PAPER NO.101

LITERATURE OF ELIZABETHAN AND RESTORATION PERIOD

NAME PANDYA MAYURI.M

ROLL NO.25

EMAIL ID pandyamayuri0610

BATCH –M.A 2021-2023

SUBMITTED TO S.B.GARDI DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH MAHARAJA KRISHNAKMARSINHJI BHAVNAGAR UNIVERSITY

VARIOUS THEMES ON PLAY MACBETH

 

Introduction

William Shakespeare (BORN. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted.

The Great Chain Of Being

Elizabethans believed that God set out an order for everything in the universe. This was known as the Great Chain of Being. On Earth, God created a social order for everybody and chose where you belonged. In other words, the king or queen was in charge because God put them there and they were only answerable to God (the Divine Right of Kings). This meant that disobeying the monarch was a sin, which was handy for keeping people in their place! It also led to the idea that if the wrong person was monarch everything would go wrong for a country, including whether the crops would be good, or if animals behaved as they should. The Elizabethans were very superstitious.

 

The Great Chain of Being includes everything from God and the angels at the top, to humans, to animals, to plants, to rocks and minerals at the bottom. It moves from beings of pure spirit at the top of the Chain to things made entirely of matter at the bottom. Humans are pretty much in the middle, being mostly mortal, or made of matter, but with a soul made of spirit. The theory started with the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato, but was a basic assumption of life in Elizabethan England. You were a noble, or a farmer, or a beggar, because that was the place God had ordained for you.

The Great Chain of Being is a major influence on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Macbeth disturbs the natural order of things by murdering the king and stealing the throne. This throws all of nature into uproar, including a story related by an old man that the horses in their stables went mad and ate each other, a symbol of unnatural happenings.

 In Macbeth, the theme of the great chain of being - the whole concept of hierarchy in society is said to be in the play. It is evident that society starts to break down and everything is in disorder. What are some of the aspects, if any that go into disorder as Macbeth rises in power/corruption?

Macbeth and Blood

Macbeth experiences his visions of blood in Act II, as he contemplates killing King Duncan.

While waiting for the signal to enter the king's chambers, Macbeth sees a dagger before him. As he

stares at the dagger, he watches it become covered in blood and says, 'I see thee still, And on thy

blade and dudgeon gouts of blood.' This is the rst sign that Macbeth feels guilt about the murder he is about to commit. However, he tells himself that it is he and just the 'bloody business' worrying him.

After Macbeth kills King Duncan, he runs from the chamber and looks at his bloody hands, saying,'This is a sorry sight.' As Lady Macbeth tries to calm him down and tells him to go back and leave the dagger with the drugged guards, he cannot move. Macbeth continues to feel guilty, staring at his bloody hands, reacting, 'Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?'

During the play, Macbeth's paranoia that someone will and out about the king's murder continues to grow. Eventually, he becomes worried that his friend Banquo will take his place as king. He then plots the murder of Banquo to take place during a banquet he has planned for his noblemen.  The murderers enter, after having killed Banquo, Macbeth notes, 'There's blood on thy face.' Feeling more guilt about this murder, Macbeth soon imagines Banquo's ghost at the banquet. The ghost, not surprisingly, is covered in blood. As he begs the ghost to leave, Macbeth reacts 'they say, blood will have blood.' Macbeth believes that the blood of Banquo will expose him.

When it becomes clear to his men that Macbeth is a murderer, they begin to plot to overthrow him .Macbeth even cries over the state of a airs in Scotland, saying, 'Bleed, bleed, poor country!' and later, ‘an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter’s.'In the last scene of the play, Macbeth is under attack and knows he cannot win. However, he continues tonight, even saying that he likes to make people bleed, 'whiles I see lives, the gashes do better upon them.' Macbeth has moment of guilt before his death when Mac duff enters to confront him. Having killed Mac duff’s family, Macbeth cannot bring himself to kill him, 'get thee back; my soul is too much charged with blood of thine.'

