powmac The Power of Religion and Fate in Macbeth

The Power of Religion and Fate in Macbeth

Macbeth presents a religious view of man's existence and destiny. Shakespeare, however, did not write a religious or theological tract. He explored the meaning of human life in those terms which art uses in order to project our deepest thoughts and feelings; in broad, popular religious symbols and myths, whose meaning is as profound as it is easily recognized.

The unparalleled religious crisis, through which Europe was passing at the time of Shakespeare writing Macbeth, the first decade of the seventeenth century, shook the traditional religious heritage to its foundations. Placed between an Everyman and a Pilgrim's Progress Macbeth did not have the simple clarity of either; the former was written before the phase of violent disintegration and the latter when more settled ideas had begun to consolidate themselves. We do not see the fluency of construction in Macbeth as we see in Everyman or Pilgrim's Progress. But the religious, Christian view is intensely there to determine the nature of imagery and the significance of characters. The human problem that is the basic idea of Macbeth is the relation between evil in human nature called "sin" and the everlasting scheme of things presided over by a Deity whose justice, wisdom and benevolence could be doubted temporarily but never rejected. More abstractly, the problem was that of human responsibility and free will, human freedom, in a world ruled by divine necessity.

Macbeth begins with a set of supernatural figures. Witches have been always associated with darkness, night and crime. Saul, in Samuel (1), visits the Witch of Endor in order to know his destiny. Saul himself had taken seve...

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...moil in Act I shows the process of perversion of reason and corruption of will. He knows the good but will not and cannot do it and there is no intercessory power for him to turn to for aid His incapacity to pray in the soliloquy in Act I, the intervention by his wife (instead of by a good angel) just when he decides not to proceed further, the promptness with which the fantasy of the deed forms itself in his mind after he hears the prophecy-all these testify that Macbeth is a reprobate predestined to damnation.

Works Cited:

Macbeth. New York: Arden Edition (New Series)

Bindoff,S.T. Sr Tudor England, Pelican Books.1959

Dyer, T. Folklore of Shakespeare. Griffith & Farren:London,1883 (First Edition)

Elliott,G.R. Dramatic Providence in Shakespeare. Princeton University Press, 1958 (out-of-print Title)