Saturday, December 4, 2010

Are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth equally tragic or is one more tragic the the other?

If we understand the tragic hero in the traditional Aristotelian sense, I would argue that Lady Macbeth is a good deal less tragic than her husband. We do not see her as a complicated individual who is good, better than most, great in fact, but with a flaw that results from her greatness. We see her as flawed and evil from the first moment we meet her. Macbeth, however, is great: he is a courageous warrior, and those virtues which make him that are what bring him down: his violence in particular. That, and his ambition (which also makes him a great warrior), and other things--such as the temptation of the witches and being seduced by his wife. From the first moment we meet Lady Macbeth she seems evil--we have no exposition that she might have been a good person before the events of the play. We can not measure her "fall" as tragic unless she begins at a "height," and I do not think she does.

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