Evil has always been in everyone’s lives. Some people have it more than others. There are places in the world where evil almost takes over. It crops up in all kinds of places, all over the world. In these texts, “Macbeth”, “Frankenstein” and “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” there is a definite theme of evil throughout. In this essay I will write about what evil there is specifically in each of these texts. I will start with “Macbeth” because it has the most overriding evil out of the three. In the play Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, the leading character is Macbeth.
He is a good, loyal nobleman in Scotland. At the beginning he has the title of “Thane of Glamis”. He has just fought a battle and is on his way back to the king. The first time we come across evil in this film is while he is walking across a heath. Three witches appear to Macbeth and his friend Banquo. Witches have always been considered as evil beings; later in the play we find this to be true. The first witch says, “All hail Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Glamis”, the second witch continues “All hail Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor” and the third witch then says “All hail Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter. Basically the witches are telling Macbeth that he will become the Thane of Cawdor and then king.
Telling the future has been considered as an evil thing to do, by some. They then go on to tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings. A messenger then comes to the heath and tells Macbeth he has been appointed Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth then goes off to see the king where he promptly announces that the successor to him will be his son, Malcolm. This troubles Macbeth as the witches just told him that he would become king. Macbeth’s evil thoughts now begin, he says “in my way it lies”.
This is referring to Malcolm; he lies in Macbeth’s way to becoming king of Scotland. The king says that he will be going to Macbeth’s castle to celebrate the victory in the recent battle. Macbeth had written a letter to his wife, Lady Macbeth, about what had happened with the witches. She is also an evil person in the play. Some say just as much as Macbeth. She has planned a way to kill off King Duncan by the time the kings party arrive at their castle. She does this because she knows that Macbeth is “too full o’ the milk of human kindness” to do it himself. When Macbeth arrives home, his wife informs him of her plan to kill the king.
He grudgingly agrees. Lady Macbeth tells him he must “look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it. ” This means he must act like everything is okay, but know underneath that he is going to kill the king. This of course in an evil thing to do, murder is one of the most evil things a person can commit. When the play was written people considered royalty to be God’s representative on earth, so killing the king was like killing God, unforgivable. The killing of Duncan went as follows: The chamberlains were drugged through their wine, and Lady Macbeth rung the bell twice as a sign to Macbeth that all was ready.
While this was happening Macbeth saw, or thought he saw, a dagger in front of him, pointing toward Duncan’s room. This is thought to be a sign from the witches who are evil to make him go towards, and kill, Duncan. As Lady Macbeth rings the bell twice, Macbeth says that the bell is one that “summons thee to heaven or to hell,” referring to Duncan either going to hell or heaven. The plan was for him to use the chamberlain’s daggers to kill the guards, and then plant them back on them. In the mad rush to escape after he murders Duncan he forgets to plant the daggers.
When Lady Macbeth sees this she immediately takes the daggers from him and does it herself. This act shows that Lady Macbeth is doing evil, or at least being an apprentice to murder. She goes and puts them back and also smothers the grooms’ faces with blood. At this point Macbeth is regretting the fact that he has committed regicide, killing a monarch. The next day, after Duncan’s sons, Malcolm and Donaldbain, find out about their father being killed, they decide to run away. They said, “there’s daggers in men’s smiles. ” This basically means people could be pretending to be good, but underneath they aren’t.
Because Malcolm and Donaldbain ran away, Macbeth was declared the new king of Scotland the third of the witches’ prophecies comes true. Macduff is very suspicious of Macbeth and chooses not attend Macbeth’s coronation at scone. After the coronation Macbeth is very insecure about his position. This is because the witches’ prophecies came true about him, and his is worried the same will happen with Banquo. He says “to be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus” he is basically saying that being king is nothing, if his descendants wont be. At this point he starts to think about killing Banquo and his son, Fleance.
Macbeth says, “full of scorpions is my mind”. Even thinking of killing not one, but two people, is definitely a wrong thing to do. Macbeth then goes on to hire three assassins to do the deed for him. Banquo gets brutally murdered with, “with twenty trenchered gashes in his head. ” That night Macbeth had a banquet celebrating his coronation. At the beginning of it, one of the murderers shows up with blood on his face. Macbeth goes to see him, but the killer tells him that, “Fleance is ‘scaped”. This distresses Macbeth and he comes out with, “here comes my fit again. Later in that scene, Macbeth is invited to sit at a table with some noblemen; he does not see an empty chair. He does, however, see the ghost of Banquo in the seat that is being pointed out to be empty. Macbeth is obviously scared by this phantom, he shouts to the ghost, “never shake thy gory locks at me”.
At seeing this, Lady Macbeth instantly makes an excuse for this bizarre behaviour, she tells the party that he sometimes has fits, and anyone who knew him would think nothing of them. Macbeth then stops seeing the ghost, and raises a toast to Banquo. As soon as he does this the spirit returns. “Avaunt and quit my sight! shouts the king, “hence horrible shadow! ” Lady Macbeth instantly tells the crowd to leave “at once”, to stop the embarrassing display from her husband. This scene shows that there is definitely evil, coming from Macbeth. He is either hallucinating this or the witches are putting Banquo there, either way, there is underlying evil in both of these things. At the end of the banquet, Macbeth reveals that he will go and see the Weird Sisters once again. When he does this the witches show him four apparitions: the first is of a helmet, it tells him, “Beware Macduff”. The second is a bloody child; this says to him, “Be bloody, bold and resolute.
