thesis on fate in macbeth

William Shakespeare

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From the moment the weird sisters tell Macbeth and Banquo their prophecies, both the characters and the audience are forced to wonder about fate. Is it real? Is action necessary to make it come to pass, or will the prophecy come true no matter what one does? Different characters answer these questions in different ways at different times, and the final answers are ambiguous—as fate always is.

Unlike Banquo, Macbeth acts: he kills Duncan . Macbeth tries to master fate, to make fate conform to exactly what he wants. But, of course, fate doesn't work that way. By trying to master fate once, Macbeth puts himself in the position of having to master fate always. At every instant, he has to struggle against those parts of the witches' prophecies that don't favor him. Ultimately, Macbeth becomes so obsessed with his fate that he becomes delusional: he becomes unable to see the half-truths behind the witches' prophecies. By trying to master fate, he brings himself to ruin.

Fate ThemeTracker

Fate Quotes in Macbeth

Macbeth Theme of Fate and Free Will

The dog ate my homework. The devil made me do it. She forced me to eat that apple .

People have been coming up with excuses for their actions since Ugg first had to apologize for hitting Zog with a rock. (The saber-toothed tiger made me do it?) And the favorite excuse of great tragedy is almost always "fate." But Macbeth questions that excuse. Is it Macbeth's fate to be a traitor and a king-killer? Or is he alone responsible for his actions, and did he freely choose his choice? The play pits the prophecies of the three weird sisters against its own dramatization of Macbeth's internal conflict—and it's not clear which wins. In fact, fate and free will might just be working together.

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Questions About Fate and Free Will

• What is Macbeth's initial response to the weird sisters' prophesy? Does his attitude change at some point? If so, when does the change occur?
• Macbeth is repeatedly described as giving the witches his "rapt" attention. Why is that? What does this suggest about Macbeth's choices?
• Do all of the witches' prophesies come true?
• What role does Lady Macbeth play in her husband's actions? Is she always involved in Macbeth's decision making?

Chew on This

Macbeth leaves us hanging. It never answers the question of whether free will or fate determines a person's future.

Macbeth may be fated to be king, but he decides all on his own that he will murder Duncan in order to obtain the crown. His actions suggest that fate may be predetermined, but free will determines how a people reach their destinies.

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Macbeth Fate Vs Free Will Analysis

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Published: Mar 5, 2024

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Macbeth Fate Essay

Macbeth is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare about the downfall of Macbeth, a Scottish lord and later King. Macbeth goes through three stages in his life: initially noble and just, then corrupted into committing regicide to attain power and eventually suffering from guilt. Macbeth’s tragic flaw or error is his ambition which leads him to murder the King, Duncan, in order to take his place. Macbeth is later visited by three apparitions or witches who predict Macbeth’s downfall.

This leads Macbeth to believe that he has free choice when in fact the course of Macbeth’s life was already predetermined. Several times throughout Macbeth Macbeth is reminded of the prophecies made by the witches. Macbeth is constantly questioning whether he has free will or not. Macbeth phrases questions such as, “Is this a dagger which I see before me? ” Macbeth constantly refers to different sources of power during Macbeth’s lifetime including fate, prophecy, and “supernatural soliciting.

Macbeth’s language is extremely significant in Macbeth. Macbeth changes his perspective on fate because of the witch’s prophecies that he has free choice and will be king. Macbeth often questions whether his actions are right or wrong, but eventually Macbeth sees himself as good person who struggles to do the right thing. Macbeth’s perspective on the witches and their prophecies change over time. MacBeth believes that the witches prediction of MacDuff taking his place as king is wrong because MacDuff already had a claim to royalty.

Years later, Macbeth calls Banquo’s issue with Fleance a “weakness in his prophecy” Macbeth views MacDuff as a threat because MacDuff is the rightful heir to the throne. MacBeth does not believe in fate for most of Macbeth’s life; he believes that he has free will and makes his own decisions. MacBeth’s perspective changes over time after being visited by different people including witches, Banquo, MacDuff, and Macbeth’s wife. This changes Macbeth’s perspective on fate and free will because Macbeth begins to be more aware of the influences of others on his decisions.

Macbeth is a dramatic tragedy by William Shakespeare about Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis and later also Than of Cawdor, who receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. The story is an expanded version of a tale from “Holinshed’s Chronicles”, a history of Britain familiar to Shakespeare. Macbeth becomes a heroic protagonist of his country and his personal ambition leads him to great risk as time passes. In the end, Macbeth loses everything – power, title and even his life – because he cannot overcome the influence of evil or defy fate.

