...Clayton Prescott Macbeth Final Essay Macbeth’s life was great in the beginning, but turned into a disaster in the end. Macbeth was in a situation of power and success and ended up throwing it away due to greed, envy and power hunger. One could call his story a success because he got the power he wanted and was respected and feared by many of his people. Macbeth also had controlled and manipulated people he thought could be of service to him, and he ruined their lives also. Lady Macbeth was changed completely and was the sole reason that they would not be able to keep their murders hidden. Lady Macbeth was sleepwalking and a worker had heard her talking of the tragedies that she and Macbeth had committed. Macbeth was very regretful of the...
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...acquire a evil mind, one has to overcome a lot powerful to be able to ignore the feeling of compassion and guilt and to destroy their visual image of a human being and to turn it into a monster. In one of Shakespeare's famous play, “Macbeth,” Macbeth strips away his heroic traits when his ambition comes into play and slowly dehumanizes into a non-empathic monster which causes his marriage downfall. In the early stages of the play, Macbeth is the one in the relationship to fear failure and to lose his sense of morals while, in contrast, Lady Macbeth prays to be “unsexed” and to lose her sense of guilt. After they murder Duncan, their attitudes slowly start to change throughout the play and now Macbeth is one to obtain the power and replaces...
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...relationship. In William Shakespeare Macbeth, darkness, blood, supernatural and animals imagery occurred to indicate the evil deeds and development of the relations of the characters. Macbeth kills the king Duncan, the morning is dark after the night of King Duncan murder and Lady Macbeth’s hands full of blood which show their relation to the evil side of the world. Furthermore, Macbeth hallucinating a dagger and supernatural abilities of the witches and animals attacking each other which also indicate the evil side in the events that has occurs. Motif is used in the play to manipulate the characters emotions and indicate their...
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...Robert Shea once said, “Anyone who seeks power wants absolute power.” In the tragic play of Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, Macbeth journies through the consequences of a temptation for absolute power. As the Thane of Glamis, Macbeth displays his strength and loyalty toward the king. When the Three Witches come upon him and reveal what will become of him, temptation floods over him and impatience arises. However, Banquo, his war ally, warns Macbeth that even though what the witches said seems favorable, they may have hidden motives that ultimately may not benefit Macbeth. Although Macbeth desires to let fate determine his path, he takes matters into his own hands and seeks instant power. That urge is the very cause of his downfall. He eventually...
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...those who are subject to it.” (Aung San Suu Kyi) In the tragedy Macbeth by William Shakespeare, a man named Macbeth is approached by three witches who tell him his future. Macbeth tells his wife Lady Macbeth and they plan and follow-though with killing the king for power. Macbeth gets in over his head with the desire for absolute power and fears that his friend’s son will kill him for power as the witches predicted so he sends hit men to kill his friend and his son. William Shakespeare uses personification, diction, and characterization in Macbeth to reveal the theme of power corrupting innocent people. Shakespeare...
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... “The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men to endow them with small talents and great ambition” (Marques). Ambition is infinite. The distinction between having an excess amount of ambition and having too little is misconstrued depending on the person’s morality. It is healthy to have ambition and pushing oneself to be the best. In the case of Macbeth, he has an unhealthy amount and is unable to control it. When Banquo and Macbeth stumble upon the witches, he takes the prophecy to heart, while Banquo is suspicious about it. On the other hand, for Lady Macbeth, her ambition is clearly evident, which she insist on encouraging Macbeth to murder Duncan. Although the supernatural plays a crucial role in the couple’s evil doings, the real root of their evil come from their increasing ambition. It is evident...
