Multiple Faces Of Macbeth From Shakespeare To Ionesco And Visual Art

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Introduction

Art is regarded as a reflection of the creative side of the individual expressing essentially a personal, emotional, subjective experience. But these data are minimal if we want to understand the phenomenon of art in its scale. We can say that art is one of the dimensions that define humanity, along with emotion, cognition and will. Art reflects the level of metaphor and transcendence all stages of anthropological development turning points of history and new societal models. It can be said with certainties that art awaken consciousness and shapes, exploring life in all sizes, asking questions and looking for new answers.

The phenomenon of art is so broad and so generous, that can be approached from several perspectives: the artistic education, aesthetics and philosophy of art, psychology and sociology of art.

Albert Camus said, "If the world would have a clear sense, art would not exist." Relentless search for meaning, answers, knowledge and the continuing need to create are deeply human traits. Art was at the beginning of time a precious individual company, state policy and is another sign of power, wealth and fame. But sometimes it can become – your choice – a manipulation tool or a means of salvation. Picasso completes his words also with our definitions: “Art is a lie that helps us see the truth”.

Art condenses the experience that we have as human beings and all its manifestations; it allows it to become significant. We all need inner harmony and structures that create harmony. Fundamentally, art is an affirmation of life.

Art reflects human nature, allowing him to record our most glorious moments and darkest. It also "frees us to transcend the constraints of physical and spiritual beauty to explore the universe in which we live," writes Nigel Wyman, a specialist in art space.

Science brings us peace, through logic and reasoning explanatory. Art comes with its questions and anxieties. The creators of art are those whose philosophy, religion or science does not provide satisfactory answers. They find it beyond that there is something else. And that something lived and was felt in privacy, then translated into sound, colour, movement or image, emerges as the physical body art.

Art reflects what we are and at the same time promote the self-realization of everyone. Psychology and psycho-sociology of art today confirms the idea that the entire creative arts play an important role in shaping an evolution of human consciousness. Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung noted that “art intuitively senses the changes that will take place in the collective unconscious”.

All art, poetry, music, ritual, visual arts, theatre, must individually and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society and his masterpiece, the free human being. Art is the triumph over chaos, of death and time. In the words of the painter Rene Magritte, “art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist”.

But why Macbeth? It might be summarized as a man progressing erratically around power and destruction towards the end, an oversight around disbelief and impetuosity. His own reasons seem to be his goals, his misdoubts, and his resignation to his wife’s more competent personality. Macbeth also disputes with more opposite concepts, intertwined forces: time and religion, power and gender.

Concerning time, Shakespeare uses the concept and its significance more often in Macbeth than in any other of his masterpieces. It is truly important in Macbeth, for instance, the infamous letter from Macbeth for his wife regarding the witch’s prediction of the future with the concept of ‘coming on of time’, and the unusual response to it:

Nor time nor place,

Did then adhere, and yet you would make them both:

!ey have made themselves, and that their ‘tness now

Does unmake you.

Even with a well written plot, how is it different from any other masterpiece written by Shakespeare? How is it different from Hamlet or Othello? That is the main goal of this paper – with the use of concepts such as power and gender, I intend to reveal those differences.

Basic gender roles are overthrown through the existing relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth at the beginning of the play. Up until the end of the masterpiece, it suggests that basic gender roles are converted by the relationship between two characters. Upon the usage of the key words ‘gender’, ‘power’, and ‘convert’ in terms of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, only one character has these ‘qualities’ – Lady Macbeth represents, one way or another, the accomplished hostess. 

An implied power to that position is present, which she clearly transforms when she takes charge on the murder of a guest in her own home.

The concept of ‘murder’ will be often mentioned from now on due to the fact that is the centre of the entire play and will not stop troubling Macbeth, for whom its official status has been misunderstood:

The time has been, That when the brains were out, the man would die, 

And there an end; but now they rise again

 With twenty mortal murthers on their crowns, 

And push us from our stools. This is more strange 

Than such a murther is.

The drama leads towards the most famous and most powerful speech/declaration present in English language:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

The reason I chose this topic implies the author and his writing, his approach on the conservative issues regarding the time period. Sensitive to the transformations of his era, Shakespeare tends to express them fully, in his own way, he imprints the poetic vision of his genius.

Shakespeare was never acknowledged during his lifetime, but he did felt the large amount of praise in his honour. In 1598, Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English writers as ‘the most excellent’ in both comedy and tragedy.

The authors of the Parnassus plays at St John’s College, Cambridge numbered him along with writers such as Chaucer, Gower and Spenser . During the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the ‘soul of the age, the applause, delight, and the wonder of our stage’, though he had remarked elsewhere that ‘Shakespeare wanted art’.

Among the Restoration period of the monarchy in 1660 until the end of the 17th century, basic ideas were applied.

In conclusion, critics during that time mostly rated Shakespeare under public figures such as John Fletcher or Ben Jonson. For instance, Thomas Rymer pointed out Shakespeare for reuniting comedy with tragedy. Nonetheless, John Dryden praised Shakespeare in a very high manner, stating about Jonson that ‘I admire him, but I love Shakespeare’.

Throughout several decades, Rymer’s opinion held sway; still, throughout the 18th century, critics wanted to respond to Shakespeare based on his own terms and praised what they defined his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation.

By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet. In the 18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo. During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism.

In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare’s genius often bordered on adulation. ‘That King Shakespeare,’ the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, ‘does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible’.

The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale. The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as ‘bardolatry’, claiming that the new naturalism of Ibsen’s plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.

The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays.

Numerous manners in which one can define fate exist. According to Webster’s Dictionary, it is “a power that supposedly predetermines events”, it is synonymous to destiny, suggesting that some actions are inevitable. Regarding Shakespeare’s Macbeth, fate has a vital role in the lives of characters as Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and Banquo.

The characters’ lives have been dominated in terms of fate. Each situation they found themselves, that happened/didn't happen to them was a straightforward result of fate’s layout for them. A situation which applies in real life.

After reading the play for the first time, one might think why Macbeth falls to the depths of evil that he does. In a superficial manner, Macbeth might appear as a victim of fate, including destructive characters such as the witches and his wife “leading” him in “the arms” of evil acts. Still, Macbeth is no victim of fate. What goes around comes around! In exchange, he allows destructive elements influence him, lending in a path of murder. Hence, even though Macbeth is influenced by the witches and Lady Macbeth, in the end, he performs as an agent of free will.

Two truths are told,

As happy prologues to the swelling act

Of the imperial theme.

Surrounded by all the female characters, Macbeth takes into consideration murder as a way to accomplish his kinghood: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical.

After a closer look at Macbeth from a cause and effect standpoint, the witches appear to be a starting point of Macbeth’s tragedy.

In conclusion, it is Macbeth’s own fault for allowing this prophecy to take over him into committing murder and corruption.

From a metaphoric point of view, the witches gave Macbeth something to start with, a fire for instance, but Macbeth lit himself on fire and kept feeding with fuel that fire until the point in which he was completely doomed. Therefore, Macbeth being a victim of fate is hardly believed, him being a victim of circumstance is quite absurd. In return, Macbeth “builds brick by brick” his own tragic doom, murdering his way to his demise without any strings attached.

If there was a criminal act in Macbeth, it was often committed at night or in the dark. This then also ties in with the entire connection of darkness with evil, murder being the source of evil.

The most known example of vicious act is when Macbeth kills Banquo. During his speech where he is proceeding to kill Banquo he says …Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates pale Hecate’s offerings, and withered murder, alarmed by his sentinel, the wolf, howl’s watch…..’ The references to the dreams, sleep, witches, and the wolf’s howl all depict the night-time as this is when most of those words are seen. Another example of evilness during the night regarding a vicious act is when the son of MacDuff is murdered and Lady MacDuff goes running out into the night screaming ‘Murder!!’ continuously. This then is another perfect example of the terrible occurrences at night which occur during the play Macbeth. These two excerpt s are two more phrases that portray mental pictures to the readers and show Shakespeare’s dark creativeness.

The final examples of the use of darkness and night highlights evilness in the play Macbeth, showing Macbeth’s slip in to madness, ‘allowing’ to commit horrendous crimes and act as evil as Satan.

Macbeth’s insanity is a result after the three warnings he receives from the witch sisters; an example of his madness is ‘ Still it cried ‘Sleep no more’ to all the house; ‘ Glamis has murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more ; Macbeth shall sleep no more’.’ noted by Macbeth to his wife explaining a dream which he had at night and his conscience is eating away at him. He is now just about to be shocked when with his friends, he sees the ghost of Banquo, enjoying dinner and drink with his friends. He says ‘Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake thy gory locks at me’ when he sees Banquo’s ghost in his place. He thinks it is a prank to prove that Macbeth committed a vicious act when ironically they have no idea what he is talking about. This was yet another perfect example of Shakespeare use of night-time to show evil. His darkest, most brooding, and sinister of Shakespeare’s tragedies begins ominously with the magic evocation of thunder, lightning, and a drain. Regarding the undeniable atmospheric phenomena traditionally associated with the power of the male gender, divine and dominating gods.

In the context of the play with masculine violence and power struggle, even the fact that the magical incantation is pronounced by witches, that is, female figures, takes nothing away from the gruesomely warlike, masculine aspect of their message. As a result, one can easily notice the predominance of male presence and dominating composure.

Ostensibly a woman, that is, inviting associations with the gentle, life-affirming qualities of traditional femininity, the witches talk of the ‘hurly-burly’ of the battle and of worldly power and its inevitable ruin, in their confused gender creating ‘a murky atmosphere of blurred distinctions, mingled opposites, equivocations, and reversals.’

Femininity is stereotypically associated with geodynamic forms of behavior, as explored for example in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies with their exuberant, playful, and assertive female heroines, but in Macbeth the geodynamic behavior first signaled by the witches’ female sex is instantly obliterated by the dark powers of the masculine, end dynamic magic of violence, of moral ambivalence, of confusion and chaos, where ‘fair is foul, and foul is fair,’ and things ‘hover through the fog and filthy air’.

Even the witches’ physical appearance, wild and otherworldly belies their female sex, causing confusion and apprehension in Banquo:

you should be women,

and yet your beards forbid me to interpret

That you are so.

The witches’ cauldron, this hell-broth betokening chaos and destruction, is an antithesis of the fertile female womb, producing poison and death instead of health and new life. As also discussed earlier, the tragic mode is usually characterized by forms of behavior, connected with ruthless acquisition of power, in the majority of cases associated with male characters. 

What often happens in tragic plays as a result of the domination of masculine end dynamism is that female figures either become helpless victims of masculine oppression, like Ophelia, Gertrude, Cordelia, or Lady Macduff, or become masculinized into characters full of ‘unfeminine’ ambition, ruthlessness, and cruelty, like Goneril, Regan, Volumnia, or Lady Macbeth. This gender inversion is emblematized in the opening scene of Macbeth by the witches, in whom the geodynamic, feminine principle is symbolically transformed into its masculine opposite, setting the pattern, to culminate in the sinister figure of Lady Macbeth, of gender and moral inversion and confusion, where ‘nothing is, but what is not’.

Male violence materializes in all its gory terror in the first scene with a blunt question, ‘What bloody man is that?’, followed by a realistic report of the battle, full of upbeat military rhetoric of manly courage of the victors and the villainy of the traitors.

Valor in fighting for the just cause is a static virtue, and such is the opinion that the ‘valiant cousin’ Macbeth enjoys with King Duncan. Macbeth’s efficaciousness receives due praise because it helped to win the battle, but Macbeth’s unceremonious killing of the traitor Macdonwald, with whom he ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him, signals an end static character, prepared to break the accepted rules if necessary—a quality as yet unsuspected by others who still regard Macbeth as a ‘worthy gentleman,’ that is, a static man of honor. Macbeth’s potentially dangerous result is further suggested by a comparison and unintentional identification with the traitorous thane of Cawdor, whose title Macbeth now assumes as an immediate reward for his spectacular performance in the battle. In dynamic terms, Macbeth’s promotion from the thane of Glamis to the thane of Cawdor marks a transition of his character from honest, honorable statism to potentially disloyal, opportunistic, and traitorous endostatism. 

The third and ultimate step in Macbeth’s social advancement is announced in the witches’ triple all-hails, which imply a natural progression from Glamis to Cawdor to king, while in dynamic terms they supply the final, end dynamic phase.  If the witches’ prophesy anticipates the development of Macbeth’s character, their balanced, symmetrical equivocations also define the essentially static character of Banquo, whose fate is to be

lesser than Macbeth, and greater.

Not so happy, yet much happier.

Macbeth’s mental distance from the static and straightforward Banquo is markedly the former’s absentmindedness and the appearance of asides to hide his dark thoughts (Glamis, and Tane of Cawdor: / The greatest is behind), while Banquo prudently dismisses the prophesy as a temptation to ‘win us to our harm’, Macbeth is unable to control the ever-swelling flow of ambitious thoughts, experiencing, for a time at least, an acute dilemma. 

The particular nature of Macbeth’s dilemma has occasioned a considerable topic to take into consideration for deliberation in the fastidious history of the play, caused by what the critics perceived as an inconsistency in Shakespeare’s characterization of the figure.

How could a man fully aware of the horror of his deeds be able to commit them?

The critics did not deny Macbeth his deep moral sense, noting at the same time his ability to overcome his scruples, to commit one atrocious deed after another, and to live with guilty conscience.

