Реферат на тему Yet Another MacBeth Essay Research Paper Macbeth
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Yet Another 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.