Fate is defined as predestination: things that have been decided or ordained to happen in advance. Macbeth is a tragedy of Macbeth’s ambition leading him to ruin despite his heroism in the face of overwhelming forces. Macbeth begins with Macduff and Lennox discussing the strange events regarding predictions made by three witches about Macbeth. Macduff, being sceptical, does not believe that Macbeth will become king at all, whereas Lennox believes Macbeth was meant to be king from birth.

This conversation foreshadows Macbeth’s eventual downfall because he does become King but also because he cannot escape fate; it comes to control his life instead of allowing him to make his own decisions. When Macduff goes back to Scotland, Duncan names him Thane of Fife, Macbeth’s home county. Macbeth is initially happy and honoured to hear this news, but when Macduff then rebels against Macbeth and kills many members of the royal family, Macbeth does not even try to convince Macduff that he would be a better king than Duncan.

This shows that Macbeth wants power too much to risk it all for his friends or family. Fate controls Macbeth because he could have saved lives by making decisions other than murder, such as imprisoning Macduff so his country would still have a leader. However, Macbeth makes these bad choices because he thinks they will give him more power in the long run; whether his actions are good or evil does not matter, as Macbeth is not truly in control of his life. Macbeth’s fate is sealed when Macduff and Malcolm come to fight Macbeth.

Macbeth regrets his decision to kill Duncan, as he says “I am in blood/Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er. ” Macbeth does not have a choice of whether or not he goes into battle because he is already stained with the blood of Duncan. Macduff kills Macbeth by wounding him with spears and then cutting off his head with a sword. The prophecy from the witches comes true – Macbeth has become king – but what they did not say is whether Macbeth would be a good king. Macbeth’s actions, which were not decided by his own will but by fate, show that he is not fit to rule as a monarch.

Thus, Macbeth does become King of Scotland, as the witches foretold through their prophecy, but it was all part of his downfall, as everything Macbeth did was predestined from the time he killed Duncan until the moment Macduff killed him (directly or indirectly). Fate controlled Macbeth throughout his life and ultimately led to his death; people seem unable to avoid fate even though they can make decisions. Shakespeare uses lots of symbolism in Macbeth because it shows how powerful words are; Macbeth can change his mind when Macduff rebels against him because Macduff says “Lay on Macduff, and damn’d be him who first cries hold!.

Macbeth hears this speech in Macduff’s third line of dialogue which shows Macbeth is willing to accept Macduff’s good advice. Macbeth knows that Macduff would not say this unless he was truly frightened for his life or someone else close to him, so Macbeth changes the way he thinks about what it means to kill Macduff. However, Macbeth does exactly what he did before with Banquo because the prophecy tells him that Banquo will be important one day which makes Macbeth paranoid.

This is Macbeth actually making a decision, but it goes against what Macduff said and therefore Macbeth is still not making his own decisions. Macbeth decides to kill Macduff’s family because he is afraid of Macduff, especially after the prophecy from the witches. This is perhaps another decision made by Macbeth because if Macbeth does not kill Macduff’s family, then Macduff might rebel against him even more. In this case, Macbeth makes a poor choice that will come back to haunt him in the future; it is possible that he would have had an easy time with Macduff and Malcolm if he left them alone.

However this choice was also caused by fate because Macbeth does not know what Macduff and Malcolm will do until Macduff tells him to “Lay on Macduff, and damn’d be him who first cries hold!. ” Macbeth’s paranoia towards the prophecy is an important part of his downfall as it makes him kill those around him that he fears will challenge his power. Fate controls Macbeth because if the witches never made a prophecy about Macbeth becoming king then Duncan would still be alive and Macbeth would never have become king. If this had happened, Macbeth might have lived a long life or at least more peacefully than he did.

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Macbeth – A* / L9 Full Mark Example Essay

This is an A* / L9 full mark example essay on Macbeth completed by a 15-year-old student in timed conditions (50 mins writing, 10 mins planning).

It contained a few minor spelling and grammatical errors – but the quality of analysis overall was very high so this didn’t affect the grade. It is extremely good on form and structure, and perhaps could do with more language analysis of poetic and grammatical devices; as the quality of thought and interpretation is so high this again did not impede the overall mark. 

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MACBETH EXAMPLE ESSAY:

Macbeth’s ambition for status and power grows throughout the play. Shakespeare uses Macbeth as an embodiment of greed and asks the audience to question their own actions through the use of his wrongful deeds.

