In Shakespeare's play Macbeth, it is Macbeth himself, the eponymous antihero, who meets the witches upon the heath and first conceives the idea to murder his king. It is he who kills Duncan, seizes the throne, has Macduff's family and his friend Banquo killed too, and holds onto power until he is...
@NapoleonWilson Yes, I'm aware it's not easy to answer, but still hoping for some interesting answers. There are people here who seem very knowledgeable about Shakespeare.
Macbeth was one of the plays I 'studied' before I started actually going through each play properly line by line, so I don't know the text well at all. Others here probably do, and will be able to pick out much better evidence than the few relevant scenes I remember.
@NapoleonWilson How do you mean? Phrasing it more like "what are the arguments to be made for ..." to make clear I don't expect a single objective answer?
I do agree that her trauma later on was surprising to me, too, after having her be the driving force all the time. But I guess that's just character development. She goes from a calculating hardass to a nervous wreck and he goes from a reluctant chess figure to simply "accepting" his villain status and playing it to the fullest.
But if you really go as far as taking any of the two as the "true villain", you definitely ignore the witches and the fate or the general evil in humanity or whatever fancy words you might call it.
But I'm sure there will be some nice answers on this elaborating on all that stuff in detail. Interesting question anyway.
It's the good ole antigone thing of the self-fulfilling prophecy. But I can't believe the witches to be oblivious to what their prophecy does to Macbeth.
They can't not know that telling him crap like that won't make him chase after it. And even the later prophecies are what makes him rather careless to begin with, I'd say.
But it is an interesting question if the witches had any ulterior motives to begin with, be those just a natural desire to sow chaos.
Could either be something specific like "what was the witches' motive/intention in telling Macbeth their prophecy originally?" or a more general thing like "what does the play say about fate and predetermination?"
@NapoleonWilson I can't remember how much of his actions are only at her urging. E.g. does she push him to kill Banquo and Macduff too, or does he accept his role as a murderer once Duncan is dead?
Hmm, I don't quite remember right now. But I think she makes him go after Banquo too.
Heh, which reminds me that he gets struck with guilt too in the party scene. But after that he seems rather hell-bound. Killing entire families and all that.
It could be interesting to trace the exact point where their roles switch, if there is such a point.
Well, I honestly don't know much about many of the plays really. I probably know Macbeth best because I liked the story since we read it in school and also like the various films.
Oh, apparently there's a videotaped TV-version of one of her theatre performances in '79 if that's it.
I can highly recommend the Polanski film from the 70s as well as the very new one with Michael Fassbender. But then again, I'm also far from a Shakespeare or theatre expert.
Gheez, those are some really nice questions. What is it that turns Macbeth from a hesitant laggard into a true villain? Was he maybe always just playing along to his villainy because he didn't see any other way after a certain point?
An example of such a text:
I see men running, staggering, falling
I am coughing, retching, choking.
I have to breathe now, I can't run without breathing.
Half blinded by my mask I trip and fall, crashing my head against the trench wall, knocking myself half senseless.
I am on my hands and knees ...
@Gallifreyan If someone pings me in a couple of weeks I'll try to find my copy of "Commentaries upon the past" and see if anything is said about that book. I might be able to find something in BNS off-line interviews too
In the short story "Inertia" by Rudy Rucker (which I found via this ID question on another site, and which is published to be read in full at the author's website here), the near-Googlewhack phrase "pulchritudinous callipygosity" appears in a piece of dialogue near the start:
“Campbell’s dead...
When the Strikers re-emerged, there would've been numerous abandoned factories and equipment (including, presumably, factories and equipment that had been abandoned by the Strikers themselves). While the original owners may have been around in some cases, in many other cases there wouldn't be any...
When Hank Reardon and Dagny Taggart searched the abandoned 20th Century Motor Company, they found the prototype of John Galt's motor along with some documents describing it. However, the documents related to it were incomplete, missing what Robert Standler and some other characters described as t...
When Dagny visited William Hastings's wife, she showed absolutely no sign of any alignment with the Looters or Moochers - she was very straightforward with Dagny and showed none of the basic "whininess," evasiveness, or self-righteous rationalization that was characteristic of the other Looters. ...
...I actually saw it and decided to leave it, because I wasn't sure if that was something we do...
Flags generally get handled pretty quickly here. The exact speed, of course, depends on whether I have access to userscripts, the amount of chocolate I've eaten, whether or not Zy is wearing a beanie, and the phase of the moon.
So, y'all - question for the room. Do you feel like this is worth adding a featured tag to? Is it worth bugging SE about, if community consensus is to change it? Is it a viable change?
In the past, people have criticized the "primarily opinion-based" close vote reason by saying "well, aren't most of our questions kind of opinion-based"? (This has definitely been a discussion on a number of occasions where questions were closed as "primarily opinion-based," and I can see it cont...
I've worn it a couple times but I'm not a big hat wearer unless it's winter and I'm about to freeze my ears of and the SE hat isn't good for that... Maybe they should make a beanie version of it.
@Mithrandir I know! But I'm trying to figure out what to do for Winter Bash... I'll have to get a good mugshot of him and Hippo without a hat but he's not great at sitting still for a photo.
@Riker - Because that's literally what it says. If you don't understand this, you don't even have enough wit to be a halfwit. — S0N_0F_A_S0N3 hours ago
ouch, lol
he's not quite wrong, my comment wasn't well phrased