Essay on Macbeth: Macbeth and Macbeth’s Thoughts

Submitted By katebeth
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Pages: 10
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Macbeth
In this essay I will be discussing the main emotions within Macbeth such as Fear, Ambition and Greed, Love and Guilt. As these are the main emotions that run strongly throughout the play and some that you see up until the very end. These emotions are some of the reasons the book is so enticing you wonder how a certain character is feeling and you can put yourself in their shoes.
The first emotion I am going to discuss is Fear some of the most simple of sentences or statements can show vivid amounts of fear that the character is hiding not only from everyone else but in some cases they are trying to hide it from themselves. There appears to be a lot of distressing emotion within ‘fear’ as we will discover as I go through the book showing the places fear is most prevalent to me.

As Macbeth speaks in soliloquy you see a vivid description of Macbeth’s thoughts as he is going through the process of understanding his own mind and seeing more and more dark thoughts that he wants to turn into reality if he feels that it would be worthwhile for him.
Macbeth is fearless at the start because he saves Scotland and he is in a sense classed as a hero because he fought on Scotland’s side and coming out victorious, then named the Thane of Glames. After the prophecy Macbeths mind twists and becomes very fearful of his own actions, the prophecy reveals that he could become more power if he wanted and he sees how he can get it if he wants it. As soon as he kills the current king he becomes extremely fearful believing that he will be found out for who he actually is which means he will kill anyone who even try’s to stand in his way and he gets more and more terrified of his actions yet he never stops. Macbeth shows that he is fearing his conscience because he feels it will eventually come back to get him after he killed the king and from there on in it spirals downwards out of control like a tornado in the middle of the ocean, the tornado being Macbeths conscience and the water being actions that get worse as he gains more power. In Macbeth doing this the audience become fearful of what he is capable of and what he could be capable of if he needed to get revenge or make anyone fearful he would certainly stop at nothing in getting what he wanted.
In the same way Lady Macbeth’s fearless at the beginning of the play because she has nothing to fear but in the play lady Macbeth is the one that torments Macbeth into killing the king so that she can be queen I feel that at the beginning lady Macbeth is more power crazy than Macbeth. Lady Macbeth’s conscience causes her to become an insomniac forcing her to stay up in the night rubbing her hands and mumbling under her breath unable to communicate after so long her mind can’t control her body and longer and it’s like her body goes numb but her mind keeps replaying all the things that she would rather forget. When Lady Macbeth becomes exceptionally disorientated she speaks in disjointed sentences keeping the audience on edge as we are trying to piece together what she feels and what’s going through her head but there’s always something missing like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle that never gets found so the picture is never quite complete. Lady Macbeth’s emotions don’t ever seem to make sense she goes from one thing worrying her to another it’s hard to keep track sometimes. Although when lady Macbeth’s mind takes a turn for dark desires, a mind that she has ill control over she admits when she speaks in soliloquy she is fearful, when she says ;
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‘His flight was madness. When our actions do not, our fears do make us traitors’
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Shakespeare represents fear as an illusion and the witches are and illusion in some people’s imagination so could the witches be fear represented in bodily form. The illusion that fear is represented as is very dark and if you were to fall into that illusion it would be very hard to get out of or get away from when all your thoughts are dark and
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