Macbeth
William Shakespeare (1606)
“A Scottish general receives a prophecy, murders a king, and discovers that the real horror isn't the crime — it's living with it.”
Character Analysis
A great man with a fatal desire to be greater. Macbeth is not simply ambitious — he is capable enough that his ambition has some basis. He knows what he is doing is wrong (his soliloquies make this explicit) and does it anyway. This makes him not a villain but a tragic hero in the Aristotelian sense: a man of stature brought low by his own hamartia. His deterioration — from eloquent anguish to monosyllabic defiance — is one of theater's great character arcs.
Formal iambic pentameter in soliloquies, increasingly fragmented after the murder. Military diction ('armed head,' 'tramples,' 'bear-like'). His language deteriorates from elaborate Latinate periods to short, defiant monosyllables by Act V.