REVIEW
Holloway, John. The Story of the Night:
Studies in Shakespeare's Major Tragedies. London: Routledge, 1961.

Thesis: Towards the end of his "Introduction," after sharply criticizing critics of Shakespeare who have written about imagery, characterization, themes, and moral values, Holloway makes his boast:

The examination of a number of Shakespeare's plays which follows has its 'ulterior conception' of the great work of art, its own paradigm and guide, just like the examinations which have been scrutinized in this preliminary chapter. But I do not wish to have it left undiscussed: I should prefer to force it upon the attention. It is, that such a work is not a statement or insight or special kind of informativeness — not these things essentially, though it may be all of them incidentally — but is a momentous and energizing experience. The major aspect of what makes the dramatic (or non-dramatic) fiction such an experience has already been indicated. It is the whole action, the whole developing course that it pursues from the beginning of the work to the end.   (19)
Apparently Holloway thinks he's on to something new, but as it turns out he sees Macbeth as the story of a doomed revolt against God's Providence, which is not a new idea.

Evaluation: Holloway plays fast and loose with context and sequence. Consider the following paragraph, the third of his chapter on Macbeth:

At the opening of Macbeth, Macbeth himself is the centre of respect and interest. He is the cynosure, the present saviour of the state.
. . . brave Macbeth—well he deserves that name—
Disdaining Fortune, with his brandish'd steel
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valour's minion, carv'd out his passage . . .
                                                 (I.ii.16)
With these vivid words, the absent is present: the minion of valour and disdainer of Fortune is sharply before our imagination in all the slaughter of civil war. Yet this image of Macbeth is ambivalent. Only a few lines before, in the explosive opening words of the very first scene (other than that of the witches, no clear part of human life at all), Shakespeare has provided his audience, before their eyes and on stage, with an actual picture that the account of Macbeth in battle, quoted just now, disquietingly resembles:
What bloody man is that? He can report,
As seemeth by his plight, of the revolt
The newest state.
                                                 (I.ii.1)
But insofar as we identify Macbeth with the image of a man stained in blood, and his weapon dripping with blood, he is no image merely of a destroyer of revolt. By a more direct and primitive mode of thought, by simple association, he is an image of revolt itself. The doubtful goodness of his disdaining Fortune (of which more must be said later) appears in a new, uneasy light.
I think Holloway should have thoroughly explained what "primitive mode of thought" it could be that would pick up the word "revolt," carry it forward 14 lines, and apply it to Macbeth. I suspect it's only the mode of thought of Holloway in his study.

Bottom Line: Windy and questionable.