essay on violence macbeth

William Shakespeare

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

To call Macbeth a violent play is an understatement. It begins in battle, contains the murder of men, women, and children, and ends not just with a climactic siege but the suicide of Lady Macbeth and the beheading of its main character, Macbeth . In the process of all this bloodshed, Macbeth makes an important point about the nature of violence: every violent act, even those done for selfless reasons, seems to lead inevitably to the next. The violence through which Macbeth takes the throne, as Macbeth himself realizes, opens the way for others to try to take the throne for themselves through violence. So Macbeth must commit more violence, and more violence, until violence is all he has left. As Macbeth himself says after seeing Banquo's ghost, "blood will to blood." Violence leads to violence, a vicious cycle.

Violence ThemeTracker

Violence Quotes in Macbeth

THEMES: VIOLENCE.

  Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Explore the theme of violence in Macbeth

Macbeth is an extremely violent play.

Macbeth takes the throne of Scotland by killing Duncan and his guards, and tries to hold on to it by sending people to murder Banquo and Macduff’s family. Finally, he attempts to keep his reign by fighting Macduff. These might be the scenes of violence which are the most obvious in the play, but there are others throughout. Even before any characters are on stage, the theatre’s special effects of thunder and lightning, made with gunpowder, cannonballs and fireworks, would have sounded, and smelled, like a battle.

After the Witches, one of the first characters we see is the Captain, wounded in battle in Act I, scene 2. ‘What bloody man is that?’ asks Duncan, drawing attention to him. So when the play begins, the violence of the battle has already been happening. We are not told the causes of ‘the revolt’ but merely its ‘newest state’, that is, just the latest developments.

Those developments are described very graphically by the Captain, who tells us of Macbeth fighting Macdonwald:

‘Till he unseam’d him from the nave to th’ chops, And fix’d his head upon our battlements’ — Act I, scene 2

So, before we even meet Macbeth, he has sliced someone in half and chopped his head off as a prize. This might seem in character for the killer that we know Macbeth to be. The difference is that Macbeth’s actions here are celebrated by the king: ‘O valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!’. Later in the scene, Duncan sentences Cawdor to death. So what the play gives us is two different types of violence: one that is acceptable, and one that is criminal; the first holds Scotland together, the second tears it apart.

Violence is definitely linked to power in the play: the most successful king seems to be the one who is the best at killing. What this means is that the world of Macbeth is caught in a repeating circle of violence:

‘It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood’ — Act III, scene 4

is how Macbeth sums this up. It also leaks into the language of the characters, who make their points with bloody images. Perhaps the most unsettling one belongs to Lady Macbeth, who imagines a baby:

‘I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out’ — Act I, scene 7

She is trying to persuade Macbeth to keep his promise, but has to do so like this because the language of violence is the most convincing in Macbeth’s world.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

What do you think about violence in the play?

In what ways is it similar to violence today?

How is it different?

Does the play offer alternatives to a cycle of violence?

OTHER RESOURCES YOU MIGHT LIKE

Get to know the characters we meet in  Macbeth

Delve deeper into the language used in Shakespeare’s  Macbeth

Context & themes

Everything you need to know about the context of  Macbeth , as well as key themes in the play

Follow the production of  Macbeth  through weekly blogs & resources

We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience from our website.

Carry on browsing if you're happy with this, or find out how to manage cookies .

The Role of Violence in Shakespeare's Macbeth (Essay Sample)

Macbeth, written by the literary master Shakespeare, is a story full of tragedy, ambition, and suspense. However, a larger theme of violence encompasses and controls the story and its characters. Violence, playing an important role in the play, depicts Macbeth's degradation from an honorable soldier and thane into an evil and selfish king. As Derek Cohen says in Macbeth's Rites of Violence, “There is no peace in the play. Lurking behind every scene, every dialogue, every fantastic appearance or event, is the spectre of violence with death following in its wake.” (Cohen), Macbeth is wholly centered around violence playing an insurmountable role in the determination of Macbeth's morality. When the Three Witches, speaking in trochaic tetrameter, give paradox in the line “Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air” (Shakespeare 1.1.12-13), they give us the most prominent theme in Macbeth. Paradox, and the “fair is foul” theme, is used throughout multiple events in the play, yet is most present in the role of violence. As Macbeth gradually yields to more violence, he changes from an honorable, honest man who fought for a greater good into a corrupt, evil king who fights for his own gain. Violence throughout Macbeth is viewed as valiant, honorable, and rewarding at the start of the play. However, the honor in violence begins to distort as the play carries on, shifting to selfish and cruel intentions. Throughout Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the role of violence emphasizes the shifts in Macbeth’s moral compass and coincides with the theme “fair is foul, and fair is foul” by first being viewed as honorable, representing pathetic fallacy, and ending as a representation of evil. 

At the start of the play, the role of violence is one of valor and honor, however this is distinctly different from its role of evil towards the end of Macbeth. When Macbeth returns from the first battle, he is greeted with congratulations and honor. He is rewarded for being a courageous and valiant soldier with a new thane title. The people of Scotland express pride and gratitude for Macbeth's violence in battle and reward him for being ruthless on the battlefront. Macbeth’s friends bare him the great news of his successes: “The king hath happily received, Macbeth, / The news of thy success, and when he reads / Thy personal venture in the rebels’ sight, / His wonders and his praises do contend / Which thine or his” (Shakespeare 1.3.87-91).  At this point, Macbeth uses violence for the greater good of defending his country. In Shakespeare for Students: Critical Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Plays and Poetry states: “Macbeth encounters three witches who predict that he will become King of Scotland; these prophecies begin the process of awakening his personal ambition for power” (pg. 440). Macbeth's view of violence drastically alters towards the end of the play from one of honor and loyalty, to one of selfishness and treachery, and this change is depicted with the help of pathetic fallacy in Macbeth's surroundings. 

Violence is reflected with pathetic fallacy and continuously present throughout the course of Macbeth in the weather, animals, and other characters. As Macbeth progresses, violence increases, and Macbeth grows eviler with each scene. Actkinson states in Enter Three Witches that “As Macbeth ascends to the throne, the court descends to violence and murder”. (Actkinson), further illustrating that Macbeth's increase in power corresponds to an increase in violence in Scotland. Macbeth's submission to violence and commitment increasingly heinous murders following the introduction of the three witches has an apparent negative effect on the weather and depicts a manifestation of evil in Scotland. As Macbeth's morals slip, the weather becomes stormy, and animals begin to act distressed, notably during the murder of King Duncan when Lady Macbeth says, “I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry” (2.2.15). Violence throughout the play also constitutes a disarray of the environment in Scotland and presents a grim, formidable mood with destruction: “The night has been unruly. Where we lay, / Our chimneys were blown down and, as they say, / Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of death / .... Some say the Earth / Was feverous and did shake.” (Shakespeare 2.3.28-36). Shakespeare uses pathetic fallacy to attribute human qualities and emotions to nature, and violence encompasses a larger theme in Macbeth by affecting Scotland negatively. As Macbeth progressively turns to violence, Scotland's environment experiences stormy weather, disturbed animals, and desecrate natural disasters. Because the damaging violence in Macbeth corresponds heavily to pathetic fallacy in weather and animals, this shows that violence is necessary to the progress of the play and essential in explaining the turn and fall of Macbeth into total violence and evil. 

