Shakespeares Macbeth: A Challenge to the Metaphysics of Anthropocentric Presence

Abstract

Keith Sagar (2004) in his recent book, Literature and the Crime against Nature has referred to Ted Hughes argument concerning the role of creative imagination as an essential part of our biological survival gear. He further says that great literature, of any age, already embodies the holistic, biocentric vision now advocated by deep ecology. Recent developments in ecocriticism have witnessed a debate with reference to anthropocentric and biocentric world-views and a shift towards a biocentric world-view which is in chime with what Keith Sagar calls, the healing power of the imaginative atonement. There is no dearth of books and papers that concentrate on the representation of natural environments in Shakespeare (see Heise 1997: 29n). The present paper is neither a formalist attempt to thematically taxonomize the various elements of biosphere nor a venture in abstract theoretical nihilism. On the contrary, looking at Shakespeares creative imagination from the present day changing perspective when there is a healthy emergent trend to revalidate literature with an ethical, interdisciplinary earth-centered approach (Prasad 2004) in which language and literature transmit values with profound ecological implications (Glotfelty 1994), the paper will discuss how Shakespeares Macbeth questions and resists the anthropocentric constructions of environment ( Branch: 1994) by challenging the metaphysics of anthropocentric presence in the midst of Renaissance humanism that believed in the central position of human beings in the universe (Abrams 1999: 116).