The Universality Of Shakespeare Character Analysis

The greatness of Shakespeare most can be felt in his inimitable power of character creation. He borrowed the stories and plots of his plays from different sources but transmuted wooden figures into tangible human personalities with depth of psychology and subtle currents of emotion. A Shakespearean character is not an abstract formula of good and evil, a lifeless silhouette but sentient figures, true to life endowed with under currents of feeling and thought. One sees Macbeth not only from the outside but also from the inside; and what one sees is a moral spectacle the emotional quality of which is not too far removed from the tragic dynamics indicated by Aristotle in his Poetics. The Elizabethans wrote incredible plays of murder and horror

In his plays every situation is related to some aspect of human life and is utilized for the brilliant presentation and analysis of inscrutable human emotions. The situations may be extraordinary and the behavior of the characters may appear abnormal but they are neither artificial nor unreal because they are true to the genuineness of the passions that have been stirred in the reaction of the spectators. Every action and every speech of the character sounds genuine and true to human nature because it comes out of the crucible of the real experience of the characters. This renders them complexity and makes them round and three-dimensional, capable of growth and change like real human beings. Macbeth’s last nihilistic and blasphemous outburst about life being “ a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” may be bad philosophy but it is dramatically justified in the context of the mental stress Macbeth has been made to suffer all through in the play. More ever the events in the lives of characters are so excellently arranged that they help built up the picture of true human beings, real individualized and distinguishable; for example, the witches come to Macbeth and not to Lady Macbeth, and their prophecies do not have the same effect on Banquo and Macbeth; Macbeth sees hallucinations while Lady Macbeth suffers from

“Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger.” [ibidem] To this charge of Shaw against Shakespeare, S.C. Sen Gupta has given a befitting reply: “whether an impulse is original or is a mere external pressure has to be determined in every individual case by the nature of the feeling. If it has passed through the alembic of a man’s soul and been transformed in the process, it has become original and personal. It is not the idea but the nature of the feeling that matters. Looked at from this point of view, every protagonist in Shakespeare’s tragedies is a heroic figure. The duty of avenging the murder of a man may be a policeman’s prejudice, but no policeman feels it in the manner of Hamlet. Hamlet’s duty is an external stimulus, but his conscience is original, because it is his own. He has, of course, no will except in bursts of temper. But Shakespeare cannot be blamed for this, because in the tragedy of ‘Hamlet’, he wants (as Shaw also haltingly recognized) to draw the picture of a will paralyzed by a moral shock and by a tendency to think too precisely on the event. Macbeth has a share of the cupidities of a bushranger,