Nature Of Evil And Evil In Macbeth

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Is evil inherent? In Shakespeare’s Macbeth one of the main questions is, are people born evil or is evil a learned trait. In Macbeth the main character Macbeth starts out as an exceptional scottish general. As the play progresses Macbeth meets three strange witches who tell Macbeth about his future.(put the witches prophecy quote here). This inadvertently causes Macbeth to over think this prophecy as he tries to make it come true. Thanks to Macbeth’s impatience it causes him to act in some ways that would be definitely considered evil. That brings up the question of learned versus inherent evil. Are people born with the capacity to commit evil acts such as murder or is it learned through the environment a person is raised in? In the play Macbeth murders the present king so he can take the throne and later doesn't kill his partner …show more content…
Lady Macbeth was a terrible and manipulative woman. She was extremely insistent on Macbeth killing the king. The idea of killing the king first came from lady Macbeth and she threatened more than once to do the deed herself which seems to be one of her ways to convince Macbeth to do it. This means Lady Macbeth would have most likely been charged with accessory to murder especially because she helped hide the evidence. The play does not give much information on Lady Macbeth’s past so there is no way to know if she is inherently evil or not all that is implied is that she is definitely evil. In the end it seems the answer to the big question is that evil is learned. Everyone is born with the capability for evil and violence but everything depends on how a person is raised and the environment a person is raised in. In the play Macbeth may not have been evil in the beginning but because he had been through a violent environment such as war and was peer pressured by outside factors like his terrible wife he learned to be