Explore the ideas of duality in both Macbeth and Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde?
William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Robert Louise Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde both demonstrate duality through the theme, character, appearance and settings. Macbeth is the story of worthy warrior who serves his country Scotland, but is lead into a poisonous path of sorrow and despair due to the conflict of moral and foul in his mind, thus showing the rise of a heroic man to the demise of hated ruler because of his ambition. Shakespeare uses dichotomies to display Macbeth’s righteous as well as malicious qualities. Stevenson’s tells a story of Dr Jekyll, the embodiment of a trustworthy and noble gentleman, who has another distinct identity within him that is
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These inseparable conflicting forces constantly struggle for sovereignty in his consciousness as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are implied to be the primitive duality of good and evil. Dualism is used to convey both good and evil within individuals during the Victorian and Jacobean era.
Stevenson uses the ideology of the three divisions of psychoanalytic theory which was created by Sigmund Freud (a neurologist) in the nineteen hundreds. This theory suggested that the psychological side of humans was constructed of three different forms, the id which is the instinctual side; the super-ego which is the moral/ethical and ego the realistic part. This theory can be seen in Stevenson’s novella to show duality in the form of ambition as Dr Jekyll had desire and thirst for Knowledge which led to Mr Hyde. Henry Jekyll