In "The Structural Study of Myth" Claude Levi-Strauss explains that we can discover a myth's meaning by identifying and isolating what he calls mythemes. Like phonemes in language studies, mythemes are the constituent units of myths and they find meaning in and through their relationships within the mythic structure. The meaning of any individual myth, then, depends on the interaction and order of the mythemes within the story. Many critics believe that the primary signifying system is best found as a series of binary oppositions that the reader organizes, values, and then uses to interpret the text.

Applying this structuralist approach to Shakespeare's tragedy "Macbeth", we find that the play revolves around two major binary oppositions with each binary opposition being connected to and interwoven with the others. The more obvious of the two centers on the binary nature of human beings --- in this case, the evil...