WHAT IS THE POLITICAL RELEVANCE OF MACBETH ACCORDING TO TILLYARD AND ALAN SINFIELD?

Tillyard applies his theory of the Elizabethan world picture to the study of Macbeth since, in his opinion, the
play presents a clear correspondence between the political, personal, cosmic and divine planes. In his
description of the Elizabethan world picture, Tillyard points out that one of the forms under which the
Elizabethans pictured the universal order was a series of corresponding planes. The chaotic nature of one of
these planes brings about disorder in the rest. In the play, Macbeth’s corruption and political ambition give rise
to general disorder. Tillyard analyses the play by using a clear binary construction whose opposite terms are
order/disorder. In the first pair, Tillyard includes political stability, heavenly equilibrium and the rightful
political nature of Edward the Confessor, Malcolm and Macduff, the second part of the binary is represented
by Macbeth’s usurpation of power. By reinforcing the relevance of such a binary, Tillyard brings to the fore the
Elizabethan dominant discourse of political order and royal authority as he silences any other type of emergent
or disruptive discourses that could be found in the play.

Alan Sinfield’s study of Macbeth disrupts Tillyard’s orthodox analysis by deconstructing traditional clear-cut
binaries. To Sinfield, Macbeth questions the Elizabethan dominant and monarchic discourses since the play
interrogates the legitimacy of state violence, disrupts the intimate relation between power and royal
legitimacy, and dismantles the binary rightful monarch/tyrant. Alan Sinfield establishes a clear differentiation
between antagonistic political critical approaches to Macbeth: the Jamesian reading and the Buchanan reading.
The former views Macbeth, as Tillyard and N. H. Paul do, as a reaffirmation of James’s Absolutist State Ideology
and strengthens the legitimacy of state violence since it is used to impose order by annihilating people’s rights,
and he also questions the opposition between legitimate ruler and tyranny. Buchanan’s writings serve Sinfield
to prove that there were political dissident discourses at the time and that, by writing Macbeth, Shakespeare
could be supporting them.

Cultural materialists appropriate the texts they analyse so as to condemn political, economic or social issues at
work nowadays. In this case, Sinfield relates his study of state violence in Macbeth, and its references to the
Gunpowder Plot, with IRA terrorism in Ireland.