Unprincipled Ambition in Shakespeares Macbeth :: Free Macbeth Essays

Unprincipled rivalry in Macbeth The Bard of Avon saturates the pages of the catastrophe Macbeth with ugly feelings of opposition - unprincipled dream which is ready to kill for itself. Lets thoroughly search out the major instances of wishful behavior by the husband-wife team. Samuel Johnson in The Plays of Shakespeare explains the place of intake in this tragedy The danger of ambition is well described and I know non whether it may not be said in defence of any(prenominal) parts which now seem improbable, that, in Shakespeares time, it was necessary to warn superstition against vain and illusive predictions. The passions are directed to their true end. Lady Macbeth is provided detested and though the courage of Macbeth preserves some esteem, yet both reader rejoices at his fall. (133) Blanche Coles states in Shakespeares Four Giants that the protagonists ambition was not the accustomed narrow, personal ambition He has admitted to a vaulting ambition. We pull in no other evidence of personal ambition except, possibly, his own word in this speech. Onrushing events crowd the thought out of his mind and out of our view. We do have ample evidence of his ambition for his family, ambition for a son who susceptibility succeed him. . . . We think normally of ambition as a personal thing, but it is not always so. Macbeths stupendous imagination, as revealed later in the play, gives him a breadth of vision altogether out of keeping with a narrow, personal ambition. (50-51) In Memoranda Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons mentions the ambition of Lady Macbeth and its effect Re I have given suck (1.7.54ff.) nonetheless here, horrific as she is, she shews herself made by ambition, but not by nature, a perfectly savage creature. The very use of such a tender allusion in the midst of her dreadful language, persuades one unequivocally that she has actually felt the maternal yearnings of a mother towards her babe, and that she consi dered this action the most immense that ever required the strength of human nerves for its perpetration. Her language to Macbeth is the most potently eloquent that guilt could use. (56) Clark and Wright in their Introduction to The Complete whole works of William Shakespeare interpret the main theme of the play as intertwining with evil and ambition