Macbeth Character Essay, Research Paper

Macbeth is presented as a mature man of definitely established character,

successful in certain fields of activity and enjoying an enviable reputation. We

must not conclude, there, that all his volitions and actions are predictable;

Macbeth’s character, like any other man’s at a given moment, is what is being

made out of potentialities plus environment, and no one, not even Macbeth

himself, can know all his inordinate self-love whose actions are discovered to

be-and no doubt have been for a long time- determined mainly by an inordinate

desire for some temporal or mutable good. Macbeth is actuated in his conduct

mainly by an inordinate desire for worldly honors; his delight lies primarily in

buying golden opinions from all sorts of people. But we must not, therefore,

deny him an entirely human complexity of motives. For example, his fighting in

Duncan’s service is magnificent and courageous, and his evident joy in it is

traceable in art to the natural pleasure which accompanies the explosive

expenditure of prodigious physical energy and the euphoria which follows. He

also rejoices no doubt in the success which crowns his efforts in battle – and

so on. He may even conceived of the proper motive which should energize back of

his great deed: The service and the loyalty I owe, In doing it, pays itself. But

while he destroys the king’s enemies, such motives work but dimly at best and

are obscured in his consciousness by more vigorous urges. In the main, as we

have said, his nature violently demands rewards: he fights valiantly in order

that he may be reported in such terms a "valour’s minion" and "Bellona’s

bridegroom"’ he values success because it brings spectacular fame and new

titles and royal favor heaped upon him in public. Now so long as these mutable

goods are at all commensurate with his inordinate desires – and such is the

case, up until he covets the kingship – Macbeth remains an honorable gentleman.

He is not a criminal; he has no criminal tendencies. But once permit his

self-love to demand a satisfaction which cannot be honorably attained, and he is

likely to grasp any dishonorable means to that end which may be safely employed.

In other words, Macbeth has much of natural good in him unimpaired; environment

has conspired with his nature to make him upright in all his dealings with those

about him. But moral goodness in him is undeveloped and indeed still

rudimentary, for his voluntary acts are scarcely brought into harmony with

ultimate end. As he returns from victorious battle, puffed up with self-love

which demands ever-increasing recognition of his greatness, the demonic forces

of evil-symbolized by the Weird Sisters-suggest to his inordinate imagination

the splendid prospect of attaining now the greatest mutable good he has ever

desired. These demons in the guise of witches cannot read his inmost thoughts,

but from observation of facial expression and other bodily manifestations they

surmise with comparative accuracy what passions drive him and what dark desires

await their fostering. Realizing that he wishes the kingdom, they prophesy that

he shall be king. They cannot thus compel his will to evil; but they do arouse

his passions and stir up a vehement and inordinate apprehension of the

imagination, which so perverts the judgment of reason that it leads his will

toward choosing means to the desired temporal good. Indeed his imagination and

passions are so vivid under this evil impulse from without that "nothing is

but what is not"; and his reason is so impeded that he judges, "These

solicitings cannot be evil, cannot be good." Still, he is provided with so

much natural good that he is able to control the apprehensions of his inordinate

imagination and decides to take no step involving crime. His autonomous decision

not to commit murder, however, is not in any sense based upon moral grounds. No

doubt he normally shrinks from the unnaturalness of regicide; but he so far

ignores ultimate ends that, if he could perform the deed and escape its

consequences here upon this bank and shoal of time, he’ld jump the life to come.

Without denying him still a complexity of motives – as kinsman and subject he

may possibly experience some slight shade of unmixed loyalty to the King under

his roof-we may even say that the consequences which he fears are not at all

inward and spiritual, It is to be doubted whether he has ever so far considered

the possible effects of crime and evil upon the human soul-his later discovery

of horrible ravages produced by evil in his own spirit constitutes part of the

tragedy. Hi is mainly concerned, as we might expect, with consequences involving

the loss of mutable goods which he already possesses and values highly. After

the murder of Duncan, the natural good in him compels the acknowledgment that,

in committing the unnatural act, he has filed his mind and has given his eternal

jewel, the soul, into the possession of those demonic forces which are the enemy

of mankind. He recognizes that the acts of conscience which torture him are

really expressions of that outraged natural law, which inevitably reduced him as

individual to the essentially human. This is the inescapable bond that keeps him

pale, and this is the law of his own natural from whose exactions of devastating

penalties he seeks release: Come, seeling night… And with thy bloody and

invisible hand Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond Which keeps me pale. He

conceives that quick escape from the accusations of conscience may possibly be

effected by utter extirpation of the precepts of natural law deposited in his

nature. And he imagines that the execution of more bloody deeds will serve his

purpose. Accordingly, then, in the interest of personal safety and in order to

destroy the essential humanity in himself, he instigates the murder of Banquo.

But he gains no satisfying peace because hes conscience still obliges him to

recognize the negative quality of evil and the barren results of wicked action.