A. C. Bradley found in the play ‘the most remarkable exhibition of the [psychological] development of a character to be found in Shakespeare’s tragedies’, but later critics accepted the view that Shakespeare sacrificed psychological consistency to theatrical effect.

Shakespeare made the bold experiment of mixing mutually exclusive qualities—a brave warrior who is a moral coward and a brutal murderer who is racked by feelings of guilt.

Rather than sacrificing psychological realism for artistic effect Shakespeare achieved both, and that what the critics perceive as a character logical inconsistency is a classic dilemma of a man whose ‘conscious or reflective mind . . . moves chiefly among considerations of outward success and failure, while his inner being is convulsed by con-science,’ as perceived intuitively by Bradley.

The dynamic point of view a state identified as a dilemma occurs when an individual finds himself in a transitional state between two dynamic stages. Macbeth is pulled one way by his static preoccupation with honor, conscience, and loyalty, and the other way by his end dynamic tendency to accumulate power.

The dilemma of being caught between static loyalty thirsts for power is borne out by Macbeth’s introspective asides and by his indecision, until Lady Macbeth tips the scales in favor of manly action.

The progression of social success and power promised by the witches’ prophesy thus appeals to Macbeth’s already existing appetites, and as basically a man of action he cannot resist the challenge to reach for the highest reward, now that the victorious battle brought him promotion and raised him nearer to the king than he was ever before. Macbeth’s soliloquies marks a progression from the domination of static scruples over the possibilities that Macbeth is still even afraid to verbalize, to the disappearance of the voice of conscience after Macbeth’s character manages to suppress the uncomfortable thoughts, for a time at least, under his wife’s influence. The terrible possibility first enters Macbeth’s consciousness

At this stage the ‘thought’ of breaking the fundamental ethical laws can shake Macbeth’s moral sense profoundly, but it stops him from acting upon the horrible imaginings, his function still smother’d in surmise. Macbeth’s first soliloquy ends with a victory of static scruples over ambition, and with a stoic resignation to leave the matter to fate:

If Chance will have me King, why, Chance may crown me,

without my stir’.

Macbeth is still addressed by Banquo as ‘worthy Macbeth,’ and when he suggests to his companion that they ‘speak [their] free hearts each to other’, he means as yet no subterfuge. But the full realization of Macbeth’s tendency moves inexorably forward. By a stroke of dramatic irony, Macbeth’s earlier identification with the traitorous thane of Cawdor soon reveals a contrast between the two characters, to Macbeth’s moral disadvantage.

The report of the execution of ‘that most disloyal traitor’ testifies in fact to the static character of Cawdor who very frankly

. . . confess’d his treasons,

Implor’d your Highness’ pardon,

and set forth a deep repentance.

First perceived as a traitor, Cawdor thus turns out to be a misled static, while Macbeth, thought to be honest by the gullible Duncan, turns out to be a much more dangerous traitor, whose own ignoble death at the end of the play contrasts sharply with Cawdor’s dignified departure. The static Duncan in turn is, like Othello, trust incarnate, whose main concern is the fair settlement of his accounts with the ‘worthiest cousin’ to whom he owes victory in battle, hence his genuinely apologetic rhetoric of ‘the sin of my ingratitude,’ ‘recompense,’ ‘the proportion both of thanks and payment,’ ‘thy due,’ and ‘pay’. This icon of regal dignity and justice, ‘the sacred embodiment of his country’s life needing a reverent and tender protectiveness,’ balances in himself the attributes of both father and mother.

Duncan is the center of authority, the source of lineage and honor, but he is also the source of all nurturance, planting his children to his throne and making them grow and extending his ‘gardening’ function to his cousin Macbeth:

I have begun to plant thee, and will labour

so make thee full of growing.

Tragically misled by appearances, Duncan identifies Macbeth’s castle as an idyllic place promising comfort and safety:

the air

Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself

Unto our gentle senses.

An illusion also shared by the unsuspecting Banquo, who finds the air ‘delicate’ and compares the castle to the fertile ‘procreant cradle’ where the birds ‘most breed and haunt’. As a protective father concerned with the well-being of his large family, Duncan stands in symbolic opposition to Macbeth’s later ‘barren scepter’, as well as to the masculinized female characters: to the witches with their poisonous cauldron and to the childless and murderous Lady Macbeth.

Every next event seems to stir more and more Macbeth’s awakened ambition and his urge to act. Circumstances may be playing into his hands, but how Macbeth will act in these circumstances depends primarily on his intrinsic psychological makeup. Bradley correctly observed therefore that ‘there is no sign whatever in the play that Shakespeare meant the actions of Macbeth to be forced on him by an external power.’

 If we can talk at all about determinism of behavior, the deterministic factors involved always form a unique combination of external, social influences and of internal, psychological dispositions. What first whets Macbeth’s ambition and brings him closer to action is Duncan’s official appointment of the eldest son, Malcolm, as the royal successor, the fact instantly resented by Macbeth, who for the first time feels the ‘black and deep desires’ giving rise to the thoughts of the deed itself:

yet let that be,

Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

Macbeth’s first reaction to his heightened ambition is to write a letter to his wife to inform her about the witches’ prophesy, but it is not immediately clear why Macbeth should write to his wife at all, because the object of the letter is clearly not to inform her about the coming of Duncan to their castle.

 His ostensible reason is to let his wife, his ‘dearest partner of greatness,’ know as quickly as possible about their good fortune as revealed by the witches, so that she might not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being ignorant of what greatness is promis’d her. However, it would appear that Macbeth’s real, unconscious reason is to give His wife more time to strengthen her resolve on the right course of action and to decide the matter for him. The frankness of the letter betrays a character that, notwithstanding his manliness, is psychologically dependent on his wife, a fact that indicates a configuration of consecutive characters with its mixture of adoration and submission in the less mature partner and protection and domination in the more mature partner, who in this case happens to be Lady Macbeth, the masculinized woman. 

The presence and vulnerability of Duncan lodging in Macbeth’s castle provide the now-or-never opportunity, which Lady Macbeth cannot fail to seize, and which Macbeth finds it difficult to let it slip, not so much as a means to achieve the aim as a challenge to prove his worth in action. The understatements and fearful equivocations of Macbeth’s earlier soliloquies give way to the bluntness and directness of his monologue, as he now uneuphemistically calls the deed by its proper name (‘assassination,’ ’blow,’ ’bear the knife myself,’ ’the horrid deed,’  and carefully weighs scruples against ambition for the last time. He is tantalized not so much by the ultimate material prize, but by the very possibility of doing that which is most expressly forbidden by all sacred and human laws. 

The absolute outrageousness and sacrilege of the deed committed in open violation of the most sacred feudal and familial bonds and of traditional hospitality excite Macbeth’s boldness, his ‘vaulting ambition,’ as the only motive for his action. Because his ambition is as ineradicable as his character from which it derives, Macbeth de facto cannot choose but to act, not so much to become king as to become the man who dared to kill the king.

  The tragedy of Macbeth relies therefore not only on his ultimate disappointment with what he has gained, on his isolation and his disgraceful death, but on the trap that the givens of the circumstances and of his character have arranged for him: he cannot abstain from action because he will loath himself for not daring to kill the king, but when he kills the king he loathes himself for having done it, no third option being available.

Jan Kott phrases Macbeth in terms of assertion of identity: ‘Macbeth has killed not only to become king, but to assert himself. He has chosen between Macbeth, who is afraid to kill, and Macbeth, who has killed. But Macbeth, who has killed, is a new Macbeth.’

 But ‘identity’ has clearly to do here with dynamism of character: suspended between two definite dynamic categories and unable to embrace either, Macbeth remains in a limbo of indecision, unable to define himself except by negation: in Kott’s words, ’to himself he is not the one who is, but rather the one who is not.’

  With Duncan now practically at his mercy and with his mind now finally made up, the execution of ‘the terrible feat’ is a matter of determinism beyond Macbeth’s control.

The vision of the dagger leading the murderer to Duncan’s chamber betokens a mind no longer undecided, confused, or guilt-stricken, but clear of purpose and action oriented. The visionary dagger embodies the murderous thoughts, ‘a dagger of the mind’, leading to the real dagger at Macbeth’s side, now drawn for the murderous act, anticipated by drops of blood on the visionary dagger. ’The bloody business’ thus inexorably accomplishes itself in thought a moment before it is done in real action, as it now must be, all physical and psychological obstacles being removed: ‘I go, and it is done’. And when the deed is done, its irrevocability confirms the tragic trap in which Macbeth has found himself after the revelation of the witches’ prophesy: just as he could not accept his failure to act, so his residual statism cannot now accept the crime and the violation of the most sacred laws that it represents. Since Macbeth was not interested in the profit of the crime to begin with, but rather in the challenge posed by the execution of an outrageous deed, the power gained as a result of the crime does not outweigh the pressure of guilt caused by the crime. In other words, gone forever is the peace of mind, as indeed is perfectly clear to Macbeth, who has murdered his ’innocent Sleep’ together with the king. The earlier threefold progression of Macbeth’s ‘good’ fortune predicted by the witches and echoed optimistically by Lady Macbeth now reveals its true face to the guilt-stricken murderer:

Glamis hath murther’d Sleep, and therefore Cawdor

Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!’

Where the ‘king’ is appropriately now replaced with ‘Macbeth.’

Where Macbeth is crushed, for a time at least, by a sense of guilt, loses his nerve and almost botches up the murder by bringing the blood-stained daggers with him from the scene of the crime, Lady Macbeth, entirely unmoved by the moral implications of the deed, displays perfect self-control and composure, upbraiding her husband for his infirmity of purpose and ‘brainsickly’ thoughts. While for the remorseful Macbeth ‘all great Neptune’s ocean’ will not wash the blood from his hand, for the remorseless Lady Macbeth the removal of blood from her hands has no moral or symbolic connotations but is merely a practical problem, to remove the trace of implicating evidence: ‘A little water clears us of this deed’. For Macbeth no sooner is the deed committed than he wishes it undone, as he discovers, after it is too late, that it would have been easier to come to terms with the former Macbeth who was afraid to do a daring deed than to accept the present Macbeth, the man who has dared to do it: ’So know my deed, ’twere best not know myself’. The result is a terrible psychological self-injury that has left Macbeth ’a mutilated human being,’ a ‘shattered personality,’ a victim as much as a villain who, according to E. A. J. Honigmann, deserves our sympathy as well as condemnation.

Until the end Macbeth will feel painfully the loss of normal life, with the accompanying honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, but he has moved too far from the static moral mean to even contemplate the need for reparation or penance, the privilege afforded the static Cawdor, who atoned for his treachery by accepting his death with dignity. Macbeth’s existential and moral limbo will only lead to philosophic nihilism, already signaled in his seemingly hypocritical public lament after Duncan’s death, but which expresses, intentionally or unintentionally, his profoundest feelings:

Had I but died an hour before this chance,

I had liv’d a blessed time;

for, from this instant,

There’s nothing serious in mortality;

All is but toys: renown, and grace, is dead;

Te wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees

Is left this vault to brag of.

Chapter I

Classic theatre vs. the theatre of the Absurd. Shakespeare vs. Ionesco. A comparative analysis according to Jakobson’s functions

Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Time

For the primary characters and overall plot of Macbeth, Shakespeare deducted on Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, issued in 1577 and 1587. Various publications of Macbeth incorporate portions from Holinshed’s rendition of Macbeth’s life and reign during the century. An addition of Holinshed’s Scottish narratives surrounds upon the vicious act upon King Duff by Donwald, which obviously assured Shakespeare with material for Macbeth’s vicious act upon Duncan – as Macbeth, Donwald killed the king’s chamberlains on the following morning…the country was plunged into darkness; and horses ate each other.

During the process of comparing Holinshed’s historical account to Macbeth, it is obvious that the whole plot of Shakespeare’s play was ‘borrowed’ from Holinshed with some judicious embellishments and additional departures from his source.

Although Shakespeare is often credited with subverting the historical truth in his quest for entertaining theatrical performances, it is patently apparent that in this specific instance, he is staying fairly close to Holinshed’s version of Macbeth’s history. That being said, it is hard to imagine that Shakespeare could possibly believe that this version of history was remotely accurate, though it is indeed more doubtful that he cared about the veracity of Holinshed’s claim. Due to the cohesive correspondence with King James’ religious and political convictions and noting how closely Shakespeare’s play resembles Holinshed’s history, Shakespeare likely does not see the need to corroborate his information with a second source. Further, another historical publication regarding Scotland was available.

Rerum Scoticarum Historia (The History of Scottish Kings) by George Buchanan also gives an accounting of Macbeth and his ascension to the Scottish throne. In his version, he differed from Holinshed regarding the prophetic offerings of the ‘witches’ Although Buchanan’s version mentions a framed within a dreamscape prophesy given to Macbeth, there is no suggestion of magic or supernatural forces of any kind.

The portrayal of the women who appear in Macbeth’s dream is also radically different from that of Holinshed, and would not fit comfortably into the narrative that Shakespeare was devising for his version of Macbeth’s story. Although much time and research has been dedicated through the years addressing the disputes regarding the various depictions of Macbeth, one elemental fact stands out above the rest. If Shakespeare had not written his ‘Scottish Play,’ Macbeth would just be a footnote in a book no one knows or cares about. It is entirely due to his genius and creativity that an obscure King from the century is such an iconic figure.

