|
Shakespeare's Macbeth, and Euripedes' Medea, are both tragic plays in the classical sense. Both Medea and Macbeth lust for the unattainable, and that lust destroys them. It cannot be said which character is a truly tragic figure, because both fit the description. However, if either character deserves more sympathy it is Medea, the jilted wife, not Macbeth the King killer. Macbeth's lust for power and his willingness to please his wife leads to his downfall. He murders the children of his one time friend, and suffers the consequences of that sin. Medea murders her own children in her quest to win back her lover Jason. She does this to seek revenge, since Jason sees the children not as theirs, but as his. She also, like Macbeth seeks to kill her rival, Jason's new lover, the daughter of King Creon of Corinth and a 'real Greek'. Both Euripedes and Shakespeare use the supernatural to enhance their plays. Macbeth is influenced by the prophecy of the three witches. Medea, who is a witch herself, is influenced by the mythological Gods of ancient Greece. Macbeth's and Medea's ambitions and lust lead to tragic conclusions in their lives.
Urged by his henpecking wife, Macbeth lusts for the throne. In the beginning of the play, Macbeth is likeable, but we soon see his dark side that will lead to his tragic downfall. The play starts with Macbeth and Banquo as co-leaders of the Scottish army, are returning from battle when they meet three witches. The witches prophesy that Macbeth will become Thane of Cawder and, later, king.
1. Witch. All hail, Macbeth. Hail to thee, Thane of
Glamis!
2. Witch. All hail, Macbeth. Hail to thee, Thane of
Cawdor!
3. Witch. All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King here-
after! (Act 1. Sc. III, lines 50-55)
They tell Banquo that he will not be king himself but he will have his descendants as kings:
1. Witch. Lesser than Macbeth, and greater.
2. Witch. Not so happy, yet happier.
3. Witch. Thou shalt get Kings, though thou be none.
So all hail, Macbeth and Banquo! (Act 1, SC. III lines 70-74)
Here we see Macbeth's ambitions begin to appear. He begins to consider the possibility of becoming king! There is a chance that King Duncan might choose Macbeth, a cousin, as his successor, but Macbeth’s hopes are destroyed when Duncan names his son, Malcolm. Macbeth, blinded by his ambition, sees Malcolm as an obstacle to overcome.
Lady Macbeth has received a letter from Macbeth, telling her of the prophecies and his new title. She is determined to help him become king, and when Macbeth returns, she persuades him to kill the king.
Lady. We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking place,
And we'll not fail. When Duncan is asleep
(Whereto the rather shall his day's hard journey
Soundly invite him), his two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only. When in swinish sleep
Their drenched natures lie as in death,
What cannot you and I peform upon
The ungaurded Duncan? What not put upon
His spongy officers, who shall bear the guilt
Of our great quell? (Act I. SC. VII lines 67-80)
When the King's body is discovered, Duncan’s sons fear for their own lives and flee. Macbeth is made king. After killing the King, Macbeth continues his downward spiral towards a tragic ending. Remembering the witches’ prophecy to Banquo, Macbeth hires murderers to kill Banquo and his son, Fleance. Fleance escapes, and Banquo’s ghost returns to haunt Macbeth. It is here that Macbeth and Medea have the greatest similarity. Medea kills her own children in her lustful ambition to regain her lover Jason. Macbeth kills one of his best friends to satisfy his lust for his power and hi love for his wife. He also would have gladly killed the son of his best friend. His murder of Duncan a man, a man he respected and admired, in order to satisfy his own lust is also similar to Medea's plight.
Macbeth fearful of what he has done, Macbeth returns to the witches to try to find some satisfaction. Macbeth is told to be vigilant of Mucduff, Thane of Fife; he is assured that he cannot be harmed by one ‘born of woman’, and that he will never be defeated until Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane. Finally, Macbeth is shown a line of kings in the likeness of Banquo.
