The Effect of Evil in Shakespeare's "Macbeth"

Paper Summary:

This paper is an analysis of Shakespeare's play "Macbeth." "Macbeth" is the study of an honorable man and the savior of his country, falling through the turmoil of evil and corruption and ultimately becoming an unnatural man, isolated from his kinsmen, and meeting his inevitable demise. It deals with the effects of evil in "Macbeth" on four different levels of destruction: that of the fallen man, that of his family, that of the state and that of the physical universe.

From the Paper:

"Often in literature, the forces of evil play a major part in the downfall of the protagonist. As Lennox expresses to Macbeth: "The night has been unruly: where we lay,/ Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,/ Lamentings heard with air, strange screams of death,/ And prophesying with accents terrible/ Of dire combustion and confused events/ New hatched to the woeful time." (Shakespeare 2.3 54-59) Ironically, he was telling of the horrors from the night before, when King Duncan was slain in his bed, while in actuality Macbeth had done the slaying. Shakespeare's play Macbeth is a "complex study of evil and its corrupting influence on humanity." (Richards, 236) It is also the study of an honorable man and the savior of his country, falling through the turmoil of evil and corruption and ultimately becoming an unnatural man, isolated from his kinsmen, and meeting his inevitable demise. The evil unleashed by Macbeth expands into even more evils that effect humanity on all four different levels of creation: that of the fallen man, that of his family, his state, and of the physical universe."

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