While violence in the beginning of Macbeth was viewed as gratifying, the violent nature of Macbeth is gradually warped into a pure evil as he begins to maltreat his people and country. Cohen states that “Macbeth's use of violence is the measure of his depravity. It sinks ever lower in its use of lies, subterfuge and subornation, acts that are necessary to his survival as monarch.” This quote highlights the depletion of Macbeth’s morals as the violence intensifies and escalates throughout the play. Macbeth's morality by the end of the play is completely degraded. He once experienced doubt and hesitation before killing Duncan and had to be persuaded by Lady Macbeth to continue. However, by the end of the play, Macbeth experienced no hesitation or doubt in killing others. Undoubtedly, Macbeth’s forced murder soon harbored into an obsessive need for secured power: “While Lady Macbeth did provoke and shame Macbeth to kill Duncan, he is the one who voluntarily carried out the deed and continued to kill anyone who posed a threat to his position” (Tawakoli). Brutality demonstrates that violence is not as it always seems, following the “fair is foul” theme, in the sense that it can be used in valor, but also in ruthlessness and cruelty. In the same way, Macbeth’s lack of mercy at the beginning of the play was seen positively as he was aiding his country in war, but then manifested into selfish and greedy violence at the expense of his country’s well-being. As Macbeth’s greed for power is continually threatened, he turns to more evil behaviors. It is evident that Macbeth has wholly turned to supernatural evil when he professes, “Seyton! - I am sick at heart,/ When I behold - Seyton, I say! - this push/ Will cheer me ever or disseat me now,” (Shakespeare 5.3.19-21).  The allusion in this quote emphasized the effect of intensifying violence in Macbeth and how it has shifted his logic into a distorted logic. It is evident that he has turned to evil as Seyton is an allusion to the real Satan. It is evident that Macbeth has now fully turned to diabolic manners. At the beginning of the play, Macbeth used violence in a brave and loyal sense to protect his country, however at the end of the play, Macbeth used violence in a selfish and cruel way to protect his throne at the expense of others. 

Throughout Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the role of violence is used to emphasize the shifts in Macbeth’s moral compass and mindset towards his priorities. At the beginning of the play, Macbeth is very uncertain about committing to the violence due to his extreme valor but at the end of the play, violence is the only thing he turns to. As violence intensifies in Macbeth, Macbeth sinks lower into a state of pure evil, completely demolishing the once noble, honest character he was. Because Macbeth is driven by the desire for power, he feels that violence is the only option he has to keep his power and so, he experiences a vocation to be a selfish, evil king surrounded with violence. Violence also corresponds with the Three Witches’ alliteration of  “Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.” (Shakespeare 1.1.12-13) in the sense that violence is not what it first appeared to be. Macbeth was first rewarded for his valiant battle in Act 1, however, as he grew in power, his violent acts escalated into evil and had unfortunate consequences including the loss of Macbeth's life. Violence in Macbeth shifts from being perceived as honorable to corrupt, and plays a large role by degrading Macbeth's morals and altering Macbeth from an honorable man to a corrupt king.

Related Samples

• Romeo And Juliet Prologue Essay Sample
• The impact of censorship (Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Book Review)
• Women in Ancient China History Essay Example
• Violent Consequences of Tribalism in Romeo and Juliet
• Conflict in A Streetcar Named Desire Essay Sample
• Analysis of Declaration of Sentiments of the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention
• Essay Sample on Drinking and Driving
• Essay Sample on Anti-Bullying Programs in Schools
• Changing Role of Women in The 1920s Essay Example
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X Essay Example

Didn't find the perfect sample?

You can order a custom paper by our expert writers

Violence in Macbeth

Macbeth is a prime example of a violent Jacobean drama .

As the Elizabethan age gave way to the Jacobean era new young playwrights emerged. They were very much in tune with their sophisticated London audience, who delighted in the spectacle of sex and violence, so Jacobean plays became increasingly sexual and violent. Not only was there killing and wounding with swords and daggers, poisonings, stranglings, and torture, but also a great number of minor bloodcurdling acts of physical violence. In The Changeling by Middleton and Rowley , for example, De Flores, one of the most villainous psychopaths of the Jacobean stage, stabs a rival, Alonso, three times while his back is turned. He then spies a diamond ring on his victim’s finger. He tries but fails, to remove the ring so he just cuts off the finger and puts it in his pocket before disposing of the body.

Shakespeare wrote most of his plays during the reign of King James. He, of course, had been in tune with his audiences right from the beginning of his career, catering for their interest in history and humour and classical themes during Elizabeth’s reign. And now he was filling his theatres with plays as violent as those of the best of his fellow theatre writers. Cornwall, a   character in King Lear , matches De Flores’ unthinkable act by pulling out Gloucester’s eyes, with the stage direction ‘he plucks out his eyes.’

With all that violence, all those blood-drenched stages, all those dead bodies, the shock value of such things would have been somewhat blunted –  so what would shock a Jacobean audience? Nothing more than the brutal murder of a child on stage, which Shakespeare provides Macbeth .

There is nothing superficial about Shakespeare’s plays, though. Unlike some of his contemporaries, his violent plays were never about violence: when he used violence it was always in the pursuit of greater meaning and the violence was either a device for characterisation, a dramatic device to move the action forward, or something else quite profound. Indeed, he was titillating his audience, pulling them in to fill the seats but, as always with Shakespeare, he had the larger picture in mind.

If the brutal killing of Macduff’s young son is not there simply to satisfy the bloodthirsty taste of the audience then what was it about? We are used to that scene being there but try and imagine an audience seeing it for the first time. What a shock it must have been, given that most members of the audience had little children and the worst thing they would have been able to imagine would have been the murder of one of them. That scene has been familiar for four centuries but it still shocks when we see it on the stage.

The text of Macbeth is infused with blood: Shakespeare uses the word more than forty times. Putting it very simply, the play is about Macbeth’s ambition to be king (read some of the many Macbeth ambition quotes ) , and having trod a bloody path to realize that he now finds it to have been a hollow and empty enterprise. His attempt to cover up his route to the throne and simply to survive as king involves increasingly desperate acts of violence, and a lot more blood,  as he sets about eliminating his opposition.

