(3) by the agency of opposing will.
But the supreme interest of the Oracular Action is reached when the oracle is fulfilled by an agency that has all the while set itself to oppose and frustrate it. A simple illustration of this is seen in the Eastern potentate who, in opposition to a prophecy that his son should be killed by a lion, forbad the son to hunt, but heaped upon him every other indulgence. In particular he built him a pleasure-house, hung with pictures of hunting and of wild beasts, on which all that art could do was lavished to compensate for the loss of the forbidden sport. One day the son, chafing at his absence from the manly exercise in which his comrades were at that moment engaged, wandered through his pleasure-house, until, stopping at a magnificent picture of a lion at bay, he began to apostrophise it as the source of his disgrace, and waxing still more angry, drove his fist through the picture. A nail, hidden behind the canvas entered his hand; the wound festered, and he died. So the measures taken to frustrate the destiny proved the means of fulfilling it. But in this third variety of the Oracular Action the classical illustration is the story of Œdipus: told fully, it presents three examples woven together. Laius of Thebes learns from an oracle that the son about to be born to him is destined to be his murderer; accordingly he refuses to rear the child, and it is cast out to perish. A herdsman, Polybus, takes pity on the infant, carries it away to Corinth, and brings it up in secret. In due time this Œdipus becomes weary of the humble life of his supposed father; quitting Corinth, he seeks advice of the oracle as to his future career, and receives the startling response that he is destined to slay his own father. Resolved to frustrate so terrible a fate, he will not return to Corinth, but, as it happens, takes the road to Thebes, where he falls in accidentally with Laius, and, in ignorance of his person, quarrels with him and slays him. Now if Laius had not resisted the oracle by casting out the infant, it would have grown up like other sons, and every probability would have been against his committing so terrible a crime as parricide. Again, if Polybus had not by his removal to Corinth sought to keep the child in ignorance of his fate, he would have known the person of Laius and spared him. Once more, if Œdipus had not, in opposition to the oracle, avoided his supposed home, Corinth, he would never have gone to Thebes and fallen in with his real father. Three different persons acting separately seek to frustrate a declared destiny, and their action unites in fulfilling it.
The plot of Macbeth, both as a whole and in its separate parts, is constructed upon this form of the Oracular Action, in combination with the form of Nemesis. The play deals with the rise and fall of Macbeth: the rise, and the fall, and again the two taken together, present each of them an example of an Oracular Action. The rise of Macbeth an Oracular Action,Firstly, the former half of the play, the rise of Macbeth, taken by itself, consists in an oracle and its fulfilment—the Witches' promise of the crown and the gradual steps by which the crown is attained. Amongst the three varieties of the Oracular Action we have just distinguished, the present example wavers between the first and the second. varying between the second and first type.After his first excitement has passed away, Macbeth resolves that he will have nothing to do with the temptation that lurked in the Witches' words; in his disjointed meditation we hear him saying:
i. iii. 143.
If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me
Without my stir;
and again:
i. iii. 146.
Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day;