The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain, The ploughman lost his sweat; and the green corn Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard: The fold stands empty in the drownèd field, And crows are fatted with the murrion flock; The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud; And the quaint mazes in the wanton green, For lack of tread, are undistinguishable: The human mortals want their winter here; No night is now with hymn or carol blest:— Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, Pale in her anger, washes all the air, That rheumatic diseases do abound: And thorough this distemperature we see The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose; And on old Hyem's thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the maz'd world, By their increase, now knows not which is which: And this same progeny of evils comes
At its most basic level, behind the grand poetry and superb characterizations, Shakespeare shows Macbeth succumbing to the temptation of pride, the same sin as Adam. Both wanted to live without God, to lead their own lives, follow their own paths, and ignore any limits on their freedom imposed by God’s strictures.
Macbeth is a play that points to the advent, much like the turbulent last century of the Middle Ages, of a modern age gradually deracinated from its Christian grounding and increasingly enamored of a neopagan notion of virtu, of potentially infinite human achievement severed from metaphysical considerations.