Macbeth, drenched in blood

Well, what about the murder of the child?  This is where we see the master dramatist at work. Shakespeare’s plays are always manipulations of the audience’s emotions. At the beginning of Macbeth Shakespeare takes care to show them Macbeth as a great popular hero, loved by the king and respected and honored by the whole of Scotland. Shakespeare builds that in many ways. When Macbeth gets the idea of murdering Duncan and being elected king we follow him down that road as Shakespeare lets us into his mind with several soliloquies. We don’t see anything else. Macbeth is hesitant. He is still a good man, and we are basically on his side as there are no counter-arguments. We also see him as someone who wants to be king but shrinks from the act he has to commit to get there, but he is bullied and manipulated by Lady Macbeth and forced into it.

The point is that Shakespeare wants us to be there with Macbeth and so at this point, we are identifying with him and wanting him to win. When he kills Duncan it’s done offstage, and all we see is the blood on his hands and his sense of the horror of what he has done. It’s not particularly horrifying for the audience as we don’t see the killing: if Shakespeare had presented the assassination onstage we would have responded differently. But now Macbeth, crowned king, begins to be paranoid. Shakespeare moves us away from the inner life of Macbeth and we have scenes where other characters talk about his violent suppression of anyone he regards as a threat. We see the murder of his best friend, Banquo, and we hear of other atrocities. We are beginning to not like Macbeth so much but perhaps we can still sympathize with his position. But then we have a scene with an intelligent and endearing child, the son of Macduff, chatting with his mother, wondering what’s happened to his father, who has fled to England. Macbeth’s hired killers enter and begin their slaughter of Macduff’s family, on the orders of Macbeth, starting with the killing of the child. Directors of productions of the play are able to make that as brutal and bloody as they like.

This scene occurs right in the middle of the play – the apex of a structure that leads up to it, with the audience on Macbeth’s side, and follows it with our horror at what a villain he is, allowing us to rejoice in his defeat – another violent act in which he is beheaded, and his head displayed onstage. Shakespeare has manipulated our response and turned us completely. The scene depicting the brutal killing of a child takes us away from our support for Macbeth, leading us to an appalled sense of horror at his actions.

The scene is central in every way. The scenes immediately adjacent to it reflect each other, and it goes back to the beginning and forwards to the end of the play in that way, the scenes before that scene and after it reflecting each other at every step, all pointing to that supreme act of violence.

Shakespeare has adopted a structure that was used by the great writers of the past – Homer and all the books of the Old and New Testaments – in which the writers place their main point at the centre of the book and lead up to and away from it, everything pointing to that main, central point. And so, to Shakespeare, the murder of a child is the main point in Macbeth. This idea has not been generally explored by Shakespearean scholars but it suggests that Shakespeare may have seen ambition’s toll as far worse than simply the downfall of a single protagonist. But whether a member of an audience understood that or not was not as important in the early 17th century as the enjoyment of a paying audience derived from witnessing such shocking violence.

• Pinterest 0

but that isnt the main focus of the play…

Leave a Reply

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Heroic Violence

Macbeth is shown to be a hero at the start because of his violent nature. He kills a traitor. Ironically, Macbeth ends up becoming the traitor that is murdered at the end of the play.

• The violent imagery describing Macbeth at the start of the play is honourable: his violence on the battlefield is for the king.
• He is praised and rewarded for killing a treacherous thane, Macdonald (sometimes spelt Macdonwald): ‘Till he unseam’d him from the nave to th’ chops / And fixed his head upon our battlements’ (1,2).
• Macbeth shows his courage and strength by cutting his enemy open from his navel (belly button) to his face.
• The violent verb ‘unseam’d’ emphasises how Macbeth opens him up.
• It all seems very fluid (free) in motion. This implies Macbeth is very strong and is unphased by horrifically killing another man.

Macdonald's head - message about treason

• Macbeth removes his enemy’s head and displays it from the battlements. This might seem grisly, but it has a clear purpose.
• When Shakespeare was writing, anyone sentenced to death for treason, such as Guy Fawkes after the failed Gunpowder Plot, would be hung, drawn and quartered (a horrible punishment of partial hanging, disembowelling and cutting of body into quarters) and their heads would be shown on pikes on Traitor’s Gate. This was the gateway prisoners would pass through as they entered the Tower of London.
• This was done to make sure people thought twice before acting against their king and country.

Macbeth's head

• At the end of the play, Macduff removes Macbeth’s head.
• Macduff seems to be displaying it as he asks them to look at it: ‘Behold where stands / the usurper’s cursed head’ (5,9).
• This moment makes Macbeth’s heroism at the start somewhat ironic – he was a hero for killing a man who seems to have been a traitor to the king. However, almost immediately after that, he himself becomes a traitor, soon murdering the king and taking over Scotland.
• This relates back to the witches’ statement: 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair' (1,1) – things and people are not always what they seem.

Heroic code

• The warriors fighting believed in the heroic code (defines how a noble person should act): it was honourable to die in battle.
• This is why Siward says that his son ‘parted well’ (5,9). The battles were bloody and violent, but participating and fighting, even dying, bravely was very honourable. It deserved praise.
• This is why Macbeth’s murder of King Duncan seems particularly evil – he killed him while he slept, without warning.
• He did not give Duncan a chance to meet him equally in battle.

Lady Macbeth - Violent Imagery

Lady Macbeth uses very violent imagery to persuade her husband to murder King Duncan. She tells him she would have bashed in the brain of her own baby if she had promised to do it: ‘I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have plucked the nipple from his boneless gums, / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn / As you have done to this’ (1,7).

Shocking (from a woman)

• This would have been very shocking to a Jacobean (during the reign of James I of England) audience.
• Lady Macbeth is a woman whose main purpose, according to the values of the time, would be to give birth to and nurture children. The language she uses is very vivid and violent.

'Plucked'

• The verb ‘plucked’ is simple, but devastating; it’s as if she casually removed the baby from the breast and broke the connection between them.
• In this sense, Lady Macbeth goes against nature by refusing to nurture her own child and, instead, describes the violent image of her murdering it.

'Boneless'

• The adjective ‘boneless’ reflects how young the child is.
• He doesn’t have teeth in his gums yet. This reminds the audience of how vulnerable the baby is and how Lady Macbeth does not seem to care – again, her careless attitude goes against nature, especially for women at the time the play was set.

'Dashed'

• Finally, the verb ‘dashed’ is a very aggressive one. It shows how she would have bashed in her baby’s head if she had promised to do it.

• She uses violence to try and show Macbeth how strong her commitment is to anything she promises to do.
• She is trying to show him he is a coward for going back on the plan.
• She uses an image of violence against the thing she cares most about – her baby. She does this to show him that she’d do anything to keep her word to him and to make him change his mind.
• In Lady Macbeth’s mind, this violent description shows her husband the extent she’d go to for him and, therefore, how much she loves him.

