The Typicality of Macbeth’s Tragedy
江海明烛 2015-12-26 10:30:18
“Macbeth is a character of flatness and oddness. Insufficient in motivation, flawed in morality and incorrect in politic views, he looks like a character in a comedy in which the wickedness is beaten by justice. Yet the play is highly accepted and pitied as a tragedy.” said my best friend, when we were discussing the masterpiece. I argued that, Macbeth is a typical tragedy of everyone and everywhere. Macbeth could be anyone.
The Tragedy of Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s best-known dramas. Set mainly in Scotland, it narrates the inevitable fall of Macbeth from a national hero to a murderer. Allured by the predictions, consumed by his ambition and spurred to action by his wife, the man committed murders and finally fell apart both mentally and physically. The play dramatizes the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those who seek power for their own sake.
We may classify Macbeth as irrevocably evil, but his weak character separates him from Shakespeare’s other villains—Iago, Richard III, Edmund—who are all strong enough to conquer guilt and self-doubt. However, Macbeth is ill equipped for the psychic consequences of crime, and it is exactly this weakness that keeps torturing him inside. The three attributes—bravery, ambition, and self-doubt—struggle for mastery of Macbeth throughout the play. So as far as I consider, Macbeth is a character of typicality; he represents us all.
I. A Tragedy in Character
Firstly, the tragic identity crisis in Macbeth is fully revealed. When we first hear of Macbeth in the wounded captain’s description of his battlefield valor, our initial impression is of a brave and capable warrior. When his courage and loyalty was awarded by the new title of the Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth replied:
The service and the loyalty lowe,
In doing it, pays itself. Your Highness' part
Is to receive our duties, and our duties
Are to your throne and state, children and servants,
Which do but what they should, by doing everything
Safe toward your love and honor.
We see clearly that, at that time, Macbeth definitely knew who he was and who he was serving. He was fully aware that despite all his credits and achievements, he was a servant to the King, who could only accept the thanks and reward that he deserved. That is considered the true, or bright side of Macbeth. But everyone has a dual character. As a man of great contributions, he was highly praised by the King:
Would thou hadst less deserved,
That the proportion both of thanks and payment
Might have been mine! Only I have left to say,
More is thy due than more than all can pay.
The glorification gave him an EGO IDEAL--Duncan symbolizes the fame, position and prestige he is obsessed with. And not to mention he had firstly met with the three witches before visiting the King. The witches spoke in a way we just couldn’t quite understand:
FIRST WITCH. All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!
SECOND WITCH. All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!
THIRD WITCH. All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King hereafter!
Lurk like dark thoughts and unconscious temptations to evil, the witches understood the weaknesses of human being—they play upon Macbeth’s ambition like puppeteers. The realization of the first prophecy gave him an IDEAL EGO, and he had a slightest doubt on his identity for the first time. As the famous psychologist Lacan says, “Once a desire becomes words, it is officially confirmed. It’s not about realizing a wish, but confirming a wish.” The named desire attracts Macbeth with its glory and more importantly, availability. The imaginary King Macbeth gradually allured and invaded the real warrior Macbeth;both the identities seem acquirable. The attempt of making compromise between the two Macbeth has failed, when the ideal ego is replacing his real ego. Macbeth is thus torn by the imaginary identity and his real identity. The identity crisis on him becomes excruciating, puzzling and torturing him until his death.
Secondly, the struggle between ambition and morality is profound. The tragedy Macbeth is actually deeply rooted in every human being, the conflict between one’s inappropriate desire and one’s moral code. Right after killing Duncan, Macbeth is stuck in a huge guilt:
I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murther sleep" -the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravel'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast-
After the murder, he is wracked with guilt and paranoia. The ambivalence between his ambition and morality causes his mental pain directly--if he has less sense of shame and more of evilness, he would have suffered less! Like Richard III, but without the man’s appealing exuberance and self-forgiveness, Macbeth wades through blood until his inevitable fall. These fluctuations reflect the tragic tension within Macbeth: he is at once too ambitious to allow his conscience to stop him from murdering his way to the top, and too conscientious to be happy with himself as a murderer. He could control neither and he could compromise neither. His life is thus like a swing, at the mercy of destiny.
