It is a fair assessment of Macbeth's character to call him nothing but a brutal and ruthless villain?

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                Daniel Sheedy  4E1  4RM  8/5/01

It is a fair assessment of Macbeth’s character to call him nothing but a brutal and ruthless villain?

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macbeth is a very complex character showing many different traits in his many appearances throughout the play. The story starts after a battle; Macbeth then meets three witches who foresee that he will become King of Scotland.  These witches knew all about Macbeth’s fatal flaw, his greed for power.   This fatal flaw, as a typical tragic hero was the cause of his downfall.  There is no doubt that throughout the play Macbeth is a brutal and ruthless villain, but it is certainly questionable to say that they are his only qualities

Before Macbeth is even introduced to the audience, we are already told of his capacity for brutality.  The captain describes Macbeth’s actions to the king when he says, “Like Valour’s minion, carved out his passage / Till he faced the slave.” The captain goes on to say, “Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him, / Till he unseamed him from nave to chaps.”  This statement also shows the brutality and barbarity of Macbeth’s character very well as he did not just end this mans life in an honourable and quick way, but instead sliced him all the way from his stomach to his jaw.  Macbeth is also obviously very highly regarded among his colleagues and indeed enemies as being both brutal and brave, as the captain again says to Malcolm, “For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name)”, showing that others thought of him as a very brave man.  There is a lot of irony in this point as at this point in the play, Macbeth is being very highly regarded as being brave and ruthless, whereas later on these same qualities will lose him all his respect.

As the play unfolds Macbeth finds it increasingly easy to kill innocent people, which shows clearly the ruthlessness and the brutality of his character.   The first person that Macbeth kills in the play is King Duncan.  Shakespeare’s audience would have taken this particular crime of regicide very seriously as they believed in divine right, that the king was chosen from God and anyone who took that power away was defying God and it was the ultimate wrong. King James would have been very pleased at this element of the play, as it showed that any person who committed regicide suffered greatly as a consequence of it.  Also the fact that Macbeth murdered a King while he was sleeping and was utterly defenceless would have been seen as being very dishonourable.

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The most innocent of all of Macbeth’s victims of his barbarity is Lady Macduff and her son.  Macbeth’s other victims are all directly blocking his path to supreme power and so one could argue that they were necessary, but Lady Macduff and her family are just a precaution that Macbeth took to try and get to Macduff.  .  In the scene where Lady Macduff and her son are killed, the innocence of the child is emphasised in his language and the questions that he asks his mother.  When his mother questions how he will live after his father’s death he ...

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