Read Macbeth Online

Shakespeare places about this brave soldier, with a 
heart that longs unworthily, an environment which tests 
too well his weakness and which sooner or later will 
work his complete ruin. Given such a character, so 



inclined, and such surroundings as the visit of Dun- 
can to Inverness, the sly Banquo, the strong-willed, 
ambitious Lady Macbeth, the belief in the witches and 
the prophecies made true, there is no other conclusion 
for the play. 

And now we have an idea of what a hero, not of the 
popular sort, but of tragedy, means : "a person of great 
repute and prosperity who falls into adversity not 
through wickedness, but through some error." A 
great person falls through error. Macbeth is thought 
of as a man made up of good and evil, placed in an en- 
vironment which partly made by him, in turn makes 
him in part. He is great, but his temptation is greater ; 
he is strong, but less so than his ambition for the throne. 

The play simply reveals the relentless progress of 
error in a character powerless tb battle with it, what- 
ever the error may be ; and like all serious plays of 
Shakespeare reveals the gradual but steady widening 
of the tragic flaw in the hero's character, which finally 
works his ruin. There is not a line of humor in the 
play unless one construes as such the grim sort found 
in the Porter Scene, which only increases the horror 
just perpetrated ; or the possibly intended pun of the 
Lady who would "gild the faces of the grooms."