The Alignment System: Shakespearean Characters
Growing up, I played Dungeons and Dragons with my parents and friends and I still play here and there today. One of my favorite aspects of the game was the alignment system. The standard Dungeons and Dragons alignment system features two axis: one of good and evil, and one of law and chaos. Between each of these extremes is neutrality. There are nine possible alignment combinations that can describe the motivations and personality of a character in extreme detail. Since then, I have always tried to figure out the alignment of characters in books, television shows, and movies I watch. Throughout this class, I have been giving alignments that I thought fit the characters of Shakespeare’s plays. In this blog post I will be going over two of the ones that I had trouble with giving an alignment. This usually means that the character is multidimensional and an all-around well written character.
The first is Iago. In class we talked about how Iago was a motiveless manipulator. He was just screwing with all of the other character’s lives purely to generate chaos. So my initial impression was that he was a chaotic evil character. Without a doubt, Iago is an evil character but then I started questioning the chaotic part. The best example is of a chaotic evil character is a serial killer. They kill and do bad with no other reason than they could or felt like it at the time. There is no method and I felt like that wasn’t Iago. Then I flopped to the other side of the axis to lawful evil. These characters are much more cunning and strategic but are driven by some motivation to subjugate and control. This also wasn’t Iago. So finally that brought me to neutral evil. Neutral evil characters do evil just for evil’s sake. They aren’t driven by a lawful or chaotic motivation and they don’t make unnecessary risks. While Iago may hold traits of the other two, neutral evil was closer to the root of his character.
The second character I would like to look at is Macbeth himself. Macbeth’s morality is one that has been called into question in class and brought up in various film adaptations. Is he a chaotic good character driven into murder by temptresses? Or is he truly evil? Macbeth stated, after he killed Duncan, that the king was innocent and we established that the idea of murder originated from Macbeth himself and not from outside influence. I think because of these two facts, Macbeth is not a good character. Macbeth killed Duncan for power, he wanted to be king and murder was the fastest route. From the perspective of the play itself, Macbeth is an evil protagonist. The question is where does he fit on the law/chaos spectrum. Because of his inner turmoil, I do not believe he is chaotic evil and I was about to give him neutral evil like Iago but ultimately, his actions are that of a lawful evil character. Macbeth knew that he was an heir and made a play for power. One of the examples of a lawful evil character is a tyrant which is exactly what Macbeth turned into. One other thing that I would like to bring up is, from the historically accurate Macbeth, I believe that he would have been chaotic good. Chaotic good is often described as a vigilante or revolutionary. Duncan was a bad king and Macbeth rebelled and deposed him for the good of Scotland.
One of the flaws of the Dungeons and Dragons alignment system is that many character fit the criteria of multiply alignments. Overall, it is an easy way to connect the motivations and personalities across different mediums. There are still debates on the internet over what is the true alignment of Batman. Shakespeare wrote many complex characters that are hard to simply give a single alignment. I think that is part of the reason that his plays are still remembered and studied today.