Almost everyone is aware of whom Macbeth is, and it is quite an accomplishment Shakespeare has achieved that his version has completely superseded historical accuracy.

Macbeth has become an infamous and tragic figure synonymous with the character traits of greed, ambition, and treachery.

As equally famous as Macbeth are the weird sisters Shakespeare so skilfully and cunningly portrays as practitioners of witchcraft immersed in the dark and shadowy nether regions of magic and the supernatural.

Macbeth suggests the grimmest and most menacing portrayal of the supernatural with his depiction of the weird sisters. Indeed, in the opening scene of the play, with only the stage direction of Thunder and lightning. Enter three witches; Shakespeare sets the tone of the entire play.

Shakespeare pushes Lady Macbeth’s oddity so far as to reverse Macbeth’s gender roles. In the play, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is considered nearly sinister in comparison with her husband, Macbeth, a perception that is supported by such assertions as from the lips of her character. Indeed, Macbeth demonstrates considerably less determination than his wife does.

Macbeth’s self-doubting statement of ‘Each corporal agent to this terrible feat/Away, and mock the time with fairest show/false face must hide what the false heart doth know: ‘As he is considering the grave deed, he and Lady Macbeth have connived to commit, indicating his awareness of the negative consequences, he is likely to suffer, indeed if unspecific. As a result, Lady Macbeth scorns him for his mental weakness. In bloodying her hands in the death of the king, she chastises her husband:

My hands are of your colour;

though I shame

To wear a heart so white.

Typically, weakness is associated with the female, and man gains integrity through strength and boldness in battle.

Though Macbeth loses his courage at the decisive moment and Lady Macbeth assumes his bloody obligation. Her husband’s weakness is not only shameful in Lady Macbeth’s attitudes; his weakness is also as unnatural as her strength. Such a reversal carries with it significant social ramifications.

Some critics have traced the shadows of Hamlet which surrounds and influences the drama in question; afterwards, they have stated that it suggests Macbeth’s solicitation as a destructive maternal power and the will to free themselves from it.

Others have contended that all the interpretations have led to the melodramatic answer that characterizes the play, and that it weighs theological tradition and the work’s murky moral values.

1.2. Place

Shakespeare began writing tragedies very early in his career. Among the first plays he wrote, if we can depend on scholars’ estimations of his chronology, was Titus Andronicus, indeed a tragedy. It was influenced most likely by Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy which appeared at the end of the 1580s. Both plays focus primarily on blood vengeance, both have a play within the play, both have a ghost and both end with the stage littered with corpses including that of the protagonist. Sounds like Hamlet? It differs significantly from Titus and has meaningful links with the other ‘middle’ tragedies, Julius Caesar and Othello. In some ways, furthermore, it very subtly anticipates crucial aspects of the tragedies that came afterwards.

Another early tragedy, Richard II, was grouped by Shakespeare’s first editors, Hemminges and Condell, among the historical plays in the First Folio of 1623. It differs in many respects from Richard III, yet another early tragedy grouped with the historical plays. Because of Richard III’s series of criminal actions, as Shakespeare dramatized them, this play is seldom regarded as a tragedy, although some of the early editions labelled it as such. The reason for this labelling likely derives from the medieval concept of tragedy, which defined the genre, unlike Aristotle, as simply the fall from strong to weak. Richard II adheres to this medieval concept, too, though by this time Shakespeare’s idea of tragedy was becoming much more sophisticated. One might feel a good deal of sympathy for Richard II than for Richard III, certainly after the pivotal second scene in act 3, when Richard returns from Ireland to find Bolingbroke threatening his rule and ultimately his crown. In this play, Shakespeare indeed gives us a hint, often disregarded, that suggests a meaningful aspect of tragedy that he developed much more fully later on. Before he dies, this Richard has some idea of what went wrong, that is, of his responsibility for what has happened to cost him his crown. This insight, however slight, reminds us of the importance of antagonisms, recognition or insight, as some commentators have understood Aristotle’s use of the term—or misunderstood it, as Tom Clayton noted. For strong tragedy, the hero or protagonist must have some recognition or insight into his hamartia, his tragic error, before he dies. In his long soliloquy in prison before the murderers enter, Richard II glimpses this meaningful aspect of his fate moments before he dies.

The insight is essential for a right understanding of tragedy – essential not only for the tragic protagonist though for the audience as well. In this manner, we grasp a major constituent of tragedy’s effect, our sense of what might have been.

This sense of ‘what if?’ is, in my view, as significant a part of tragedy as the arousal of pity and fear, and the catharsis, or purging, of these emotions, which Aristotle defined as one of the main aims of tragedy.

For instance, Romeo and Juliet miss a very great deal in their tragic lives: their parents miss perchance indeed more, since Romeo and Juliet are their only children, their deaths bring about not only the end of the feud that has been going for no one knows how long or for what reason, their deaths also represent the end of the Montague and Capulet lines. Romeo and Juliet certainly know what they are doing and why they are doing it when they commit suicide. They know that the world they have been born into has no place for a love like theirs, and that their only recourse is to die in each other’s arms. They may be wrong, though we feel deeply what they miss. If only Friar John had not been detained by the plague! If only Friar Lawrence had got to the tomb before Romeo killed Paris or before he swallowed poison! If only, if only . . . . There we have an essential aspect of tragedy. Nevertheless, in this tragedy, chance, or fortune, plays a large part—too large a part, we may feel.

Some have argued that Romeo and Juliet are too headstrong, that their deaths are really a result of their impetuousness, resulting in their tragic failing. If so, they certainly have no sense of that. Therefore, the protagonists’ recognition is not a part of this tragedy, which, moving as it is in other ways, does not compel an awareness of the protagonist’s responsibility for the catastrophe which strong tragedy demands. We feel pity, certainly, a sense of waste, of course, though fear in the way Shakespeare’s later protagonists arouse it—a sense of dread, that of what the protagonist’s experiences is something we too might experience—not hardly, at least not among those no longer in their teens.

In his so-called apprentice years, Shakespeare continually experimented with the art of drama. We see this tendency to experiment quite clearly in another of his history plays.

As Richard II and Romeo and Juliet, King John was also written in the mid-1590s. This play reveals very well Shakespeare’s sense of tragedy and its obverse, what Susan Snyder called in her excellent book, the comic matrix of tragedy. (As Socrates remarks in the Symposium, comedy and tragedy are really two sides of the same coin; hence, the alternative to tragedy—comedy—is implicit in the action of the former.) In act 2 of King John, the armies of England and France engage in a ferocious battle, or series of skirmishes, ending in a stalemate outside the walls of Angiers. A solution is proposed: let the Dauphin of France marry John’s niece, the Lady Blanche, thereby binding the two kingdoms in a pact of peaceful coexistence. John and the King of France both see this proposal as a worthy resolution of their conflict and embrace it. Despite the outcries of Constance, who wants her son Arthur to unseat John and claim the throne of England, which she and others believe is rightly his; and despite the Bastard Falconbridge’s fulminations, the two monarchs sign a treaty of peace. The Dauphin and his bride seem happily married. This, then, appears a comic outcome to what otherwise seemed heading for a tragic one.

However, unfortunately, this is not the end of the story or the play.

In act 3 Cardinal Pandulph, an emissary of the pope, arrives and challenges the treaty. The pope was no friend of King John, whose anti-clericalism led some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries to view him as a proto-Protestant. Through his emissary, the pope insists that the King of France must renounce the treaty of peace with England. Shakespeare stages this incident very strikingly. Cardinal Pandulph arrives as John and the French king are holding hands, a sign of their newfound amity. Pandulph demands, in the name of the Church, that the King of France let go of John’s hand. Caught in a profound dilemma, the king hesitates. He knows that to accede to the cardinal’s demand will result in resumption of the warfare just concluded.

In that moment of tension and drama, it means nothing if not the conflict of moral choice—we see the alternatives of tragedy and comedy presented. True, Shakespeare had to follow the dictates of history: a comic resolution was not historically viable.

In fact, just before embarking on what we call the middle tragedies—Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Othello—or perchance at about the same time as he wrote the first of these, Shakespeare wrote a comedy which, as King John, also dramatizes the alternatives of tragedy and comedy, though with a happier outcome. In act 4 of As You Like It, Orlando comes upon his wicked brother Oliver asleep under a tree in the forest of Arden. Oliver has been sent by the usurping Duke Frederick to find and kill Orlando, a command he has willingly enough embraced for earlier in act 1 he had asked Charles the wrestler to kill Orlando in their bout. However, something wonderful happens now. Orlando sees a snake curled around Oliver’s neck, and a hungry lioness waiting for Oliver to awaken before pouncing on him. Poetic justice would seem to be operating, and Orlando walks away from the scene, not once, though twice. Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water; or rather, as the text puts it, ‘kindness, ever nobler than usual’ causes Orlando to return and do battle with the lioness, being wounded in the process though saving his brother’s life (the snake had already vanished at Orlando’s approach), evoking a remarkable change in Oliver, who repents his wicked ways and embraces his brother at last. Thus, what could have been a tragic outcome turns into a happy, or comic, one. These opposing episodes in King John and As You Like It emphasize the point made about the tragic and comic obverse. In King John, what might have been—and almost was, except for the pope’s interference—turns into tragedy: warfare is resumed within England and France, Arthur is captured and later dies, the English barons’ revolt, France invades England, and John is poisoned by monks. In striking contrast, the enmity within the two brothers in As You Like It is resolved by a noble action on the part of one and the recognition of the deed by the other. Therefore, what might have become tragic, at least for Oliver, turns into a happy outcome for the two brothers, allowing them both to suggest marriage at the altar with their brides at the end of the play.

Aware of these alternatives as he returned to writing tragedies at the end of the sixteenth century, Shakespeare subtly incorporated them in the dramas that begin with Julius Caesar in 1599. As in writing King John, he could not rewrite history, though he could interpret it in such a way as to reveal what he imagined as the alternatives to tragedy, however slim or remote they might appear.

History held that Julius Caesar was assassinated by Brutus, Cassius, and the rest of the conspirators. Shakespeare carefully examines the various motives they had, especially those of Brutus and Cassius. However, indeed before that, in the first scene of the play, he suggests, through his use of metaphor and puns in the dialogue within the tribunes and the plebeians, that illness is curable. Just as a shoemaker mends soles, a human being’s soul may be mended. The hint here is that Caesar’s imperial aspirations—his illness, as Brutus and Cassius see it—might be cured.

In one of his dialogues with Brutus Cassius acknowledges that Caesar is only human and has his afflictions. Nevertheless, curing Caesar of the illness that Cassius and Brutus are most concerned about is nowhere considered. In fact, in his famous soliloquy pondering what to do, Brutus begins, not with a series of alternatives or rhetorical syllogisms, though with a conclusion: ‘It must be by his death.’ Using spurious arguments to justify this action, he rationalizes what he has already determined to do and meets with the conspirators.

What if, instead of acquiescing in Cassius’s plan and joining the conspiracy, Brutus had taken another course? What if he had confronted his friend and benefactor, Caesar—an alternative he fails to contemplate—and tried to persuade him against his imperial ambitions? Would this suggestion have worked? Of course, there is no way of knowing. Part of the tragedy is this disastrous failure to attempt a personal confrontation. The result, which Shakespeare goes on to dramatize, is betrayal, Caesar’s brutal death, and civil war.

Interestingly, and unlike Shakespeare’s later tragic protagonists, Brutus never recognizes his error. He remains to the end a high-minded though flawed individual. It is not for nothing that in the Divina Commedia Dante placed both Brutus and Cassius along with Judas Iscariot in the lowest circle of hell, gripped in Satan’s jaw. Shakespeare treats Brutus more kindly, however, and in his eulogy, Octavius proclaims him as ‘the noblest Roman of them all.’ Whether Shakespeare was here being ironic, who knows?

The next tragedy that Shakespeare wrote, or rewrote—we are not certain of the chronology—is Hamlet. A careful—no, a meticulous—analysis of the text shows once again how Shakespeare incorporated subtle hints of the alternatives to tragedy in this play. We can begin with Hamlet’s feelings of impotence as expressed in his first soliloquy, ‘O that this too solid flesh would melt. Before Hamlet indeed hears of the Ghost, he knows something is rotten in the state of Denmark; and when he meets the Ghost on the ramparts in 1.5, he learns what he has suspected all along, that Claudius is a ‘smiling, damned villain.’ Earlier he thought about his mother’s incestuous marriage to his uncle and concluded that ‘It is not nor it cannot come to good.’

What is it exactly that the Ghost commands Hamlet to do? He first gains the prince’s confidence and sympathy and tells him how his father was murdered. Hamlet’s reaction is clear: ‘O my prophetic soul!’

He then tells Hamlet specifically what he must do:

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be

A couch for luxury and damned incest.

He follows this charge with two negative injunctions:

Though howsoever thou pursuest this act,

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive

Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven…

Although killing Claudius might well be understood in terms of the lex talionis, nowhere does the Ghost explicitly order Hamlet to do so. This is important, and directly relates to the first negative injunction, ‘Taint not thy mind.’ However, during act 3, Hamlet violates both negative injunctions and fails to carry out the first one. Immediately after his dialogue with the Ghost, Hamlet is convinced that it is an honest ghost and he tells Horatio and Marcellus as much. That is all he tells them, although later he apparently confides in Horatio everything the Ghost said. Nevertheless, what kind of action should Hamlet take to carry out the Ghost’s commands? Beset with doubts and further troubled by Ophelia’s rejection of him, Hamlet spends two months pondering his course of action. Only when the players arrive does he think of a plan to ‘catch the conscience of the king.’ Indeed then, as his famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy indicates, he is unsure whether to take action or ‘to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’.