Thirdly, he has both awareness and fluke of his crime, a criminal of strong self-conscious. The tragedy of Macbeth is the degeneration of his virtue: he has been fully AWARE of his action and yet commits the murders soberly. Right after meeting with Duncan, he had a monologue as follows:
The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap,
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires.
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
And after he has committed Banquo’s murder, he realizes that the evil actions motivated by his ambition seems to trap him in a cycle of increasing evil, as he admits:
I am in blood,
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
As Kenneth Muir writes, “Macbeth has no predisposition to murder; he has merely an inordinate ambition that makes murder itself seem to be a lesser evil than failure to achieve the crown.” I would rather say that Macbeth is making the decision for himself than saying he is blinded by his appetite. He is in a cephalocaudal awareness of the illegality and the outcomes, yet wading one step after another, till the bloodbath and consequent civil war take himself and his wife into realms of arrogance, madness and death. Unlike most villains, who always receive a temporary but tremendous happiness after committing a crime, Macbeth is always suffering from a overwhelming guilty after gets the crown as he wishes. If you ask me I would consider it a solemn and stirring decision. As things fall apart for him at the end of the play, he seems almost relieved—with the English army at his gates, he can finally return to life as a warrior, and he displays a kind of reckless bravado as his enemies surround him and drag him down.
Fourthly, the recklessness and cowardice also compose Macbeth’s tragedy. Born a warrior of courage and success, Macbeth has surely killed many lives by his own hand. Nevertheless, he also has the seed of cowardice deep inside his personality, a cowardice that keeps him from committing a crime, and a cowardice that makes him finally follow his wife’s plot. When Lady Macbeth first shows up, she is expressing her deep concern about her husband’s lack of illness in his character without which no such ambition is materialized:
Yet do I fear thy nature.
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win.
As she worries, Macbeth is indeed saturated with sympathy and kindness which is, nevertheless, virtue. To get over Macbeth’s weakness is a critical step towards the crown, so she keeps prodding him into action by her harsh words:
From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valor
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would"
Like the poor cat i' the adage?
Lady Macbeth repeatedly questions Macbeth’s manhood until he feels that he must commit murder to prove himself:
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
From the moment on, Macbeth leaves his cowardice, or virtue, at the mercy of his recklessness. His power is irresistibly advancing while his kindness is falling for ever.
II. A Tragedy in Moral Order
The tragedy of Macbeth is actually the tragedy of human being. Why do we, on one hand, know clearly how crucial and unforgivable his crimes are, and yet on the other hand not detest the character in the slightest way, and even feel pity for him? I suppose the main reason is that Macbeth is a LIKABLE VILLAIN, who doesn’t have a predisposition to murder, who is not a saint but not a master either, and who we all could be.
My strange and self-abuse
Is the initiate fear that wants hard use.
We are yet but young in deed.
A villain, not merciless enough to separate himself from the suffering and not saint enough to withdraw his wicked thoughts; not evil enough to overcome his guilt feelings and not strong enough to resist the temptations, Macbeth is struggling, or choosing between the good and evil, just like the way when we choose to skip a class or not. If given the chance, we ordinary people could also build a great credit like him, or commit a crime like him, as a result of following the inner Satan’s summon, until we err on things that we would never believe. Unlike Richard III, who is born a schemer and who is so remotely distant from us, Macbeth reflects everyone, competent, ambitious, and unreconciled. He is too real that every readers feels for him--how many of us feel panic when doors are knocked, and wash hands when things are done?
