gender and Crime in Macbeth,” shows how Shakespeare has surfaced in works of criminology and how his works can be used to test existing criminological theories and generate new ones. The second section, “The American Dream and the Scottish Play,” shows how criminological theories can aid a literary analysis of Shakespeare’s drama. And the third section, “Madness, Murder, and Medicine in Macbeth,” shows how criminological theories can influence modern Shakespearean performance and also how modern performances influenced by criminological theories can open up new insights on Shakespeare’s original text.

The suggestion that there exists some more than casual affinity between Shakespeare’s art and criminology has implications...