The nunnery scene, however, again arouses his fury against Claudius; though moments later, in his praise of Horatio in 3.2, Hamlet once more talks of forbearance, of one who ‘in suffering all, that suffers nothing’. Some swings of his within calm and fury comprise the basic rhythm of the play.

‘The Murder of Gonzago’ gives Hamlet the evidence he needs that Claudius is indeed guilty as the Ghost maintained. The prince is so exultant that Horatio is hard pressed to calm him down. The summons to his mother’s closet gives Hamlet a moment’s pause: he will ‘speak daggers to her, though use none’, he says, though he is already on the brink of violating both of the Ghost’s negative injunctions.

Going towards Gertrude’s closet, Hamlet passes Claudius attempting to pray. It is here that Hamlet violates the first of the Ghost’s warnings.

According to an article on ‘Hamlet as a Christian Tragedy,’ Sister Miriam Joseph regards 3.3 as a crucial turning point in the play. While one fully agrees with her, one sees further implications in what happens. Note: Claudius is on his knees trying to pray for forgiveness of his crimes. We know from his aside in 3.1 that his conscience stings him, so there is reason here to believe he sincerely wishes to repent. Then Hamlet enters, and does—what? Like any bloodthirsty avenger–Pyrrhus, for example, in Aeneas’s tale to Dido—he raises his sword and is about to kill the king. However, he hesitates. Concerned that Claudius may be in a state of grace and killing him would send him straight to heaven, Hamlet sheathes his sword. He prefers to kill Claudius when he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,

Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed;

At gaming, a-swearing, or about some act

That has no relish of salvation in’t;

Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,

And that his soul may be as damn’d and black

As hell, whereto it goes.

Is this any way for a Christian prince to behave? Unlike the source in Saxo Grammaticus, the play is full of Christian references. By wishing Claudius damned, Hamlet taints his mind and comes very close to damning himself. His punishment for these thoughts comes in the next scene, when he takes the offensive against his mother and, hearing someone cry out, he kills the wrong man. At first, Hamlet merely dismisses Polonius as a ‘wretched, rash, intruding fool’; though later, after the last appearance of the Ghost, he recognizes the real significance of his deed:

For this same lord

I do repent, though heaven hath pleased it so,

To punish me with this, and this with me,

That I must be their scourge and minister.

It seems clear that killing the wrong man is punishment for Hamlet’s vicious thoughts against Claudius, and Hamlet recognizes this. Though the juxtaposition of 3.3 and 3.4 suggests much more. By taking the offensive against his mother and trying to get her to abandon her incestuous bed, Hamlet violates the Ghost’s command to leave her alone. Likewise, the juxtaposition of scenes has, in my view, other meaningful implications. What if Hamlet had proceeded against Claudius in 3.3 as he does against his mother in 3.4? Admittedly, this kind of Christian action, helping someone to pray and win forgiveness, would require the virtue of a saint, and Hamlet is no saint. He is unable to rid himself of his revulsion against his uncle and therefore cannot begin to think of shriving him, as he immediately does with Gertrude. Had he done otherwise, would Claudius, like Gertrude, admit his culpability and seek forgiveness for his sins by giving up all his ill-gotten gains: ‘My crown, mine own ambition and my queen’? A question to be asked. The answer to that question is this: Had Hamlet succeeded in bringing Claudius to repentance, which Claudius at the moment seems genuinely to desire, the tragedy could have been averted, as it was in As You Like It and as it is later on in The Tempest when, prompted by Ariel, Prospero succeeds in getting Alonzo to repent. (Antonio and Sebastian’s repentance is more problematic, though not Caliban’s.) Does Hamlet ever glimpse this alternative? Through metaphor, Shakespeare indicates that he may. When the ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ ends in disorder and Hamlet exults, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern re-enter and advise the prince that the king is ‘marvellous distempered.’ Hamlet taunts them, punning on the word ‘choler’:

Your wisdom should show itself more richer to signify this to his doctor— for, for me to put him to his purgation would perchance plunge him into far more choler.

Here, Hamlet shortly recognizes his true role, as he does later at the end of the Closet Scene. He should indeed ‘purge’ Claudius, not of his choler though of his spiritual distemper, his sin. For reasons already mentioned, this striking alternative to blood vengeance

Ned B. Allen was interested in solving the problem of the double-time scheme in the play, a matter that does not concern me here, though his argument has other implications which are far more important. If acts 1 and 2 were written after the last three acts, they could represent a kind of commentary on, or contrast to, the action of those acts. And this is exactly what Shakespeare intended, whether or not he precisely wrote the acts in the order that Allen says he did.

From 3.2 onwards Othello behaves in a manner quite unlike the way he behaved earlier. Seduced by Iago’s scheming, he violates his own explicitly proclaimed modus operandi: to see before he doubts, and upon proof—act. In act 1 when challenged by Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, Othello calmly gives an account of his relationship with Desdemona, beginning with his visits to Brabantio’s home. While explaining this to the Duke and the council, he awaits the arrival of his wife whom Iago has been sent to fetch. When she comes in, she confirms everything Othello has said, and the matter is settled. The only ‘charms’ or drugs that Othello has used to win Desdemona are the stories of his adventures. Likewise, she maintains that she saw Othello’s visage in his mind; that is, she was not for a moment put off by racial considerations, unlike her father at present. Finally, she sues for the opportunity to accompany her husband to Cyprus, where he is being sent to oppose a Turkish invasion and, seconded by Othello, wins her suit. Everything in the council chamber is done in an orderly and systematic way.

In the second act, another threat to Othello’s and Desdemona’s peace arises, when Iago tricks Cassio into getting drunk and subsequently fighting with Montano. A riot ensues; hence, Othello once again has to leave Desdemona to quell the disturbance. Now Othello is not someone who can rest easily in uncertainty. In act 1, knowing what he knows, he remained calm. Here he does not know what has happened; he demands to know immediately how the brawl began and who is responsible. What follows is a kind of drumhead court procedure, not unlike the procedure followed in 1.3. Since Cassio is too filled with shame and chagrin to speak, Iago gives his account of what happened. His story is true as far as it goes, though of course, it is not the whole truth. After listening to Iago, and hearing nothing from anyone to contradict his account, Othello acts at once to cashier his lieutenant.

In these instances in acts, 1 and 2, Othello behaves rationally. In act 1, he knows what he knows and is confident that the evidence will bear him out, and it does. In act 2, he does not know what has caused the uproar though acts immediately to find out, obtaining sufficient evidence, he believes, to justify his summary decision to demote Cassio. In act 3, he fails to carry out these rational procedures effectively, despite his proclamation:

I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove;

And on the proof, there is no more though this:

Away at once with love or jealousy.

Iago fills him with doubts and provides only the flimsiest of supposed evidence to back up his story of Desdemona’s alleged infidelity. Othello, beset with anxiety to resolve his uncertainty, demands to know whether Desdemona has been unfaithful to him. As he says, ‘to be once in doubt / Is once to be resolved’. He allows himself to be persuaded without sufficient evidence that his wife is disloyal. He has only Iago’s words, and the charade of Cassio’s conversation with Bianca about the handkerchief in 4.1. He is further persuaded by Iago that she must die. When the moment comes in act 5 for him to kill her, she pleads with Othello to send for Cassio- -to get the truth from him about her innocence—just as she testified in act 1 before the council about Othello’s innocence. Her plea, ‘Send for the man,’ echoes Othello’s own demand in 1.3 that the court sends for the lady. Though Othello, under Iago’s spell and no longer in command of himself as he was then, when he knew the truth first hand, fails to follow his own declared procedure for action. He suffocates his wife—finding out too late how wrong he was. If only he had followed the very procedures he himself advocated and followed in acts 1 and 2, tragedy might have been averted.

More than either Brutus or Hamlet, Othello at the end does experience anagnorisis, the recognition of his error. It is this recognition that moves him, unlike Brutus, to suicide. Hamlet’s recognition comes after his murder of Polonius—’heaven hath pleased it so / That I must be their scourge and minister.’ Thereafter he forms no plot against Claudius though lets heaven direct his course, as it does on the ship to England when he uncovers Claudius’s plot against him. Had he placed his faith in the same providence he invokes in his talk with Horatio in act 5—if he had not resisted accepting his role as heaven’s scourge and minister—everything might have turned out differently? Though this is the ‘stuff’ regarding tragedy in Shakespeare.

If the protagonists of the middle tragedies fail to see alternatives to disaster, which Shakespeare subtly includes in the drama that cannot be noted of his later tragic heroes, in this respect, King Lear is a transitional play.

From the very first, Lear is told not once though twice—by Cordelia and Kent—that he is wrong and behaving rashly. His impetuous banishment of both of these loyal individuals leads directly to the problems he encounters almost immediately with his two elder daughters, Gonerill and Regan. He begins to see the error of his ways early, if we accept his comment in 1.5, ‘I did her wrong,’ as referring to Cordelia and not Gonerill. By the end of act 2, he fully realizes what the Fool has been trying to point out to him, that both Gonerill and Regan are evil and cannot be trusted. Though by then it is too late to undo the wrong he has committed from the first. Despite Cordelia’s attempts and others’ to save the king, Lear’s tragedy runs its course. Similarly, the earl of Goucester, also blinded by passion, paradoxically begins to see reality more clearly only after the Duke of Cornwall brutally puts out both of his eyes.

Macbeth requires no one to point out to him that assassinating Duncan is wrong. He knows it, and knows all along what he is doing. He knows that he not only jeopardizes his eternal jewel—his soul—by committing the murder; he is also teaching ‘bloody instructions’ to others. The revolt headed by Macduff in act 5 is a direct consequence of his murderous actions, which he has feared from the first, might undo him. He pursues his destiny with his eyes open, unlike the earlier tragic heroes. In a sense, he chooses his tragic destiny, spurred on by his queen and, like Claudius, by his own ambition to wear the crown. Tormented by insecurity, he commits murder after murder, until Macduff finally brings him down.

Antony, too, knows what he is about when he at first tries to make peace with Octavius Caesar and marries his sister, only to return all too soon to Egypt— and Cleopatra. Like Macbeth, he chooses his destiny, and nothing he does to alter the inevitable succeeds. Timon of Athens is in many ways like King Lear insofar as he rejects the warnings of his loyal steward and plunges headlong into bankruptcy. Though his cynicism at the end contrasts with Lear’s sad conclusion. When the old king tries to revive Cordelia, his concern is only for her. Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s last great tragedy and a link in many ways to the late romances. It is a play that A.C. Bradley called Shakespeare’s ‘tragedy of reconciliation.’

According to Willard Farnham, these later tragic protagonists represent a meaningful experiment in Shakespeare’s composition of tragedy, for each of them is a radically flawed individual. It is as if Shakespeare were setting for himself a problem: Can a person so deeply flawed still emerge as a tragic hero? As everyone else believes, Shakespeare succeeded. In his arrogance and pride, Coriolanus is certainly one of these flawed heroes. Though he is different from all of the rest in recovery a way to avoid disaster and therefore tragedy, if not for himself, then for his family and his country. Banished from Rome, Coriolanus allies himself with his former enemies, Aufidius and the Volscians, who plan to attack Rome. Given what he has experienced, Coriolanus understandably is willing to exact vengeance and destroy his native country.

The protagonists of the late romances, pre-eminently Prospero, see the alternatives to tragedy. ‘Kindness, ever nobler than indeed leads Prospero to forgive the malefactors who cost him his dukedom years ago and, in the union of Ferdinand and Miranda, which he has engineered, offer harbingers of a new era of peace and happiness.

Shakespeare saw that tragedy is inevitable, that alternatives to disaster exist, if we could though see them and, seeing them, act on them. Though human beings, being human, often suffer from moral blindness, wilful or otherwise, and fail to see those alternatives. When they do, as Orlando and Prospero, for example, surely do, tragedy is averted, and a comic, or happy, conclusion follows.

In everyday language, ‘tragic’ means ‘very sad’. Though surely, the term implies more than this. Tragic is a matter of destiny and disaster, which changes destinies due to disastrous mistakes, heroes and vengeful gods, defilement and purification, deplorable ending, cosmic order and transgression of the suffering process which purifies and transfigures.

One difficulty in defining the concepts of ‘tragic’ and ‘tragedy; is that of ‘nature’ or ‘culture’, the ambiguous terms float within descriptive and normative. Another problem regarding definition arises from the fact that ‘tragedy’ could have a triple effect, as ‘comedy’ may refer to works of art, real-life and world views or ways of structuring the feeling. Also, it implies a more chronic condition, less ostentatious. Along with tragedy as a matter of brutal blow from fate, we also ‘have’ tragedy implying an equilibrium shape of sad persistence of conditions, obscurity, and hopelessness.

For most people today, tragedy means a part of reality, not a work of art while some conservative critics say it is incomprehensible to talk about real life as tragic.

The concept of tragedy, regarding traditionalists, is based on a number of distinctions – within destiny and chance, free will and destiny, being noble and ignoble, blindness and insight, history and universe, lacks inner and outer circumstance, it might be perishable and inevitable, really tragic and pure simply pathetic or, it implies heroic defiance, humiliating inertia – which mostly do not have much force for us. Thus, some conservative critics must state that tragedy is not possible, while some radicals have concluded that it is no longer desirable.

