The Pent-up Guilt in Macbeth :: Macbeth essays

The hold Guilt in Macbeth There is hardly any emotion in William Shakespeares tragedy Macbeth that outweighs that of guilt. Both maam Macbeth and Macbeth are seriously compromised by the stupor of this emotion. Clark and Wright in their Introduction to The Complete Works of William Shakespeare explain how guilt impacts Lady Macbeth Lady Macbeth is of a finer and to a greater extent delicate nature. Having fixed her shopping centre upon the end - the attainment for her husband of Duncans crown - she accepts the inevitable means she poise herself for the terrible nights work by artificial stimulants yet she can non strike the quiescency king who resembles her father. Having su defected her weaker husband, her own strength gives way and in sleep, when her result cannot control her thoughts, she is piteously afflicted by the memory of one stain of blood upon her little hand. (792) In Fools of Time Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy, Northrop Frye sees a relationship between Mac beths guilt and his hallucinations The future moment is the moment of guilt, and it imposes on one, until it is reached, the intolerable strain of remaining innocent. . . . We notice that anyone who is forced to brood on the past and expect the future lives in a introduction where that which is not present is present, in other words in a world of hallucination. Macbeths capacity for seeing things that may or may not be there is almost limitless, and the appearance of the mousetrap play to Claudius, though more easily explained, has the same dramatic point as the appearance of Banquos ghost. (90) stinkpot Kemble in Lady Macbeth asserts that Lady Macbeth was unconscious of her guilt, which nevertheless killed her Lady Macbeth, take down in her sleep, has no qualms of conscience her remorse takes none of the tenderer forms akin to repentance, nor the weaker ones ally to fear, from the pursuit of which the tortured soul, seeking where to hide itself, not seldom escapes into the interminable wilderness of madness. A very able article, published some age ago in the National Review, on the character of Lady Macbeth, insists oftentimes upon an opinion that she died of remorse, as some palliation of her crimes, and mitigation of our detestation of them. That she died of plague would be, I think, a juster verdict. Remorse is consciousness of guilt .