In the extract, Macbeth is demonstrated to possess some ambition but with overriding morals, when writing to his wife about the prophecies, Lady Macbeth uses metaphors to describe his kind hearted nature: “yet I do fear thy nature, / It is too full o’th’milk of human kindness”. Here, Shakespeare presents Macbeth as a more gentle natured being who is loyal to his king and country. However, the very act of writing the letter demonstrates his inklings of desire, and ambition to take the throne. Perhaps, Shakespeare is aiming to ask the audience about their own thoughts, and whether they would be willing to commit heinous deeds for power and control. 

Furthermore, the extract presents Macbeth’s indecisive tone when thinking of the murder – he doesn’t want to kill Duncan but knows it’s the only way to the throne. Lady Macbeth says she might need to interfere in order to persuade him; his ambition isn’t strong enough yet: “That I may pour my spirits in  thine ear / And chastise with the valour of my tongue”. Here, Shakespeare portrays Lady Macbeth as a manipulative character, conveying she will seduce him in order to “sway “ his mind into killing Duncan. The very need for her persuasion insinuates Macbeth is still weighing up the consequences in his head, his ambition equal with his morality. It would be shocking for the audience to see a female character act in this authoritative way. Lady Macbeth not only holds control of her husband in a patriarchal society but the stage too, speaking in iambic pentameter to portray her status: “To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great”. It is interesting that Shakespeare uses Lady Macbeth in this way; she has more ambition for power than her husband at this part of play. 

As the play progresses, in Act 3, Macbeth’s ambition has grown and now kills with ease. He sends three murders to kill Banquo and his son, Fleance, as the witches predicted that he may have heirs to the throne which could end his reign. Macbeth is suspicious in this act, hiding his true intentions from his dearest companion and his wife: “I wish your horses swift and sure on foot” and “and make our faces vizards to our hearts”. There, we see, as an audience, Macbeth’s longing to remain King much stronger than his initial attitudes towards the throne He was toying with the idea of killing for the throne and now he is killing those that could interfere with his rule without a second thought. It is interesting that Shakespeare presents him this way, as though he is ignoring his morals or that they have been “numbed” by his ambition. Similarly to his wife in the first act, Macbeth also speaks in pentameter to illustrate his increase in power and dominance. 

In Act 4, his ambition and dependence on power has grown even more. When speaking with the witches about the three apparitions, he uses imperatives to portray his newly adopted controlling nature: “I conjure you” and “answer me”. Here, the use of his aggressive demanding demonstrates his reliance on the throne and his need for security. By the Witches showing him the apparitions and predicting his future, he gains a sense of superiority, believing he is safe and protected from everything. Shakespeare also lengthens Macbeth’s speech in front of the Witches in comparison to Act 1 to show his power and ambition has given him confidence, confidence to speak up to the “filthy nags” and expresses his desires. Although it would be easy to infer Macbeth’s greed and ambition has grown from his power-hungry nature, a more compassionate reading of Macbeth demonstrates the pressure he feels as a Jacobean man and soldier. Perhaps he feels he has to constantly strive for more to impress those around him or instead he may want to be king to feel more worthy and possibly less insecure. 

It would be unusual to see a Jacobean citizen approaching an “embodiment” of the supernatural as forming alliance with them was forbidden and frowned upon. Perhaps Shakespeare uses Macbeth to defy these stereotypical views to show that there is a supernatural, a more dark side in us all and it is up to our own decisions whereas we act on these impulses to do what is morally incorrect. 

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The Female-Midlife-Crisis Novel

Miranda July’s new book is full of estrangement, eroticism, and whimsy.

B ack when the word weird (or, in the spelling of the day, wyrd  ) was first commonly used in English, it was not an adjective but a noun, and it functioned as a synonym for fate . A person wasn’t weird; instead a person had a weird, which was theirs alone, determined by forces beyond control and understanding. Shakespeare’s “Weird Sisters” in Macbeth helped transform the word, linking its supernatural connotations with an aesthetic quality. Those three crones know the future—they seem to know everything, standing astride the temporal and the miraculous as they do. In them, the old and the new weird s meet: They are creatures in touch with the workings of fate, but they are also inexplicable, creepy, queer, spooky, deviant from the norm.

Explore the June 2024 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

I have been thinking about this word and its overtones since reading All Fours , the second novel by the idiosyncratic interdisciplinary artist Miranda July, probably best known for her work as a filmmaker . As I made my way through the book, I kept remarking to myself, and writing in the margins, “This is so weird.” That’s not a bad thing, in my personal lexicon, though in this instance I was registering a persistent feeling of bafflement. July’s middle-aged protagonist—a “semi-famous” artist known for her early multi-genre success (who, like July, has worked across film, writing, and performance)—consistently acted on instincts I didn’t understand and made choices I couldn’t imagine anyone making. As a narrator, she was not just unreliable but unpredictable, unsettling, shimmeringly strange.

