Yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way; thou wouldst be great, Art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it; what thou wouldst highly, That thou wouldst holily; wouldst not play false, And yet wouldst wrongly win; thou 'dst have, great Glamis, That which cries, 'Thus thou must do, if thou have it. (Shakespeare I
Bradley also notes that the witches "no longer need to go and meet him; he seeks them out. He has committed himself to his course of evil" (Bradley 286)
82-3). Stephen Greenblatt notes that the vice is "wickedness personified" (Greenblatt 34)
He admits that he has laid plots against the king and Richard justifies his deformity as a reason for his bad behavior. We know this early in the play when he says that he is "deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time" (Shakespeare Richard III I
The naive Macbeth did not fully see the ramifications of their prophecies before he commenced in his plot to take action into his own hands and kill the king. Shakespeare portrays the political and social structure of the Anglo-Saxon culture within a surreal world of witches and fate which emphasize the religious mythology as well, (Boyce 73)
This fate was based on past events of an individual's life. Their future would be adjusted accordingly by Wyrd, much like the Eastern idea of Karma, (Herbert 1995)
Although he dies in battle, it is not an honorable death; for he had brought death and misery to his friends and kinsmen. Macbeth was supposed to embody the qualities of a true gentleman; his cruel actions do not coincide with his designated role, both as thane and king, (Muir 145)
It was based on real accounts of a Scottish Thane who murdered his Lord. William Shakespeare was known for his poetic language, which helped framed the dramatic and tragic story of Macbeth, (Nostbakken 14)
Knights observes in his study entitled Macbeth: A Lust for Power, the forces of evil obliterate the light of reason in man and bring about utter disorder in nature: "Well before the end of the first act we are in possession not only of the positive values against which the Macbeth evil will be defined but of the related aspects of that evil, which is simultaneously felt as a strained and unnatural perversion of the will, an obfuscation of the clear light of reason, a principle of disorder (both in the "single state of man" and in his wider social relations), and a pursuit of illusions."(Bloom, 41) Any act of evil is seen thus to change the basic structure of the universe and to transform nature into a desolated chaos
Macbeth and Banquo are alike in that they are courageous. The captain comments on how they were "as cannons overcharged with double cracks, / So they doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe" (Shakespeare I
In Eastman 246). Harold Bloom agrees, adding the play is a "tragedy of blood not just in its murders but in the ultimate implications of Macbeth's imagination itself being bloody" (Bloom 520)
C. Bradley says it "cannot be an accident that the image of blood is forced upon us continually, not merely by the events themselves but by full descriptions" (Bradley 278)
There's no such thing: It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes. (Shakespeare I
Blood is present from the easrly moments in the play, establishing an eerie mood. Mark Van Doren writes Macbeth's world is a world that has "grown terrible with ill-smelling mists and the stench of blood" (Van Doren 347)
What is particularly good about Polanski's take on the play is that he seems to not have taken into account any versions of the play before he made his own; that is, Polanski has put his own mark on the film that proves itself to be quite different from any of the films that he would do before -- or after. Considering the year that Macbeth was made -- 1971, just two years after the Manson murders that claimed his wife Sharon Tate's life, their unborn baby, and three others (Garber 104), it might not be crazy to think that Polanski's ample use of blood in this film was a way of avenging the death
We know that Macbeth trust his wife because he takes the time to correspond with her about the details of experience. He also calls his/her "his partner of greatness" (Shakespeare I
Her reaction to the letter also tells us much about her relationship with her husband. After she reads his letter, she ralizes that he is too "full o' th' milk of human kindness" (Shakespeare I
At the start of the play, Macbeth's bravery in battle is described as one of his strengths. This includes the description of his sword smoking "with bloody execution" (Shakespeare I, ii)
This, too was Macbeth's downfall. "His fatal error, like that of Oedipus, is a failure to notice the cautionary aspect of the prophecies affixed to the gloriously inciting aspect" (Bloom, 153)
"Unlike Oedipus, he does not try to avoid the predictions. He leaps to them" (Coursen, 24)