Macbeth is a play written by Shakespeare in 1606. The play is based on an ancient story from the Scottish Chronicles, compiled by the ancient English historian Raphael Holling. In the 19th century, Macbeth and Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear were known as the "Four Tragedies of Shakespeare."
The play "Macbeth" is mainly about a general named Macbeth who, after hearing the prophecies of three witches, actually kills his cousin, King Duncan. When he succeeded to the throne, he killed many people, fell out of rebellion, and finally died under the enemy's sword. Many people say that Macbeth's experience is the proof of "fatalism", from his becoming Sir Grames to Sir Court and then becoming king, and finally dying in battle. Everything is the same as in the two prophecies. But in my opinion, Macbeth's life tragedy was caused by himself, not by fate. In the following, I will elaborate on two aspects: psychology and literary ethics criticism.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > from a psychological point of view, how Macbeth "fell" into the witch prophecy trap step by step</h1>
Macbeth begins with the witch's "prophecy" throughout the text. The entire article is inserted with many spiritual elements: darkness, crows, blood donations, ghosts, omens, hallucinations and other imagery, all of which cast a veil of "fear" on Macbeth. But is it really all fate? I think that the so-called "fatalism" in Macbeth is nothing more than a "gimmick" for what has already happened, and that what led to his tragic fate was the infinite expansion of desire in his "original self".
Freud's theory of personality structure holds that the complete personality structure of man consists of 3 parts, namely the id, the ego, and the superego. The ego is in the subconscious of one's own thoughts, representing the most instinctive desires of man, such as hunger, sex, ambition, selfishness, etc.; the self is the self cultivated through acquired learning and the environment, using reason and consciousness to deal with real things, and most of the energy of the self is used in the control and suppression of the self; the superego is differentiated from the self, driven by moralization and conscience, and supervises itself with conscience, so that the self can get rid of the entanglement of the self.
These three personalities represent different psychological needs, follow different principles, and often contradict each other. When the three personalities "live in harmony" and reach a balance, the mental health will develop. Imbalances on either side are prone to psychological problems.
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth
The play begins, and from the descriptions of others we know that Macbeth is a big hero. He went out for the country to cut down the decisive battle, and his battle achievements were great. Even King Duncan said, "Now all I can say is that all that is rewarded will not satisfy your great deeds." The appearance of these plots suggests that Macbeth's ambition energy is very great.
1. When Macbeth first heard the witch's prophecy
When Macbeth, after listening to the witch's prophecy, was crowned "Sir Court" by the king, he thought so:
The first two sentences have been confirmed, just like the wonderful opening statement, the next grand imperial drama will be officially performed. This miraculous revelation will not be a bad omen, but it will not be a good omen. If it is a bad omen, why use a psychic prophecy to guarantee my future success? If it is a good omen, why does that sentence cause a terrible impression in my mind, make me hairy, make my heart completely out of normal, and beat vigorously? The horror of the imagination is far greater than the horror of reality; the delusion of killing in my mind has shaken my whole body by chance, and the mind has lost its role in speculation, and the illusion of nothingness is considered to be real.
Macbeth's "accidentally floating delusion of killing has already shocked my whole body", why does a person who kills decisively on the battlefield suddenly feel terrified in his heart? For when the three witches finished the prophecy, Macbeth's three "I' began to waver. At this moment, Macbeth had already had the idea of killing the king. A conflict began to arise between the "id" representing desire and the "superego" representing ethics and morality. On the face of it, he is hesitant and indecisive. It was actually a struggle between his different personalities.
Psychologist Jung once said: "The collective subconscious is the precipitation of the common experience and emotional experience of ancient peoples fighting with nature and interacting with their own kind for their own survival and development, and it can be inherited." In the collective human subconscious, there is an archetype that symbolizes power. "There is a cult of power in each of our subconscious. At the same time, Freud believes that "in the unconscious instinct of man, the most completely suppressed is the sexuality and violence against relatives, that is, incest and killing of relatives." Therefore, when King Duncan announced that his eldest son Malcom would become crown prince, Macbeth's "original self" in his personality was particularly strong. But he was still hesitant because of his long-standing "superego." Finally, under the seduction of his wife, he finally let the power desire of the "original self" overcome the "self" and the "superego", and chose to kill the king.
2. When Macbeth hears the second prophecy
Macbeth killed the old king Duncan while he was asleep, and then lost his sleep himself. The more people he killed, the more fear he felt inside. Because at this moment he still has reason and conscience. Later, Macbeth struggled with the "self" all day without completely losing his "self" and "superego", and even hallucinated in public at a banquet due to excessive nervousness.
Tormented day by day by reason in the "self" and conscience in the "superego", Macbeth decides to go to the witch and ask him about his fate. This time it was the ghost who prophesied him, saying that "you can put the power of man to laugh, for no one born of a woman can hurt Macbeth" and "Macbeth will never be defeated unless one day the woods of Bonan will move like the Dunsinen Mountains".
These words allowed Macbeth to be subconsciously fed into the idea that "Macbeth you are the greatest king, and you will be invincible", so that he became more unscrupulous after that. It can be said that at this time, Macbeth has completely released the desire for power and ambition in the "original self". In the end, it was the "original self" that destroyed him.
Finally, before his death, Macbeth had an epiphany, saying, "May these deceitful devils not be believed again, and they fool us with ambiguous words, and although the sentences are fulfilled, they are completely contrary to our original expectations." Macbeth, after hearing the ghosts' prophecies for the second time, guessed the beginning, but not the end. It was not until the end of the day that he discovered that the prophecies that actually dominated his destiny were the greed and desire in the personality of the "original self" that led him to his eventual demise.
