Macbeth Essay

Tom Allen
Period 2

Macbeth Essay

In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, the main character, Macbeth is often shown
his fate ahead of time, which affects his course of action throughout the
play. However, what makes this show is how, Shakespeare characterizes him
to be. As the three witches give Macbeth his fate, he perceives it as an
opportunity and a sense of security, which leads to his rise and his fall.

In the beginning of the pay, Macbeth has been characterized as an
opportunist, especially after being confronted by his wife on the matters
of assassinating King Duncan. Though at first he is shown to be a weak
character, the three witches presented Macbeth with the golden idea to
become king after they correctly predicted that he would become the thane
of Cawdor. What he had perceived out of that revealing of faith was that
what they were saying were true and he could not really get out of it.
Though at first he hesitates to turn the knife on his own king. However,
this presents Shakespeare a time to show the true nature of Macbeth’s wife
who is much more ambitious than Macbeth and he eventually assassinates
Duncan, taking the opportunity that fate had provided him. This perception
that Macbeth had causes his great rise to become the next king of Scotland.

The next major prediction that the witches came out with shows how much
Macbeth values security. He had already become a tyrannical ruler, because
he is an ineffective leader of the country. He would take no chances and
tries to assassinate Macduff because the witches predicted that he would
cause Macbeth’s downfall. Also, what gave him a false sense of security was
that they predicted no man born from a woman could kill him. This is
seemingly impossible which makes Macbeth become more tyrannical because he
now believed that he was invincible. This, however, led to his downfall in
the end. He only made Macduff want to kill him more who turned out to be
born form a corpse and make even more enemies. Ultimately, Macbeth was
slain by Macduff.

In the play Macbeth, Shakespeare shows how one man’s perception in fate
could lead to his actions later. In this case, it only led to a mighty
fall. Macbeth could not stray from his fate and his attempts to selectively
choose to act accordingly for himself only led him on the right track for
his predicted downfall by the three witches.