Macbeth and Protestant Predestination

Abstract

G. Wilson Knight famously said that Macbeth is a play about ‘evil,’ and many subsequent studies have attempted to situate that ‘evil’ more precisely within the historical contexts of early modern Protestant England. Such studies, however, tend to reinforce Knight’s view, representing Macbeth as a person with a specifically ‘reprobate’ sensibility, characterized by such traits as increasing hardness of heart and refusal to recognize his evil nature. Yet it can be argued that, for early Protestants, there was in fact no noticeable distinction between the sensibilities of the reprobate and the elect. In this light, Macbeth’s responses might be interpreted differently, as emerging from a terrified awareness, shared by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, of the Protestant world, rather than from a specifically reprobate frame of mind.

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