“He has no children”: Macbeth and Succession
Speaker: Prof. David Scott Kastan, Yale University
Moderator: Prof. Hao Tianhu, Zhejiang University
Time: 19:30-21:30 pm, Sept. 23, 2026 (Beijing time)
Venue: 线上: Zoom: 98948594771, passcode: 2026
Macbeth is usually considered Shakespeare’s tragedy of ambition. That is what we have all been taught in school. Yet the play might better be thought of as Shakespeare’s tragedy of missing children. Ambition has never explained quite enough about either Macbeth or about Shakespeare’s play—and, in any case, most of the ambition belongs to his wife. But children or their absence are very much the focus of the tragedy. (The critic Cleanth Brooks was perhaps the first to say that Macbeth is a play about a man who wages “war on children.”) It is the absence of a child that turns Macbeth into murderer, preventing him from turning success into succession.
David Scott Kastan is the George M. Bodman Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, having previously taught at Columbia University and at Dartmouth College. He has visited universities in China, Denmark, Egypt, England, Germany, and Hungary, among others, and has been the chief International Consultant for the CMRS, Zhejiang University since 2016. He has authored many books, including Shakespeare after Theory, Shakespeare and the Book, and On Color, all of which are available in Chinese. Presently he is working on a book on Shakespeare and Rembrandt.
由浙江大学国合处“海外名师大讲堂”项目资助
浙江大学外国语学院中世纪与文艺复兴研究中心
