"Unveiling Evil: Nihilism in Shakespeare's Macbeth"

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a play abounding with philosophically significant questions which find their crystallised form in Nietzsche’s nihilism. This paper attempts to delineate a correspondence between the Bard and the German philosopher, thus applying modern philosophical theory to the aesthetic realm of early modern literature. The research centres on a handful of staple themes such as the role of time, the evil dilemma, the opaqueness of free will, the transvaluation of values and the merging of truth and appearance. The same themes are confronted with Nietzsche’s constructs of the Overman, the will to power and the eternal recurrence of the same, by analysing some of his most fortunate works such as The Birth of Tragedy, Human All Too Human, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. Therefore, this paper selects a corpus of both Shakespearean Studies and Nietzschean commentaries to build a comparative and interdisciplinary study, possibly offering a new perspective on one of the four major tragedies in Shakespeare’s production.