Murder and Violence

Violence leads to more violence in Macbeth . Macbeth murders the king and murders to protect his crown thereafter. He even orders for a child to be murdered.

Killing Duncan

• The violence of killing King Duncan is clear from the blood on Macbeth’s hands.
• King Duncan was sleeping. Macbeth was especially cowardly in the murder and he prevented him from a warrior’s death.
• Macbeth refers to his hands as ‘a sorry sight’ (2,2). This suggests that he has done something incredibly weak in murdering a sleeping man, and one who he was honour-bound (morally obliged) to serve and protect.

Other murders

• After King Duncan’s murder, Macbeth steps away from murdering others with his own hands. He prefers to send murderers to do this for him.
• This may suggest he is still ashamed of using violence against those who don’t deserve it.
• Alternatively, this could show that he cares so little about human life that he carelessly gives the job of murdering to other people – his victims do not deserve his attention.

Violence bringing violence

• Macbeth says after seeing Banquo’s ghost, ‘It will have blood they say: blood will have blood’ (3,4).
• This is a metaphor saying that once a violent act is committed, more violence will follow. This usually happens when a family tries to avenge (get revenge for) the first murder.

One murder after another

• After murdering King Duncan, Macbeth continues to kill others in an attempt to stop anyone else from taking his throne.
• He hires men to murder Banquo and his son.
• He hires men to murder Lady Macduff and her son.
• The guilt of murdering Duncan drives Lady Macbeth to suicide.
• The murder of Duncan, Lady Macduff, and her son causes Macduff to kill Macbeth.

Protecting the crown

• Macbeth will also stop at nothing to protect his crown. He punishes those disloyal to him, including women and children.
• He sends murderers to kill Banquo and his son, Fleance, who escapes.
• After Macduff leaves for England, Macbeth sends more murderers to kill his wife and children in their home.

Murdering children

• The murder of Macduff’s son is seen on stage: ‘he has killed me, mother’ (4,2).
• The murder of children is very violent and upsetting. Children are symbolic of innocence. They cannot protect themselves.
• Calling out to his ‘mother’ is very emotive (brings out feelings), because it reminds those watching of how young he is. This violence reflects how evil Macbeth has become.

1 Literary & Cultural Context

1.1 Context

1.1.1 Tragedy

1.1.2 The Supernatural & Gender

1.1.3 Politics & Monarchy

1.1.4 End of Topic Test - Context

2 Plot Summary

2.1.1 Scenes 1 & 2

2.1.2 Scene 3

2.1.3 Scenes 4-5

2.1.4 Scenes 6-7

2.1.5 End of Topic Test - Act 1

2.2 Acts 2-4

2.2.1 Act 2

2.2.2 Act 3

2.2.3 Act 4

2.3.1 Scenes 1-3

2.3.2 Scenes 4-9

2.3.3 End of Topic Test - Acts 2-5

3 Characters

3.1 Macbeth

3.1.1 Hero vs Villain

3.1.2 Ambition & Fate

3.1.3 Relationship

3.1.4 Unstable

3.1.5 End of Topic Test - Macbeth

3.2 Lady Macbeth

3.2.1 Masculine & Ruthless

3.2.2 Manipulative & Disturbed

3.3 Other Characters

3.3.1 Banquo

3.3.2 The Witches

3.3.3 Exam-Style Questions - The Witches

3.3.4 King Duncan

3.3.5 Macduff

3.3.6 End of Topic Test - Lady Macbeth & Banquo

3.3.7 End of Topic Test - Witches, Duncan & Macduff

3.4 Grade 9 - Key Characters

3.4.1 Grade 9 - Lady Macbeth Questions

4.1.1 Power & Ambition

4.1.2 Power & Ambition HyperLearning

4.1.3 Violence

4.1.4 The Supernatural

4.1.5 Masculinity

4.1.6 Armour, Kingship & The Natural Order

4.1.7 Appearances & Deception

4.1.8 Madness & Blood

4.1.9 Women, Children & Sleep

4.1.10 End of Topic Test - Themes

4.1.11 End of Topic Test - Themes 2

4.2 Grade 9 - Themes

4.2.1 Grade 9 - Themes

4.2.2 Extract Analysis

5 Writer's Techniques

5.1 Structure, Meter & Other Literary Techniques

5.1.1 Structure, Meter & Dramatic Irony

5.1.2 Pathetic Fallacy & Symbolism

5.1.3 End of Topic Test - Writer's Techniques

Jump to other topics

Unlock your full potential with GoStudent tutoring

Affordable 1:1 tutoring from the comfort of your home

Tutors are matched to your specific learning needs

30+ school subjects covered

Power & Ambition HyperLearning

The Supernatural

Macbeth by William Shakespeare: a timeless exploration of violence and treachery

Senior Lecturer (English and Drama) ANU, Australian National University

Disclosure statement

Kate Flaherty works for the Australian National University. She has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Australian National University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature.

Macbeth issues a warning: the greatest risk to the inner life comes from the delusion that it does not exist.

“A little water clears us of this deed,” says Lady Macbeth, thinking that getting the look right will make it right. But in doing so she commits treachery upon her inner life.

In a world where existence seems increasingly to equate to self-projection, she is an example of the mistake we make when we see the visible surface of public and social media as the place where reality plays out, the place where we see what we are.

Macbeth, like most of Shakespeare’s plays, sets two worlds spinning: one of outer action and one of inner being. The collision of their orbits provides the spark for the drama. The themes of Macbeth’s outer world of action are violence and treachery. The intersecting themes of its inner world are ambition, and moral reasoning.

In exploring what holds a society together and what tears it apart, the play doesn’t just condemn violence, it dramatises its uses. The play showcases both loyal violence and treacherous violence.

In Act One, Scene One, a soldier reports that Macbeth, a Scottish general, has shown prowess on the battlefield and “unseamed” his rebel opponent, Macdonald, “from the nave to th’ chops.” That means he cut him in half.

Macbeth does this in loyal service to King Duncan, and usually enters the stage splattered with blood, that of his victims and his own – blood lost in service to his king. The military campaign is to suppress domestic rebellion. Among the rebels is the “disloyal traitor” the Thane of Cawdor, whose title Duncan transfers to Macbeth, commanding that the treacherous clan chief be executed.

Macbeth’s first promotion, then, is gained through the sanctioned violence of killing traitors. There is a fragile moment at the beginning of the play, when this violence seems to have restored order.

Read more: 'Supp'd full with horrors': 400 years of Shakespearean supernaturalism

Macbeth’s second promotion is also achieved through violence, but this time by premeditated treachery. The witches on the heath greet him as Thane of Glamis, which he is, Thane of Cawdor, which we know from Duncan’s command that he will be, and “king hereafter”.

This sets the spark to the powder keg of Macbeth’s ambition. Violence is in his repertoire and he needs only to take one violent step further to fulfil their prophecy.

