Saturday, August 2, 2014

How are villainous characters presented in Shakespeare's Macbeth and Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

In Macbeth and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, villainous characters are presented through their indulgence in guilty pleasures.  For example, Macbeth becomes consumed with the idea of being king and proving himself a man.  He seeks to eliminate all doubt from others regarding his position, so he gets yet a second prophecy from the witches and kills anyone whom he believes might challenge him.  Macbeth is consumed by becoming and staying king.  Similarly, Jekyll's evil persona Hyde abuses a child on the street and kills an old man for no reason.  Jekyll has wanted to divorce himself from this evil side rather than take the responsibility of dealing with it, and now the evil has taken on a life of its own.  Like Macbeth, Hyde is consumed with evil and acts accordingly.  So the villainous characters in these two texts are motivated by their own guilty pleasures.

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