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...a while, Lady Macbeth realizes what she has done is inhumane and atrocious. At first, Lady Macbeth had no guilt for what she did to King Duncan and his groomsman, towards the end she changed dramatically. Lady Macbeth changed from the start to the end by acting irrational and finally caring about what she did to Duncan. One way Lady Macbeth changed from Act 2 to Act 5 is that the from that death of King Duncan has finally caught up with her. “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” (Act V, Scene 1, Line 50)She claims that the smell of Duncan’s blood on her hands can not be freed by perfumes. This shows the guilt Lady Macbeth has for Duncan’s that we didn’t see in the previous acts. Throughout this act we see lots of quotes from Lady Macbeth that shows her guilt. “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!(Act V, Scene 1, Line 34) Lady Macbeth visualizes a spot of blood on her hand. This represents the deed that can not be washed from her hands from a...
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...Lady Macbeth’s Conscience The events of Shakespeare’s Macbeth are triggered by an innate sense of self-serving ambition, present especially within Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Macbeth himself is a dynamic man whose ambition transformed him into an entity existing without any sense of morality. This perpetual, growing ambition clashed with his conscience, a clear differentiation between right and wrong, in a way that had eradicated it. Adversely, Lady Macbeth, driven by the same determination, had never proven to possess a conscience or even the desire to cultivate one. Frederick Kiefer suggests the contrary, claiming that “[t]he book of conscience entails personal responsibility”, a responsibility that had apparently manifested itself in Lady Macbeth’s writings during her sleepwalking scene. He theorizes that her writings were confessional, thus proving the presence of conscience. Yet Lady Macbeth’s role in Duncan’s death and as a motivator to her husband’s cruelty automatically signify a lack of conscience which is not redeemed in the sleepwalking scene. Her anxious reflections are only motivated by that same self-preservation; she ruminates in fear for her reputation but not necessarily out of guilty conscience. Lady Macbeth was introduced as a ruthless woman motivated by a selfish desire for power. She was equally ambitious and evil as she persuaded Macbeth to murder King Duncan for the sake of social mobility; for this reason, she openly renounced her humanity and requested...
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...Sleep Walking Scene In the “sleep walking scene” (Act V, scene i) of Macbeth, Shakespeare presents on the stage the terrible theme of how the entire personality of a human being is eaten up by the sense of guilt arising out of the murder of a saint-like innocent king. In Lady Macbeth the sense is so strong and deeply rooted in the unconscious that it ultimately brings about psychological disorder in her personality. But this does not simply focus on the guilty conscience of one character, rather it lays bare the entire tragic process in its extremity: how evil repays. Modern readers find the scene interesting because of the dramatist’s psychological treatment of the consequence of guilt, but the for the contemporary audience the importance of the scene must have had something to do with the divine ‘vengeance’ for the violation of the divine order, in which the king on earth, as E. M. W. Tillyard says, represented the king in heaven. The murder of the king must have been shocking to the Elizabethan ethos. This is emphasized on the religious level of thought; for the couple not only violated one of God’s commandments, “Thou shall not kill”, but also the act of murder can be traced back to the first murder committed by Cain, therefore to evil. At the beginning of the drama Lady Macbeth had been the most determined, the most cruel and the most inhuman figure, but now in scene I, Act V, she emerges as the most suffering, most disintegrated and most human figure. The scene opens...
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...Excessive ambition can lead an individual to depression.Shakespeare wrote The play Macbeth to show support for the new king James I. The king was not popular because of his choice to make protestantism the official religion of Great Britain. Shakespeare wrote Macbeth to reveal that betraying the king will ultimately lead to their demise.In Macbeth, William Shakespeare uses Macbeth to show how excessive ambition when geared the wrong way can lead to darkness and depression. Macbeth is told by the second Witch in the beginning of the play that he is the new thane of Cawdor.When he and Banquo approached them she said “Hail to thee thane of Cawdor”(1.3.51-53).The second witch starts the play on Macbeth’s ambition by telling him he is the Thane of Cawdor before he actually is....
