'Tis unnatural, even like the deed that's done' (Old Man). How does Shakespeare present the idea of 'Evil' in Macbeth? And, what conclusions do you draw about the theme of 'Nature and Nurture'?
In the play Macbeth, Shakespeare has done a very good job in presenting the idea of 'evil' in the play. He does this by instilling the essence of evil into some of the characters and also nurtures the essence of evil into some of the remaining characters as we go along in the play. The play was written in 1606 for King James I who was very fond of the theme of witchcraft and evil. Shakespeare used this knowledge to make a play with dominant evil characters like the three witches and Hecate, Queen of Darkness. The strong and powerful character represented in Lady Macbeth was very normal in that time because Queen Elizabeth was also an equally strong, powerful and very domineering woman herself. She was very strong, very demanding and made an impact on people she interacted with like how Lady Macbeth had an influence on Macbeth.
Act 1 Scene 1 acts as a prologue, and is set by the witches. They give us a feel to the dark and evil things that are about to happen in the play. They show this by setting a negative atmosphere,
'When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightening, or in rain?'
This is a dramatic device because they are all aspects of bad weather and it gets the audience's attention from the beginning and forces them to be alert. The rhyming couplet and the sentence show something has already happened and gives a mysterious atmosphere. 'When the hurly burly's done' sounds very contradicting and feeds to the mystery of chaos and highlights the way that things do not appear as they seem. 'When the battle's lost and won' shows the conflict between good and evil which is one of the underlying themes of the play. 'Where the place ... Upon the heath ... There to meet with Macbeth' shows the level of detail and importance their meeting of Macbeth is. This also shows to the audience that Macbeth is a very significant character in the play. Although, ironically when the witches talk to him and tell him what his future would hold they do not push him towards being evil but know that he would. Macbeth immediately gets consumed with greed and ambition to reach that goal even though some evil deeds would go on in the process. There are more evil and dark terms the witches use like relating to a Graymalkin (a grey cat) which are associated with witches. 'Hover through the fog and filthy air...' this shows the negative attitude of the play and is also a metaphor for the chaos that Macbeth is stuck in.
In Act 1 Scene 3, the witches' magic and malice is shown as they are waiting for Macbeth. They show the intensity of their evil by making statements like 'I'll drain him dry as hay...', 'Pilot's thumb...'which refers to the Master of the Tiger who the witches have ruined. 'A drum, a drum: Macbeth doth come...' Shakespeare subtly refers to the future of Macbeth in this scene. The Master of the Tiger has just been ruined by the witches are about to start ruining Macbeth. We see that they refer to him right after talking about what they ...
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In Act 1 Scene 3, the witches' magic and malice is shown as they are waiting for Macbeth. They show the intensity of their evil by making statements like 'I'll drain him dry as hay...', 'Pilot's thumb...'which refers to the Master of the Tiger who the witches have ruined. 'A drum, a drum: Macbeth doth come...' Shakespeare subtly refers to the future of Macbeth in this scene. The Master of the Tiger has just been ruined by the witches are about to start ruining Macbeth. We see that they refer to him right after talking about what they have done to the Master of the Tiger.
In Act 1 Scene 5, we are introduced to Lady Macbeth; she has just read the letter she received from her husband of the prophecy of the witches. Immediately after reading the letter, Lady Macbeth is overcome by her greed and ambition and starts thinking evil deeds. Shakespeare has very subtly added the theme of natural evil into this character. He has made it in a way that would surprise the audience whilst watching the play as Lady Macbeth has changed almost instantly from a gentle woman to a strong powerful woman with evil thoughts. She calls upon evil spirits to give her strength to take control over the situation and to take away her femininity, 'come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts! Unsex me here and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty...come to my woman's breast, and take my milk for gall, you murdering minister...' The use of language here is very straight forward as Lady Macbeth highlights her point clearly. The words used like 'unsex me here' and 'take my milk for gall, you murdering minister' have such emotion in them. They show her proclamations to be ripped from her femininity and sensitivity to become heartless, strong-willed and tough like a man.
In Act 1 Scene 7, Macbeth has already started to consider the murder, 'if it were done, when tis done, then twere well it were done quickly.' Macbeth does not realise that he has started to nurture evil by indirectly thinking about killing King Duncan and talking around the subject with his wife. The soliloquy in Scene 7 shows his battle against the growing evil and greed inside of him and his inner conscience telling him it is a wrong deed, 'I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o'er leaps itself and falls on the other.'
In Act 3 Scene 1, Banquo is suspicious of Macbeth, 'Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, as the weird women promis'd; and, I fear, thour has play'dst most foully for t...'. Macbeth has now planned to kill Banquo as the scene develops. His throne and everything he has is in jeopardy so he has to do everything in his power to secure it, even though it means killing another person. This time what is different is that he does not even try to battle his sense of greed but wants to destroy everything that comes in his way. This addresses Macbeth's fears of Banquo who was there when the witches promised Macbeth would be King. Banquo was also promised that his children would be successors of the throne. Macbeth is scared of Banquo's suspicion of him killing King Duncan and Banquo's children being heir to his throne. 'Our fears in Banquo stick deep, and in his royalty of nature reigns that which would be fear'd...' This is figurative and metaphorical as it relates to his fear as a dagger sticking into him and making him uncomfortable so he has to prevent this from happening by killing Banquo so he orders the killing to take place.
