How Moby-Dick or, The Whale drew on Macbeth
A documented line of influence: Herman Melville demonstrably engaged William Shakespeare’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Macbeth
William Shakespeare · c. 1606
ShakespeareThe influenced
Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Herman Melville · 1851
The Age of the NovelRelevance
8/10
On Moby-Dick or, The Whale’s page
- Ahab is a sea-captain cut from Shakespeare's cloth — read Macbeth and you see the mold: the great man undone not by enemies but by his own ungovernable will
- Fedallah's prophecy works exactly like the Witches' riddles to Macbeth — true to the letter, fatal in the reading
- Melville studied Macbeth line by line while writing this; the high, doom-struck diction of Ahab's soliloquies is the debt
On Macbeth’s page
- Melville bought a large-type Shakespeare in 1849 — Macbeth above all — and came out of it with the language to write Moby-Dick
- Ahab is the Macbeth tragic hero hauled out to sea: a man of stature ruined by his own judgment, chasing a doom he's been warned of
- Fedallah's equivocating death-prophecy to Ahab is the Witches' riddle structure transposed onto a whaling ship