Sunday, May 13, 2012

How far fate is responsible for Macbeth's doom?

I would like to read Macbeth as essentially a Renaissance play dealing with the tragedy of 'vaulting ambition' in a fast-expanding world, in a world in which individual will locked its horns with dark fatality.


If we tend to conclude that Macbeth shows fatal victimhood, it is surely an unjust negation of the worthiness of 'Bellona's bridegroom', of the story of the fall of the brightest of angels in the muddled heaven of Scotland. The fact that Macbeth was an incomparable soldier, a great saviour of Duncan's Scotland, should not be set aside in a bid to prove his victimisation in the hand of Fate, the witches serving as agents of inscrutable fatality.


The story of Macbeth is one of temptation and fall. But did the witches tempt Macbeth? Surely not. The witches' proclamations were but an exteriorisation of the seed of evil already in Macbeth. Macbeth is an example of a self-divided personality, the unlawfully ambitious Macbeth tempting the Macbeth of imaginative conscience and moral scruples. Shakespeare dramatises the theatre in the soul of his protagonist through soliloquies and asides.


'Macbeth' is a Renaissance Morality play, a play that reveals the battle between predestination and free will. Macbeth's fall is chiefly due to his submission to the temptation within himself, rather than any hostile predestination. The witches led a trap; Lady Macbeth stood actively by him; but, after all, it was his own ambition which paved 'the primrose way to everlasting bonfire'.

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