William Shakespeare’s Macbeth contains many life lessons. Number one: don’t listen to strange bearded women when wandering through the fog. Number two: never let anyone bully you into doing something you don’t want to, even if she is your wife. And number 3? If you want to become king, the strategy of killing everything in your path, while seemingly effective, is bound to fail.
Macbeth is indeed a cautionary tale of greed, power and ambition. At the center of the work, it deals with humanity’s tendency towards evil and cruelty, particularly when fueled by the desire for ascension. Macbeth, a Scottish nobleman fresh from a relentlessly victorious battle, stumbles upon a pack of prophesying witches who hint that kingship is in his future, affecting his head and his ego. Just a few words set Macbeth in motion to achieve his destiny of being king, instead of letting things unfold naturally.
Looking at the summary of Macbeth, Macbeth is presented as both a tragic hero and a villain in the play, as he is a man whose ambitious ego and thirst for power set him on a path of destruction that inevitably arrives at a grisly fate head on. a spike. Violent is like violent for Macbeth.
What we learn from Macbeth, aside from all the inconvenience of going on a murderous rampage, is that our desires and emotions control us far more than we realize. He also highlights how easily humanity can be swayed sometimes, when all it takes is a few creepy women to plant a seed of power in our impressionable egos. At its basic level, Macbeth is about the power and drive of man, and how that power and drive can effortlessly throw us off course. Take, for example, a selection of Macbeth quotes that feature Macbeth’s hallucinations that ultimately convince him to kill the king. A floating mirage of a dagger, “a dagger of the mind” he calls it, seals the deal for Macbeth, interpreting it as something to “command” him on his way to power. Note the level of agency he ascribes to this image, which could be a manifestation of witches or his “heat oppressed” brain. The image is both a sign and a beginning of spells for Macbeth, suggesting his own lack of agency and self-determination that allows him to be easily swayed. A useful comparison for understanding Macbeth’s madness can be found in another famous Shakespearean play where a tragic hero deals with inaction, uncertainty, and of course, impressionability when it comes to the supernatural. In the summary of Hamlet, the ghost of his father leads Hamlet on a path to avenge his late father. He falters and wonders what to do, much like Macbeth, until he finally commits the first murder (Poor Polonius!) that sets things in motion. For him, as for Macbeth, the first murder is always the hardest, but it gets easier with subsequent ones. For Macbeth, it becomes exceedingly easier.
The tendency to be impressionable, either by one’s own mind tricks or by the biting words of Lady Macbeth or the witches, makes Macbeth vulnerable to his own impulses for greed and power and the consequent implication for evil. It’s also what makes him appear in part as a tragic hero, someone whose flawed initial sense of self allows him to be a plaything of fate and witches. Those who read Macbeth as a story of power and greed must also keep in mind how such ambitions are essentially weaknesses for Macbeth, as he falls victim to his own failings. A cautionary tale indeed.