The thought of killing the king, a thought “whose murder yet is but fantastical”, occurs to him immediately. And when he arrives back at his castle, his wife Lady Macbeth urges him to “catch the nearest way” to fulfilment of the prophecy by stabbing King Duncan to death as he sleeps in their home.

Here one of the inner-world themes intrudes – who is morally responsible for what Macbeth does? Do the witches wield power over him? Does Lady Macbeth, as the architect of regicide, carry equal blame with Macbeth?

Read more: Guide to the classics: Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Everest of literature

Outer and inner dimensions

The unfolding of their murderous plot is dramatised by Shakespeare as having outer and inner dimensions. The physical world is portrayed as instantly ruptured by their act of violence. Even before Duncan’s murder is discovered, Lennox speaks of the unruly night that has passed: chimneys were blown down, strange lamentings and screams of death were heard in the air, and the earth shook and was feverish.

There is dramatic irony in Macbeth’s response to this poetic description of cosmic disorder: “It was a rough night.”

Society is also fractured. Duncan’s sons flee Scotland. A mood of paranoid crisis sets in as Macbeth is crowned.

But the treachery resonates inwardly, too, and Shakespeare keeps the inner dimension perpetually before the audience. That image from Act One of a man split down the middle is a potent symbol for the destruction the Macbeths have wrought upon themselves.

The order of Macbeth’s mind begins to break down the moment he murders his king. He roams out of the king’s chamber with the bloody daggers still in his hands saying he has heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep.”

Lady Macbeth seems to preserve her practical mindset for a time. She says “a little water clears us of this deed”. But this is another moment of dramatic irony. Her moral delusion is patent.

It seems that Macbeth, with his auditory and ocular hallucinations, has the clearer moral vision. Inevitably, her sleeping mind goes to war with her waking consciousness: “Out damn spot!” She cannot unsee the blood on her hands.

The Macbeths have failed to anticipate that their inner lives – their minds and their functional connection with the world – will be broken by their outer action. Remarkably, these mental, physical, spiritual breakdowns are rendered from the sufferers’ point of view.

Before he kills the king, Macbeth gives a speech about ambition that shows he has the moral insight to avoid the crime. He says he has “no spur to prick the sides of [his] intent”, using the metaphor of riding a horse to express that there is nothing about Duncan to urge him forward into the act of murder.

Macbeth realises he has “only vaulting ambition”, which leaps over itself and falls on the other side. He anticipates the catastrophe, but he kills the king anyway.

Read more: Guide to the classics: Shakespeare’s sonnets — an honest account of love and a surprising portal to the man himself

The twists and turns of moral reasoning

Why does Shakespeare include such contradictions?

Shakespeare understood that it is spellbinding to witness a character forming an inner resolution, or breaking one. In Macbeth, the stakes are high: an innocent life and a kingdom’s peace hang in the balance. The tension is relentless. Lady Macbeth enters, cutting off Macbeth’s reflection on ambition. He has just reasoned himself out of committing the murder, and she reasons him back into it.

The play dramatises the twists and turns of moral reasoning and the pressure of emotional coercion on conscience. Macbeth is wise and compassionate one instant, and preparing to kill his friend the next. This challenges our tendency to see the world in black and white, populated by good people and bad people.

All of the themes of Macbeth – violence, treachery, moral reasoning, conscience and ambition – were close the surface of public consciousness in Shakespeare’s day.

Since Henry VIII left the Catholic Church, establishing himself as the head of the Church of England in 1534, the nation’s political landscape had been riven by religious opposition. This affected people’s everyday lives and challenged their deepest inner convictions. In 1557, you could be burned as a heretic for being Protestant; in 1567, you could be burned as a heretic for being Catholic.

Being able to see the soul in motion, as Shakespeare allows his audience to do, was a fantasy that interrogators of both Catholic and Protestant persuasions would have cherished.

By the time Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, he was a member of The King’s Men – a playing company patronised directly by a new king – James the First of England and the Sixth (you guessed it) of Scotland. What can we make of the fact of Shakespeare writing a Scottish play for a Scottish king, who is also the boss of his particular business enterprise? He had to be very careful.

Shakespeare steered a clever course. His play seems mildly topical and politically correct on the surface, but underneath it complicated the moral questions of its moment.

The first thing to be aware of is that James had a preoccupation with the occult. In 1597, James had published a book called Demonology , seeking to prove and condemn witchcraft. He had it published again in 1603 when he became King of England.

Shakespeare seems to pander to this obsession when he includes witches in his play, who discuss spells and make prophetic predictions.

Notice, though, that Shakespeare leaves unanswered the question of their moral culpability. We are left wondering whether it pleased or disturbed King James that the supernatural element in the play explains very little about the actions of its characters. Shakespeare portrays the Macbeths’ ambition for power as perfectly adequate motivation for their criminal action.

The second thing to be aware of is the Gunpower Plot . When Macbeth was first staged in 1606, England was reeling from the discovery of a nearly successful conspiracy to blow up parliament. If successful, the attempt would have killed the king and a large number of the nation’s ruling class, and triggered catastrophic civic disorder.

Read more: The Gunpowder Plot: torture and persecution in fact and fiction

Gunpowder, treason and plot

On 4 November 1605, Guy Fawkes was arrested. A letter tipping off a member of parliament had led to the discovery of a stash of barrels of gunpowder in a cellar under parliament. Under torture, Fawkes revealed the names of his Catholic conspirators.

The discovery of the plot was promoted as a defining moment of victory for the Protestant nation against its Catholic traitors within, and led to intensified persecution of Catholics across Europe.

The adage, don’t waste a crisis, seems to have been heeded by James. Even in its own moment, the event became a black and white moral fable, in which treachery was weeded out and punished with violence. The traitors were tortured and publicly executed. Their bodies were literally quartered.

How did Shakespeare’s play, first performed in 1606, engage with the Gunpowder Plot and the grisly punishment of its perpetrators?

On the surface, Shakespeare cashed in on the way the Gunpowder Plot had shocked the people of London. Fireworks, or “squibs”, were used at the opening of the play as special effects for the “thunder and lightning” called for in the script. It is easy to imagine the first audience jumping with terror and then telling friends to attend the next spectacular performance.

By inventing the witches, Shakespeare also sets up ambiguous, almost imaginary figures of evil who “melt into air”. Were these anything like the monsters that the trial of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators had created in the public imagination? Many understood the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot to be an act of supernatural preservation of their God-ordained ruler. A silver commemorative medal from 1605 bears the Latin inscription: “You [God], the keeper of James, have not slept.”

Tracing a parallel with this sensibility, Shakespeare borrows Banquo – a real 11th century person believed to be an ancestor of King James – from the historical Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed . His characterisation, deviating from that of Holinshed, puts King James, through association, on the side of right in the play.