Lady Macbeth and Blood

At the beginning of the play, Lady Macbeth is strong and determined. She seems to feel no remorse as she encourages Macbeth to kill King Duncan and plots the murder with him. On the night of the murder, she tells herself, 'make thick my blood; Stop up the access and passage the remorse.' Lady Macbeth does not want to feel guilty for what she is about to do. She asks for her blood to become thick and her heart to become cold. She wants to close o her soul so that she does not feel remorse. After Macbeth kills King Duncan, he comes to Lady Macbeth with guilt. However, she does not seem to feel any. She takes the dagger from Macbeth and returns to the chamber to place the dagger on King Duncan's guards and to smear the king's blood on them. When she returns, she shows Macbeth her hands, saying, 'My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white.' Although her hands are just as bloody as Macbeth's, she would be embarrassed if she felt any of the remorse he feels at that moment. We really do not see too much of Lady Macbeth again until Act V. By then, she is so overcome by guilt that she sleepwalks, trying to wash imaginary blood on her hands, 'Out, damned spot! out, I say!' As she relives the murder of King Duncan, she says, 'who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' Although Lady Macbeth particularly wanted King Duncan murdered, and initially felt no remorse, she is now overcome by her feelings of guilt and cannot seem to get her hands clean. As the scene continues, Lady Macbeth again tries to wash her hands, 'What, will these hands ne'er be clean?' It is this guilt that drives her to madness and, eventually, to suicide.

1. The Corrupting power of unchecked ambition:

The main theme of Macbeth—the destruction wrought when ambition goes unchecked by moral constraints—finds its most powerful expression in the play’s two main characters. Macbeth is a courageous Scottish general who is not naturally inclined to commit evil deeds, yet he deeply desires power and advancement. He kills Duncan against his better judgment and afterward stews in guilt and paranoia. Toward the end of the play, he descends into a kind of frantic, boastful madness. Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, pursues her goals with greater determination, yet she is less capable of withstanding the repercussions of her immoral acts. One of Shakespeare’s most forcefully drawn female characters, she spurs her husband mercilessly to kill Duncan and urges him to be strong in the murder’s aftermath, but she is eventually driven to distraction by the effect of Macbeth’s repeated bloodshed on her conscience. In each case, ambition—helped, of course, by the malign prophecies of the witches—is what drives the couple to ever more terrible atrocities. The problem, the play suggests, is that once one decides to use violence to further one’s quest for power, it is difficult to stop. There are always potential threats to the throne—Banquo, Fleece, Macduff—and it is always tempting to use violent means to dispose of them.

2. The Relationship between Cruelty and Masculity:

Characters in Macbeth frequently dwell on issues Of gender. Lady Macbeth manipulates her husband by questioning his manhood wishes that she herself could be “unsexed,” and does not contradict Macbeth when he says that a woman like her should give birth only to boys. In the same manner that Lady Macbeth goads her husband on to murder, Macbeth provokes the murderers he hires to kill Banquo by questioning their manhood. Such acts show that both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth equate masculinity with naked aggression, and whenever they converse about manhood, violence soon follows. Their understanding of manhood allows the political order depicted in the play to descend into chaos. At the same time, however, the audience cannot help noticing that women are also sources of violence and evil. The witches’ prophecies spark Macbeth’s ambitions and then encourage his violent behavior; Lady Macbeth provides the brains and the will behind her husband’s plotting; and the only divine being to appear is Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft. Arguably, Macbeth traces the root of chaos and evil to women, which has led some critics to argue that this is Shakespeare’s most misogynistic play.

3. The Difference between Kingship and Tyranny

In the play, Duncan is always referred to as a “king,” while Macbeth soon becomes known as the “tyrant.” The difference between the two types of rulers seems to be expressed in a conversation that occurs in Act 4, scene 3, when Macduff meets Malcolm in England. In order to test Macduff’s loyalty to Scotland, Malcolm pretends that he would make an even worse king than Macbeth. He tells Macduff of his reproachable qualities—among them a thirst for personal power and a violent temperament, both of which seem to characterize Macbeth perfectly. On the other hand, Malcolm says, “The king-becoming graces / [are] justice, verity, temperance, stableness, / Bounty, perseverance, mercy, [and] lowliness”.

The model king, then, offers the kingdom an embodiment of order and justice, but also comfort and affection. Under him, subjects are rewarded according to their merits, as when Duncan makes Macbeth thane of Cawdor after Macbeth’s victory over the invaders. Most important, the king must be loyal to Scotland above his own interests. Macbeth, by contrast, brings only chaos to Scotland—symbolized in the bad weather and bizarre supernatural events—and offers no real justice, only a habit of capriciously murdering those he sees as a threat. As the embodiment of tyranny, he must be overcome by Malcolm so that Scotland can have a true king once more.

