Macbeth The Realm Of Evil Research Paper

Macbeth: the Realms of Evil

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth ‘The heavens, as troubled with man’s act, / Threaten his bloody stage. By th’ clock ‘tis day, / And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp. / Is’t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame, / That darkness does the face of earth entomb, / When living light should kiss it? The natural order of the universe has collapsed giving rise to the realm of darkness where ‘Men must not walk too late’, since things are not what they seem and evil circulates at his ease. So we have from the very beginning three nightmarish figures--The Weird Sisters--telling us that ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air’. In nightmares nothing is certain to keep its consistency.
With regard to the effects of evil on human beings, we can see a Macbeth entirely aware of the evil he embraces, and like Satan he can never renounce his free-willed moral choice, once it has been made. The Thane of Cadwor, through love of self, sets his own will against that of God, chooses a lesser finite good--kingship and power--rather than eternal salvation. Now there is no turning back and Macbeth has overtly rendered to darkness: ‘Come seeling night, / Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day; And with thy bloody and invisible hand / Cancel and tear to pieces the great bond / Which keeps me pale!’. Steadily Macbeth moves farther and farther from God and his fellow men, and his bonds with nature is weakened. He becomes an alien to himself: ‘For mine own good, / All causes shall give wrong: I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er’. However, Banquo’s ghost returns to him as a reminder that, as man, he cannot easily extinguish the human force within himself, that the torment of fear, the ‘Terrible dreams / That shake us nightly’ and the ‘Full of scorpions is my mind’ will continue till his own final destruction. Later his dehumanisation becomes obvious in his unwillingness to live, which is in itself a denial of the mercy of God: ‘I
A falcon is killed by a mousing owl and ‘Duncan’s horses--a thing most strange and certain-- / Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race, / Turn’d wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out, / Contending ‘gainst obedience, as they would make / War against mankind’. But this perversion of nature contains within itself the means of restoring harmony: Macbeth believes himself invincible in the light of what a ghostly apparition says to him: 'Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn / The pow’r of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth’. However, there comes Macduff, the saviour: ‘Despair thy charm; And let the angel whom still hast serv’d / Tell thee Macduff how was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d’. So Shakespeare uses the very perversion itself--a child unborn of mother--to overthrown the tyrant and restore the physical universe to its natural state of