Shakespeare’s story of Banquo, who is murdered on Macbeth’s orders but returns as a ghost, seems to shore up by supernatural intervention James’ right to the throne. That is, until we consider that the witches who prophesy that Banquo will be the father of kings are the same ones who predict Macbeth’s ascent to the crown.

Shakespeare’s play is unsettling. It provides a thought experiment. It teases out the moral ambiguities of a society whose members see others in black and white, while permitting shades of grey in themselves.

It is a society in which treachery is punished with sanctioned violence, but in which ambition paves the way to real power via both violence and treachery. It is the kingdom of Scotland riven by contending clans. It is England of 1606 reeling from the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. It is our world of perpetual crisis.

Crisis appeals to the human imagination because it offers to suspend the rules by which we normally operate. Crisis can, as Macbeth shows, make moral compromises appeal as “the nearest way” to increased power. It can make brutal measures seem necessary to retain it.

Macbeth issues a warning for our times about the harm done to individuals and societies when they allow the will for power to drown out the inner voice of conscience.

• William Shakespeare
• Guide to the Classics

Lecturer (Hindi-Urdu)

Senior Lecturer - Earth System Science

Associate Director, Operational Planning

Sydney Horizon Educators (Identified)

Deputy Social Media Producer

William Shakespeare

• Literature Notes
• Major Themes
• Macbeth at a Glance
• Play Summary
• About Macbeth
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Act I: Scene 1
• Act I: Scene 2
• Act I: Scene 3
• Act I: Scene 4
• Act I: Scene 5
• Act I: Scene 6
• Act I: Scene 7
• Act II: Scene 1
• Act II: Scene 2
• Act II: Scene 3
• Act II: Scene 4
• Act III: Scene 1
• Act III: Scene 2
• Act III: Scene 3
• Act III: Scene 4
• Act III: Scene 5
• Act III: Scene 6
• Act IV: Scene 1
• Act IV: Scene 2
• Act IV: Scene 3
• Act V: Scene 1
• Act V: Scene 2
• Act V: Scene 3
• Act V: Scene 4
• Act V: Scene 5
• Act V: Scene 6
• Act V: Scene 7
• Act V: Scene 8
• Act V: Scene 9
• Character Analysis
• Lady Macbeth
• Character Map
• William Shakespeare Biography
• Critical Essays
• Major Symbols and Motifs
• Macbeth on the Stage
• Famous Quotes
• Film Versions
• Full Glossary
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Major Themes

The Fall of Man

The ancient Greek notion of tragedy concerned the fall of a great man, such as a king, from a position of superiority to a position of humility on account of his ambitious pride, or hubris . To the Greeks, such arrogance in human behavior was punishable by terrible vengeance. The tragic hero was to be pitied in his fallen plight but not necessarily forgiven: Greek tragedy frequently has a bleak outcome. Christian drama, on the other hand, always offers a ray of hope; hence, Macbeth ends with the coronation of Malcolm , a new leader who exhibits all the correct virtues for a king.

Macbeth exhibits elements that reflect the greatest Christian tragedy of all: the Fall of Man. In the Genesis story, it is the weakness of Adam, persuaded by his wife (who has in turn been seduced by the devil) which leads him to the proud assumption that he can "play God." But both stories offer room for hope: Christ will come to save mankind precisely because mankind has made the wrong choice through his own free will. In Christian terms, although Macbeth has acted tyrannically, criminally, and sinfully, he is not entirely beyond redemption in heaven.

Fortune, Fate, and Free Will

Fortune is another word for chance. The ancient view of human affairs frequently referred to the "Wheel of Fortune," according to which human life was something of a lottery. One could rise to the top of the wheel and enjoy the benefits of superiority, but only for a while. With an unpredictable swing up or down, one could equally easily crash to the base of the wheel.

Fate, on the other hand, is fixed. In a fatalistic universe, the length and outcome of one's life (destiny) is predetermined by external forces. In Macbeth, the Witches represent this influence. The play makes an important distinction: Fate may dictate what will be, but how that destiny comes about is a matter of chance (and, in a Christian world such as Macbeth's) of man's own choice or free will.

Although Macbeth is told he will become king, he is not told how to achieve the position of king: that much is up to him. We cannot blame him for becoming king (it is his Destiny), but we can blame him for the way in which he chooses to get there (by his own free will).

Kingship and Natural Order

Macbeth is set in a society in which the notion of honor to one's word and loyalty to one's superiors is absolute. At the top of this hierarchy is the king, God's representative on Earth. Other relationships also depend on loyalty: comradeship in warfare, hospitality of host towards guest, and the loyalty between husband and wife. In this play, all these basic societal relationships are perverted or broken. Lady Macbeth's domination over her husband, Macbeth's treacherous act of regicide, and his destruction of comradely and family bonds, all go against the natural order of things.

The medieval and renaissance view of the world saw a relationship between order on earth, the so-called microcosm , and order on the larger scale of the universe, or macrocosm. Thus, when Lennox and the Old Man talk of the terrifying alteration in the natural order of the universe — tempests, earthquakes, darkness at noon, and so on — these are all reflections of the breakage of the natural order that Macbeth has brought about in his own microcosmic world.

Disruption of Nature

Violent disruptions in nature — tempests, earthquakes, darkness at noon, and so on — parallel the unnatural and disruptive death of the monarch Duncan.

The medieval and renaissance view of the world saw a relationship between order on earth, the so-called microcosm, and order on the larger scale of the universe, or macrocosm. Thus, when Lennox and the Old Man talk of the terrifying alteration in the natural order of the universe (nature), these are all reflections of the breakage of the natural order that Macbeth has brought about in his own microcosmic world (society).

Many critics see the parallel between Duncan's death and disorder in nature as an affirmation of the divine right theory of kingship. As we witness in the play, Macbeth's murder of Duncan and his continued tyranny extends the disorder of the entire country.

Gender Roles

Lady Macbeth is the focus of much of the exploration of gender roles in the play. As Lady Macbeth propels her husband toward committing Duncan's murder, she indicates that she must take on masculine characteristics. Her most famous speech — located in Act I, Scene 5 — addresses this issue.

Clearly, gender is out of its traditional order. This disruption of gender roles is also presented through Lady Macbeth's usurpation of the dominate role in the Macbeth's marriage; on many occasions, she rules her husband and dictates his actions.

Reason Versus Passion

During their debates over which course of action to take, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth use different persuasive strategies. Their differences can easily be seen as part of a thematic study of gender roles. However, in truth, the difference in ways Macbeth and Lady Macbeth rationalize their actions is essential to understanding the subtle nuances of the play as a whole.

Macbeth is very rational, contemplating the consequences and implications of his actions. He recognizes the political, ethical, and religious reason why he should not commit regicide. In addition to jeopardizing his afterlife, Macbeth notes that regicide is a violation of Duncan's "double trust" that stems from Macbeth's bonds as a kinsman and as a subject.