Read: Miranda July on ‘Kajillionaire’ and nice people in Hollywood

This unnamed narrator—who, being a wry Los Angeles creative type, enjoys half-mockingly noting that she is a minor celebrity—is perplexing even to herself. Stalled out in her art practice and dissatisfied in her marriage (stable, loving, stale) to a music producer, she decides to drive to New York, leaving him and their young child behind for three weeks. She conceives the trip ostensibly to prove a point. At a party, her husband offhandedly suggests that people fall into two personality types: Drivers and Parkers. Drivers can immerse themselves in the ongoingness of life; they enjoy time with their children and pets; they’re good on road trips because they’re present and steady. Parkers “need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause,” or they lapse into boredom and disappointment. The artist feels that she is being pegged as a Parker, and undertakes this road trip, she tells herself, to “finally become the sort of chill, grounded woman I’d always wanted to be.” That this is overly literal and somewhat illogical—leaving your family for three weeks doesn’t suggest a willingness to be present in daily ongoingness and child-rearing—doesn’t occur to her.

But even the artist is aware that this classic plot—a combination of the American road trip and the midlife crisis , both clichéd subgenres of the quest narrative—is the kind of trope that she typically wouldn’t bother with. Naturally, the road trip, and by extension the novel, goes sideways immediately. July herself has never been given to making chill, grounded art.

The narrator hasn’t gotten an hour away from her house before she makes eye contact with a young man at a gas station in Monrovia. A few minutes later, they run into each other at a nearby restaurant, and as they talk, he mentions that he works at Hertz and that he and his interior-decorator wife are trying to save $20,000 as a “nest egg.” For no discernible reason, the narrator proceeds to drive first to one of his Hertz locations and then to a dingy motel, where she rents a room. Soon after, she commissions the wife (without mentioning her encounter with the husband) to redecorate the motel room to look like a room at Le Bristol hotel, in Paris, for a fee of $20,000.

Is she stalking the Hertz guy, nearly 15 years her junior? Is this an art project? Whether July is presenting this as an earnest hero’s journey or as a self-skewering satire of the free spirit who does erratic things upon hitting her mid-40s and calls it art isn’t clear. That may sound like a huge flaw in the novel, and it does sometimes feel like a glitch, yet the ambiguity about what July and her narrator are up to makes the novel as intriguing as it is frustrating. July thwarts the reader’s instinct to decipher whether this is a narrative about miraculous fate or one about an odd character’s mundane sexual and hormonal odyssey. Instead, she writes as though there’s no difference.

I ’m not the first to be cheerfully confounded by July’s oeuvre, which amounts to a multipronged investigation of alienation from what the world sees as “normal.” Critics have often dismissively described her enterprise as “twee,” likely because she is fashionable and somewhat affectless, and her work features West Coast oddballs who blend quirkiness and borderline erotic perversity. Stylistically, she rides the line between deadpan humor and earnest absurdity. To take a representative example, in the first of her three feature-length films, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), a young video artist (played by July) fixates on a man whose wife has left him, and who recently set one of his hands on fire in an ill-conceived stunt to impress their children; secondary plotlines involve a middle-aged man leaving sexually explicit messages for two teen girls, and a woman planning to meet an internet stranger in the park after being titillated by his suggestion that they “poop back and forth” forever.

All of her projects, which revolve around a sort of randomness and mystery, probe shame and estrangement, but with a tonal lightness. “Who really knows why anyone does anything?” the narrator of All Fours remarks before she embarks on her zany motel-redecoration project. “Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.” This aimlessness, her attunement to randomness, is entwined with her creativity. Yet as she keeps riffing, the narrator drifts toward a formulation of her experiment that’s more specific and ennobled, borrowing from feminist politics.

What kind of monster makes a big show of going away and then hides out right nearby? But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit? A madwoman? Probably. But my more seasoned parts just had to be patient, hold their tongues—their many and sharp tongues—and give this new girl a chance.

The appearance of the word monster comes as no surprise here. The female artist who does battle with what Virginia Woolf called “the Angel in the House” and leaves home to accomplish something inscrutable to her family and society at large still seems obligated to reckon with whether this act is horrific. As the critic Lauren Elkin observes in her recent book, Art Monsters , the impulse to demonize women who refuse domesticity in favor of creative exploration goes back hundreds of years (at least). So does the female artist’s own willingness to wonder whether her impulses are reprehensible .

