SOURCE: Foakes, R. A. “Images of Death: Ambition in Macbeth.” In Focus on Macbeth, edited by John Russell Brown, pp. 7-29. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.

In the following essay, Foakes characterizes Macbeth as Shakespeare's most complex examination of ambition and its brutal potential.

Macbeth is Shakespeare's last and most original play on the theme of the ambitious prince finally overthrown. Its roots lie deep in the medieval and Renaissance preoccupation with tragedy as the fall of great men or women, brought low by fortune's wheel and so exemplifying the mutability of human life, or overreaching themselves and illustrating the retribution visited upon the proud and sinful. It was natural for Shakespeare to explore the possibilities for tragedy of

          sad stories of the death of kings: How some have been depos'd, some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd, Some poison'd by their wives, some...