- Gardner, Helen. "Milton's 'Satan' and The Theme of Damnation in Elizabethan Tragedy."
- English Studies 1948. Ed. F. P. Wilson. English Association Essays and Studies. 1. London: John Murray, 1948. 46-66.
Thesis: Gardner's main concern is to explain why we find in Milton's Satan an "image of enormous pain and eternal loss" (46). She believes that this happens because we are shown "the deforming of a creature in its origin bright and good, by its own willed persistence in acts against its own nature" (47), and she illustrates her point by comparing Milton's Satan to the tragic protagonists of Middleton's The Changeling, Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, and Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Macbeth commits the murder of King Duncan "with the fullest knowledge of its wickedness" (54) and receives "deadly ironic justice":
He put aside feeling and he finds himself at the end incapable of feeling. He threw away "golden opinions" and he gets curses; he broke the laws of hospitality and friendship, and he finds himself solitary in a world united against him. (54)
We see that Macbeth gets what he deserves, but "what astounds our imagination is the spectacle of the hero's suffering":
Macbeth never loses that horror at himself which made him gaze upon his "hangman's hands" as if they were not his. What he does is a perpetual offence to what he is, and he never ceases to feel it. (55)
Bottom Line: Macbeth isn't the main topic, but this is excellent.