William Shakespeare's Macbeth and Ambition's Dark Side

Macbeth is truly a great tragic figure because his downfall cannot be explained away by the facile use of the mistaken translation of Aristotle's "character flaw", but rather because his story is one of the de-evolution of a person's innate humanity through bad judgment based on the often prized characteristic of ambition. Rather than pushing him forward to greatness, ambition Macbeth degenerates backward from a rational individual to an amoral animal. The most fascinating element of Macbeth trajectory away from his humanity is that it does not happen immediately, but rather develops slowly, mirroring the progression toward rationality from birth to maturity. From the opening scenes when Macbeth illustrates a total grasp of logic, to his retention of some measure of compassion as decides to kill Duncan, to his faltering senses of sympathy surrounding the murder of Banquo until his total lack of sagacity at the end of the play, Shakespeare's tragedy presents a complete portrait of a man whose both gains and loses the world as a result of the light and dark sides of ambition.