Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Rowling has alluded to links between Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the titular protagonist hears a magical prophecy spoken by three sisters, and witches, on a Scottish moor after a bloody battle where Macbeth defended his liege, King Duncan. The sisters tell Macbeth that he will become king. Macbeth finds the prophecy maddeningly tantalizing and commits a series of increasingly bloody murders to bring the prophecy to fruition. Rather than the witches causing Macbeth to magically become king, they simply plant this idea, and Macbeth actualizes it through his increasingly violent and depraved actions. Eventually, an army marches against King Macbeth in opposition to his usurping and murderous actions, and he is killed.

Similarly, Voldemort, determined to achieve absolute power in the wizarding world, sets out to kill the entire family of a baby prophesied to be his equal. This baby, Harry Potter, survives his attack through ancient magic enacted by his mother’s loving sacrifice of herself. By choosing to try to kill Harry, Voldemort actualizes the part of the prophecy that states Voldemort will “mark him as his equal” (774). Before this point, the prophesied child had an equal chance of being Neville Longbottom, who was also born “as the seventh month dies” (at the end of July 1980) (774). Like Macbeth, Voldemort becomes increasingly obsessed with removing the object of his prophesied competition; he makes many attempts to kill Harry. Also, like Macbeth, Voldemort is eventually vanquished.