A series of neoclassical theorists continued to examine the tragic answer regarding a painful experience producing pleasure. Three major explanations are presented, each with variations and modern versions have emerged in this period: didacticism, psychological conditioning, and aesthetic appreciation.

The belief of many theorists about the imperfection of the universe underpins a subtle change of focus in the theory of tragedy.

The psychological suggestion is to move to metaphysics, specifically in view of the universe as a two-tier system, crossing a mysterious evil force.

Romanticism, as used herein, describes the movement that grew from the late eighteenth century in Germany. It was rooted in the notion of dual universe with a metaphysical dimension, inaccessible to rational understanding.

Although Kant did not address the problem of tragedy, its systematic philosophy underlies many subsequent definitions. Knowledge is possible only on experience, although it is the prerogative of the spirit. Knowledge – the reference to the phenomenological world – not just recording characteristics of the product by our senses. The spirit imposes things which are perceived by our intuition and sensitive teaching. These frames are a spiritual priori.

Tragedy must disclose the nature of suffering, and moral resistance against suffering. Schiller condemns artistry, self-pity, simple compassion. ‘Pathetic’ is aesthetic only as far as it is sublime, only if it is an act of moral freedom.

Tragedy has ceased to be a defence for universal order, becoming rather a representative of free will of a man who confronts the universe. Schiller argues that we must accept the incomprehensibility of the universe. Seeing tragedy, the spectacle of human freedom, we are ourselves better prepared to face real-life suffering.

The purpose of tragedy is distinctive as to guide the mind to a divine origin, earthly existence should be regarded as futile and insignificant, all the troubles endured and overcome all difficulties.

Tragedy is the highest art form that looks almost fully for the Spirit. This spiritual realm in tragedy occurs, according to Hegel, primarily through characters that are driven by categorical imperative, a character that may incorporate contradictory forces; it is the representation, which demonstrates the futility of will. The terrible side of life: indescribable pain dinged from humanity, the triumph of evil, mastering chance, and irretrievable fall of the just and innocent is shown here for us; and, this is a significant indication of the nature of the world and existence.

Tragedy demonstrates the wisdom of renunciation. A conflict occurs within two equal forces entitled, each only wrong, insofar exclude the other. Greatness solves this conflict by repealing a unilateral particularity that has not been able to adapt itself to this universal harmony of being. This becomes a source of active genuine suffering in tragic characters, for this collision involves the entire body and soul.

Shakespeare presented a tragic vision which understood the endless possibilities for good and evil as close as human imagination ever has. His heroes/characters represent the ‘motors’ of psychological, societal, and cosmic nature forces which tend to reveal and praise humanity or do harm to it.

The judgement of tragedy that held him required an insistence upon the last mentioned. In a first instance, his heroes are free to do as they please and have the above mentioned freedom to turn back, even if they move toward their ruin as Oedipus did.

The entire tragic affirmation, still, is not restrained to the fate regarding the hero. Nevertheless, he is though the centre of an action which takes place in a context surrounding other characters, each of them contributing with their personal thoughts, a set of moral values or anti-values to the complexity surrounding the play. Given Macbeth’s demon-ridden Scotland, where unusual situations occur to men and horses, the virtuous Malcolm makes his presence, and society resists. Hamlet for instance had his trustworthy friend Horatio, and, for all the vicious acts resulting in blood, what was ‘rotten’ was purged.

The ‘defect’ in the hero may be a moral failing or, in some cases, a profusion of virtue; the flaw or guilt or dislocation may be in the universe in question, as dramatized as we’ve encountered in Shakespeare’s plays. Even if they do not spell repulsion, disorder, or misery regarding all these issues, Shakespeare seems to be referring to them as ‘inevitabilities of the human condition’. As in the words of the novelist E.M. Forster to describe the retrieved power regarding tragedy, the hero dies because ‘he has given us life.’

Such is the precarious balance a tragedian must maintain: the cold, clear vision that sees evil though is not maddened by it, a sense of the good that is equally clear though refuses the blandishments of optimism or sentimentalism. Few have ever sustained the balance for long. Aeschylus tended to slide off to the right, Euripides to the left, and indeed Sophocles had his hero transfigured at Colonus. Marlowe’s early death should perchance spare him the criticism his first plays warrant. Shakespeare’s last two tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, are close to the edge of a valueless void. The atmosphere of Macbeth is murky with evil, the action moves with almost melodramatic speed from horror to horror.

Shakespearean tragedies follow the classical tragedy conventions, though some such as King Lear rigidly adheres to the traditional form and spirit while Hamlet for instance, employs classical norms only secondarily in an attempt to dramatize a basically Christian dilemma.

Both plays reveal tragedy in the royal court of a country in order to raise the level of the action above the individual level of suffering and in order to provide a significant scope for an awe-inspiring climax. King Lear and Prince Hamlet both have moral defects in their characters which similarly start a route of tragic effects toward a disastrous catastrophe.

After one notes these remarks about the necessary and probable nature of the tragic plot, the significance of causal relationships is immediately apparent.

Some philosophers also focused upon the cause and effect in discussing the heroes’ flaws, the turning point, and the end or fixation of tragedy.

In portraying a character, the poet should always focus at the necessary or the probable nothing about the character or the plot should be affected by machinery, gods, or the irrational.

For instance, for the gods, Aristotle ascribes the power of seeing all things, though never of foreordaining or altering.

The unravelling of the plot should be attributed to consequences of men’s actions, primarily those of the tragic hero, a man.

The unhappy ending is the best one to culminate the artistically structured incidents and to arouse horror and pity.

Various interpretations explaining catharsis in the spectator exist, though in general catharsis has been described as a moral effect produced through the purification of the passions, pity and fear, artificially stirred, expel the latent pity and fear which the spectator brings from real life; the misfortunes of the hero cause pity for his situation and fear for the possibilities of human nature, though in the pleasurable calm which follows when passion is spent on an emotional cure is wrought.

In the case of the hero being sufficiently removed in stature, the outward conditions of life are not too much as those of the spectator.

1.3. Characters

The notions of hero and heroine are not only motifs for the material of a given historical and social point of view, though are also susceptible to a grand variety, indeed in the content of a well-based set of norms.

Modern day political personalities relinquish their heroic greatness with amazing rapidity when the ‘tide in the affairs of men’ (Julius Caesar) turns against them, whereas some celebrities continue to be admired despite criminal allegations and activities.

The hero and heroine figures in Shakespeare’s plays may be discussed from factual, interpretive, and evaluative perspectives. In the factual realm, Henry V, Beatrice and Benedict, and Viola—and secondarily, Olivia and Orsino, Othello, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra—are undeniably the protagonists of his most famous plays. The outcome of their various stories depends on the genre, and in two cases, on historical fact. The quality of each, however, leads to a less definitive area of questioning. The interpretation of each as a hero or heroine depends partially, of course, on the very definition of these ideas. For instance, Antony’s suicide may be poorly executed, though it follows in the tradition of the defeated Roman warrior, and must be addressed in that context. The evaluation of these heroes and heroines must similarly be accomplished within both personal and contextual discussions of the plays. Another example, do we admire Viola for her brash impersonation of the eunuch, or must we temper that admiration by remembering that women alone were simply unable to function independently in the culture represented by the play? How do we balance, examine, and enlarge our relationships to the heroes and heroines of our own time by carefully considering the heroes and heroines of his four centuries year-old plays?

Author Eugene Ionesco argues that the level of theatre of the absurd could include Shakespeare, Chekhov, Sophocles, or Aeschylus, as well as other authors of the world, more or less important. Beckett’s creatures that inhabit the world are representatives of a decomposed humanity, passed through a catastrophe, or an expectant humanity. If ancient tragedy took his subjects from world leaders or king’s gestures, the absurd theatre designed its ‘heroes’ as creatures devoid of content, living in a hostile world, abandoned by divinity. Tragic heroes are general types of humanity, with extraordinary spiritual dimensions. In general, the battle is unequal within men and gods, men being victims of divine will.

In accordance with the conversations with Claude Bonnefoy, Eugène Ionesco stresses, among other things, that the perpetrators of the so-called absurdities are very different from each other. The playwright, known for his playfulness with bending believes that the perpetrators of theatre of the absurd level could have included Shakespeare, Chekhov, Sophocles, or Aeschylus, as well as other authors of the world, is more or less important. Absurdity, a very vague concept, according to Ionesco is perchance misunderstood sometimes for the laws of the world, though surely, it is born with the universal willed urge, which will surpass the various conflicting impulses.

Lady Macbeth is the focus of much of the exploration of gender roles in Macbeth. As Lady Macbeth propels her husband toward murdering Duncan, she indicates that she must take on masculine characteristics. Her most famous speech addresses this issue.

In Act I, Scene 5, after reading Macbeth’s letter in which he details the witches’ prophecy and informs her of Duncan’s impending visit to their castle, Lady Macbeth indicates her desire to lose her feminine qualities and gain masculine ones. She cries

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts! unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top full

Of direst cruelty.

Clearly, gender is out of its traditional order. This disruption of gender roles is also presented through Lady Macbeth’s usurpation of the dominant role in the Macbeth’s marriage; on many occasions, she rules her husband and dictates his actions.

The disruption of gender roles is also represented in the weird sisters. The trio is perceived as violating nature, and despite their designation as sisters, the gender of these characters is also ambiguous. Upon encountering them, Banquo says

You should be women,

And yet your beards forbid me to interpret

That you are so.

Their facial hair symbolizes their influence in the affairs of the male-dominated warrior society of Scotland. Critics see the witches and the question of their gender as a device Shakespeare uses to criticize the male-dominated culture.

Issues relating to gender in Shakespeare’s dramas have inspired critical interest for centuries, though in the late twentieth century, gender has become of enormous importance to many Shakespearean scholars. Modern commentary has focused on a variety of issues related to gender, including relations and conflicts within the sexes, the concept of what it means to be masculine or feminine, and the ambiguous ground where differentiation within the sexes blurs.

Additionally, many critics have taken an interest in the historical component of gender on the Elizabethan stage, noting, for instance, the fact that female roles were originally performed by young boys. In addition, scholars have explored Shakespeare’s ideas about gender identity as they evolved over time in the different dramatic genres he produced, from the early comedies to the histories and later tragedies and romances. Taken as a whole, these studies portray the dramatist’s highly complex and varied suggestion to the question of gender as an evolving personal, social, and cultural phenomenon.

Critics note that the nature of gender identity in Shakespeare’s plays is generally portrayed from the perspective of the male, and, as a result, women are almost invariably seen as archetypal figures.

Writer Paula S. Berggren has explored Shakespeare’s mythic and supernatural suggestion to women and finds that they are often viewed as having innate energies of rebirth and renewal—energies which the men do not possess.

When Shakespeare appeared in the Elizabethan England, instantaneously, his contemporaries and the critique to come heralded that a poetic genius succeeded in turning Old English into Modern English that is, he found the literary creation of ‘brick’ and turned it into ‘marble’.

The national context was highly favourable by which Elizabeth the First had all the means and intention to develop a powerful empire; both outside the country and at home in the United Kingdom. Practically, all London had been built with institutions and monuments of architecture that we may see even today in that country.

The literary world declined after Shakespeare, due to the obvious fact that there was no greater writer to fill his place. Apart from this, other reasons regarded work, and the main ones were at the very source of the Elizabethan dramas. One must acknowledge that our first playwrights wrote in order to please the audience due to the desire of a patriotic people to see glimpses of the stirring life of those times reflected on the stage. As children, they wanted to see performances of the story; and as men, they wanted to know what it meant. Shakespeare’s greatness is based on the fulfilment of that desire. He took care of the story, while his genius was grand enough to be revealed in every play. As a result, good and evil camouflaged in his plays with evil never being attractive and as in any type of story, good triumphs as inevitably as fate does. Even if his language is coarse, due to the custom of his age to speak in that manner, and that in language, as in thought and feeling, Shakespeare is far above most of his contemporaries.

Upon looking into the origins of his remarkable work we understand he found himself protected by Lord Southampton in London; in whose house he met intelligent noblemen and books in translation from Greek and Latin writers. Then, there was another great playwright, exceptional Marlow who wrote ‘Doctor Faustus’ – a myth that was much spread in the UK and Europe at that time.

Critical writing in English was in fact inconsiderable before the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First (1558 – 1603), and it was only after 1660 when criticism became a recognized profession which a man of abilities and even genius gave the best part of their energies and their time.

Literary criticism is the application of thought to the business of writing and it is therefore an inevitable part of imaginative writing, although the imaginative writer is only recognized as a critic if he expresses his ideas on literature as a critic. It follows that imaginative writing of a high author can exist without the accompaniment of any explicit literary criticism at all but it cannot exist without literature. We need therefore to consider 3 questions:

  1. Where did these ideas come from, in periods when there was no discoverable literary criticism?

 2. If the professional critic is unnecessary for the production of literature, why did he ever come into existence?

 3. What is the value of literary criticism apart from the guidance that it offers to the imaginative writer?

Part of the answer to the first question has already been given.

The imaginative writer has always been his own critic but ideas do not operate in isolation and imaginative creation in a social activity.

When Shakespeare began writing, he found himself in a tradition of writing. He might depart from this tradition but he could not start afresh as though no literature had ever existed.

For his own mind, he was influenced by the way of life which has shaped the literature of his age. This way of life income was shaped by material forces such as the methods of food production and distribution and by ideas of his forces.

