When we create or interpret a text's meaning and genre, numerous and often conflicting historical concerns mediate our insights. Because of its historical situation, Macbeth imperfectly articulates its tragic dimensions and thus empowers later interpreters to draw on their historical situations to imagine Macbeth's motives. Two eighteenth-century illustrations of Macbeth II.ii radically reconceive Macbeth's troubling choice of action: both designs invite contemporary critics to define his inchoate yearnings, to identify the play's tragic vision. John Zoffany playfully appropriates the “Choice of Hercules” topos to represent Macbeth's predicament satirically, allowing us to see Macbeth's appalling regicide as a tragic product of now common entrepreneurial schemes. The melodramatic confusion of motive and motion in Henry Fuseli's watercolor reveals another kinship with Macbeth, a psychoanalytic linkage between our desires and his deed. Interpreting these interpretive illustrations enables us to see through the problematic surface of Macbeth to its tragic richness.