Lois Feuer: Shakespearean Scholar Publishes New Essay on “Macbeth”

Lois Feuer contributed an essay, “Hired for Mischief: the Masterless Man in ‘Macbeth,’” to a new collection of critical essays on Shakespeare’s tragedy. Published in March by Routledge, the anthology Macbeth: New Critical Essays (ed. Nick Moschovakis) is aimed at upper division students.

The professor of English answered a call for papers for the book with an essay she had previously written, which looks at the play from a social history viewpoint.

“There’s a place in ‘Macbeth’ where he is hiring some killers to kill his friend Banquo, whom he fears,” Feuer says. “There’s this completely superfluous discussion about dogs in the middle of this hiring conversation. Years ago, a historian I knew at [UC] Irvine, said, ‘Isn’t that weird? What’s it doing there?’ In the course of figuring it out, I realized that the hired killers in ‘Macbeth’ represent a kind of guy that you find in some of Shakespeare’s plays, which is the masterless man.”

Feuer points out the hierarchal society of Shakespeare’s characters, saying, “If you don’t have a place in a hierarchal society, you’re really at the edges. I realized there were a lot of ironies regarding Macbeth himself [since] he kills his master after all. A masterless man is the guy with no roots, the guy who doesn’t belong anywhere. He doesn’t have a lord to whom he owes fealty, he’s not a farmer, he’s not a tenant, or a member of a guild. There’s a hired captain in “King Lear,” who kills Cordelia. There are a number of other masterless men in “Henry VI,” and in “Henry VIII,” there’s the figure of Cardinal Woolsey, who is a strange kind of masterless man. He profits in a society that’s increasingly rootless and capitalistic.”

The enduring quality of Macbeth is described by Feuer as the “contrast between who he is and what he does. Macbeth isn’t one of those rubbing-his-hands-gleefully murderers. He’s somebody who knows exactly what’s wrong with what he does. He knows what it means, in a huge cosmic sense, to kill your king. But he does it anyway. And, as his heart becomes hardened, the second murder is easier and the third one is easier still, and so on.

“And, students like it because it’s Shakespeare’s shortest play,” she laughs.

Feuer arrived on the Cal State Dominguez Hills campus in 1972 as an assistant professor of English and interdisciplinary studies, achieving her tenure in 1987. She has served on and chaired numerous committees during her tenure, including the Writing Intensive Course Preparation and Implementation, the Engaging Critical Literacy Project (ECLP) Multi-Year grant, and the University Curriculum Committee. She was vice chair of the Academic Senate from 1976 to 1978 and acting associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1996 to 1997. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English and philosophy at the University of Arizona and her master’s degree and doctorate in English from the University of California, Irvine.

- Joanie Harmon