Virgil wrote his epic during a period of civil war
and political and moral chaos in Rome after the fall
of the Republic. Accordingly, The Aeneid reflects an
attempt to revive Roman greatness by appealing to
its mythic history and its basic moral values of piety,
virtue, and constancy. At the same time, it sets out a
political ideology that could be used beyond Virgil’s
moral aims to justify imperialistic ambitions in the
aggrandizement of the Roman Empire. In more
modern times, the concept of manifest destiny, in
the history of American expansion, worked in simi-
lar fashion to appropriate Native American land and
to exploit indigenous people, in a “divinely ordained”
mission to spread democracy. Both examples show
how human beings have exploited “divine agency”
and otherwise manipulated fate and destiny toward
self-interest.
As in the previously discussed works, the clas-
sical trope of superhuman prophecy figures impor-
tantly in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth to
advance plot and human intention. Unlike Oedipus
the King and The Aeneid, both of which revolve
around a single, defining prophecy, Shakespeare’s
tragedy operates with two, one propelling the rise
and the other underwriting the fall. The prophecy
of the three witches (a spin-off of the Fates) incites
the protagonist into evil in the first half of the play;
then, symmetrically in the second half, the suddenly
unveiled prophecy regarding Macduff seals Mac-
beth’s defeat and death. In act 1, Macbeth, thane
of Glamis, and his companion, Banquo, come upon
three witches on the heath who respectively address
Macbeth as thane of Glamis, thane of Cawdor, and
“king hereafter” (1.3.50). To Banquo they enounce
the following occult prophecy: “Lesser than Mac-
beth, and greater. / Not so happy, yet much hap-
pier. / Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none”
(1.3.67–68).
With the partial fulfillment of the prophecy, his
becoming thane of Cawdor, Macbeth is tempted
against his better reason by the further fruits of
“vaulting ambition” (1.7.27): kingship. When the
she-man, Lady Macbeth, accuses him of unmanly
cowardice in her infamous speech (of how she’d
“[pluck her] nipple from [her baby’s] boneless gums,
/And dash’d the brains out” [1.7.57–58]), she gives
Macbeth the courage to kill the king. Though Mac-
beth chidingly affirms the moral position “I dare do
all that may become a man; / Who dares do more
is none” (1.7.46–47), he goes along with the plan of
regicide nonetheless, crossing from honor to villainy.
After the murder of Duncan, Macbeth becomes
king in his place, but the more he tries, like Oedipus,
to adhere to the prophecy, the more it eludes him.
Hence, one murder leads to further: He has Banquo
killed to ensure the crown for his progeny rather
than Banquo’s as the witches foretold. Again like
Oedipus, Macbeth both acts upon and acts against
the prophecy in ardent contradiction, incited by
momentary megalomania, sealed by the murderous
deed and, thereafter, the will never to submit in the
downward spiral of violence and death. The fulfill-
ment of the witches’ prophecy drives the events of
further carnage fatefully and fatally with a peculiar
vitality of their own—a concatenation of one violent
act igniting the next. Ultimately, Macbeth’s final end
comes in a showdown in act 5, scene 8 with Macduff,
the man “of no woman born” (5.8.13), the only man
whom, according to the witches’ prophecy, Macbeth
must fear. Presenting itself as the fulfillment of fate,
the duel between Macbeth and Macduff can also be
seen, like the other preceding cases, as an example of
self-fulfilling prophecy. The event materializes not
so much through the agency of higher powers but
more often through a human being’s reactions to his
foreknowledge of the event. In Macbeth’s case, it is
less a superhuman agency that controls the outcome
and more a wearied Macbeth himself, who, finally
facing his nemesis, is taunted by Macduff, who
fights him with invincible fury to avenge the deaths
of his wife and children.
In roMeo and JuLiet, fate again plays a defining
role to induce tragedy, working as a force of fortu-
ity to obstruct the best intentions of human beings.
In Shakespeare’s early tragedy about star-crossed
lovers, Romeo and Juliet’s problems lie in that they
have been born into two families engaged in an
age-old feud. The deaths of the young lovers might
have been prevented had there not been a plague,
which kept Friar John from informing Romeo that
Juliet was under a spell of faked death. They might
have succeeded in living peacefully apart from their
families, but such an outcome probably would not
have effected an end to the feud that the chastening34 fate