Derek,

Your question stimulates a fascinating idea for me -  I'll just put it down briefly, maybe develop it another time.

It's as follows: you don't know how to *view* the play. I doubt that anyone in academe does. You're trying to read/analyse/distill it into something else - something "deeper"  - into some verbal formula that you can make the subject of an essay.

You/we/our culture doesn't know how to view images and Macbeth like most plays is a complex image.

If you look at a visual image - let's take the Mona Lisa - in a sense, almost anything you can *say*/*verbalise* about that image is irrelevant. Because the image itself is the thing. Writing verbal essays about almost any image - and its supposedly "deeper" content -  is practically useless. The best thing you can do is something that has only become possible in the last few years. Take a visual program and outline/highlight any features of the image itself to make your point - outline say what makes the smile distinctive. As a good novelist-dramatist like Henry James would say, "don't tell me, show me." [I'm not saying, literally nothing useful can be said in words about images, just not much]. The same applies to music. Verbal philosophical/literary analysis of music is usually pretty pointless. But now we have music programs, that enable you to analyse and highlight features of the music image itself.

So for the first time in history, proper analysis of the images of art can begin. Culturally, right now, we are at the changeover of an entire epoch. The book of writing or print has been replaced by the movie book, pace the tablet/ipad - and the image has been enfranchised and made extraordinarily cheap as text was enfranchised by the printed book. We can and will as a consequence become image-literate or mediate for the first time. At the moment, culturally, we are still image-illiterate or "immediate."

I start with these more graphic images, because a play is a more subtle kind of image, (if we're thinking of it in manuscript vs. movie form). But it's still an image.

And for Macbeth like every drama, "the play's the thing." Not your or any philosopher/academic's analysis, but the play itself.

So  if you look at Macbeth - [let's just take up to the murder] - basically the play as a whole - the dialogue as a whole -  scene after scene - is the thing. And you'll find that the play [up to the murder]  *is* largely the debate about the dilemma - "Macbeth" is almost all Macbeth's debate about his dilemma of whether to kill his king -  Claudius' praise and recognition of him, his wife's urgings, the witches' predictions, his own inner debates - they're all part of his evolving debate pro and con killing, all factors pro and con.

And note: all of these speeches of people and inner debates would or could in principle have been part of the real Macbeth's, or a real usurper's, actual total debates.

So the big deal is the play-as-a-whole's rendition of the protagonist's whole debate, wh. typically includes both their own inner debates, and their debates with those around them, who are usually actually, or effectively, urging them pro and con deciding one way or other about the dilemma.

That's the achievement of the dramatist - the whole total debate - all 1000 or however many lines of it -  remove parts, or distil it, and you lose the achievement - just as if you were to focus on only one part of Mona Lisa's face - the eyes or lips,say - you would lose the whole achievement of the total expression captured.

You can certainly highlight parts -  I'd highlight how Macbeth is caught between being a "man" by killing, and being human and a loyal subject - but the key thing is the debate itself as a whole.

And what we now have the ability to do through technology, is compare other comparable murderers' debates. Compare how they proceeded to the point of murder, and what thoughts moved or didn't move them. Compare the man who murders his king without a second thought, with Macbeth who is tortured about it, with Hamlet  who is tortured he can't do it. Compare actual dialogue in actual movies. You'll find there are loads of such collages on youtube - not systematic, serious stuff, yet, but pointing the way, to the radically new forms of image analysis and comparison that will be born in the academy of the arts.

We will have to develop new faculties to understand all this - - to be able to think of plays as wholes. We will have to acquire the faculties of the artists themselves. After all, if you're writing Macbeth, the whole play is indeed the thing - all of those 1000 or however many lines are integral parts of the debate you're capturing - just as every line in an artist's portrait is part of the sitter's expression. If the dramatist/artist changes just one dialogue or visual line, they may screw, or severely impair the whole work. So to truly understand drama or visual art, we must all acquire that sensibility/ overall framework.

No, you can't simply equate all plays with protagonist's debates about their turning-point dilemmas. Certainly, there's more to them and some place more emphasis on the typical lifestyle of the protagonist. But my original concern remember, was merely to compare the central functions of games and drama.