In Act 3 Scene 4 starts with a banquet. Banquo has just been killed by the murderers in the previous scene but Fleance, Banquo's son escapes and flees. Macbeth has heard the news from the murderers that Banquo has been killed but Fleance escaped and his fears reappear, 'then comes my fit again: I had else been perfect; whole as marble, founded as the rock, as broad and general as the casing air: but now I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd, bound in to saucy doubts and fears...' This shows how Macbeth was trying to calm himself reassuring himself that everything was good but now that Fleance escaped from death, he knows that he would no longer be in peace until something was done, and now he is worried about what is going to happen to him as he has been completely overcome by evil that nurtured in him. He is incredibly disturbed after the news he just got of Banquo's death, some things are revealed in the banquet as Macbeth starts to act odd, 'Avaunt! and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee! Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold; thou hast no speculation in those eyes which thou dost glare with...' He has seen a ghost of Banquo and acts oddly and disrupts the peace of the banquet which starts to open curiosity and suspense about Macbeth. The banquet symbolising something much greater, the unity of Scotland which Macbeth disrupted, 'with the most admir'd disorder' just as he had done in the banquet. In this scene, Lady Macbeth tries to bring back her strong character and tries to pull her husband together again whilst he is falling apart and scolds him for embarrasing himself and trying to give up everything they worked for, 'you lack the season of all natures, sleep...' Ironically Lady Macbeth starts sleep walking as her evil has taken everything in her. She reveals little by little what happened as she could not bear keeping it to herself any longer. She was being tortured by the evil and cannot live with what she has done so it is driving her mad.
In Act 5 Scene 1, Lady Macbeth suffers from a guilty conscience. She walks in her sleep and dreams about killing King Duncan. She is guilty and is being tortured by the evil inside of her and what her and her husband has done. 'Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One; two: why, then 'tis time to do't. Hell is murky! Fie, my lord-fie! A soldier, and afeared? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him...' Showing her fear and how she is re-living that night. 'Here's the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh! Oh...'
Shakespeare has used some recurring themes in the play Macbeth. The theme of greed comes up a lot in the play, Macbeth is not used to being a cold blooded murderer but out of his desire for power he kills King Duncan and everyone in his way to securing the throne and then suffers with the guilt. Lady Macbeth pursues what she wants with greater determination and makes her husband do such an evil deed. Although unlike Macbeth, she does not hold the skill to withstand the intensity of the result of her actions. Another theme is ambition. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth want to be what they are not, they would go through anything to secure what they have and get more. Another theme is violence and death. The play begins with the idea of a battle that has just finished where a lot of killing would have taken place, then the witches talking about the horrible thing they did to the Master of the Tiger and then Lady Macbeth forcing her husband to kill King Duncan, Macbeth's constant habit of murdering people and finally the battle at Dunsinane where Macbeth was killed. Another very big theme is guilt. Macbeth and his wife both suffered from the guilt of what they had done. Macbeth got so guilty with what he had done that he did anything he could to cover it up, mostly by killing people. Lady Macbeth took her own guilt to the extreme by reliving the night of the murder of King Duncan and talks and walks in her sleep then finally kills herself in the guilt of it all.
The most important theme is the evil. Immediately the play starts with a dark, evil and mysterious mood portrayed by the witches. They summarise the play and highlight to the audience there is chaos and evil even before it is experienced first hand. The use of language and the way the scene is set in 'Thunder, lightening and rain' adds to the theme of evil. With Lady Macbeth in Act 1 scene 5, where she says, 'come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts! Unsex me here and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty...come to my woman's breast, and take my milk for gall, you murdering minister...' we see her call on evil spirits to strip her of her femininity and make her strong and powerful to control Macbeth and make him carry out the evil deed. Although, the guilt of her actions turned her mad as the evil was too much for her to deal with anymore. The same evil that drew her to push her husband to commit murder conquered and killed her. Macbeth originally was not an evil but good, he fought between good and evil, whether or not to kill King Duncan but he was consumed in his greed and ambition and killed King Duncan. From then on he was driven by evil and killed anyone or anything that got in his way of achieving his goal.
Shakespeare represents the theme of Nature and Nurture by putting it into the characters. Right from the beginning of the play, Shakespeare shows the witches as very evil characters by nature. Lady Macbeth's evil did not seem nurtured because immediately she heard of the prophecies she had decided what she needed to do and called upon evil spirits which is not normal or natural but we see her being weak and womanly again when she starts talking in her sleep out of guilt of what she and her husband at done. We see her as not being able to cope with the evil which drove her to madness. Macbeth had evil nurtured in him by Lady Macbeth and battled against it but it eventually took over him. Ironically the corrupted Macbeth's evil was stronger than the natural evil of Lady Macbeth. This is because Macbeth's evil was being powered by his greed and ambition of being King so he felt nothing could get in his way and stopped anything from getting in his way. Lady Macbeth on the other hand was consumed with guilt of corrupting Macbeth to kill the King and the guilt and evil tortured her to the point where she could not take anymore.
Oyinkansola Oladitan English Coursework 27/02/2008
