Summary Of Individuation On Macbeth

The Effect of Individuation on Macbeth in The Tragedy of Macbeth

Harold Bloom’s essays, “To The Reader” and “Shakespeare’s Universalism, Part 1”, address how Shakespeare taught the modern human personality, therefore creating the modern human. A part of this idea can be applied to Macbeth's changes in personality in Shakespeare’s play, The Tragedy of Macbeth. Without Bloom’s argument, people would state that Macbeth's major changes were brought upon by outside factors rather than internal factors. Bloom’s idea of self-awareness and how characters can only go through change based on self-perception can be applied to Shakespeare’s play. Using Bloom’s argument, it can be observed how Macbeth’s actions bring upon self-aware personality change along with how his major changes were brought upon by himself, rather than by outside factors.

Part of Bloom’s argument is that characters in Shakespeare develop due to self-awareness, leading to character change based solely on inside factors. Bloom

(Shakespeare 5.5.11-17)

Macbeth shows the self-perception described by Bloom along with the transformations that have come along with his developing personality.

Using Bloom’s argument of character development by self-perception, Macbeth’s personality change be found to be directly from his own actions rather than outside factors such as his wife. Harold Bloom states that individuation is the only cause of personality change, meaning that a character’s changes are based solely upon themselves. Bloom explains his ideas on Shakespeare’s individuation and how it can only be done by the characters themselves: Self-overhearing is their royal road to individuation, and no other writer, before or since Shakespeare, has accomplished so well the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-consistent voices for his more than one hundred major characters and many hundreds of highly distinctive minor personages. (“To The Reader”