Selfish Desires

Why do people act upon their selfish desires when it will negatively affect others?

When people want something they justify that it is their right to have it and therefore can do what it takes to get it. This is a fact that is shown in the play of Macbeth many times and often explains the horrible actions of some of the characters. He says: “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me without my stir.” This shows that he now knows of his potential to be king which means that he will do whatever it takes to become king. He believes that it is now his right to take that position and therefore has to kill King Duncan to get it. You can also see this in the way lady Macbeth thinks. Once she hears of Macbeth’s meeting with the witches she automatically thinks of how they will get it and can only see all the good things that they could have and doesn’t think of any of the consequences. Selfish desires get the best of us and we don’t see the consequences as a reason to not try to get what we want.
We wrote the song from Macbeth’s point of view, however the chorus is sung by the citizens. We started the song with Macbeth saying how badly he wanted to be king and how he could see himself as a ruler, he then says “a different murder every night” because even though at the beginning Macbeth’s intentions weren’t to kill someone every day, but ended up killing people constantly. We then end the verse with “Scotland better prepare, for when I get myself there” because it’s like in act 1, scene 7 when Lady Macbeth convinces Macbeth that killing Duncan was necessary and a good idea. It shows that he is convinced that he is going to become king and that he’s prepared. The second verse begins with Macbeth gloating about how there’s no one around who can tell him what to do because he’s in charge. He says that there is no one who is telling him what to do, where to be or how to be, it’s him coming to power and really loving it. The verse then goes into saying that he’s been trying to forget the passed, like back at the beginning where he was a coward and very feminine, he wouldn’t stand up for himself, but now he has killed Duncan and became king and so he wants to forget ever being beneath other people. He then says that he could forgive people but he hates to let them live. For example when he killed Macduff’s wife and son, it wasn’t necessary and he didn’t have to, but he didn’t want to let them live. The witches told him that he didn’t have to fear anyone who was woman born, and so he didn’t think he had to fear anyone, including Macduff but he chose to kill Macduff’s family anyway. The last verse is focused on the end of the play when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both realize that what they’ve done was a bad idea and that they shouldn’t have done what they did. The first line says that it’s too late to apologize, which is a representation of when Macbeth is saying that he won’t give up and he wants to die with honour. It’s showing that he still somewhat believes in himself and doesn’t want to give up, and it also means that there’s no way of getting out of the consequences, he made his bed and he now has to lay in it. He then says that it’s his life and it’s now or never, which represents that it’s his time to fight for himself or he will never get the chance again because the soldiers are on their way to kill him. He also says that he isn’t going to live forever and he just wants to live while he’s alive which we put into the song as well because we wanted to also remember when Macbeth says that he had lived a long and healthy life and it was okay for him to die and he was okay with him losing his life that night. The last two lines in the third verse are representing that Macbeth is taking responsibility for his actions and he did the horrible things that he did because that’s how he wanted things to be. In the end of the song we said “I tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter” because it represents that Macbeth tried so hard to become king and he was very successful in becoming king, but in the end everything he did didn’t really matter because he wasn’t happy and he died as an unhappy man. Lastly the chorus, we made the chorus from the perspective of the citizens who were brutally affected by Macbeth and his decisions. The chorus focuses on asking how Macbeth can continue living while the citizens suffer. They say “How can you sleep while the rest of us cry” which isn’t exactly what happens because he can’t really sleep, and Lady Macbeth can’t sleep at all, it’s more focused on the point that everyone is suffering while they continue to live peaceful lives.
The multiple intelligences that we used in our project are musical, intrapersonal and visual. In the play there are many different emotions felt by the characters and they are all expressed in different ways. Music is similar in the way that many artists are going through different struggles and therefore have different emotions. Some emotions that they experience are the same emotions but the way they express them is diverse in every song. For example several artists may be sad about breaking up a relationship and some may express those feelings by creating a sad song lamenting it. Others may create a song as a way to get over that relationship and express it in a more defensive way.