Thus the poet would also write in the light of the general ideas the philosophy that prevailed over him. Literature thought proceeded and still extensively proceeds from 3 sources apart from literature criticism:

from the writer’s own mind in the act of creating;

from the tradition that has shaped his mind;

From the philosophy and religion that has shaped the tradition.

The critic came into existence only to increase in the science of the public on literature. Before the introduction of printed books and the extension of interest in education caused by the Renaissance, the well informed public for literature was all. By 1850, printed has been in use in England for a century.

The concept of femininity is further explored by Linda Bamber, who has noted how frequently women are defined only in their relation to the actions or perceptions of men. Female roles, she observes, are notably downplayed in the histories, which generally deal with masculine power struggles.

In the comedies, Bamber contends that women are largely static creatures characterized by their avoidance of decision-making. In contrast, men in Shakespeare’s plays tend to take a more proactive stance toward their fates.

Critic Coppélla Kahn noticed, still, that this attitude could produce negative results, as in the cases of Macbeth and Coriolanus. Both use violent means, at the bidding of influential female figures—Lady Macbeth and Coriolanus’s mother, respectively—to prove their manhood, though only succeed in bringing about their own destruction. Shakespeare’s exploration of androgyny is also of interest to many critics.

The intersection of the male and the female appears most frequently in his romances, and it is in these works that commentators find some of the dramatist’s strongest heroes—who often make their mark while disguised as men or boys. This device of a woman assuming the guise of a man has interested many feminist writers, for instance, Juliet Dusinberre who argued that it allows Shakespeare the means to present the strengths and weaknesses of his feminine characters more fully, as well as an opportunity for the critique of gendered social mores.

In opposition, Jean E. Howard viewed the process of gender inversion through camouflage as potentially radical, though ultimately unable to effect social change. She argues that though female characters such as Rosalind and Viola assume a masculine gender for a time, they indeed return to their proper positions in society as (married) women.

Still other critics see Shakespeare’s attitude toward gender as a function of genre that changes from the comedies and histories to the tragedies and romances.

Sooner, Barbara J. Bono has focused on recovery an intertwined masculine and feminine discourse; the latter she describes as ‘double voiced’—that is, simultaneously adopting and deriding the conventions of the male-dominated culture.

Being one of Shakespeare’s most famous female characters, Lady Macbeth, when we first see her, she is already plotting the current King’s murder.

She is stronger, more ruthless, and more ambitious than her husband is. She may seem frightening, though she is frustrated, she will have to push her husband Macbeth into committing a vicious act in order for him to become King.

At one point, she wishes that she were not a woman so that she could do it herself (this is a recurrent motif examining the relationship within gender and power) and is key to understanding Lady Macbeth’s character.

Her husband implies that she is a masculine soul inhabiting a female body, which seems to link masculinity to ambition and violence.

The deed is done. Still, Lady Macbeth calms her husband’s nerves immediately after the murder. 

In short order, guilt begins to plague her and create a nightmarish existence.

By the close of the play, we watch as this once sure and steady woman loses her mind; she is constantly and desperately trying to wash away an imaginary bloodstain. Lady Macbeth is unable to cope.

Significantly, she (apparently) kills herself, signalling her total inability to deal with the aftermath of their crimes. 

Lady Macbeth is ‘all woman’, and Shakespeare, seems to use her, and the Witches, (‘something wicked this way comes’) to undercut Macbeth’s idea that

undaunted mettle should compose

Nothing though males.

Shakespeare portrays women as crafty, who use female methods of achieving power— that is, the notion of manipulation— to further their supposedly male ambitions. Women, the play implies, can be as ambitious and cruel as men, yet societal constraints deny them the means to pursue these ambitions on their own:

‘Here’s the smell of the blood still;

all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten

this little hand. Oh, Oh, Oh!’

Open to the powers of the air and of the night: occult world, medium type, prophetic, and moral at least in part, it should be the most unique imagination in all of Shakespeare’s plays. It has great limitations, inadequate intellectual powers, autonomy, and desperate strength.

Shakespeare’s female characters are not divided either in types or in stereotypes. Shakespeare gives women the opportunity to take initiatives so crucial in a world dominated by men and to blur the differences between male and female characteristics.

Macbeth excels cruel conspiracies abound terrible, bloody scenes and, above all, makes the fear taken to paroxysm, the cornerstone of the building. There, the Shakespearean tragedy develops an atmosphere of fear equal to that of Macbeth.

One of the persistent topics of interest in the field of Shakespearean studies is the one which considers the various roles that women play in the bard’s comedies and tragedies.

Literary and historical scholars affirm that women did not enjoy political, economic, or social parity with men during Shakespeare’s time and this historical reality is meaningful to keep in mind when analysing the variety of female characters in the plays of Shakespeare.

In this Shakespearean society, men were the ones who held exclusively the official posts of authority and power, and men who possessed the agency and influence to direct the outcome.

Nevertheless, the careful reader notices a curious trend in many of Shakespeare’s plays: many of Shakespeare’s female characters exercise a rather great deal of subtle forms of power and influence, and often do so in unusual and indeed subversive ways that challenge traditional gender roles.

Although the male characters generally fail to notice or refuse to acknowledge women’s authority and influence openly, they are affected by it in a significant manner. Even if Shakespeare himself might not have been ‘aware of the dissonances he create[d]’, the modern reader cannot help even if he is aware of them and in many cases, to view many of the characters presented in several plays by Shakespeare as some of the main motivators of action as well as some of the most complex characters overall.

Shakespeare’s work, then, when understood in the context of his own epoch, was indeed more radical than one might understand or consider it to be.

As Ehnenn writes, ‘female performance becomes performative, problematic, and threatens the dominant discourse when women’s actions reveal an ontological disliking from that discourse; it becomes unfixed, and threatens to expose and challenge the hegemony that previously sanctioned and enabled it’ resulting into a curious combination of suppression of some aspects of femininity and the elevation of others; not only in the plays as Shakespeare wrote them, though also in the ways they have been performed and interpreted in the centuries that have followed.

Shakespeare, by reflecting upon the limitations and opportunities available to all people in the time during which he lived and wrote, was able to create casts of characters who were authentic in their search for personal power and meaning, as well as authentic in their struggles to achieve such power and purpose.

The bard did not, however, resort to didacticism to impress his own beliefs and opinions upon the reader, he preferred creating complex and nuanced characters which were both compelling and likeable and, at times, morally questionable, Shakespeare challenged the reader to come to his or her own conclusions.

Shakespeare the playwright is often described as the first ‘modern’ English writer. He deserves this award because he has created complex and multidimensional characters, not based on the cliché of ‘stock’ characters.

The characters of Lady Macbeth, Lady Macduff and the three ‘weird sisters’ offers three different views of women and they perform three different game retirements.

Lady Macbeth is one of the most discussed characters in literature.

Contrary to many of the female characters created by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Lady Macbeth is powerful and power hungry, willing to manipulate her husband to make sure that the crown of Scotland stand on his head. It schools him on how to behave and even invoke dark spirits to ‘unsex’ them and any female inclination she might have that might cause her to behave in a vulnerable or feminine manner.

Lady Macbeth, until the end of the play is broken and disturbed. Her role in ‘Macbeth’ seems to warn desperate women regarding the fate that awaits them if they try to ‘escape’ their natural femininity.

It is safe to call Lady Macduff ‘the dramatic film’ of Lady Macbeth, because her behaviour is exactly the opposite of Macbeth’s wife.

Lady Macduff’s husband flees Scotland in fear of his life, but leaves a trace. It does criticize the actions of her husband, but holds her ground loyal to their family home, where she and her son are murdered by Macbeth’s henchmen. She personifies all the qualities of ‘feminism’ which Lady Macbeth has no knowledge: maternal love, devotion and steadfast passive acceptance.

‘The weird sisters’ represent a fascination across Europe and at the same time repulsion towards witches in Shakespeare’s day.

Women from all over Europe were charged and convicted of performing witchcraft. Those who were killed were sentenced for their crimes.

Shakespeare’s audience, for the most part, would have fully believed, and may have been appalled the witches in Macbeth. Their presence certainly added to the atmosphere of ‘creepiness’. It is interesting to note that they were hunted down, for the most part, it targeted only women and many have denounced the actions of those who persecuted a ‘witch’ as an attempt to punish women who were seen by the community as too independent or ‘weird

Largely through Macbeth’s relationship to them, the play becomes a representation of primitive fears about male identity and autonomy itself, about those looming female presences who threaten to control one’s actions and one’s mind, to constitute one’s very self, even at a distance. When Macbeth’s first words echo those we have already heard the witches speak:

So fair and foul a day I have not seen

Fair is foul, and foul is fair.

Finding ourselves in a realm with doubts upon the very possibility of autonomous identity, in the end, the play will reimaging autonomous male identity, throughout the ruthless excision of all female presence, its own peculiar satisfaction of the witches’ prophecy.

1.4. Stage directions

For the brave warrior, he is given a prophecy by three witches that he will be king of Scotland. This news leads Macbeth to seize the throne using devious and bloody means, showing how power corrupts a man.

The play establishes a motif of masculinity, which is traditionally defined by ideas of physical strength, assertiveness, loyalty and power or success. Both male and female characters exhibit these traits in deviant and heroic ways.

Macbeth is easily manipulated by his masculinity. He is a war hero who faced an army with his friend Banquo. As a result, his violent deeds are glorified by King Duncan. Once given the prophecy, however, Macbeth shows a lust for power.

Ambition, typically seen as a virtuous quality, becomes his downfall as he concentrates on becoming king.

As Macbeth secretly kills Duncan and his close allies, his ego and paranoia drive him insane. Macbeth represents usually positive attributes of masculinity gone wrong.

While he is considered the antagonist, Macduff precisely turns out to be the hero. Macduff is a faithful thane to Duncan and is suspicious about his murder. He embodies the qualities of patriotism and loyalty because he strives to make Scotland a great country. He is also vengeful after his family is slaughtered by Macbeth’s orders. Macduff reappears when he beheads Macbeth, thus restoring order to his country.

Banquo is Macbeth’s friend and a Scottish thane. Banquo fights alongside Macbeth and is renowned for his bravery. He is the ONLY other character to receive a prophecy from the witches. Banquo openly challenges the witches and does not automatically believe their predictions. Though he is suspicious of Macbeth after Duncan’s murder, Banquo shows loyalty to his friend. Unfortunately, Macbeth is paranoid of Banquo and has him assassinated. Banquo’s last deed of saving his son’s life exemplifies his heroic loyalty.

Malcolm is King Duncan’s son and true heir to the throne. The king’s murder is pinned on Malcolm, so he flees to England to build an army against Macbeth. Malcolm is a leader and is respected by his people.

During a moment of weakness, he shares with Macduff his hesitance to become king, since he is lust-filled and greedy. Macduff convinces him otherwise, which inspires Malcolm to lead the army against Macbeth’s forces. When Malcolm takes his place on the throne, he shows honour to his loyal thanes by making them earls. Power is a motif used by Shakespeare throughout the play.

The plot involves Macbeth trying to gain more power. He considers killing Duncan so that he will become king in his place. Lady Macbeth then convinces him that he should carry through with his plan. Macbeth also wants to kill anyone that threatens his chances of being king, including Banquo.

In the beginning of the play, Lady Macbeth is a strong-willed character. She takes on the role of a dominant male. She has great influence over her husband, who is weaker than she is.

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are opposites in many ways. He is weak, indecisive, and takes on the traditional female role in a marriage; she is strong, decisive, and takes on the traditional male role. One place in the play where Macbeth’s character is present is Act I, Scene 5, Lines 15-17. This is just after Lady Macbeth receives the letter from Macbeth. She says of Macbeth:

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be

What thou art promis’d: yet do I fear thy

nature

Is too full o’ the milk of human kindness.

Lady Macbeth thinks that being gentle is a weakness. When she says Macbeth is too full o’ the milk of human kindness, she means that he is too gentle and weak to murder Duncan.

Another part of the story that shows Macbeth’s character is Act II, Scene 2, Lines 57-74. Macbeth has just murdered Duncan, and he is feeling guilty about doing it. He wishes Duncan were alive again. He is also paranoid that someone will discover he has murdered Duncan. He is afraid that his guilt will be a stain on him, like the blood. Macbeth is becoming irrational in this scene. He is busy worrying about his guilty conscience when there are things to be done.

Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, is calm and rational. She tells Macbeth to wash his hands and change his clothes so people will not discover his crime.

By the end, Macbeth is finally convinced that he should murder Duncan. Lady Macbeth persuades Macbeth to achieve his goal of becoming king by taunting him and telling him that they cannot fail.

Furthermore, Lady Macbeth plans and organizes the murder of Duncan – all that Macbeth knows is that he is going to kill Duncan. He does not know exactly how to go about it. Lady Macbeth is the one who plans everything and leads Macbeth step-by-step through the murder. In Act II, Scene 2, Lines 1-13, it is shown what Lady Macbeth has done to prepare for the murder:

That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold . . .

The doors are open: and the surfeited grooms

Do mock their charge with snores:

I have drugg’d their possets . . .

I laid their daggers ready, he could not miss ‘em.

Macbeth might be viewed as a reflection regarding a concern with the ambiguities found in names and identity forming an abiding concern in Shakespeare’s drama, and that has been broadly analysed in connection with other works in the canon as well.

