powmac The Power of Religion and Fate in Macbeth Essay -- Macbeth essa

The Power of Religion and Fate in Macbeth Macbeth presents a apparitional view of mans existence and destiny. Shakespeare, however, did not write a religious or theological tract. He explored the meaning of kind-hearted life in those terms which guile 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 europium was pas underworldg 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 Pilgrims occur 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 unify themselves. We do not see the fluency of construction in Macbeth as we see in Everyman or Pilgrims Progress. But the religious, Christian view is intensely at that place 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, nighttime and crime. Saul, in Samuel (1), visits the Witch of Endor in order to know his destiny. Saul himself had taken seve... ...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 i n 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 & FarrenLondon,1883 (First Edition) Elliott,G.R. Dramatic Providence in Shakespeare. Princeton University Press, 1958 (out-of-print Title)