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...Because we first hear of Macbeth in the wounded captain’s account of his battlefield valor, our initial impression is of a brave and capable warrior. This perspective is complicated, however, once we see Macbeth interact with the three witches. We realize that his physical courage is joined by a consuming ambition and a tendency to self-doubt—the prediction that he will be king brings him joy, but it also creates inner turmoil. These three attributes—bravery, ambition, and self-doubt—struggle for mastery of Macbeth throughout the play. Shakespeare uses Macbeth to show the terrible effects that ambition and guilt can have on a man who lacks strength of character. We may classify Macbeth as irrevocably evil, but his weak character separates him from Shakespeare’s great villains—Iago in Othello, Richard III in Richard III, Edmund in King Lear—who are all strong enough to conquer guilt and self-doubt. Macbeth, great warrior though he is, is ill equipped for the psychic consequences of crime. Before he kills Duncan, Macbeth is plagued by worry and almost aborts the crime. It takes Lady Macbeth’s steely sense of purpose to push him into the deed. After the murder, however, her powerful personality begins to disintegrate, leaving Macbeth increasingly alone. He fluctuates between fits of fevered action, in which he plots a series of murders to secure his throne, and moments of terrible guilt (as when Banquo’s ghost appears) and absolute pessimism (after his wife’s death, when he seems...
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...Erma Bombeck once said “Guilt, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.”The play Macbeth, by William Shakespeare suggests that Guilt will always catch up with you. No matter what you do or try to do, guilt is inevitable. Queen Mary was mean to her sister, but also jealous of her. The guilt and pressure overtook Queen Mary the 1st. She was under a lot of pressure to have a son during her reign. News spread that she was having a child and everyone hoped it was a boy. It turns out that she wasn’t pregnant at all. She was so keen on having a child she had a phantom pregnancy. Mary showed signs of being pregnant but was not actually pregnant with a child. Queen Mary the first was mean to her sister princess Elizabeth. She went to the extent of arresting her on charges that weren't true just to make sure Elizabeth did not pose a threat to her throne. Mary can relate...
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...Rash Language Arts IV 17 December, 2015 Macbeth: Good, Bad or Both? The Paradox of His Life. There has been a lifelong argument over whether Macbeth, is a good or a bad man. Simply Macbeth is disillusioned. He is both a good and a bad man at heart. He was capable of serving his country and he was a loyal soldier. In the end Macbeth let his greed and political ambition get the best of him, and that became the fault for his downfall. What started out as a good hearted loyal soldier, became a man who let his greed get the better of his morals and values, soon he lost his sense of purpose and became a bloodthirsty king, with the help of his wife and her encouragement throughout the beginning of the play. When Macbeth and Banquo left the battle, they came across three witches in a bleak place near the battlefield. The...
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...I decided to set my design in Feudal Japan during the Warring states period from 1400-1600 because like in Macbeth, in feudal Japan there is high emphasis on the samurai warriors or military leaders, and their role in society. I thought doing set design would be really interesting because of the iconic architectural structures in Japan and along with the architectural aspects of Japan I wanted to heavily focus on the harmonious balance that Japan has achieved between natural elements and man made elements coexisting. As there is contrast between the character Macbeth and the three witches, I felt that making a royal pagoda easily flown in and out would make a scene, and overall mood, transition into other settings smooth and efficient. The platform with the bridges descending off of it are made stationary in order to exercise the Japanese picture of simplicity but also the bridges are symbolic to the japanese belief of the bridges always leading to new beginnings and and a path of determination. That being said, the platform...
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...All hail, Macbeth! In the future, you shall be king! The person who is the most responsible for the murder of Macbeth is Lady Macbeth. She constantly makes Macbeth question himself, his masculinity and his love for her, which causes him to feel the need to prove his manhood and passion to her on a regular basis. While some say that the witches are at fault because they give the prophecy in the first place or that Macbeth is responsible for his own demise because he allows himself to become too driven by his ambition of being a king. However, Lady Macbeth is the most at fault for her husband’s demise due to the fact that she uses her husband's’ flaws to work against him. The witches play a significant...
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