Macduff has not co-operated with Macbeth, and he goes to see Malcolm in England. Macbeth orders the deaths of Macduff’s wife and family. Malcolm and Macduff lead an English army, reinforced by Scots sympathizers, against Macbeth. Lady Macbeth has gone mad and she dies. Approaching Macbeth’s castle at Dunsinane, Malcolm’s army cuts branches from the trees of Birnam Wood as camouflage. Macbeth’s forces are easily defeated. Macbeth himself is killed by Macduff, who was born from his mother prematurely by caesarean operation. The witches prophecy comes true, and Malcolm is made king of Scotland.
Macbeth is by far one of the greatest of Shakespeare's tragedies. Its images and representations of ambition, guilt and the degradation of being make him a truly tragic character. Macbeth starts out as a pretty-cool guy - he's a Scottish general and a gentleman, but has always wished to be more. It is not until after Duncan's death, that Macbeth truly begins to deteriorate into a faithless and remorseless man. He tells one lie to cover up another, having to commit one murder to cover up the other, until he looks back, and cannot even remember the first little step he took over the line. Only MacDuff, a faithful servant and soldier of Duncan and Malcom, can bring him down, even though the witches have rightfully prophesied that "no man of woman born" could possibly bring down Macbeth's reign of terror. Towards the end, we see Macbeth as a hopeless and destroyed man who has come far down the twisted path of deceit and murder, desperately attempting to hold on to life. It is in this passage, when he learns of his wife's death and really does not care that we see him finally lose his grip:
She should have died hereafter.
There would have been time for such a word.
Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow
creeps in this petty pace from day to day
to the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have but lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life is 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. (Act V. SC. V Lines 17-30)
Macbeth in a tragic ending to his once promising life tells Macduff:
I will not yield
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet
And to be baited with the rabble's curse.
Through Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries "Hold, enough!" (Act V. Sc. VIII lines 32-39)
Medea, a barbarian witch, having betrayed her family to help her lover Jason win the Golden Fleece, now finds him courting another woman, the daughter of King Creon of Corinth and a 'real Greek'. Her Nurse tells the events that will lead to her tragic demise at the beginning of the play:
For then my lady Medea would not have sailed to the towers of Iolcus, her heart smitten with love for Jason, or persuaded the daughters of Pelias to kill [10] their father and hence now be inhabiting this land of Corinth, with her husband and children, an exile loved by the citizens to whose land she had come, and lending to Jason himself all her support. This it is that most rescues life from trouble, [15] when a woman is not at variance with her husband. But now all is enmity, and love's bonds are diseased. For Jason, abandoning his own children and my mistress, is bedding down in a royal match, having married the daughter of Creon, ruler of this land. [20] Poor Medea, finding herself thus cast aside, calls loudly on his oaths, invokes the mighty assurance of his sworn right hand, and calls the gods to witness the unjust return she is getting from Jason.
After failing to persuade Jason to return to her, she decides to kill her rival with a gift of poisoned clothing. Here, she is eerily like Macbeth seeking revenge for being jilted. However, her motive for revenge is more admirable than Macbeth's. In another move that sounds like Macbeth, she also decides to kill her children to get revenge against Jason.
Medea
Oh, what sufferings are mine, sufferings that call for loud lamentation! O accursed children of a hateful mother, may you perish with your father and the whole house collapse in ruin!
Nurse
[115] Oh, woe is me! Why do you make the children sharers in their father's sin? Why do you hate them? O children, how terrified I am that you may come to harm. The minds of royalty are dangerous: [120] since they often command and seldom obey, they are subject to violent changes of mood.
Jason, sees his children as Greeks, and therefore not Medea's children, but his alone. King Aegeus of Athens stumbles along in search of a cure for his childlessness. He agrees to grant her asylum should she need it. She escapes from Jason at the end of the play on a dragon-drawn chariot given to her by her grandfather Helius, the sun god.
Both Medea and Macbeth are truly tragic characters. However, according to Denys L. Page:
Medea's emotions are far moving than her revenge: Jason's mind state of mind is more interesting than his calamity. The murder of children, caused by jealousy and anger against their father, is mere brutality: if it moves us at all, it does so towards incredulity and horror. Such and act is outside our experience, we--and the fifth-century Athenian--know nothing of it. But the emotions of the woman whose love has turned to hatred, and equally those of the man whose loves no longer, represent something eternal and unchangeable in human nature; here we find, what in great drama we must always seek, the universal in this particular. (Page, Denys L. Medea. "Introduction," Oxford Press: London, 1938, P. xiv-xv)
It is much easier to sympathize with the jilted woman Medea, we condemn her actions, but we understand her emotional anger. This makes her more tragic than Macbeth.