None of woman born shall harm Macbeth. ” The third is of a child with a crown on his head, holding a branch it tells him no one will harm him “until Birnam Wood, to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him”. The forth, and last apparition is one of the “blood bolter’d Banquo” alone with 8 kings. Macbeth’s thugs are ordered to go to Macduff’s castle and murder all that are within. When Macduff who is in England with Malcolm building an army to take Macbeth hears of the news he is furious, and calls Macbeth a “hell-kite” and a “fiend”, he says that he wants to get Macbeth “within [his] swords length.
After Macduff and Malcolm have assembled and army, they all march up to Scotland. At this moment Macbeth has extremely strong belief that he is invincible. Even when a messenger reports that Malcolm has an army of ten thousand strong he says “I’ll fight till my bone from my flesh is hacked”. Macbeth’s wife is reported as dead and Macbeth is still determined to keep going even though he has just had a long soliloquy about how pointless life actually is. He still seems confident when one of his servants informs him that Birnam wood appears to be moving towards him at Dunsinane Castle.
When Macduff eventually meets Macbeth, Macbeth reassures himself by saying that no one born of woman shall harm him. Macduff shatters this theory by telling Macbeth that he was from his mother’s womb “untimely ripp’d”. Macbeth becomes furious with the witches and identifies them as “juggling fiends”. Although the witches’ prophecies have gone against him, he “will not yield”, but Macduff kills the tyrant. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is a traditional story with evil as an underlying theme. This evil is shown throughout this novel. The story begins with Victor Frankenstein.
He is a very ambitious man, who main aim in life is to”… unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation. ” Some might consider doing this an evil thing to do, as he is trying to take the place of God, or whomever you consider to be the creator of life. Another of his aims is to “banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death. ” This is also an extremely wrong thing to do for the same reason that he would be taking the power away from God, to give and take life. The final product of his ambition is the Monster; it does not have a name but is just called the Monster.
This is a physically disgusting creature to all who observe it. In creating this body he needed to get parts for the body. To get these parts he went into graveyards at night and dug up dead bodies and cut off limbs organs. This is one more example of wrongdoing in this book. It disrespects the dead immensely. When the monster is brought to life, Frankenstein neglects his duty as a parent and runs away from the Monster. Because of Victor running away the Monster it does not learn anything, and when it goes out in public it is shunned, and gets stones thrown at it and is generally treated very badly.
The Monster goes into a forest and finds a house with an blind man and his family living in it. The Monster decides to live in a hidden part of the house, and while he is there, he picks up how to communicate. The Monster plucks up the courage to go and see the blind man, when he does; the man is not bothered by him as he cannot see how disfigured the Monster is. But when his family comes back they see the Monster and the family beat it off and send it away. The Monster is very angry with this and goes back to the forest later in the book to try and get revenge; the family are not there.
The Monster then goes in search of Victor Frankenstein, his creator. While he is looking for Frankenstein, the Monster comes across Frankenstein’s younger brother, William, and kills him. This is, of course a very evil thing to do, perhaps more than any other thing someone can do. The Monster takes William’s locket and puts it in his mum’s pocket to frame her. She is hung for murder. When has a mental breakdown, one of his friends, Cleval helps him through this rough time. He is almost completely recovered when he finds out about William being killed.
Frankenstein knows that it was the Monster that did it. The Monster is still seeking revenge; he goes off and kills Cleval. Victor sees the Monster, later in the book, on top of a mountain, but he does not mention it because he feels guilty because he knows that what he has done is evil and wrong. When Frankenstein goes on a walk he crosses paths with the Monster. The monster tells Victor his story, that all he wants is to be loved, and that if Frankenstein makes him a mate, he will go away to the north pole and never come back. Frankenstein moves to Scotland to create this second creature.
This is more evil than it was the first time, because he knows the consequences of making another monster. He has the second monster all ready to be brought to life, but he decides to destroy it instead. The Monster sees this happen and is extremely angry about it. The Monster says to Victor, “I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master –obey! ” The Monster kills Elizabeth Frankenstein’s friend fiancé on their wedding night. He then goes to the North Pole to commit suicide. Frankenstein then dies on a boat. In “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde” there is many examples of evil and wrongdoing. The story is basically about a man who creates a potion to separate the evil and good into separate people. This is a wrong thing to do, as it is taking the place of God, and creating a being by himself. When Dr. Jekyll takes this potion he made, he splits into himself, and Mr. Hyde Mr. Hyde is the evil in Dr. Jekyll. Mr Hyde is pure evil, all he does is evil actions, he pushes over a small girl in the street, kills a man for no reason and kills himself killing yourself is evil as it is taking the responsibility away from God to kill you off when he sees fit.
By using his potion that he created, he has created a character of complete evil, this is, of course a wrong thing to do. In conclusion I would like to say that in most stories, not all, but most, the good comes off as the winner. In real life this is not always the case. Readers like to read about evil, and what it would be like if all the novels, and plays containing evil were real. Evil is a very overriding theme in some people’s lives. It is the same in these three texts, although, in all of them the evil is eradicated in the end, not always the case in everyday life.