In an attempt to understand Macbeth, I have found that there is a fundamental question that must be answered: What is the nature of the conflict and how is that conflict treated in the work?

Macbeth is such a vital character that in some ways the play seems to be a one-character play, and in the work, one cannot find any other single character that can oppose him.

In looking for such a character and failing to find one, I came to understand that the conflict is not within the character, but in the play.

The play concerns itself with the tension within the individual and society by exploring and exposing the instability of its foundation: communication.

Macbeth is clearly cognizant of the fact that society is based on the interaction of the outward images of individuals rather than the interaction of the individuals themselves.

Macbeth understands that although he cannot change what is meant to be he can ,through words and actions, alter his image. Because the outward image is nothing more than a representation, it need not be an accurate one. In other words, he can manipulate his image to present the appearance of an inner nature wholly unlike his true nature; he can lie.

Macbeth is both a hero and a deserter, often at the same time, all depending on what significance of the words one uses.

Macbeth is the hero of the story though he does not act as one, except for one moment at the beginning of the play. After the vicious act upon Duncan, he does not ever become his heroic self again. Macbeth then becomes a coward, which he demonstrates by killing in cold blood all those individuals that pose indeed a small threat towards him, including his companion and comrade, Banquo who is suspicious of him: which can be seen in the text.

That, trusted home,
Might yet enkindle you unto the crown
Besides thane of Cawdor.

If we were to state that Macbeth was a deserter in today’s meaning of the word, which is an old one at that and use it in a Shakespearean play, we could be seriously misunderstand the word. By killing the king while he was sleeping, Macbeth was displaying some very dire signs of being a deserter.

I go and it is done; the bell invites me
Hear it now Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven, or to hell.

Macbeth is blaming others for his weakness. He cannot be seen as acting in a heroic way, as he is the one who killed all those people in cold blood and committed regicide in order to obtain the throne.

I am settled and bend up
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.

Macbeth can also be seen as acting in a very brave way by indeed attempting to kill the king, though it is an also very stupid thing to do because if he were to be caught he would almost certainly be killed.

Macbeth fits our description of a hero in the context that the story revolves around him and so therefore, he is the hero of the story, though he does not act in a heroic way, it can be noted to be the ‘Hero’ though not ‘Heroic.’ Therefore, one way or another, Macbeth can be seen as both types of hero as he is the person who saves the day from the traitor-the Thane of Cawdor, though also in the other meaning of the word, as he is the central male figure of the story throughout the play.

So, is Macbeth a hero or coward? Well, that depends on what connotation of the words you use. Macbeth is both of them for at least some part of the play.

Macbeth can also be seen as a deserter as he acts in a cowardly way by killing lots of innocent people, though he does not lack courage which is how Chambers Dictionary describes a coward, as Macbeth fought the Traitor and he did not moved on when he found out that Macduff was ‘Not of woman born,’ so, Macbeth can be noted to have acted in a ‘cowardly’ way though he is not a ‘coward.’

In addition, thou opposed, being of no woman born
Yet I will try the last.

He also can be seen to be weak-because he listens to what the witches say whilst Banquo, who also heard them talking, does not take it seriously and so by listening to what the witches say, Macbeth becomes disoriented.

Ultimately, Macbeth fails as a hero because of the way he acts as a man by killing Banquo and Macduff’s family- all of whom were innocent.

One cannot really say whether he/she approves or disapproves due to the way the words have derived from the original meanings of them though if we were going to use today’s language, I would agree with the statement that Macbeth is a deserter as a man and a hero as a soldier, whose dying words sound heroic.

I throw my warlike shield: Lay on Macduff
And Dammed be him that first cries ‘Hold, Enough.

In the end, we see that Macbeth’s course has led him full circle, returning him to that which he was before the play began a soldier. For all his attempts to make his outward appearance different than his nature, he could not change that nature.

The division that Macbeth creates within his societal image and his innate nature made both valueless to himself and to those around him. His total opposition to society’s implied desire that an individual’s image should not contradict his nature led to his destruction.

Macbeth’s alleged madness is often linked to his use of emotive language. For example, ‘full of scorpions is my mind’ makes it sounds as though Macbeth’s mind is poisoned, or out of his control, it is perhaps likely that Macbeth is referring to the conflicting nature of his mind, and the inner turmoil that he is facing.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth was born due to a feeling regarding ambition. Without any hesitation, ambition represents an amazing interior force to spread upon the individual in order to rise with strength in life just when it is aimed in the proper way.

Macbeth decides based on an ambition to become King though he does it by killing the present ruler, who is his kinsman, who shown only love and generosity, likewise, he is a visitor to his house.

Macbeth takes into considerations all these factors and deliberates to introduce the manner of killing the king. He indeed realizes that his role is to be a good host instead of taking a life. Though his wife, Lady Macbeth overpowers him and ‘gives a hand’ in committing the crime, one can realize who the real monster is. She is harsh and ingenious without any type of womanly qualities. Due to her restless desire to rule over the country she puts behind and the qualities regarding moral values and concentrates only upon the goal. Not only is her end unfair though she also employs most unfair methods to achieve it.

A proverb adequately applies to her: ‘As you sow, so shall you reap.’ She has to bear the consequences for her evil deed, goes insane and commits suicide. Those who commit such deeds suffer on a mental and spiritual level, regardless of how hard they might try to conceal their real condition. Ergo ‘look before you leap’ is a good advice to take into consideration for all and sundry who undertake some task.

Macbeth believes the witches’ prophesies, encounters them as they support his secret ambitious desire. In any play, having contact with evil surroundings, either natural or supernatural, never results well. It is the ‘recipe’ for disaster and inevitably death.

Often, we see and read in the media stories revealing innocent individuals being killed, even though the foul deed is dreadful for any normal human being. A spouse can form or mar the life of the other spouse.

A woman should reveal her strengths or weaknesses in her relationship with her other half. Those two should be at the same level. Neither should she neither take a bow in front of him unnecessarily nor make him feel empowered.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare reveals the tragic results of Macbeth’s craving for power. Revealed as an honorary worthy and loyal soldier, and filled with goodness and respect, Macbeth’s ‘obsessive’ ambition to become King follows the end of the dignified King Duncan. Macbeth’s kingship is nothing but a supreme form of derision.

Power becomes psychosis, and at ‘night’ Macbeth moves forward to madness, a madness of a king which cannot escape and takes the form of obsessive desire mined by fear.

The combination of power and ambition blinding man reappears in many of Shakespeare’s works. The same manner in which this combination played an important role in Julius Caesar for instance, the impetuous effects of ambition and power also affect the main in Shakespeare’s disputed play in the this paper. 

Ambition has the capacity to highly lead a character into accomplishing amazing goals in life.  Still, when it is taken too far, ambition can become a character’s main end leading flaw which ultimately ends his road for success.

Throughout the play, Macbeth is seen nonstop trying to reach more goals in life all determined from the main prophecy that as being a king.  

The first time ambition plays a harmful role in Macbeth’s quest for power is when he in fact plans to kill the king.  King Duncan, the present king when Macbeth hears the prophecy, honours Macbeth with great fervour after his many military accomplishments in the name of Scotland.  Because Macbeth desires kingship over his own morals, he kills Duncan in the night after honouring Duncan with a feast. 

The second time Macbeth’s ambition gets the best of him occurs when he orders the death of both Banquo and Macduff’s family.  In killing these people, specifically Macduff’s family, Macbeth shows his true ambition of reigning as king by killing all possible threats to his reign displaying such a state of paranoia.  This ambition in Macbeth’s life eventually leads to his fall from power because he cannot control its influences.  If Macbeth had not given in to the murderous temptations and deceptive actions that came from his ambition for power, then he might have had a peaceful and successful rule as king of Scotland. During the last moments of a Macbeth performance on stage, as he feels himself increasingly cornered by enemies

The duplicity of Macbeth’s repeated question—its capacity to mean both itself and its opposite—carries such weight at the end of the play, because the whole of the play represents in very powerful form both the fantasy of a virtually absolute and destructive maternal power and the fantasy of absolute escape from this power; the peculiar texture of the end of the play is generated partly by the tension between these two fantasies.

Shakespeare used the stylistic devices he was fully aware his Renaissance readers would approve. Without taking into consideration cultural differences, we can recognize some of them which Shakespeare uses stylistic devices to deepen his readers’ understanding of the play

Frequent symbols assure main aspects of reference throughout the play, often having very well established correlations for a reader. For instance, the presence of birds is one nature scene which symbolizes superstitions.

Foreshadowing is where, much like the witches predictions, the readers are given clues as to what is to follow.

The witches set the tone with a storm and predictions that Macbeth’s life will become so confused he will find it difficult to differentiate between right and wrong. Their later predictions foreshadow a downfall the readers are aware of long before Macbeth is willing to accept their implications.

The play itself opens with thunder and lightning, immediately foreshadowing the tumult which will break upon the lives of all the characters.

Through dramatic irony, the enacted actions by character have a dual and often darker meaning. Often times, only the readers can appreciate the dramatic irony of a scene as they continue reading. When Duncan comments on the ‘pleasing air’ of Macbeth’s castle, the readers know that this air will be the last he breathes. The most powerful examples of dramatic irony include Macbeth’s acceptance of the apparitions’ seeming assurances that no man ‘of woman born shall harm Macbeth’ and that he is safe until Birnam Wood moves. Macbeth continues to feel confident of his safety even though the readers, through dramatic irony, have seen the equivocations of the witches long before Macbeth realises them.

Lady Macbeth’s portrayal begins with the powerful elements of her ambitious and successful plotting of Duncan’s demise, effective rhetorical manipulation of her husband to ‘be a man’ and take action, and her potential position as Macbeth’s equal in their relationship, his desired ‘dear partner of greatness.’ Still, for the most part, these powerful moments are all in the service of disorder and the unnatural.

From the beginning, Lady Macbeth’s cultural value has generally included the sense that she is monstrous – she not only has crossed the boundaries of appropriate behaviour for a wife and subject, but she has called on demonic forces to help her achieve her goals.

The play’s narrative about her ambition to obtain position and fame collapses into a heavily gendered cautionary tale about tyrannical overreaches and their demise. Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth borrows from earlier ‘monstrous women’ stereotypes though also provides an iconic model for later interpretations of her character.

Are there other productive ways of representing Lady Macbeth without re-inscribing her within the traditional evil female stereotypes such as the witch and seductress?

A tangle of kings, earls, and thanes, Macbeth whips Shakespeare’s tale of power, corruption, and devilry into an emotional whirlwind. Macbeth’s goriness alone might assure its appeal to the reader.

The plot thickens with intrigue, not to mention the fascinating interplay between the title character and his diabolical wife in a world of literal darkness. Here light is as likely the bringer of terror as of salvation.

Throughout the entire play, characters in Macbeth are frequently transitioning of abiding by gender roles. In the meantime, others prefer to maintain their ambiguity. In the end, this paper debates the fact that due to gender roles, in order to break free, the process will be destructive.

During Macbeth’s appearance as the perfect individual in the beginning of the play (courageous, powerful soldier), Lady Macbeth doubts his masculinity and manipulates him, causing chaos in the end.

On the other hand, there is Macduff. He follows established gender roles and is capable to revive peace and order to the world. This man is humble, and does not want power; all he wants is justice and fairness. His honesty in a play like Macbeth is like a breath of fresh air. Just as every human being sheds blood when wounded, every human being suffers guilt when violating the moral law.

Lady Macduff plays a role in front of Lady Macbeth, revealing what might occur when people do not follow their gender role, fact which ends in chaos.

Throughout the Elizabethan society, gender roles were definitely different.

Men had to rule the household and their power was determined based on their physical commanding and strength during war. On the other hand, women had only one goal: to take care of the household, their children and morally sustain their spouse. These strict and traditional views, it was without a doubt outrageous to free themselves from one’s gender roles. But when an individual is a member of Britain’s nobility, the interest is higher. Ergo, Shakespeare took a huge risk by expressing the unthinkable in the play.

The weird sisters are the ones with features of both genders and are not tied by established gender roles, leading to a path filled with chaos and lack of moral values.

Power can change people in a way that is incomprehensible. Power can make one so greedy that he/she will do anything for it and will not let anyone, or thing stand in his/her way, power can corrupt.

Power is something that if placed in the wrong hands, can spoil a lot.

The greed for power can make people do outrageous things, and once the power gets into the wrong hands, it will be abused, and can disrupt the sort order that power is supposed to hold within the society, it changes people and it is mostly for the worst. Still, not in all cases. Macbeth portrays this well, and clearly.

Maybe not only the spreading of ideas in literature and art of the modern antiquity era had to have been a phenomenon whose magnitude is comparable to that of Shakespeare’s reception in the culture of the four centuries that have passed from death ‘of the Avon swan’. It was even said that his creation represents ‘a barometer of the cultural movements between the European seas, revealing a romantic or classic foundation of an entire era’.

The relationships between the various elements that make up the history of culture are, of course, more complex than it tends to portray such a definition; on the other hand, it is hard to only accept two ways to reduce the expression of the human mind. It was noted, however, that Shakespeare was ‘a territory where they met and faced successive judgments and passions of the era’. But if Shakespeare addressed to the entire humanity, if it he was once called ‘greater than eternity itself’ it is not less true that it includes a specific substance to a world of his creation of an era, of a mentality. That he focuses a whole featured vision that just balances of the sixteenth and seventeenth century in the glorious twilight of the English Renaissance.