But what exactly caused this tragedy, turning a warrior to a regicide, making one’s virtue his weakness? It was the disturbing upheavals of the social order. At the beginning of Renaissance, humanists were singing the praises of the value of human being. But with the development of Capitalism, people under the control of egoism, adventurism, and money worship started to lose their natural morality. As witches sings:
Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
It was a time when the whole Europe was drifted into a series of wars fighting for the crown. In a society where “Fair is foul and foul is fair”, it was lust of power that blinded, allured and seduced upright heroes like Macbeth to become one of the countless ambitious schemer who were plotting bloody crimes against their consanguinity so that they could enthrone themselves. Macbeth could be Richard III; Macbeth could be Hamlet’s uncle; Macbeth could be Iago--Macbeth could be any kings and whose who didn’t kill enough to become a king.
III.The Main Dramatic Techniques
As a drama master, Shakespeare applied several dramatic techniques in this work, and conveyed the characters to the audience successfully. Here are my shallow views on three of them.
First of all, the idea of applying supernatural power is brilliant. Appearing in a thunder and lightning, singing “fair is foul and foul is fair”, the three witches are totally separated from the mortal lives. It add a sense of mysticism to an already strange scene with great rhyming and prophecies of the future:
FIRST WITCH. When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
SECOND WITCH. When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.
THIRD WITCH. That will be ere the set of sun.
FIRST WITCH. Where the place?
SECOND WITCH. Upon the heath.
THIRD WITCH. There to meet with Macbeth.
The same technique is applied broadly in Chinese classical literature. Take A Dream in Red Mansions as an example, whose beginning is very akin to the above piece. Like the Buddhist monk and Taoist priest who predict miserable destinies by songs and poems, the three witches are agents of fate, whose prophecies are only reports of the inevitable. So in both eastern and western literature, supernatural powers, witch, fairy, ghost, or sometimes even religious figure, carry a resemblance to the fates, who weave the fabric of human lives and then cut the threads to end them. Speaking through supernature power, Shakespeare keeps Macbeth’s inevitable fate outside the limits of human comprehension.
Secondly, the closely related asides and monologues indicate the inner thought processes of characters, their ideas, their motivations, and their mental struggles. This dramatic technique enables the audience or readers to know what is going on in the “privacy” of a character’s mind. How can readers, from the bottom of their hearts, enjoy, appreciate, or even be fascinated with an evil villain? Only when they share feeling of complicity:
The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap,
For in my way it lies.
Once readers see through Macbeth’s plot, they seem to become his reliable support, watching him fight his way to the crown. And on reading his inner struggle, readers tend to have compassion for the pitiable but execrable man:
Whence is that knocking?
How is't with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here? Ha, they pluck out mine eyes!
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
By making endless speeches. characters’ inward world unfolds directly and undisguisedly to the readers only. Because reveal the mental activities is to get the character understood by readers.
Thirdly, the application of contrast gives a remarkable effect to the play. Instead of similarities, contrasts can give readers a more vivid impression of the differences. For example, just a moment after Macbeth makes up him mind to kill Duncan, his swing of moods contrasts with Lady Macbeth’s resolution:
MACBETH. We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honor'd me of late, and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.
LADY MACBETH. Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely?
Walking towards the abyss of sin, Macbeth is hesitating if it is worthy to sacrifice his virtue for ambition. But Lady Macbeth is impregnably steady to get the crown, only leaving her indecisive husband swirl. Another sharp contrast is between Macbeth and Banquo. Unlike rapt Macbeth after hearing the three witches, Banquo is sober all the time:
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence-
Both Macbeth and Banquo are predicted a future related to the crown, but Banquo doesn’t give in to ambitions and wickedness. It is his rationality that spares him from losing his loyalty and morality. His integrity truly offers a contrast with Macbeth’s ambition, cowardice, and evilness.