Analyzing the fate of Macbeth from a psychological point of view, it is not difficult to find that man cannot be swallowed up by his own ambitions and desires. When many voices surround our hearts and fill our hearts, we must not forget our original intentions, and insist on learning to use the reason in the "self" and the morality in the "superego" to keep the bottom line of being born as a human being, so that we will not let ourselves be affected by the original desires in the "original self".
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > analyzes the cause of Macbeth's tragedy from the perspective of literary ethics</h1>
Nie Zhenzhao, a well-known scholar of literary ethics in China, wrote in the Introduction to the Criticism of Literary Ethics: "Literature is essentially an art about ethics, and the core of ethics is the ethical order formed in the development of human society and the moral norms for maintaining this order. He believes that literary ethics criticism is a method of literary criticism, which is mainly used to interpret, analyze and interpret literary works from an ethical standpoint, study writers and issues related to literature.
Shakespeare's "Macbeth" seems to be a "fatalistic" tragedy, but from the perspective of literary ethics, it is not difficult to find that Macbeth's tragedy is not the fate of the witch's prophecy, but is caused by its own weak ethical consciousness and disregard for ethical order.
Macbeth first heard the witch prophecy, but hesitated without setting out to kill King Duncan. Even his wife said:
You want to be a great man, you are not without ambition, but you have less treachery associated with that ambition; your desire is great, but you only want to use legitimate means; on the one hand, you do not want to play tricks, on the other hand, you want to grab it indiscriminately.
From the perspective of literary ethics criticism, Macbeth's hesitant and contradictory character before the assassination of the king is ostensibly a collision between weakness and ambition in his personality, but in essence, macbeth himself faces ethical choices in his heart. He hesitated because if Macbeth chose to "kill the king", he would violate a series of ethical taboos. King Duncan was also Macbeth's cousin, and once Macbeth chose to usurp the throne, he would cause chaos in the ethical order. However, in the end, Macbeth was defeated by the animalistic factor in his own body, and chose to usurp the throne and destroy ethics and morality.
It is worth noting here that Macbeth destroyed three layers of ethics: Macbeth killed the king in disregard of the ethics of the monarch; he established himself as king and destroyed the social contract; Macbeth killed his own cousin and exterminated his nephews, undermining the ethics of blood kinship. Caught up in the lust for power and killing, he couldn't help himself.
Even a king could not rule the country for long, because in the monarchy (england at the time), the king was an inseparable part of the social camp. The "king" must be recognized by the whole social mechanism in order for this title to be established, to truly have the power of the king and the belief of being embraced by the people. However, Macbeth's seizure of the throne by killing the king is not justified in itself, and his actions cannot be approved by social mechanisms, so the royal power will not be stable. But even more frightening, he did not have the slightest repentance or desire to restore this chaotic social order, but to satisfy his own desires and plunge the entire people of the country into the depths of the water. His various crimes have inevitably led him to internal and external troubles and the end of rebellion.
The prophecies of the witches that appear in Macbeth, the prophecies of the "future king", drive the development of the play; from the narrative structure, the "prophecy" is only a presupposition, that is, a presupposition of an ethical knot: Macbeth can only become a king himself by killing King Duncan. And the premise of this ethical knot leads to the main ethical thread that runs through the whole text- "the execution of the king". The "King", on the other hand, violated a series of ethical taboos, as King Duncan was macbeth's cousin. Once Macbeth chooses to usurp the throne, he will cause chaos in the ethical order.
Shakespeare once said, "When someone wants to transcend his or her ethical identity and challenge ethical taboos that should be adhered to, the normal ethical order will be seriously threatened." Once this threat becomes a reality, it will inevitably bring great disasters to the entire country and society. So Macbeth eventually broke the ethics of monarchy, the social contract, and the ethics of kinship, causing the people to resent, rebel, and eventually die in a duel. Just as Oedipus himself in the famous Greek tragedy Oedipus, after he killed his father and married his mother, he sent a plague, which is a symbolic illustration of the serious calamity that ethical crimes have brought to mankind.
Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in the early 17th century, when England was in the process of gradually moving from an agrarian economy to a capitalist economy. There have been great changes in the socio-economic structure, which have led to changes in social classes, such as the gradual decline of the aristocratic class and the rise of the petty bourgeoisie. In this transitional period of alternating old and new societies, Britain neither fully established capitalist society nor completely got rid of the shadow of the old feudal society, so the whole of England at that time was in a state of extreme chaos. The contradictions between people have been further intensified, and social unrest has been unstable. In this social context, Shakespeare created Macbeth in order to call on people to pay attention to ethical order, everyone should abide by their duties, control their inner desires, and follow the ethical order.
The tragedy of Macbeth's life fully shows that social people should not deviate from traditional ethics, let alone destroy the ethical order. People should be cautious in the face of desires, and should not be blinded by interests to write their own tragedies.
"Macbeth", which is known as one of Shakespeare's "four tragedies", is that Shakespeare is wrapped in the cloak of "fatalism", with the help of the fate of the protagonist of history, Macbeth, to remind people in the world and even in future generations that they must have a correct moral consciousness and cannot destroy the bottom line of inner morality; they must learn to restrain their desires and listen to the voice of their inner conscience; they must follow the ethical order, abide by their duties, and must not disregard the ethical order.