On the other hand, Lady Macbeth has a more passionate way of examining the pros and cons of killing Duncan. She is motivated by her feelings and uses emotional arguments to persuade her husband to commit the evil act.

Previous William Shakespeare Biography

Next Major Symbols and Motifs

• International
• Schools directory
• Resources Jobs Schools directory News Search

EXEMPLAR ESSAY on the theme of VIOLENCE in 'Macbeth' GCSE 9-1 English Literature

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

29 April 2023

• Share through email
• Share through twitter
• Share through linkedin
• Share through facebook
• Share through pinterest

This resource is a model essay answering the following question: ‘How is the theme of violence presented in 'Macbeth’?’

It is of GCSE standard and targeted at teachers who want to show their students a grade 8/9 answer that they can analyse and obtain ideas from.

Tes paid licence How can I reuse this?

Your rating is required to reflect your happiness.

It's good to leave some feedback.

Something went wrong, please try again later.

This resource hasn't been reviewed yet

To ensure quality for our reviews, only customers who have purchased this resource can review it

Report this resource to let us know if it violates our terms and conditions. Our customer service team will review your report and will be in touch.

Not quite what you were looking for? Search by keyword to find the right resource:

Join Now to View Premium Content

GradeSaver provides access to 2360 study guide PDFs and quizzes, 11007 literature essays, 2767 sample college application essays, 926 lesson plans, and ad-free surfing in this premium content, “Members Only” section of the site! Membership includes a 10% discount on all editing orders.

The Effect of Violence on Ambition Anonymous 10th Grade

A seemingly innocent spark of aspiration can spiral into an ignited wildfire of vengeance. The play written by William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, is set in a kingdom in Scotland during the eleventh century; once peaceful and filled to the brim with prosperity, is now racked with violence beginning with Macbeth’s great zeal to become king. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth both have a desire for Macbeth to become king, which results in him killing Duncan, the king. Lady Macbeth takes her own life out of guilt and Macbeth is killed. Duncan’s son, Malcolm who is the rightful successor, gains power. In The Tragedy of Macbeth, Shakespeare uses the motif of violence, the symbolism of the dagger, and the characterization of Macbeth to convey that an excess of ambition and desire can lead to violence.

Shakespeare uses the motif of violence to demonstrate how the effect of passionate desires can be cruelty. Macbeth elucidates his morals and reasoning for wanting to kill Duncan, “Bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague the inventor … To prick the sides of my intent, but only, Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself, And falls on th’other” (Shakespeare 1.7.9-10.26-28). To illustrate, the words “bloody instructions”...

GradeSaver provides access to 2313 study guide PDFs and quizzes, 10989 literature essays, 2751 sample college application essays, 911 lesson plans, and ad-free surfing in this premium content, “Members Only” section of the site! Membership includes a 10% discount on all editing orders.

Already a member? Log in

Macbeth Essays

There are loads of ways you can approach writing an essay, but the two i favour are detailed below., the key thing to remember is that an essay should focus on the three aos:, ao1: plot and character development; ao2: language and technique; ao3: context, strategy 1 : extract / rest of play, the first strategy basically splits the essay into 3 paragraphs., the first paragraph focuses on the extract, the second focuses on the rest of the play, the third focuses on context. essentially, it's one ao per paragraph, for a really neatly organised essay., strategy 2 : a structured essay with an argument, this strategy allows you to get a much higher marks as it's structured to form an argument about the whole text. although you might think that's harder - and it's probably going to score more highly - i'd argue that it's actually easier to master. mainly because you do most of the work before the day of the exam., to see some examples of these, click on the links below:, lady macbeth as a powerful woman, macbeth as a heroic character, the key to this style is remembering this: you're going to get a question about a theme, and the extract will definitely relate to the theme., the strategy here is planning out your essays before the exam, knowing that the extract will fit into them somehow., below are some structured essays i've put together., macbeth and gender.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Macbeth — Corruption Of Power In Macbeth

Corruption of Power in Macbeth

• Categories: Macbeth Power

About this sample

Words: 506 |

Published: Mar 13, 2024

Words: 506 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

• Expert in: Literature Life

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 793 words

1 pages / 627 words

4 pages / 1904 words

1.5 pages / 763 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Macbeth

A. Restate the thesis statement and summarize the main points discussed in the essay. Macbeth's downfall is attributed to his ambition, moral decay, and psychological decline, leading to his tragic end.B. Final thoughts: The [...]

Macbeth, one of William Shakespeare's most renowned tragedies, delves into the intricate nuances of macbeth masculinity. Set against a backdrop of power, ambition, and betrayal, the play offers a profound exploration of how [...]

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2009.Bradley, A. C. 'The Witch Scenes in Macbeth.' In Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. Macmillan, 1904.Knight, G. Wilson. 'The [...]

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Early 1600s.Corrigan, Timothy. 'Ambition and Its Consequences in Shakespeare's Macbeth.' College Literature, vol. 30, no. 1, 2003, pp. 124-147.Smith, John. 'The Role of the Witches in Macbeth: An [...]

How far are you willing to go to get what you want? One of the themes in William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth is greed. How a humble person can turn into a savage and uncontrollable beast just for wanting more. In the play [...]

In Shakespeare's play Macbeth, Macbeth is given a prophecy by three witches saying that he will become king. With high ambitions, Macbeth murders his king and becomes king himself. As king, Macbeth rules with tyranny and [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Advertisement

Supported by

Critic’s Notebook

‘James,’ ‘Demon Copperhead’ and the Triumph of Literary Fan Fiction

How Percival Everett and Barbara Kingsolver reimagined classic works by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

• Share full article

By A.O. Scott

One of the most talked-about novels of the year so far is “ James ,” by Percival Everett. Last year, everyone seemed to be buzzing about Barbara Kingsolver’s “ Demon Copperhead ,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction . These are very different books with one big thing in common: Each reimagines a beloved 19th-century masterwork, a coming-of-age story that had been a staple of youthful reading for generations.

“Demon Copperhead” takes “David Copperfield,” Charles Dickens’s 1850 chronicle of a young boy’s adventures amid the cruelty and poverty of Victorian England, and transplants it to the rocky soil of modern Appalachia, where poverty and cruelty continue to flourish, along with opioids, environmental degradation and corruption. “James” retells Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” first published in 1884, from the point of view of Huck’s enslaved companion, Jim — now James.

The rewriting of old books is hardly a new practice, though it’s one that critics often like to complain about. Doesn’t anyone have an original idea ? Can’t we just leave the classics alone?

