Traditional and Non-traditional Masculine Representations in Macbeth (Shakespeare’s and Kurzel’s)

In spite of the innumerable critical and academic commentaries written and published about William Shakespeare’s literary legacy, his works, particularly his tragedies, continue to offer more questions than answers. His political motives and his philosophical agendas tend to be ambiguous at best and get lost in the innuendos of his characters’ material and transcendental experiences. This is precisely the case in Macbeth, in which the protagonist is portrayed as both a meek husband and a tyrant, a victim and a perpetrator of his own calamities, a hero and an anti-hero. The image of Macbeth is, if anything, ambivalent, which accounts for the perplexity with which Shakespeare engages the audience and affects them with animosity and/or pity.