William Shakespeare was a great playwright who understood the depths of the human soul. He was ethically aware as few human beings have ever been, and if he did not come up with solutions for the evil that lies potentially in every human breast, at least he outlined its extent, described it accurately, and suggested more moral alternatives.
Piety has various shades of meaning, including the concepts of being dutiful to orthodox religious beliefs or ôfidelity to natural obligations (as to parents)ö (Merriam-Webster 1999: 880). In Macbeth, Shakespeare showed the tragedy of a mighty king being brought to his downfall by violating the concept of piety in his treatment of others.
The idea of piety to ancient beliefs was present in the origins of Greek drama (Gill 2003). Begun as a religious observance in honour of Dionysus, Greek tragedy reflected the central values of the culture that was at its peak of greatness in the short but historically influential reign of Pericles in the 5th century B.C. Central to Greek values was the idea of piety û to the gods, to traditional morals and law, to oneÆs social betters, such as the king, and to oneÆs fellow human beings. Greek tragedy originated as serious religious pageantry, and showed how a lack of piety brought ruin to the tragic heroes of the plays.
Now let us fly through time and space from ancient Greece to Elizabethan London. Here plays were profane, secular entertainments for profit, and the unruly spectators milled around eating and drinking while the actors tried to attract their attention.
Macbeth deals with much the same murderous behaviour as the Greek tragedy, but gone are the religious motives for drama, the seasonal performance in conjunction with a festival, the chorus, the masks, and the high-heels. The motives are still ambition and the means are still murder, but the concepts of piety and revenge, although dissimilar in cultural context to the ancient Greeks,...