Of course not. Without imitation, our literature would be threadbare. The modern canon is unimaginable without such acts of appropriation as James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which deposited the “Odyssey” in 1904 Dublin, and Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea,” an audacious postcolonial prequel to “Jane Eyre.” More recently, Zadie Smith refashioned E.M. Forster’s “Howards End” into “ On Beauty ” and tackled Dickens in “ The Fraud, ” while Kamel Daoud answered Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” with “ The Meursault Investigation .”

Shakespeare ransacked Holinshed’s “Chronicles” for his histories and whatever Latin and Italian plays he could grab hold of for his comedies and tragedies. A great many of those would be ripped off, too — reinvented, transposed, updated — by ambitious artists of later generations. Tom Stoppard and John Updike twisted “Hamlet” into “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and “Gertrude and Claudius.” “Romeo and Juliet” blossomed into “West Side Story.” The best modern versions of “Macbeth” and “King Lear” are samurai movies directed by Akira Kurosawa .

As for Dickens and Twain, it’s hard to think of two more energetic self-imitators. Their collected writings are thick with sequels, reboots and spinoffs. Literary brands in their own right, they were among the most successful IP-driven franchise entertainers of their respective generations, belonging as much to popular culture as to the world of letters.

“David Copperfield,” drawing on incidents in Dickens’s early life and coming in the wake of blockbusters like “The Pickwick Papers” and “Oliver Twist,” functions as an autobiographical superhero origin story. David, emerging from a childhood that is the definition of “Dickensian,” discovers his powers as a writer and ascends toward the celebrity his creator enjoyed.

Twain was already famous when he published “Huckleberry Finn,” which revived the characters and setting of an earlier success. The very first sentence gestures toward a larger novelistic universe: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’; but that ain’t no matter.” (Classic sequelism: a welcome back to the established fans while ushering in the newbies.) Tom, who very nearly ruins Huck’s book when he shows up at the end, is the heart of the franchise: Tony Stark to Huck’s Ant-Man, the principal hero in an open-ended series of adventures, including a handful that Twain left unfinished .

“James” and “Demon Copperhead,” then, might fairly be described as fan fiction. Not just because of the affection Everett and Kingsolver show for their predecessors — in his acknowledgments, Everett imagines a “long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain” in the afterlife; in hers, Kingsolver refers to Dickens as her “genius friend” — but because of the liberties their love allows them to take. “Huckleberry Finn” and “David Copperfield” may be especially susceptible to revision because they are both profoundly imperfect books, with flaws that their most devoted readers have not so much overlooked as patiently endured.

I’m not talking primarily about matters of language that scrape against modern sensibilities — about Victorian sexual mores in Dickens or racial slurs in Twain. As the critic and novelist David Gates suggests in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of “David Copperfield,” “sophisticated readers correct for the merely antiquated.” I’m referring to failures of stylistic and narrative quality control.

As Gates puts it, Dickens’s novel “goes squishy and unctuous” when he “stops following his storytelling instincts and starts listening to extra-literary imperatives.” Preachiness and piety are his most evident vices. Twain’s much noted misjudgment goes in other directions, as he abandons the powerful story of Huck and Jim’s friendship — and the ethical awakening at its heart — to revert to strenuous boys-adventure Tom Sawyerism. The half-dozen final chapters postpone Jim’s freedom so that Tom — and possibly Twain as well — can show off his familiarity with the swashbuckling tropes of popular fiction and insulate “Huckleberry Finn” from the charge of taking itself too seriously.

“Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished,” Twain warned in a prefatory note. But “Huckleberry Finn” and “David Copperfield” are both essentially comic — sometimes outright hilarious — novels rooted in hatred of injustice. It’s impossible to tease those impulses apart, or to separate what’s most appealing about the books from what’s frustrating.

That tension, I think, is what opens the door to Kingsolver’s and Everett’s reimaginings. For Kingsolver, “David Copperfield” is an “impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us.” (“You’d think he was from around here,” her protagonist says when he reads Dickens for the first time.)

One way Kingsolver insulates “Demon Copperhead” from Dickensian sentimentality is by giving her protagonist a voice likely to remind many readers of Huckleberry Finn himself. Huck, after all, is the North American archetype of the resourceful, marginal, backwoods man-child. Though she doesn’t push as far into regional dialect as Twain did, the tang and salt of what used to be called southwestern humor season her pages.

Dialect figures in Dickens and Twain as a mark of authenticity and a source of laughter. In “James,” Everett weaves it into the novel’s critique of power. He replicates Jim’s speech patterns from “Huckleberry Finn,” but here they represent the language enslaved Black characters use in front of white people, part of a performance of servility and simple-mindedness that is vital to surviving in a climate of pervasive racial terror. Among themselves, James and the other slaves are witty and philosophical, attributes that also characterize James’s first-person narration. “Never had a situation felt so absurd, surreal and ridiculous,” he muses after he has been conscripted into a traveling minstrel show. “And I had spent my life as a slave.”

In “Huckleberry Finn,” Jim is Huck’s traveling companion and protector, the butt of his pranks and the agent of his redemption. Early in their journey downriver, Huck is stricken with guilt at the “sin” of helping Jim escape. His gradual understanding of the error of this thinking — of the essential corruption of a society built on human chattel — is the narrative heart of Twain’s book. Against what he has been taught, against the precepts of the “sivilized” world, he comes to see Jim as a person.

For Everett’s James, his own humanity is not in doubt, but under perpetual assault. His relationship with Huck takes on a new complexity. How far can he trust this outcast white boy? How much should he risk in caring for him? To answer those questions would be to spoil some of Everett’s boldest and most brilliant twists on Twain’s tale.

Which, in Everett’s hands, becomes, like “David Copperfield,” the story of a writer. James, who has surreptitiously learned how to read, comes into possession of a pencil stub — a treasure whose acquisition exacts a horrific cost. It represents the freedom of self-representation, the hope, implicitly realized by the novel itself, that James might someday tell his own story.

James’s version is not something Twain could have conceived, but it is nonetheless a latent possibility in the pages of “Huckleberry Finn,” much as the terrible logic of dispossession, addiction and violence in 21st-century America can be read between the lines of Dickens. Everett and Kingsolver are able to see that. This is what originality looks like.

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times’s Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. More about A.O. Scott

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, “Knife,” addresses the attack that maimed him  in 2022, and pays tribute to his wife who saw him through .

Recent books by Allen Bratton, Daniel Lefferts and Garrard Conley depict gay Christian characters not usually seen in queer literature.

What can fiction tell us about the apocalypse? The writer Ayana Mathis finds unexpected hope in novels of crisis by Ling Ma, Jenny Offill and Jesmyn Ward .

At 28, the poet Tayi Tibble has been hailed as the funny, fresh and immensely skilled voice of a generation in Māori writing .

Amid a surge in book bans, the most challenged books in the United States in 2023 continued to focus on the experiences of L.G.B.T.Q. people or explore themes of race.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .