Macbeth starts the play as a hero and ends up a tyrant. Does this mean there are no truly evil people and power corrupts, or just that some people have bad judgment when choosing heroes?
Lady Macbeth is often hailed as the source of Macbeth’s evil, but she never talks about her own gain. Even when she should be all happy as queen, she takes her own life. Is Lady Macbeth just caught in fate here? Was she just trying to do the good thing by being a supportive wife? Is good in the eye of the beholder?
The three witches, the weird sisters, are also often blamed for planting the seed of treachery in Macbeth’s mind – yet the root of the word “wyrd” goes back to the Anglo Saxon word for “fate.” Does one only need to think a thing is fate to make it happen? How much personal agency does one have against fate?
