Power In Macbeth

Frank Herbert once said, "Power attracts the corruptible. Absolute power attracts the absolutely corruptible.” In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the title character seizes “absolute power”, making him “absolutely corruptible”, which ultimately led him to his eventual death. In the play, Macbeth, the title character, seizes absolute power over his people when he brutally kills the real king to be crowned the new king of Scotland. Achieving power in this way allows him to be consumed by guilt and fear at first, which then develops into violence and the demise of both him, his wife, and ultimately his reign. Through examining the consequences that both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth face after trying to achieve power, it is clear that wrongly seizing power
affects people internally, suggesting that power has a major negative and corruptive influence on the conscience mind, which ultimately leads to the demise of the usurper.
In the early acts of the play, Macbeth decides to wrongly seize power over Scotland by killing Duncan, the current king, which leads to the ultimate downfall of both him and his wife, Lady Macbeth, who supported him in his wrongdoings. Macbeth admits that he is doing the wrong thing when he says ““Stars, hide your fires/Let not light see my black and deep desires” (Shakespeare 1.4.57-60). Macbeth clearly confesses that his desires to murder the current king for power are dark and immoral, but eventually carries on with them anyway. Lady Macbeth, on the contrary, indiscreetly supports his decision, and confirms the witches’ prophecies (which state that Macbeth will be king of Scotland), when she says he “shalt be/What [he]
art promised” (Shakespeare 1.5.15-16). This rash decision was made to fulfill the greatest of the witches’ prophecies, and “Given the eventual fate of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, this initial rush to seize their fortune is itself their undoing” (Major 79). When Macbeth says that he does not wants the “Stars” to “see [his] black and deep desires”, he is telling them that he will be doing something bad soon, and he doesn’t want anyone to know about it because of how fatal and immoral it is. He decides to murder the king anyway despite his fears and doubts. Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth had supported his crime from the very beginning, which is proven when she says that he “shalt be” the king, as he was “promised [by the witches]”. The aspiration to fulfill the witches’ finest prophecy to become the king by wrongfully seizing power and murdering Duncan is what leads to the ultimate “undoing” and fall of Macbeth and his wife.
One of Macbeth’s consequences of his actions were hallucinations. Hallucinations are a way of telling that the conscious mind has been provoked. One of Macbeth’s hallucinations appears immediately before he sets out to murder the king. On the night of the murder, he sees a gory dagger dangling in front of him. To his vision of the dagger, which symbolizes his guilty conscience, he responds “There’s no such thing. It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes” (Shakespeare 2.1.59-61). The obsessive guilt over the unjust murder that he has is “His conscience is already getting the best of him before the act [even] takes place” (Berger 79). Prior to the “bloody business”, or murder, of the king, when Macbeth sees a dagger floating in front of him, he says that it does not exist since there is “no such thing”. The mere thought of the wrongful murder in attempt to seize power is what “informs”, or drives, the hallucination to appear before him. The hallucination is clearly an effect of his guilty conscience “getting the best of him”, and it is what will eventually kill him in the end.
Because Lady Macbeth supported Macbeth in his wrongdoings and unjustly seizing of power, she also had to endure the internal consequences.
When a gentlewoman observes that Lady Macbeth has been sleepwalking and sleeptalking, she calls upon a doctor to diagnose her. The doctor says he cannot clearly identify the issue since it is a mental problem and not a physical problem, but he adds that ““Unnatural deeds/Do breed unnatural troubles. Infected minds/To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets” (Shakespeare 5.1.75-77). He is suspecting that she is guilty of something major, and she is confessing her secrets while she sleeps, through “unnatural deeds” such as sleepwalking and sleeptalking. This sleepwalking and sleeptalking that Lady Macbeth suffers from is considered to be a “Freudian slip”, and is “best explained, according to Freud, in terms of the unconscious and its repressed desires” (Beeley 16). It is evident that Lady Macbeth’s “unconscious” and “repressed desires” includes washing away the blood and guilt that came from the murder of Duncan. This desire is revealed when she says “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” (Shakespeare 5.1.45) while she talks and acts as if she’s washing her hands in her sleep. She is clearly desperate to remove Duncan’s blood from her hands since they symbolize her guilt, but she is unable to. Her hands will “ne’er be clean” due to the stain they have left on her conscience. The doctor concludes that Lady Macbeth’s “unnatural
deeds”, which include supporting the killing of the king, accompanies her “unnatural troubles”, which are the effects that the deed has on her conscience. Her and Macbeth’s “infected minds” allude to the guilty conscience caused by the murder. The doctor goes on to say that people suffering from such a guilty conscience are known to sleep-walk and sleep-talk as a way of attempting to absolve their minds of their guilty sins and secrets. This “Freudian slip” and the guilt that accompanies it is what slowly drives her insane enough to kill herself. Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth face dire consequences after wrongly seizing power. This evidently illustrates that unjustly seizing power affects people internally, suggesting that power has an extremely negative and corruptive influence on that conscience mind. This ultimately leads to the downfall of both the usurper and their accomplices. Macbeth’s multiple hallucinations, especially the one of the floating dagger, and Lady Macbeth’s “Freudian slips” are what leads to their eventual death; one dying as the cause of guilt, and the other dying as a result of the guilt.