Unpopular opinion- I actually tested this out- When you ask people who’s worse, Claudius or Macbeth- everyone says Claudius. But... is he? I mean Macbeth basically went on a killing spree because he could. He really didn’t have to kill Macduff’s family. He technically didn’t have to kill anyone. Compared to Macbeth, Claudius isn’t that bad. He’s more annoying, sure, but he killed the king and then tried to kill Hamlet, and that was it with his intentional murders.
strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree
Huh, weird I’m surprised people thought Claudius was “worse”. Though tbh I didn’t know there was… a debate??
I say “worse” in quotes because there’s any number of ways to judge morality beyond body count but uh. I agree there. I dislike Claudius profoundly as a character for reasons which are difficult to articulate but float vaguely around “your dad’s dead but get over yourself” as a concept. He makes me squirm. But Macbeth is like. Most definitely on a different level of paranoid kill-anyone-who-crosses-me, maintain-power-at-all-costs tyranny after a while.
So uh. Yes?
I think one of the reasons why I personally think Claudius is worse than Macbeth is because Claudius is completely sane for the duration of the play. When Macbeth starts killing people, he becomes less and less sane, however murder seems to have very little impact on Claudius’s sanity.
Also, Macbeth is the type of person who you’d suspect would commit murder. The other characters in Macbeth suspected Macbeth from more or less the start. Banquo even feels the need to check up on Macbeth before Duncan was murdered to make sure Macbeth wasn’t going to kill Duncan. But when it comes to Claudius, he’s not the kind of guy who people are suspicious of. Even Hamlet, who clearly disliked him at the beginning, seemed surprised when he found out Claudius killed his father. To the other characters in the play, Claudius is just the previous king’s brother, who happens to be king now. And yes, there’s no suggestion that the previous king’s death was a murder. But regardless- when a king (or anyone with power or money) dies suddenly, it’s only natural for people to be suspicious.
Anyway thats that Idk where I’m going with this- in conclusion even though Macbeth killed more people he wasn’t sane while killing them, so Claudius is a worse person
