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A Comparative Study: Shakespeare's Macbeth and Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan

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A Comparative Study: Shakespeare's Macbeth and Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan
Essay Writing
'corruptibility is inherent in both texts - discuss corruptibility in both texts'

Across the history of humanity, we cannot avoid man's susceptibility to evil and the internal influences that inherently corrupt our morality. Within both Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' and Sam Raimi's 'A Simple Plan', the catalysts of ambition and greed portray the notions of corruptibility and the corruption of natural order. Corruptibility of man is found throughout both texts, accentuating women as the corrupting power and showing how this emasculates man throughout both texts. Similarly, the corruption of the natural order is a theme which recurs throughout Macbeth and A Simple Plan, through this showing how the emasculation of man then also acts as an imbalance to the scales of natural order. Although this changes from period to period, an imbalance in the natural order is always corrected.

In Macbeth, the corruptibility of man is explored by showing man as corruptible, while showing women as corrupting. In the first act, the witches are portrayed as women dangerous powers and a completely incongruous personality when compared with the outside world. Throughout Shakespeare's life and times, witches were the objects of morbid and fevered fascination. A veritable witch mania covered England in the reign of King James I, the monarch present at the time of Shakespeare's plays. It is because of this that most believed in witches and many immediately connected witches with the supernatural and their dangerous ability to corrupt, along with many other powers. Their foresight in Act I, scene iii, as they say the three "all hail to thee"s as the audience realise the dangerous nature of this foresight from the beginning. Lady Macbeth is also a corrupting force in Shakespeare's play, as she is used as the medium by which Macbeth kills Duncan in act I, scene v. Throughout Macbeth, Shakespeare effectively employs women as the corrupting force for Man's inherent corruptibility.

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