From all these indignant but compassionate words, I seem to see a reflection of Shakespeare, a writer who tries to portray only the true, the good and the beautiful pieces like A Midsummer Night's Dream, feels rather grief and wrathful on seeing the hideous devouring the beautiful, and a writer who looks down at humanity, at ceaselessly unavailing fights between families, pitifully, sympathetically and helplessly.
The Tragedy of Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s best-known dramas. Set mainly in Scotland, it narrates the inevitable fall of Macbeth from a national hero to a murderer. Allured by the predictions, consumed by his ambition and spurred to action by his wife, the man committed murders and finally fell apart both mentally and physically. The play dramatizes the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those who seek power for their own sake.
We may classify Macbeth as irrevocably evil, but his weak character separates him from Shakespeare’s other villains—Iago, Richard III, Edmund—who are all strong enough to conquer guilt and self-doubt. However, Macbeth is ill equipped for the psychic consequences of crime, and it is exactly this weakness that keeps torturing him inside. The three attributes—bravery, ambition, and self-doubt—struggle for mastery of Macbeth throughout the play. So as far as I consider, Macbeth is a character of typicality; he represents us all.
I. A Tragedy in Character
Firstly, the tragic identity crisis in Macbeth is fully revealed. When we first hear of Macbeth in the wounded captain’s description of his battlefield valor, our initial impression is of a brave and capable warrior. When his courage and loyalty was awarded by the new title of the Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth replied:
The service and the loyalty lowe,
In doing it, pays itself. Your Highness' part
Is to receive our duties, and our duties
Are to your throne and state, children and servants,
Which do but what they should, by doing everything
Safe toward your love and honor.
We see clearly that, at that time, Macbeth definitely knew who he was and who he was serving. He was fully aware that despite all his credits and achievements, he was a servant to the King, who could only accept the thanks and reward that he deserved. That is considered the true, or bright side of Macbeth. But everyone has a dual character. As a man of great contributions, he was highly praised by the King:
Would thou hadst less deserved,
That the proportion both of thanks and payment
Might have been mine! Only I have left to say,
More is thy due than more than all can pay.
The glorification gave him an EGO IDEAL--Duncan symbolizes the fame, position and prestige he is obsessed with. And not to mention he had firstly met with the three witches before visiting the King. The witches spoke in a way we just couldn’t quite understand:
FIRST WITCH. All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!
SECOND WITCH. All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!
THIRD WITCH. All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King hereafter!
Lurk like dark thoughts and unconscious temptations to evil, the witches understood the weaknesses of human being—they play upon Macbeth’s ambition like puppeteers. The realization of the first prophecy gave him an IDEAL EGO, and he had a slightest doubt on his identity for the first time. As the famous psychologist Lacan says, “Once a desire becomes words, it is officially confirmed. It’s not about realizing a wish, but confirming a wish.” The named desire attracts Macbeth with its glory and more importantly, availability. The imaginary King Macbeth gradually allured and invaded the real warrior Macbeth;both the identities seem acquirable. The attempt of making compromise between the two Macbeth has failed, when the ideal ego is replacing his real ego. Macbeth is thus torn by the imaginary identity and his real identity. The identity crisis on him becomes excruciating, puzzling and torturing him until his death.
Secondly, the struggle between ambition and morality is profound. The tragedy Macbeth is actually deeply rooted in every human being, the conflict between one’s inappropriate desire and one’s moral code. Right after killing Duncan, Macbeth is stuck in a huge guilt:
I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murther sleep" -the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravel'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast-
After the murder, he is wracked with guilt and paranoia. The ambivalence between his ambition and morality causes his mental pain directly--if he has less sense of shame and more of evilness, he would have suffered less! Like Richard III, but without the man’s appealing exuberance and self-forgiveness, Macbeth wades through blood until his inevitable fall. These fluctuations reflect the tragic tension within Macbeth: he is at once too ambitious to allow his conscience to stop him from murdering his way to the top, and too conscientious to be happy with himself as a murderer. He could control neither and he could compromise neither. His life is thus like a swing, at the mercy of destiny.
