How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?

There is an approach to political understanding that has much in common with that Shakespearean criticism dominated by "the assumption that Shakespeare was pre-eminently a great 'creator of characters'". Of course political commentators occupy themselves not with "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" rather, "The nature of the relationship between Brown and Blair ”, but they need to be Knighted just as much.

Knights' insight, that "the only profitable approach to Shakespeare is a consideration of his plays as dramatic poems, of his use of language to obtain a total complex emotional response" applies just as well to the New Labour Project;
Blair’s years should be understood as just such an attempt “to obtain a total complex emotional response" .

Knights writes,
“ Macbeth [i.e. the New Labour Project] is a statement of evil. I use the word "statement" (unsatisfactory as it is) in order to stress those qualities that are "non-dramatic," if drama is defined according to the canons of William Archer or Dr. Bradley. It also happens to be poetry, [harder to argue for the Project, but it shares the abstraction of values and their presentation, rather than policies and their delivery] which means that the apprehension of the whole can only be obtained from a lively attention to the parts, whether they have an immediate bearing on the main action or "illustrate character," or not. Two main themes, which can only be separated for the purpose of analysis, are blended in the play [the Project]—the themes of the reversal of values and of unnatural disorder. And closely related to each is a third theme, that of the deceitful appearance, and consequent doubt, uncertainty and confusion. All this is obscured by false assumptions about the category "drama" [or politics]. Each theme is stated in the first act [i.e. since 1997]... every word...[which] will bear the closest scrutiny, strikes one dominant chord:

Faire is foule, and foule is faire,
Hover through the fogge and filthie ayre.

It is worth remarking that "Hurley-burley" implies more than the tumult of sedition or insurrection." Both it and "when the Battaile's lost, and wonne" suggest the kind of metaphysical pitch-and-toss... played with good and evil. At the same time we hear the undertone of uncertainty... the scene [i.e. the beginning of the Project] expresses the same movement as the play/Project as a whole: the general crystallizes into the immediate particular ("Where the place?"—"Upon the Heath.") and then dissolves again into the general presentment of hideous gloom [or, in the Project’s case, general presentment of vainglorious achievement].

Just as Knights traces the development of the reversal of values, unnatural disorder, and deceitful appearance themes, these themes can be traced too through the New Labour Project. Macbeth /Blair’s "ruin is never complete. [though Shakespeare in My way of life / Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf, and "To morrow, and tomorrow" has quite an edge over Blair’s echoic speech writer]. To the end he never totally loses our sympathy... In the very depths a gleam of his native love of goodness, and with it a tinge of tragic grandeur, rests upon him." [precisely what Blair was after].

But ‘to concentrate attention on the personal implications of these lines [Macbeth /Blair’s] is to obscure the fact that they have an even more important function as the keystone of the system of values that gives emotional coherence to the play/ Project .
While "total complex emotional response ", is not all about themes and a "system of values ", political commentary about character is too common while in-depth examination of themes and values, rather scarce.

(Probably this could be boiled down into a couple of sentences; but L.C. Knights explains it so well, hence the extensive quotes. Today’s Blair speech, emotionally distasteful as it was, was all about evoking Project values and responses. It’s a different kind of politics, not within shouting distance of Shakespeare's manipulations of the world, cheapened, but a derivative).