The Evil within - A motif analysis on Shakespeare´s 'Macbeth'

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: Roy F. Baumeister maintains in his magnum opus 'Evil inside Human Cruelty and Violence' that the '[e]vil is always ready and waiting to burst into the world'. At first glance this statement seems exaggerated and entirely pessimistic. But today´s news demonstrate that Baumeister´s statement reflects reality: nearly every day, newspapers and TV report about death, brutal crimes, gang violence, rape victims and natural disasters. Although the evil has different faces and differs in its dimensions, it always goes along with two core aspects: harm and chaos, which cause a breakdown of the stable, peaceful and rational patterns of the ordinary life (cf. Baumeister, Evil inside Human Cruelty and Violence 5 and 69). While, on the one hand, the victims suffer, the perpetrators on the other hand derive pleasure from causing harm. Not rarely the question rises: What made these people turn to the dark and evil side? A prominent literary example of this phenomena is Shakespeare´s tragedy Macbeth . Not only can the tragedy be seen as a setting of different degrees of the evil, it also reflects how ordinary people turn to the evil side. Therefore, the question: how does the protagonist Macbeth turn evil? will be the object of investigation.