Harry V. Jaffa: Macbeth and the Moral Universe
Macbeth is a moral play par excellence. In this, it stands in stark contrast to two more recent well-known tales of murder, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Camus's The Stranger. In Macbeth Shakespeare presented the moral phenomena in such a way that those who respond to his art must, in some way or another, become better human beings. In Dostoevsky's and Camus's heroic criminals we see the corruption of moral consciousness characteristic of modern literature....
Lady Macbeth says
that Macbeth is not without ambition, but lacks the "illness should attend
it." This is the only occurrence in Shakespeare of "illness" to
mean "capacity for doing evil." That a capacity for evil is an evil
capacity is not what Lady Macbeth intends to convey, but Shakespeare conveys it
to us nonetheless. That ambition "should" be attended by release from
moral restraint is a thesis much older than Machiavelli. It is explored in the
greatest depth in both Plato's Republic
and Gorgias, wherein
Socrates maintains that the worst fate to befall a human being is not to become
the victim of a tyrant - terrible as that may be - but to become a tyrant. The
soul of the tyrant makes him the enemy of everyone, and the friend of none.
Without friends, the life of the tyrant is barren of every good thing that might have tempted him to become a tyrant. But the actions that made him tyrant make it impossible for him safely to relinquish or abandon his tyranny. As Macbeth discovers, once he crosses the threshold of murder, he almost cannot help being driven to commit ever multiplying murders. Every step of his way, after the first murder, drives him further down that path. But he cannot turn back; he has lost the moral freedom which accompanied his first soliloquy, and he is in the grip of a remorseless and relentless necessity. His career of crime can end only in damnation both in this world and the next. The lesson of the play is the inexorable and inescapable vindictive power of the moral universe....
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/macbeth-and-the-moral-universe/
Ivan Turgenev on Hamlet and Don
Quixote // The madness in Hamlet and Don Quixote
Salman Rushdie: how Cervantes and
Shakespeare wrote the modern literary rule book
Nikolai Berdyaev: The Religion of
Communism (1931) // The Paradox of the Lie (1939)
Society
of the Spectacle / 'इमेज' - 'Image': A Poem on Deaths in the Age of
Covid