Nurse
The house is no more: it has perished. [140] For the husband is held fast in a royal marriage, while the wife, my mistress, wastes away her life in her chamber, her heart in no way soothed by the words of any of her friends.
Medea
Oh! May a flash of lightning pierce my head! [145] What profit any longer for me in life? Ah, ah! may I find my rest in death and leave behind my hateful life!
These lines allow us to feel sympathy for Medea's plight, even if we cannot accept her killing of her children. We see the anger and feel the emotion of a woman wronged.
Medea
[160] O mighty Themis and my lady Artemis, do you see what I suffer, I who have bound my accursed husband with mighty oaths? May I one day see him and his new bride ground to destruction, and their whole house with them, [165] so terrible are the wrongs they are bold to do me unprovoked! O father, O my native city, from you I departed in shame, having killed my brother.
We see here that Medea feels remorse and shame for killing her brother. We feel even more sympathy towards her, because this foreshadows what she will eventually do to her own children. We still cannot accept what she does, but this makes her even more tragic of a character.
However, neither Macbeth's motives or revenge are moving. Macbeth is motivated by greed, and a lust for power. He is a likeable character, and Lady Macbeth's constant henpecking makes us feel some sympathy towards him, but both his actions and his motives are repulsive, and unwarranted. Here is a man that is granted one of the highest positions in the feudal government of his day, but he turns his back on the man who bestowed honor upon him and becomes the trader, he replaces as Thane of Cawdor. Both Macbeth and Medea use violence to try to accomplish their goals, and neither is successful.
It is obvious that Shakespeare was influenced by Euripedes. The similarities between the two plays are numerous. The killing of children to seek revenge is a common theme in both that in Macbeth leads to the tragic ending and in Medea is the tragic ending.
In a final analysis, it must be said that Medea is the truly tragic figure. Macbeth, while tragic, acts solely out of the lust of power. Medea's lust for husband is not an admirable trait, but it does draw our sympathy. We may not understand why she kills her children, but we can certainly understand the wrath of a woman wronged. Especially when she says:
if I find any means or contrivance to punish my husband for these wrongs [and the bride's father and the bride], keep my secret. In all other things a woman is full of fear, incapable of looking on battle or cold steel; [265] but when she is injured in love, no mind is more murderous than hers.
Macbeth is tragic in that he has everything and man could want, money, power, prestige, but he is driven more by the temptress his wife. When his wife becomes crazy, we feel sympathy for the man, because like Medea his love for his spouse is apparent. However, like Medea, he is abandoned by his wife. Although we feel no sympathy for Macbeth or Lady Macbeth at this point of the play it does point out another similarity between the two works. One major difference is that audiences in the Greek drama know what is going to happen before the events occur. Euripedes uses the chorus to tell the audience what will come in the future. This helps to make her plight even more tragic, because we know what is going to happen, but we are helpless to do anything to prevent the deeds from occurring. The chorus says near the end of the play:
Chorus
[990] And you, unlucky bridegroom, married into the house of kings, all unwitting you bring destruction upon your children's life and upon your wife a dreadful death. [995] Unhappy man, how wrong you were about your destiny.
Chorus
Your sorrows next I mourn, unhappy mother of the children, who mean to kill your sons because of your marriage-bed. [1000] Your husband wickedly abandoned it and now lives with another as his wife.
Medea is the truly tragic character, because in her mind she is left no choice. We follow her thoughts and actions, and see how she is driven to act. A tragic hero is driven by their destiny. Macbeth's destiny, according to the three witches, was to become King. However, it was his lust for power that drove his ambitions, not the circumstances beyond his control.
Works Cited
Page, Denys L. Medea. "Introduction," Oxford Press: London, 1938, P. xiv-xv
|
| |