July’s artist is consciously pushing back against this legacy here—she will not be kept from her greatness!—while July herself seems also to be lightly ridiculing the way her character’s politically enlightened logic is leading her into a foolish, perhaps unjustifiable set of actions. Her ghost self travels onward—she keeps track of where she should be, dutifully reporting home about the sights she isn’t seeing—while she remains installed in a Louis XIV–style motel room, where she is not busy making great art. Instead, she is masturbating furiously, overwhelmed with desire for a married stranger. This behavior is not monstrous, but it is wayward— weyward being an early spelling of weird .

Except that in a sense, it isn’t weyward at all: The narrator’s behavior (her erraticism, even her eroticism) is right on schedule. She has entered perimenopause , when estrogen levels begin to zigzag. This Rumspringa of hers is less about artistic evolution than the bewilderments of hormonal flux and (in her case) the problem of fitting wild, outsize desire into a life of monogamy, heterosexuality, and parenthood. Her yearnings converge: She wants to become more embodied, more honest and self-accepting, and creatively free—a state that she doesn’t entirely believe is possible. Her sexual awakening, experienced just as she’s learning that she’s likely nearing the end of her high-libido years, is baffling, transcendent, and abject. “This kind of desire made a wound you just had to carry with you for the rest of your life. But this was still better than never knowing.”

From the December 2014 issue: The real roots of midlife crisis

Continuing her old life now seems unbearable; leaving it behind is unthinkable. Whether as a woman, a wife, or an artist, July’s narrator has never, as yet, been an integrated person, believing instead in selectively presenting others with different selves, “each real, each with different needs.” For her, “the only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand.” And yet she still dreams of intimacy, of having a self that can be wholly expressed and held by another. “One fine day I would tell him all about me,” she fantasizes, thinking of her husband, “and this trip would be one of my stories. We would be holding each other in bed, saying everything, laughing and crying and being amazed at all the things we didn’t know about each other, the Great Reveal.”

The perimenopausal plotline—easily dismissed as niche and sentimental, unlike its cousin, the plotline of male midlife crisis—may in fact be the perfect form for July, who turns it into something appropriately whimsical and stark. She writes this hormonal crucible so well in part because she seems already positioned to capture precisely how heightened, bizarre, off-putting, confusing, absurd it is; these elements are the hallmarks of her style. In this context, the tone that might have been dismissed as irony or caprice in earlier work takes on a kind of embodied, material plausibility: “I was a throbbing, amorphous ball of light trying to get my head around a motherly, wifely human form,” the narrator reports with true desperation after returning home. What she has found in Monrovia may be weird, but it is also her weird—transgressiveness in search of honest intimacy, performative selfhood in search of authentic freedom. If this truest, weirdest self cannot be contained in the family structure or the social world that she occupies, perhaps breaking that structure counts as creative liberation.

Perimenopause, as the narrator experiences it, is a profound betrayal in that it begins transporting her into crone-hood without her consent, before she is ready. At the same time, the crone, the weird sister, is afforded proximity to the transporting, the repugnant, the queer, the prophetic. This is good for art, or it can be. In one climactic scene of the book—a sort of symbolic consummation with her future self—the artist has sex with an older woman with a connection to the Hertz attendant. “Her skin was beginning to thin with age, like a banana’s, but instead of being gross it felt incredible, velvety warm water. Well, knock me over with a feather , I thought.” After the encounter, in an epiphanic haze, she feels certain that promiscuity is the secret to life. This mania, as July renders it, is both completely earnest and totally laughable—a trademark tension in July’s work since her 20s.

Later, her narrator mulls:

I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.

Here, finally, she arrives at something that looks like a viable future, though after her return home from Monrovia, the book loses the fevered outlandishness that July achieves at its apex. The back half of the novel depends largely on an experiment with polyamory, presented as edgy, but an angsty middle-aged artist curing her ennui with an escapist lesbian affair is hardly radical. This delivers its share of tragicomic setbacks—and a banal, if true, realization that “the point was to keep going without a comprehensible end in sight.”

In Art Monsters , Elkin quotes an essay in which Woolf characterizes the two primary obstacles in her writing life: “The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet.” July frantically disassembles Woolf’s Angel in All Fours , without quite solving Woolf’s second challenge. (Has anyone?) Yet her entry into the canon of attempts to capture that truth, in all its flagrant specificity, is one only she could have produced: fascinating, jarringly funny, sometimes repellent, and strangely powerful.

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “Miranda July’s Weird Road Trip.”

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