University of California Press Our Naked Frailties: Sensational Art and Meaning in Macbeth

Our Naked Frailties: Sensational Art and Meaning in Macbeth by Paul A. Jorgensen offers a penetrating reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy through the lens of sensational art. Jorgensen argues that Macbeth is distinguished among Shakespeare’s plays by its deliberate evocation of physical and emotional sensation―what Banquo calls “our naked frailties.” Exploring imagery, language, and atmosphere, the book demonstrates how Shakespeare crafts a play that disturbs not only the intellect but the nervous system, producing a tactile, almost bodily experience of evil. Rather than treating the sensational merely as excess, Jorgensen situates it in Renaissance traditions of biblical spectacle, witchcraft literature, and moralized violence, showing how Macbeth’s artistry magnifies horror into moral recognition. At once a work of literary criticism and a study in Renaissance culture, the book moves from broad accounts of sensationalism in Elizabethan drama to close readings of Macbeth’s murders, blood imagery, witches, and visions of torment. Jorgensen contends that the play embodies a tragedy of crime and punishment, where the protagonist’s ordeal is rendered through poetic sensation and condign suffering. By linking Shakespeare’s dramaturgy to contemporary notions of providence, imagination, and conscience, Our Naked Frailties reveals how Macbeth achieves its haunting power: not by abstract philosophy but by forcing audiences to confront their own capacities for fear, pity, and guilty recognition. This study stands as both a defense of sensational artistry and an exploration of Shakespeare’s most viscerally unsettling work. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.