Macbeth Opening Scene Essay

The opening scene of Macbeth has an emotionally orienting function. First, there is the thunder and lightning, triggers for fright. Moreover, unnatural figures such as the witches are likely to provoke at least anxiety, if not fear.
There was also the physical appearance of the witches, which prepares us for disgust. The witches conclude their colloquy with the well-known lines, “fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air”. When they say “foul and “filthy air” Shakespeare is associating the scene with disgust. Moreover, what is crucial for our present concerns is that these images introduce one of the most common cognitive models activated in shame, being soiled.
Lady Macbeth later characterizes the blood of murder as “filthy witness that one must “wash”.

In the second scene, Shakespeare takes up both blame and disgust when the Leader refers to the rebel, Macdonwald , explaining “The multiplying villainies of nature, Do swarm upon him”. The reference to villainies clearly points toward aversive acts. Through its
suggestions of vermin, “swarm” serves to link these villainies with feeling of repulsion.
The actions of Macdonwald are not aversive to the speaker, but morally blameworthy. This sort of moral evaluation is commonly seen as a central feature of guilt particularly. In my view, one’s moral judgment is not fundamental in generating one’s emotional response.

The emotional orientations of these opening scenes with their suggestions of fear, disgust, and empathic response to the suffering of others, begin to suggest some of what might go into an account of guilt and shame, as well as regret.
I distinguished three types of self-blaming emotion. In the first one, we are concerned primarily with prudential consequences of the act, such as being caught by the police and punished, this can be seen as regret and fear. A second type of aversion relates to our sense of our qualities or achievements relative to others or to our own self-expectations, by this we could feel disgust to ourselves when for example we fail a test in school or loosing a race in the Olympics, the response for this is self-blame which would produce shame. The third one, is one’s past actions, the empathic feeling one has with regard to victims of these acts. This is “guilt” which is bounded up with
compassion.

Returning to the play, we can perceive that fear becomes more prominent when Macbeth begins to imagine the murder of Ducan. This does not mean, however, that Macbeth’s primary emotion will be regret. In anticipation, any aversive outcome including guilt or shame will elicit fear. His emotion systems are largely unaffected by current perceptions and are aroused, rather, by imagination. In consequence, his working memory is cyclically occupied with the horrid images of the possible murder.

Shakespeare through the play uses the soliloquy. He makes us feel that repulsion “organizes” pulsion, that the repulsive reflex is so dominant and intense that whatever eventually gets done in the name of its opposite (in the name of murder) really in a fundamental way is structures, determined, and limited by that original and irremovable repulsionism.
This strange part can be felt in the important “If it were done” soliloquy. Here, already and under the influence of Lady Macbeth’s manipulations, the hero is beginning to try to think out his revulsion in terms of its opposite: “real” desire to murder. But precisely because revulsion still plays the leading part, the part it remains playing for the duration of the tragedy, the soliloquy does not take Macbeth where “he” murder would have linked it to go. The soliloquy I am referring to is the following one: “ If it were done, when ‘tis done, then’twere well. It were done quickly: if th’assassination could trammel up the consequence...”.
This soliloquy reveals the shallowness of his moral capacities. We are told that Macbeth has no true way is raising moral objections to murder in this soliloquy, and that his moral logic is lame and insufficient.