This post is based on an extract from my Ultimate Guide to Macbeth, available on Amazon.
Fate and Free Will
God created Eden as an experiment in free will. Could Adam and Eve refuse to be tempted? Could they choose to be good, using their own free will? The answer is no.
They freely chose to go against his command. However, he continually allows all men and women to exercise free will for the rest of their lives. Only by choosing to live good lives, and make moral choices, can they get back to the state of perfection they had in Eden, and get into Heaven.
We can clearly see this idea of temptation and free will being played out in the choices the Macbeths make about murder.
However, theatre and tragedy come to us from the Greeks, whose civilisation predated Christianity. Greek Gods didn’t create a moral universe in which you would get to heaven by being good. Instead, everyone died and went to the underworld, Hades.
Instead, Greek Gods demanded that you worship them with sacrifices, in order to stop the Gods punishing you in some way with bad harvest, shipwreck, disease, etc. However, the Gods decided on your fate – how and when you would die, and many of the events in your life. In Greek tragedy a character will find out their fate from a prophecy. They try to avoid their fate, but then whatever they do brings about that fate without them knowing it. They can’t escape it. In Greek Tragedy, there is no free will.
In Christian Teaching, Everyone Has Free Will
As you know, Christians believed that Adam and Eve chose to defy God. They did this because God gave them to choice to choose good over evil. However, they failed this test, and chose to defy him. They chose evil.
Macbeth thinks this is a sham. He doesn’t believe in free will, at least not at the end of the play. He compares God to a playwright, who gives each character a script they have to follow:
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
God has written the tale, and the idiot is the ‘player’, the actor enacting the tale. The actor is an idiot because they behave as if they are making real choices, when they are really simply strutting an hour on the stage of life, doing everything God has written for them. In this extended metaphor, free will is simply an illusion we tell ourselves.
If we think about Original Sin this way, Adam and Eve were always going to be tempted from the moment they were told not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. After all, if they did not know what evil was, until they had “knowledge”, how could they know that disobeying God was evil?
So, Macbeth is a tragic hero, because Macbeth can’t escape his fate. But, unlike Greek tragic heroes, Macbeth’s hubris* is that he runs towards his fate, killing Duncan so his fate will arrive more quickly. This feels like free will, doesn’t it? So perhaps Macbeth’s extended metaphor is just another way for him to deny responsibility: “Thou canst not say I did it!”
The Great Chain of Being
The Great Chain of Being was a way of keeping power with the rich, and stopping those lower down the social ladder asking for more.
The idea was God sat at the top of this chain, then came angels, then the Pope, then kings and queens, then the nobility in all their ranks, then the middle classes (people with wealth but no title), tradesmen, and workers. Then women, then animals, with eagles and lions at the top, down to through less impressive creatures to insects at the bottom.
In medieval times this meant that God decided on everyone’s ‘station’ or status in life, and where you sat in the social hierarchy. It meant that kings and queens were appointed by God, by “Divine Right”, so rebelling against a monarch was a sin against God.
But this also meant that if you were born into a poor family, well, that was pretty much the way it was supposed to be, and you had to respect the lords and ladies who ruled over you.
Constant plagues and exploration of the new world in Elizabethan times meant this belief was being challenged. Suddenly London expanded quite rapidly; it was filled with new businesses, where men could now change their status. Shakespeare was one typical example, starting as an actor, becoming the country’s most successful playwright, but also a really successful businessman and property owner.
The idea of people becoming who they want to be, rather than who they are destined to be by birth, is revolutionary, and it probably started in Elizabethan times.
It is no coincidence that Shakespeare invented the soliloquy at this time (although the Greeks got there 2000 years before). Before that, in Britain, the idea that characters had rich inner lives, and were powerful individuals never found its way on stage. But now that many more people could succeed as individuals, it made sense to show this on stage.
The translation of the King James Bible was also revolutionary in this. Suddenly people were able to read the Bible and understand its teaching themselves. They didn’t have to learn Latin to do it, or depend on priests to explain it to them.
The other attack on the Great Chain of Being is that it was mainly a Catholic idea. Once Henry the Eighth converted to Protestantism, and destroyed the monasteries, this ‘natural’ order looked less certain. The Pope disappeared from it straight away!
This of course led to persecution of Catholics, and to the gunpowder plot of 1605, which wouldn’t just kill King James, but all the nobility in Parliament as well. This is (almost) the first time that a plot against a king had not been led by other nobles, who thought that God had chosen them to be king.
*Hubris - this is a tragic hero’s pride, when they think they can outwit the gods, or are superior to them in some way. This leads to the gods punishing them with a tragic end.