Thirdly, he has both awareness and fluke of his crime, a criminal of strong self-conscious. The tragedy of Macbeth is the degeneration of his virtue: he has been fully AWARE of his action and yet commits the murders soberly. Right after meeting with Duncan, he had a monologue as follows:
The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap,
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires.
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
And after he has committed Banquo’s murder, he realizes that the evil actions motivated by his ambition seems to trap him in a cycle of increasing evil, as he admits:
I am in blood,
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
As Kenneth Muir writes, “Macbeth has no predisposition to murder; he has merely an inordinate ambition that makes murder itself seem to be a lesser evil than failure to achieve the crown.” I would rather say that Macbeth is making the decision for himself than saying he is blinded by his appetite. He is in a cephalocaudal awareness of the illegality and the outcomes, yet wading one step after another, till the bloodbath and consequent civil war take himself and his wife into realms of arrogance, madness and death. Unlike most villains, who always receive a temporary but tremendous happiness after committing a crime, Macbeth is always suffering from a overwhelming guilty after gets the crown as he wishes. If you ask me I would consider it a solemn and stirring decision. As things fall apart for him at the end of the play, he seems almost relieved—with the English army at his gates, he can finally return to life as a warrior, and he displays a kind of reckless bravado as his enemies surround him and drag him down.
Fourthly, the recklessness and cowardice also compose Macbeth’s tragedy. Born a warrior of courage and success, Macbeth has surely killed many lives by his own hand. Nevertheless, he also has the seed of cowardice deep inside his personality, a cowardice that keeps him from committing a crime, and a cowardice that makes him finally follow his wife’s plot. When Lady Macbeth first shows up, she is expressing her deep concern about her husband’s lack of illness in his character without which no such ambition is materialized:
Yet do I fear thy nature.
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win.
As she worries, Macbeth is indeed saturated with sympathy and kindness which is, nevertheless, virtue. To get over Macbeth’s weakness is a critical step towards the crown, so she keeps prodding him into action by her harsh words:
From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valor
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would"
Like the poor cat i' the adage?
Lady Macbeth repeatedly questions Macbeth’s manhood until he feels that he must commit murder to prove himself:
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
From the moment on, Macbeth leaves his cowardice, or virtue, at the mercy of his recklessness. His power is irresistibly advancing while his kindness is falling for ever.
II. A Tragedy in Moral Order
The tragedy of Macbeth is actually the tragedy of human being. Why do we, on one hand, know clearly how crucial and unforgivable his crimes are, and yet on the other hand not detest the character in the slightest way, and even feel pity for him? I suppose the main reason is that Macbeth is a LIKABLE VILLAIN, who doesn’t have a predisposition to murder, who is not a saint but not a master either, and who we all could be.
My strange and self-abuse
Is the initiate fear that wants hard use.
We are yet but young in deed.
A villain, not merciless enough to separate himself from the suffering and not saint enough to withdraw his wicked thoughts; not evil enough to overcome his guilt feelings and not strong enough to resist the temptations, Macbeth is struggling, or choosing between the good and evil, just like the way when we choose to skip a class or not. If given the chance, we ordinary people could also build a great credit like him, or commit a crime like him, as a result of following the inner Satan’s summon, until we err on things that we would never believe. Unlike Richard III, who is born a schemer and who is so remotely distant from us, Macbeth reflects everyone, competent, ambitious, and unreconciled. He is too real that every readers feels for him--how many of us feel panic when doors are knocked, and wash hands when things are done?
