![]() The bottom line is that he does not want to go ahead with it and is ready to defy his ‘vaulting’ ambition, but just at that point, Lady Macbeth joins him. He outlines all the reasons why he shouldn’t kill his king, admitting that there’s no good reason to do it but that his ambition is so compelling that it just sweeps all those things aside. After having decided, with his wife, to kill Duncan, he leaves the banqueting hall and reflects on having agreed to kill Duncan. He himself categorises his ambition as ‘vaulting,’ He talks about it almost as though it’s a nuisance to him. He wavers but it doesn’t take long for her to succeed and he commits to the scheme.Īt the root of Macbeth’s trouble is his ambition. Enter Lady Macbeth, who uses her manipulation skills to persuade him. There is still some sense of honor and loyalty in him at that point. However, although the idea of killing Duncan drifts through his imagination as a way of fulfilling his ambition, he more or less rejects it. Lady Macbeth recognises that and tells him scornfully that he is ‘too full of the milk of human kindness.’ The witches don’t have to suggest that he kill Duncan: they know that he will come to the conclusion that that’s what he has to do to achieve his ambition: the very fact that they tell him that he will be king is enough to allow his ambition to take over. Even though, after some horrific acts of violence, he would like to reverse it, he does not have the integrity to do so. ![]() He is none of those things, in spite of that first impression. That is interesting, considering our first impression of him – that he is steadfast, honorable and loyal to the king. At one point he considers it but then he says that he is too far in to go back ( I am in blood stepp’d so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er – Act 3 Scene 4). Perhaps the first thing we should say about Macbeth is that he is corruptible and not prepared to reverse the journey to complete depravity that he has embarked on. So we have a basic contradiction to deal with in our assessment of Macbeth. Shakespeare is not doing that just to give his audience some extreme theatre violence: he is doing it to horrify us, expose Macbeth’s depravity and wrench us away from him so that whereas less than an hour before we were in sympathy with him we are now on the side of his opponents. Then, right in the middle of the play, Shakespeare does something absolutely extraordinary – something we are used to after four hundred years but which must have been shocking to every mother and father and every other person in his audiences: he has Macbeth’s murderers slaughter a child onstage, with the child crying for his mother. Then he commits the murder and slowly, we begin to hear the voices of other characters talking about him and presenting him in a different light, and we start seeing him through the eyes of others rather than from exclusively inside his head. That is reinforced by the way he is described – as a hero – by others. In reading or watching the play, this goes on for some time, and we are party to the internal tension that preoccupies him.īeing inside his mind and experiencing what he is, we sympathise with him, and we are on his side. In this post we dig into the character of Macbeth – what kind of a man was he?įrom the moment the Macbeth character is told by the three witches that he is going to be king we find ourselves inside his mind, unable to see things in any other way. Macbeth is the lead character in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order. Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15.
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