At the Beginning of the Play, Macbeth Is Hailed as a War Hero, by the End He Has Become an Evil Tyrant.
At the beginning of the play, Macbeth is hailed as a war hero, by the end he has become an evil tyrant.
Explain: A) How Shakespeare conveys Macbeth’s moral decline.
B) Why this decline was inevitable.
Macbeth is a great example of how Shakespeare uses dramatic irony to convey the moral decline of a brave and admirable hero, into a regicide-committing evil tyrant. Macbeth is a great example as the character Macbeth starts the play as a brave and courageous war hero. However towards the end, Macbeth becomes a power-hungry, crazed lunatic who is easily manipulated by his wife. I feel his wife Lady Macbeth, was the one who actually craved power, but she could not get this herself, so she resorted to the above.
At the beginning of the play, Act one Scene one, the audience know that a man named Macbeth will meet with three witches in the future. Then in scene two, Shakespeare uses a conversation between a soldier and Duncan, to introduce Macbeth. The soldier describes Macbeth as “brave Macbeth” who “smok’d with bloody execution” in a battle. Duncan then replies by calling Macbeth a “worthy gentleman!” so why would this “brave”, “worthy gentleman” be meeting with three of the devil’s advocates? Already Shakespeare has made known to the audience that Macbeth will be the protagonist in one of his famous tragedies.
The audience then find that in Scene two of Act one, the three witches have met upon a heath. Macbeth described the day as “so foul and fair a day I have not seen”, this could be recognised as a description of Macbeths feelings, but as the witches make predictions about Macbeth, maybe Macbeth himself, could be predicting his own feeling in the future. The three witches hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and “king hereafter”; this confuses Macbeth. He then calls them liars “imperfect speakers” , and tells them he is Thane of Glamis, “But how of Cawdor?”. Macbeth then goes on to describe Duncan as a prosperous gentleman,
Explain: A) How Shakespeare conveys Macbeth’s moral decline.
B) Why this decline was inevitable.
Macbeth is a great example of how Shakespeare uses dramatic irony to convey the moral decline of a brave and admirable hero, into a regicide-committing evil tyrant. Macbeth is a great example as the character Macbeth starts the play as a brave and courageous war hero. However towards the end, Macbeth becomes a power-hungry, crazed lunatic who is easily manipulated by his wife. I feel his wife Lady Macbeth, was the one who actually craved power, but she could not get this herself, so she resorted to the above.
At the beginning of the play, Act one Scene one, the audience know that a man named Macbeth will meet with three witches in the future. Then in scene two, Shakespeare uses a conversation between a soldier and Duncan, to introduce Macbeth. The soldier describes Macbeth as “brave Macbeth” who “smok’d with bloody execution” in a battle. Duncan then replies by calling Macbeth a “worthy gentleman!” so why would this “brave”, “worthy gentleman” be meeting with three of the devil’s advocates? Already Shakespeare has made known to the audience that Macbeth will be the protagonist in one of his famous tragedies.
The audience then find that in Scene two of Act one, the three witches have met upon a heath. Macbeth described the day as “so foul and fair a day I have not seen”, this could be recognised as a description of Macbeths feelings, but as the witches make predictions about Macbeth, maybe Macbeth himself, could be predicting his own feeling in the future. The three witches hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and “king hereafter”; this confuses Macbeth. He then calls them liars “imperfect speakers” , and tells them he is Thane of Glamis, “But how of Cawdor?”. Macbeth then goes on to describe Duncan as a prosperous gentleman,