But what exactly caused this tragedy, turning a warrior to a regicide, making one’s virtue his weakness? It was the disturbing upheavals of the social order. At the beginning of Renaissance, humanists were singing the praises of the value of human being. But with the development of Capitalism, people under the control of egoism, adventurism, and money worship started to lose their natural morality. As witches sings:
Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
It was a time when the whole Europe was drifted into a series of wars fighting for the crown. In a society where “Fair is foul and foul is fair”, it was lust of power that blinded, allured and seduced upright heroes like Macbeth to become one of the countless ambitious schemer who were plotting bloody crimes against their consanguinity so that they could enthrone themselves. Macbeth could be Richard III; Macbeth could be Hamlet’s uncle; Macbeth could be Iago--Macbeth could be any kings and whose who didn’t kill enough to become a king.
III.The Main Dramatic Techniques
As a drama master, Shakespeare applied several dramatic techniques in this work, and conveyed the characters to the audience successfully. Here are my shallow views on three of them.
First of all, the idea of applying supernatural power is brilliant. Appearing in a thunder and lightning, singing “fair is foul and foul is fair”, the three witches are totally separated from the mortal lives. It add a sense of mysticism to an already strange scene with great rhyming and prophecies of the future:
FIRST WITCH. When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
SECOND WITCH. When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.
THIRD WITCH. That will be ere the set of sun.
FIRST WITCH. Where the place?
SECOND WITCH. Upon the heath.
THIRD WITCH. There to meet with Macbeth.
The same technique is applied broadly in Chinese classical literature. Take A Dream in Red Mansions as an example, whose beginning is very akin to the above piece. Like the Buddhist monk and Taoist priest who predict miserable destinies by songs and poems, the three witches are agents of fate, whose prophecies are only reports of the inevitable. So in both eastern and western literature, supernatural powers, witch, fairy, ghost, or sometimes even religious figure, carry a resemblance to the fates, who weave the fabric of human lives and then cut the threads to end them. Speaking through supernature power, Shakespeare keeps Macbeth’s inevitable fate outside the limits of human comprehension.
Secondly, the closely related asides and monologues indicate the inner thought processes of characters, their ideas, their motivations, and their mental struggles. This dramatic technique enables the audience or readers to know what is going on in the “privacy” of a character’s mind. How can readers, from the bottom of their hearts, enjoy, appreciate, or even be fascinated with an evil villain? Only when they share feeling of complicity:
The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap,
For in my way it lies.
Once readers see through Macbeth’s plot, they seem to become his reliable support, watching him fight his way to the crown. And on reading his inner struggle, readers tend to have compassion for the pitiable but execrable man:
Whence is that knocking?
How is't with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here? Ha, they pluck out mine eyes!
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
By making endless speeches. characters’ inward world unfolds directly and undisguisedly to the readers only. Because reveal the mental activities is to get the character understood by readers.
Thirdly, the application of contrast gives a remarkable effect to the play. Instead of similarities, contrasts can give readers a more vivid impression of the differences. For example, just a moment after Macbeth makes up him mind to kill Duncan, his swing of moods contrasts with Lady Macbeth’s resolution:
MACBETH. We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honor'd me of late, and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.
LADY MACBETH. Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely?
Walking towards the abyss of sin, Macbeth is hesitating if it is worthy to sacrifice his virtue for ambition. But Lady Macbeth is impregnably steady to get the crown, only leaving her indecisive husband swirl. Another sharp contrast is between Macbeth and Banquo. Unlike rapt Macbeth after hearing the three witches, Banquo is sober all the time:
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence-
Both Macbeth and Banquo are predicted a future related to the crown, but Banquo doesn’t give in to ambitions and wickedness. It is his rationality that spares him from losing his loyalty and morality. His integrity truly offers a contrast with Macbeth’s ambition, cowardice, and evilness.
From all these indignant but compassionate words, I seem to see a reflection of Shakespeare, a writer who tries to portray only the true, the good and the beautiful pieces like A Midsummer Night's Dream, feels rather grief and wrathful on seeing the hideous devouring the beautiful, and a writer who looks down at humanity, at ceaselessly unavailing fights between families, pitifully, sympathetically and helplessly.
Hilaros
Dec, 2015
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