To say that Macbeth is a bloody butcher is to endorse Malcolm's final view of Macbeth and his wife-"the dead butcher and his fiend-like queen." Macbeth killed Duncan; murderers appointed by him killed Banquo, and the family of Macduff. Even then, we should not reduce him to a one-dimensional character--just a criminal/villain; we have gone through his soliloquies and asides from act 1 sc.3 till the very end of the play. We must have noted his divided self, his fears and agonies, the conflict between his "vaulting ambition" and his imaginative conscience. He has caused great sufferings to the people, and yet he himself has no less suffered. His reaction to the news of his partner's death and the ensuing deliberation on the tragic futility of life--"a tale told by an idiot," it being "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"--must be a memorable existentialist commentary. Macbeth is a great poet sadly counterpointed with uncontrollable desire. That is precisely the irony of the Renaissance man, the tragedy of being both "fair and foul."
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