4. Ambition

Although he is encouraged by the Witches, Macbeth’s true downfall is his own ambition. Lady Macbeth is as ambitious as her husband, encouraging him to commit murder to achieve their goals. Both Macbeths fail to see how their ambition makes them cross moral lines and will lead to their downfall. Once Macbeth kills Duncan, his ambition to hold on to his title as king becomes intertwined with his paranoia. Rather than being able to enjoy the fruits of his ambition, he becomes obsessed with maintaining the power he’s won. Macbeth’s blind pursuit of power can be contrasted with other ambitious characters in the play like Banquo. Banquo also hears the Witches’ prophecies, and similarly has ambition for his sons. But unlike Macbeth, Banquo’s morality prevents him from pursuing his goal at any cost. At the end of the play, Macbeth has achieved all he wanted but has nothing. With his wife gone and no hope of producing a prince, Macbeth sees what his unchecked ambition has cost him: the loss of all he holds dear.

5. Guilt

Macbeth’s guilt about murdering his king, Duncan, and ordering the murder of his friend, Banquo, causes him to have guilty hallucinations. Lady Macbeth also hallucinates and eventually goes insane from guilt over her role in Duncan’s death. The fact that both characters suffer torment as a result of their actions suggests neither Macbeth nor his wife is entirely cold-blooded. Although they commit terrible crimes, they know, on some level, that what they’ve done is wrong. Their guilt prevents them from fully enjoying the power they craved. Lady Macbeth says “What’s done/ cannot be undone” in Act Five scene one, but her guilt continues to torment her. While Macbeth’s guilt causes him to commit further murders in an attempt to cover up his initial crimes, Lady Macbeth’s guilt drives her to insanity, and, finally, suicide.

6. Children

 

The loss of children is a complex and intriguing theme in the play. For both Macbeth and Banquo, children represent the idea of the continuation of a family line. Macbeth has Banquo murdered in hopes of thwarting the Witches’ prophecy that Banquo will sire a long line of kings. However, Fleance is able to escape being killed, leaving open the possibility he will one day take over the throne. Macbeth and his wife have no heirs, although

Lady Macbeth references having been a mother once, saying, “I have given suck, and know / How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me. “ This line suggests the Macbeths may have lost a child. Similarly, Macduff mourns the children Macbeth ordered killed and uses their memory to spur him on to victory against their killer; and Siward laments the loss of his son in the play’s closing battle, but is proud to have fathered such a brave soldier who fought in a noble cause.

Appearance and Reality:

Another significant theme in the play is the disparity between appearance and reality. How people perceive things, what their eyes see and what their own biases permit them to believe, is apparent throughout Macbeth. Even as the play opens, the witches speak to this theme, indicating nothing is what it may seem:

Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Lady Macbeth directly describes the importance of appearance and deception in Act I when she says the following: Look like the time, Look like th' innocent flower But be the serpent under’t.

Supernatural: Another important theme in Macbeth is the supernatural. It all starts with the witches, who offer the prophecy about Macbeth’s future. Even Macbeth’s statement about the witches shows how they are part of the supernatural: Into the air; and what seemed corporal melted. As breath into the wind. Would they had stay'd. Later, Macbeth sees an apparition of a dagger, another element of the supernatural. He has difficulty determining whether the dagger is really there or is an element of his imagination:"I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. 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? Often, the theme of the supernatural in Macbeth directly relates to the theme of appearance vs. reality. Macbeth has an increasing level of difficulty telling the difference between something that is supernatural and something that his mind her Femininity and masculinity represent another important theme of Macbeth. Specifically, Shakespeare explores how both genders are related to violence.

In one scene, Macbeth urges his hired assassins to kill Banquo by questioning their masculinity. In another, Lady Macbeth questions Macbeth’s manhood when he waffles on his decision to kill Duncan When you durst do it, then you were a man. The play also explores how femininity and violence are related, painting the character of Lady Macbeth as just as ambitious and ruthless as her husband but much more deceitful in her actions. Lady Macbeth chafes at her restrictions, wishing to be less constrained by the expectations for her gender:

Unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty’s created.

CONCLUSION:

 In conclusion, the adversity "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare renders the downfall of a glorified, respected man who is brought down by his vicious ambition in six stages. ... Macbeth's ambition leads him to secure his power; he overlooks his guilt and focuses on doing whatever it takes to hold onto his authority.

Refers:

Dr.Dilip Barad M.A. STUDY MATERIAL

https://sparknotes.com.