William Shakespeare s Macbeth - A Man Without Ethics Is A...

Albert Camus, a highly regarded scholar, once spoke â€Å"A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.† It can be speculated that what Camus was insinuating, is that in the absence of morality, one descends into corruption that impacts not just the individual, but also those who surround them. Hundred of years earlier, William Shakespeare illustrated the same concept in his renowned work, Macbeth. In this play, Shakespeare primarily uses the characters of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and Banquo to warn of the dangers of a loss of morality. Closer to Camus s time, the 1998 film A Simple Plan uses strikingly similar techniques to exhibit the same concept. It too, uses its main characters- Hank, Sarah, and Jacob- to warn of this ambition-fuelled corruption of morality. Through juxtaposing the significant actions the main characters of each work make, it is clearly evident that these two works bear more in common than an over-arching theme. Therefore it can be said that the characters of Macbeth and Hank, Lady Macbeth and Sarah, and Banquo and Jacob perfectly illustrate the commonalities between these two bodies of work. Macbeth and A Simple Plan have many story elements in common, with the strongest of these centering around the main characters of each work. No two characters illustrate this better than Macbeth and Hank, the protagonists of each tale. The most significant comparison between them is that they were both put in a position where they had to act and chose to