ABSTRACT
There is a clear sense, in Hamlet and to a lesser extent in Othello, that a retributive justice works through human life, and that an order and symmetry may therefore be seen in the doings of men. Macbeth is a work which offers the spectator no view of life alone, but a view of life which is part of a view of the world. In a broad and perhaps old-fashioned sense of the term, it is a philosophical play as Hamlet and Othello are not. The nature of Macbeth's conduct, and the experience for ourselves which this makes of the play, are quite misunderstood if he is thought, however, to be an 'image of revolt' merely at the level of civil disobedience. In the last episode of the play, the combat between Macbeth and Macduff, it is made plain that night's black agents are the fallen angels, the powers of Satan himself.
