Macbeth 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.