Henry Fuseli in the context of "Changelings"

A vice is a practice, behaviour, habit or item generally considered morally wrong in the associated society. In more minor usage, vice can refer to a fault, a negative character trait, a defect, an infirmity, or a bad or unhealthy habit. Vices are usually associated with a fault in a person's character or temperament rather than their morality.

Synonyms for vice include fault, sin, depravity, iniquity, wickedness, and corruption. The antonym of vice is virtue.

Act 5, Scene 1, better known as the sleepwalking scene, is a critically celebrated scene from William Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth (1606). It deals with the guilt and madness experienced by Lady Macbeth, one of the main themes of the play.

Carrying a taper (candlestick), Lady Macbeth enters sleepwalking. The Doctor and the Gentlewoman stand aside to observe. The Doctor asks how Lady Macbeth came to have the light. The Gentlewoman replies she has ordered a light be beside her at all times (she is now afraid of the dark, having committed her crimes under its cover). Lady Macbeth rubs her hands in a washing motion. With anguish, she recalls the deaths of King Duncan, Lady Macduff, and Banquo, then leaves. The Gentlewoman and the bewildered Doctor exeunt, realizing these are the symptoms of a guilt-ridden mind. The Doctor feels Lady Macbeth is beyond his help, saying she has more need of "the divine than the physician". He orders the Gentlewoman to remove from Lady Macbeth the "means of all annoyance", anticipating she might commit suicide. Despite his warning, the audience is informed in Act 5, Scene 5, that Lady Macbeth has managed to commit suicide off-stage.

In Greek mythology, Anticlea or Anticlia (/ˌæntɪˈkliːə/; Ancient Greek: Ἀντίκλεια, (literally "against fame") was a queen of Ithaca as the wife of King Laërtes.

A tribunal, generally, is any person or institution with authority to judge, adjudicate on, or determine claims or disputes—whether or not it is called a tribunal in its title. For example, an advocate who appears before a court with a single judge could describe that judge as "their tribunal". Many governmental bodies are titled "tribunals" to emphasize that they are not courts of normal jurisdiction. For instance, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was a body specially constituted under international law; in Great Britain, employment tribunals are bodies set up to hear specific employment disputes.

In many but not all cases, tribunal implies a judicial or quasi-judicial body with a lesser degree of formality than a court, in which the normal rules of evidence and procedure may not apply, and whose presiding officers are frequently neither judges nor magistrates. Private judicial bodies are also often-styled tribunals. Tribunal is not conclusive of a body's function; in Great Britain, the Employment Appeal Tribunal is a superior court of record.

Charybdis (/kəˈrɪbdɪs/ ; Ancient Greek: Χάρυβδις, romanized: Khárybdis, Attic Greek: [kʰárybdis]; Latin: Charybdis, Classical Latin: [kʰäˈrʏbd̪ɪs̠]) is a sea monster in Greek mythology. Charybdis, along with the sea monster Scylla, appears as a challenge to epic characters such as Odysseus, Jason, and Aeneas. Scholarship locates her in the Strait of Messina.

The idiom "between Scylla and Charybdis" has come to mean being forced to choose between two similarly dangerous situations.

Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking is a c. 1784 oil painting by the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. Based on the Sleepwalking scene of the 1606 tragedy Macbeth by William Shakespeare, it depicts a life-size Lady Macbeth sleepwalking. Long resident in Britain, Fuseli was known for his Gothic paintings. He produced a number of pictures inspired by Macbeth.

The painting was displayed at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1784 at Somerset House in London. Today it is in the collection of the Louvre in Paris, having been purchased in 1970.

The Rütli Oath (German: Rütlischwur, Swiss Standard German pronunciation: [ˈryːtliˌʃvuːr]) is the legendary oath taken at the foundation of the Old Swiss Confederacy (traditionally dated to 1307) by the representatives of the three founding cantons, Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden.It is named after the site of the oath taking, the Rütli, a meadow above Lake Uri near Seelisberg. Recorded in Swiss historiography from the 15th century, the oath is notably featured in the 19th century play William Tell (Wilhelm Tell) by Friedrich Schiller.

The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. It shows a woman with her arms thrown below her, in deep sleep as she undergoes a nightmare as an almost hidden horse (the "night-mare") looks on as a demonic and ape-like incubus crouches on her chest. Its erotic and haunting evocation of obsession became a breakthrough success for Fuseli. Critics were taken aback by its overt sexuality, since interpreted as anticipating Jungian ideas about the unconscious.

Although Fuseli had unsuccessfully exhibited at the Royal Academy of London many times earlier, critics reacted with horrified fascination when this painting was shown at his 1782 showing, and the Nightmare became his first commercially successful work. The image became popular to the extent that he produced at least three other versions, engraved versions became widely distributed, it was parodied in political satire, and became a frequent source for 18th-century Gothic fiction authors such as Mary Shelley.

Being "between Scylla and Charybdis" (/bi.ˈtwiːn ˈsɪ.lə ænd kə.ˈrɪb.dɪs/ also /bə-, bɪ-/) is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology, which has been associated with the proverbial advice "to choose the lesser of two evils". Several other idioms such as "on the horns of a dilemma", "between the devil and the deep blue sea", and "between a rock and a hard place" express similar meanings. The mythical situation also developed a proverbial use in which seeking to choose between equally dangerous extremes is seen as leading inevitably to disaster.

Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology, also spectral studies, spectralities, or the spectral turn) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as if to haunt the present. The term is a neologism first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. It has since been invoked in fields such as visual arts, philosophy, electronic music, anthropology, criminology, politics, fiction, and literary criticism.

While Christine Brooke-Rose had previously punned "dehauntological" (on "deontological") in Amalgamemnon (1984), Derrida initially used "hauntology" for his idea of the atemporal nature of Marxism and its tendency to "haunt Western society from beyond the grave". It describes a situation of temporal and ontological disjunction in which presence, especially socially and culturally, is replaced by a deferred non-origin. The concept is derived from deconstruction, in which any attempt to locate the origin of identity or history must inevitably find itself dependent on an always-already existing set of linguistic conditions. Despite being the central focus of Spectres of Marx, the word hauntology appears only three times in the book, and there is little consistency in how other writers define the term.