Macbeth: The Pattern of Idea and Action

Abstract

daring experiment in tragedy, for in play he set himself to describe the operation of evil in all its manifestations: to define its very nature, to depict its seduction of man, and to show its effect upon all of the planes of creation once it has been unleashed by one man's sinful moral choice. It is final aspect which here receives Shakespeare's primary attention and which conditions the sombre mood of the play. Shakespeare anatomizes evil both in intellectual and emotional terms, using all of the devices of poetry, and most notably the images of blood and darkness which so many commentators have described. For his final end of reconciliation, he relied not upon audience identification with his hero, but rather upon an intellectual perception of the total play. In lay his most original departure. Macbeth is a closely knit, unified construction, every element of which is designed to support an intellectual statement, to which action, character, and poetry all contribute. The idea which governs the plays is primarily explicit in the action of the central character, Macbeth himself; his role is cast into a symbolic pattern which is a reflection of Shakespeare's view of evil's operation in the world.' The other characters serve dramatic functions designed to set off the particular intellectual problems implicit in the action of the central figure.2 The basic pattern of the play is a simple one, for which Shakespeare returned to an earlier formula he had used in Richard Ill. The hero accepts evil in the third scene of the play. In the second act he commits the deed to which his choice of evil must inevitably lead him, and for the final three acts, as he rises higher in worldly power he sinks deeper and deeper into evil, until at the end of the play he is utterly and finally destroyed. There is here no pattern of redemption or regeneration for the fallen hero as in King Lear.3 Shakespeare's final statement, however, is not one of despair, for out of the play comes a feeling of reconciliation which does affirm the kind of meaning in the world with which great tragedy must end.4 In the earlier tragedies feeling had been created largely through the regeneration of an essentially sympathetic hero. In Macbeth, however, there can be little doubt of the final damnation of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen (V. viii. 69).