The individual who once prized mutable goods in the form of respect and

admiration from those about him, now discovers that even such evanescent

satisfactions are denied him: And that which should accompany old age, As honor,

love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but, in their

stead, Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath, Which the poor heart

would fain deny, and dare not. But the man is conscious of a profound

abstraction of something far more precious that temporal goods. His being has

shrunk to such little measure that he has lost his former sensitiveness to good

and evil; he has supped so full with horrors and the disposition of evil is so

fixed in him that nothing can start him. His conscience is numbed so that he

escapes the domination of fears, and such a consummation may indeed be called a

sort of peace. But it is not entirely what expected or desires. Back of his

tragic volitions is the ineradicable urge toward that supreme contentment which

accompanies and rewards fully actuated being; the peace which he attains is

psychologically a callousness to pain and spiritually a partial insensibility to

the evidences of diminished being. His peace is the doubtful calm of utter

negativity, where nothing matters. This spectacle of spiritual deterioration

carried to the point of imminent dissolution arouses in us, however, a curious

feeling of exaltation. For even after the external and internal forces of evil

have done their worst, Macbeth remains essentially human and his conscience

continues to witness the diminution of his being. That is to say, there is still

left necessarily some natural good in him; sin cannot completely deprive him of

his rational nature, which is the root of his inescapable inclination to virtue.

We do not need Hecate to tell us that he is but a wayward son, spiteful and

wrathful, who, as other do, loves for his own ends. This is apparent throughout

the drama; he never sins because, like the Weird Sisters, he loves evil for its

own sake; and whatever he does is inevitably in pursuance of some apparent good,

even though that apparent good is only temporal of nothing more that escape from

a present evil. At the end, in spite of shattered nerves and extreme distraction

of mind, the individual passes out still adhering admirably to his code of

personal courage, and the man’s conscience still clearly admonishes that he has

done evil. Moreover, he never quite loses completely the liberty of free choice,

which is the supreme bonum naturae of mankind. But since a wholly free act is

one in accordance with reason, in proportion as his reason is more and more

blinded by inordinate apprehension of the imagination and passions of the

sensitive appetite, his volitions become less and less free. And this accounts

for our feeling, toward the end of the drama, that his actions are almost

entirely determined and that some fatality is compelling him to his doom. This

compulsion is in no sense from without-though theologians may at will interpret

it so-as if some god, like Zeus in Greek tragedy, were dealing out punishment

for the breaking of divine law. It is generated rather from within, and it is

not merely a psychological phenomenon. Precepts of the natural law-imprints of

the eternal law- deposited in his nature have been violated, irrational acts

have established habits tending to further irrationality, and one of the

penalties exacted is dire impairment of the liberty of free choice. Thus the

Fate which broods over Macbeth may be identified with that disposition inherent

in created things, in this case the fundamental motive principle of human

action, by which providence knits all things in their proper order. Macbeth

cannot escape entirely from his proper order; he must inevitably remain

essentially human. The substance of Macbeth’s personality is that out of which

tragic heroes are fashioned; it is endowed by the dramatist with an astonishing

abundance and variety of potentialities. And it is upon the development of these

potentialities that the artist lavishes the full energies of his creative

powers. Under the influence of swiftly altering environment which continually

furnishes or elicts new experiences and under the impact of passions constantly

shifting and mounting in intensity, the dramatic individual grows, expands,

developes to the point where, at the end of the drama, he looms upon the mind as

a titanic personality infinitely richer that at the beginning. This dramatic

personality in its manifold stages of actuation in as artistic creation. In

essence Macbeth, like all other men, is inevitably bound to his humanity; the

reason of order, as we have seen, determines his inescapable relationship to the

natural and eternal law, compels inclination toward his proper act and end but

provides him with a will capable of free choice, and obliges his discernment of

good and evil.

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Melville’s first five novels all achieved quick popularity. Typee: A Peep at

Polynesian Life (1846), Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas

(1847), and Mardi (1849) were romances of the South Sea islands. Redburn, His

First Voyage (1849) was based on his own first trip to sea, and White-Jacket, or

the World in a Man-of-War (1850) fictionalized his experiences in the navy. In

1850 Melville moved to a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he became an

intimate friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated his masterpiece

Moby-Dick; or The White Whale (1851). The central theme of the novel is

the conflict between Captain Ahab, master of the whaler Pequod, and Moby-Dick, a

great white whale that once tore off one of Ahab’s legs at the knee. Ahab is

dedicated to revenge; he drives himself and his crew, which includes Ishmael,

narrator of the story, over the seas in a desperate search for his enemy. The

body of the book is written in a wholly original, powerful narrative style,

which, in certain sections of the work, Melville varied with great success. The

most impressive of these sections are the rhetorically magnificent sermon

delivered before sailing and the soliloquies of the mates; lengthy ?flats,?

passages conveying nonnarrative material, usually of a technical nature, such as

the chapter about whales; and the more purely ornamental passages, such as the

tale of the Tally-Ho, which can stand by themselves as short stories of merit.

The work is invested with Ishmael’s sense of profound wonder at his story, but

nonetheless conveys full awareness that Ahab’s quest can have but one end. And

so it proves to be: Moby-Dick destroys the Pequod and all its crew save Ishmael.

There is a certain streak of the supernatural being projected in the writings of

Melville, as is amply obvious in Moby Dick. The story revolves around the idea

of an awesome sea mammal, which drives the passions of revenge in one man and

forces him to pursue a course of action which leads ultimately to his death as

well as the deaths of his companions. There is a great deal of imagination

involved in these stories and the creativity is highly apparent. There is an

expression of belief in the supernatural, as the author strives to create the

image of a humongous beast in the mind of the reader. There are no indications

that Melville was in any way averse to fame or to the pursuit of excellence in

his work. Every author, when writing a book, is hopeful of it?s success and

Melville was no less.