A critical appreciation on asides and soliloquies of Macbeth in Macbeth
Introduction: It was such a time when only the witches, wolves, and ravishers were awake. Macbeth was holding a dagger in his hand. He softly stole in the room where his guest King Duncan lay. But all of a Sudden it happened. He thought, he saw another dagger in the air, drops of blood at its point. He tried to grasp at it, but it was nothing but air. Unable to bear this, he cried:
“Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling, as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”
These above lines were a dramatic device, called soliloquy.
A soliloquy is a speaking alone; a character talking to himself aloud when he is alone. And an aside, another dramatic device, is slightly different from a soliloquy, since the character is not alone here. In an Elizabethan play, both of them express the secret thoughts and designs of a character. Not only in Macbeth, Shakespeare used these techniques in many of his other plays, in tragedies and comedies; to advance the plot and reveal the character.
Main Essay: As we have said earlier, both in aside and soliloquy; a character talks to himself. In a soliloquy, a character speaks to himself when he’s all by himself in the stage, and nobody except the audiences hear his speech. Chiefly here an aside differs from a soliloquy; for aside is also made by the character to himself, but in an aside others are also present. Among the many asides and soliloquies in the play Macbeth, made by different characters in different modes, we are going to discuss only about those made by Macbeth.
Macbeth’s first aside (Act I, scene III): Macbeth utters his first aside while returning from the battlefield. The witches have just made their predictions and Ross and Angus have brought news of his new title of Thane of Cawdor. The attractions of ‘the imperial theme’ begin to