Literary analysis: Interpreting evil as displayed in Shakespeares Macbeth
It would be hard to argue that an overwhelming sense of evil is not ubiquitous in the thematic and structural elements of Macbeth. As G. Wilson Knight deftly argues in his 1930 essay “Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil” a nebulous, indeterminate, and amorphous evil haunts virtually every aspect of the play, going so far as to conclude, “Macbeth is the apocalypse of evil” . Knight’s in-depth analysis of the play does provide a wealth of textual support for this assertion, such as the prevalence of questions and rumors in the dialogue, the discord in nature exemplified in the horse cannibalizing scene, the centrality of nightmare imagery and sleeplessness, and so forth; but while this does demonstrate the ubiquity of evil in Macbeth in so far as that it is present throughout the text, to define said evil as absolute is an entirely different matter.
When we pin down metaphysical absolutes, we do so in ignorance of the perspectives of others, which we have not been exposed to. By examining three different critical approaches to evil in Macbeth, I hope to prove that there is no “absolute”, definitive version of evil in the play, and furthermore, that various approaches to and types of “evil” in Macbeth, and in society at large, can co-exist without bringing the overarching structure of the text, or our society, crumbling down. To bring this contention further, I assert that what is at stake in the debate surrounding evil in Macbeth, is our perceived cultural capital. By cultural capital I mean the trappings and givens that we take for granted, but nevertheless lead us to label others with faux authority.
Knight was writing in the historical context of an increasingly nebulous and terrifying world all too similar to Macbeth’s war torn Scotland, with the horrors of the First World War only freshly healed, and the anxieties surrounding the outbreak of a second war looming large, evil naturally would have seemed to be an absolute force. Knight even directly alludes to personal experiences with evil in the course of his essay, writing “We, who have felt the sickly poise over the abysmal deeps of evil, the hideous reality of the unreal, must couch our judgment in a different phrase.” . However, as time has passed and more critics have re-examined the function of evil in Macbeth from different historical and methodological contexts, and there has been a distinct shift from the evil Knight claims is a “suffocating, conquering evil fixed by the basilisk eye of a nameless
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