Macbeth is a monster - In the light of this comment consider Shakespeares presentation of Macbeth in the play.

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‘Macbeth is a monster’ - In the light of this comment consider Shakespeare’s presentation of Macbeth in the play.

The idea of man as monster is one perpetually peddled not only by Gothic writers, but throughout literature; Shelley toys with the concept in Frankenstein, and Shakespeare himself explores the dark fringes of humanity in character such as Richard III. Yet Macbeth is not quite so simple – whilst he certainly possesses irredeemably features, it is difficult to bracket him with the Duke of Gloucester; similarly, though he begins the play a hero, his descent cannot be easily compared to that of the archetypal tragic hero Othello. Rather, he is a complex hybrid, challenging audiences and critics to consider the nature and definition of monstrosity itself.

Perhaps Macbeth’s most ‘monstrous’ feature is his ambivalence to his own tyranny; whilst the natural order of Scotland is turned upside down, he acknowledges that he is ‘in blood stepp’d in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er’. Here, Shakespeare summons a viscerally violent image of Macbeth wading in a river or lake of ‘blood’ before having him casually dismiss it as ‘tedious’; the contrast of surreal horror and offhand flippancy highlighting what would appear to be Macbeth’s complete lack of empathy. Combine this with the fact that, in the context of production, Macbeth’s regicide would have represented one of the greatest possible breaches not only of judicial but of moral code, and his fate as a character seems sealed. It may even be argued that the play’s archetypally Gothic conclusion: having the characters embark to meet ‘at Scone’ – the traditional site of Scottish coronations representative of all the social strictures Macbeth flouts – would lose impact if Macbeth’s evil was not absolute; if his downfall is to serve as a warning against the breaking of societal regulation, then the audience must surely be without doubt that his actions were irredeemable.

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Though this may be an easy argument to superficially impose in pursuit of a clear-cut moral message, we must not forget that Shakespeare was a dramatist, not a sermoniser, and that to impose definite meaning on his work is to undermine it. Throughout the text, there are suggestions that Macbeth is in fact a form of Renaissance man, bridging the gap between the Medieval and the modern. In Act I, Scene iii, Macbeth ascertains that the witches’ predictions ‘cannot be ill, cannot be good’; a phrase not only reminiscent of the witches’ chants of ‘fair and foul’, linguistically linking ...

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