Macbeth | Evil

In the first excerpt, Irving Ribner maintains that Macbeth symbolizes Shakespeare's larger view of evil's operation in the world. Therefore, the tragedy is not resolved through the fallen hero's redemption, but through good correcting the evil that Macbeth has unleashed. In the second excerpt, J. Lyndon Shanley considers the tragic context of Macbeth's evil actions in an attempt to determine whether or not his downfall warrants sympathy or arouses fear at the end of the play. The critic maintains that Macbeth has a fundamentally different experience from Shakespeare's other great tragic heroes: he does not achieve a great recovery in the end because his actions throughout the play were ignoble.

Irving Ribner
I
Macbeth is in many ways Shakespeare's maturest and most daring experiment in tragedy, for in this play he set himself to describe the operation of evil in all its manifestations: to define its very nature, to depict its seduction of man, and to show its effect upon all of the planes of creation once it has been unleashed by one man's sinful moral choice. It is this final aspect which here receives Shakespeare's primary attention and which conditions the sombre mood of the play. Shakespeare anatomizes evil both in intellectual and emotional terms, using...