Creating the Shakespearean work was possible in a time wherein there were doubts upon the traditional vision of the Middle Ages; a new meaning for the relationship between humankind and nature was given, the ultimate measure of all things became new – as in classical antiquity – the human nature being strong, doomed in victory.

Culture was going through a complex period of affirmation: the pastoral novel Arcadia, published in 1580 by Philip Sidney, introduced often subtle psychological analysis; the six books of the Fairy Queen poems composed by Edmund Spencer, associate in a meaningful vision, medieval chivalric traditions, the Greek Roman allegory inspired elements of the ancient British folklore.

In the works of Kyd, Peele, Greene, or especially Christopher Marlowe human personality takes charge, overwhelming in its aspirations to assert the entire creative power, ‘shaping a new world upon the generous hero’. After a long timid imitation of the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, the second well known English writer of the Middle Ages, the era which Shakespeare lived, he proclaimed confidence in the ability of literature to integrate rational grounds in human nature and composition.

The oldest and the latest dramas of life in English history regarding craftsmen and peasants are worthy counted to be a matter of poetic literature in order to recognize the human soul forever and everywhere.

The nearly thirty year career as a writer and Shakespeare’s poetic nature coincide thus the affirmation of a literature whose supreme virtue is faith in human creature and powers to uncover the fundamental truths of the world. In this so diverse spiritual landscape, dealing with Shakespeare’s creation is a well-known, very special place.

The controversy that has sparked his years of life dates back to the writer; with short periods of time, they were resumed, sometimes with violence designed to divide the man from his works. Even in an uncertain manner, Macbeth represents a ruthlessly small drama, marked by a never ending eloquence, surprising even for the author himself.

Shakespeare overshadows other plays with the purpose of maintaining a continuous ‘line’ of tragic intensity, with the help of darkness and its evil connotations:

My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man that function

Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is

But what is not.

By the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African-American studies, and queer studies. In a comprehensive reading of Shakespeare’s works and comparing Shakespeare literary accomplishments to accomplishments among leading figures in philosophy and theology as well, Harold Bloom has commented that, ‘Shakespeare was larger than Plato and than St. Augustine. He encloses us, because we see with his fundamental perceptions.’

For future references, Graham Bradshaw aptly wrote an essay describing the horror surrounding nature in Macbeth, and Robert Watson has focused to its Gnostic affinities.

Shakespeare throws us into everything that is not ourselves, not so as to induce an ascetic revulsion in the audience, but so as to compel a choice between Macbeth and the cosmological emptiness, the kenoma of the Gnostics.

Regarding the aesthetic greatness of Macbeth, there is no doubt.

The play cannot compete with the purpose and depth of Hamlet and King Lear, or the outstanding ache behind Othello, or the never ending panorama of Antony and Cleopatra, and still, Macbeth is on top of the list of all the high tragedies.

Shakespeare’s never ending strength is radical personal issues, and this is his most personalized drama, played out in the guilty imagination shared with Macbeth.

There is no other critical method that functions in the same manner as well for Thomas Middleton or John Fletcher and for Shakespeare is going to enlighten Shakespeare for the readers.

Regarding us, his devoted readers, Shakespeare is some type of a mortal god; our interpretations for measuring him fail in the attempt to apply them. Macbeth, as its best critics have seen, barely shows us that crimes against nature are repaired when a legal manner or social order is restored. Nature is crime in Macbeth, but hardly in the Christian sense that calls out for nature to be redeemed by grace, or by expiation and forgiveness.

As in King Lear, we have no place to go in Macbeth; there is no sanctuary available to us. Macbeth himself exceeds us, in energy and in torment, but he also represents us, and we discover him more vividly within us the more deeply we delve.

The works are peppered with allusions grounded in classical and contemporary literature, the bulk of them at that time not available in English and in historical data discussed here does not follow that the character had such knowledge, or even the existence of circumstances he could have accomplished. Moreover, in several parts, it demonstrated knowledge surrounding England’s laws, since in addition to the literary allusions using a variety of legal terms.

One last factor upon the language used in the work of Shakespeare is given by the presence of his jargon phrases from Cambridge University, which we know with certainty due to documents and archives that William did not attend as a student.

His death in 1616 was not anything special. It was specific to that period as the death of an artist also occur an outpouring of poems in his memory by contemporary authors, which also did not happen in the case of Shakespeare, his death remains just an event for the Stratford residents.

Chapter II

The role of myth in literature and dramatic arts in the 20th century

Questions of class are fundamental to nineteenth-century British history. Class was an important part of contemporaries’ world-view and class distinctions were deeply incorporated in the social fabric. For much of the century class was not only the one most important form of social categorization, but also the foundation of understandings of political and social change and of the narratives which were constructed around them. For contemporaries, the history of the nineteenth century was written above all in the turning fortunes of the classes, the eclipse of the aristocracy, the victory of the middle class and the challenge of the working class.

The 19th century’s political historiography discovered no position for women’s or gender history. Focusing on the progress of political institutions and on masculine politicians it was assumed that the politics in the nineteenth century owed little to women, separately from a few exceptional examples. Assessments of nineteenth-century gender and politics have endured a series of paradigm turns since the 1970s and the subject is now characterized by contradictory narratives about the model of women in public life in that period. This has tended to similar discussions about identity, men and politics a domain that until now had been viewed as unproblematic. The effect of these theoretical discussions has been to construct a different vision, of the lives of women, men and the entire panorama of nineteenth-century political history.

In 1960, the progress of social history did little to counteract the supposition that political history was written without mention to women or gender. The centre remained on political establishments and masculine political actors, although centred in working-class than elite communities.

In 1970, the rise of women’s history, characterized by Rowbotham’s Hidden from History, contributed to foreground women’s model in the politics of the nation. Although pioneer women’s historians had various objectives, there was an underlying feminist agenda that distinguished their work as they searched both to reveal the roots of the ideology of patriarchal oppression and to follow the origins of women’s political action as a means of explaining the contemporary fighting for women’s liberation. This conducted to a search to recover past heroines of women’s movements that imitated the men approach of many traditional political historians. There was also a concentration on the early-twentieth-century campaigns of female vote campaigners that concentrated on women’s struggle to obtain the franchise and centred on women’s penetration of the high political territory. A consequence of this research was that many of the early writers assumed there was little female political agency either outside the campaign for the vote or for much of the nineteenth century.

A second theoretical current appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, influenced by the application of social scientific, literary and cultural methodologies to history. This supposed the categories of gender, race and class as central to any social structure. The most influential and innovative example of this conceptual progress was Davidoff and Hall’s Family Fortunes. They underlined their intentions thus: “In particular, our concern has been to give the neglected dimension of gender its full weight and complexity in the shaping and structuring of middle-class social life in this period.” In a thesis, they tried to demonstrate the crucial impact of changing gender roles on the formation of a different middle-class identity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They recognized the important nineteenth-century rhetoric of separate territories in establishing boundaries between the public and private worlds of the English middle class. While public life was seen as an exclusively male territory characterized by the virtues of action, determination and resolution, the domestic setting was where women’s moral virtues of gentleness, tenderness, piety and faith developed.

These ideals were originally expressed in England by a group of evangelicals and being suited to the values of the appearing middle class, they became central to the bourgeois identity of the nineteenth century, absorbed by government policy-makers and social commentators.

The use of ‘separate spheres’ ideologies to characterize gender relations mainly in this period has been contested by historians who have sustained that the discourse of domesticity was neither novel to the nineteenth century nor restricted to a unique social class. There was separation of responsibilities, mainly among the middle class but these did not necessarily take place along public/private boundaries and were permanently negotiated. In special fields, such as philanthropy, the boundaries between the public and private domains intersected. Historians have continued to consider the use of the language of separate domains. A recent contributor to the debate has sustained that ‘several spheres’ is a more adequate term to describe the ways in which middle-class women interpreted their public and political identity and that it is difficult to establish one definition of such a complex term. These multiple interpretations of ‘separate spheres’ reflect the mentalities of nineteenth-century commentators themselves. Although many conduct manuals and social-policy makers glorified the virtues of the bourgeois culture of domesticity, some radicals and early feminists embraced the idea of the home as an activating site for specifically female political agency. Thus the notion of public and private were ideological composes utilized in different ways rather than fixed, unchanging entities.

Davidoff and Hall contributed to a chronology of women and politics that had been based by the early women’s historians. The nineteenth century was showed as a period of closure, excluding the women and the working class from specific types of political activity. The rising of the bourgeoisie, the ideology of domesticity and economic trends separating the home from the workplace, confirmed the political arena as a middle-class men world from which women and the poor were excluded.

This world was only broken through by women in the second half of the century when new opportunities for participation were opened in the emergent domain of local government and extra-governmental organizations such as school boards. This Whiggish interpretation considered the 1860s and 1870s as the guide of campaigns for women’s civil and political rights. Recently, this chronology has been challenged by a range of historians, who have underlined the richness of women’s political culture earlier in the century and have argued for a more complex evaluation of nineteenth-century politics which does not privilege women’s campaigns for the vote over other domains of political engagement.

Davidoff and Hall’s work described one theoretical approach to the centre on gender and its use as a category of historical analysis. A second response appeared in the 1980s from historians influenced by French post-structuralism. Scott discussed for the primary role of language in the construction of gendered identity. Gender should be used as an analytical category for historical investigation recognizing its turning and unstable nature. Many feminist historians had used the terms ‘gender’ and ‘woman’ as alternative, but Scott wanted to displace from the identification with the biological categories of male and female and explore the cultural meanings of masculinity and femininity. Scott’s argument was summarized by Bock: “Gender is a category, not in the sense of a universal statement but . . . in the sense of public objection and indictment, of debate, protest, process and trial.”

For historians it was considered that such theoretical methods would initiate new domains of historical enquiry, mainly in the area of political history where power relations between and within the sexes were continually contested. Scott’s contribution was subject to challenge from women’s historians who considered that they had been responsive to issues concerning women’s multiple cultural identities and sustained that her approach would lead to the experiences of women in the past being reduced to ‘subjective stories’.

The discussions were mingled with the wider debate in the historical profession about the contribution of postmodernism and its concentration on the construction of meaning through language.

The emphasis on discussed gender identities and a more cultural approach to political history has conducted women’s historians to revise their focus. Discussions on the endurance of the patriarchal setting have moved on to a consideration of the limit of women’s political agency within cultural, societal and economic constraints. The emphasis is on the variety of women’s experiences within the complex political culture of the nineteenth century. Recent work has concentrated on the variety of women’s political practice and the continually turning contexts in which they operated. This has conducted to a revival of interest in elites, the traditional domain of study by political historians, to discover some methods by which women undermined institutional, legal and political constraints on their civic role, their property rights and their interaction with the political nation.

further consequence of the discussion between gender and women’s historians has been led new research on competing versions of masculinity in the nineteenth century and the implications for political activity. Men and power have been seen as synonymous and these explorations offer new ways for interpretations and explanations of political activity. Notions of nineteenth-century masculinity are beginning to be discussed as historians consider that the contested versions of manhood signify wider debates about the structure of power. Clark considers the impact between working-class, bourgeois and aristocratic concepts of masculinity in its domestic context and gender connections within the industrial and manufacturing communities. She takes the same approach to women’s historians, viewing the family as a site for public discussion, rather than as a private space. She argues that Chartists, for instance, used the rhetoric of domesticity for many purposes: to support manhood, to appeal to women and to extract concessions from the state. For working-class men, fighting to come to terms with the demands of industrialization, a feminized workforce and bourgeois notions of respectability and the patriarchal family, developing the concept of domesticity allowed them to reaffirm their control. Although some Chartists sustained for a more egalitarian family structure, others used the language of domesticity to justify their superiority over working-class women, saying that they wished to protect and support them.

This picture of gender tensions within political movements in the nineteenth century has been supported by studies of different political campaigns, such as the anti-slavery movement, the Anti-Corn Law League, the demand for female vote and the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts. The objectives of male and female campaigners conducted to confrontation. For instance, many activists for an extension of the franchise deliberately excluded a demand for female vote from their campaigns, on purpose to secure the vote for working men. There were also gender conflicts in the trade-union movement.

The concept of the ‘family wage’, contributed to the adoption of gender-specific restrictive practices and the increasing predomination of the male-provider system. Trade unions adopted the language of the bourgeois family model in the struggle over male salaries. Male-dominated trade unions made rights for men, pressed for the interdiction on female employees and permanently reiterated the intention of creating circumstances in which women could fulfil their duties as wife and mother. The model of gender and class conflict could be more complicated. Elite socialist women, for instance, campaigned for the extension of the franchise to all adults, not just women. A collection of essays has underlined the ‘connections between the exercise of power and the construction of masculinities’ recovering the neglected contribution of men to the vote campaigns. It discusses how men with different agendas and from a wide range of political, economic and social backgrounds were able to contribute to the women’s vote movement in Britain. The gender roles within the trade-union movement were not always marked by male domination and much depended on the social context of individual trade unions. In some textile districts, the organization of the workforce continued to be based on similarity networks well into the nineteenth century, trade-union politics being marked by far more gender collaboration. There can be no open account of men and politics and recent work has complicated the traditional story of men’s dominance of the public domain. The contested nature of masculinity and men’s different experiences means that direct connections between men and power are weak.

As the historiography of political engagement in the nineteenth century has become more varied, historians have reconsidered the sources available to get back the nature of public participation, for instance, an examination of the representation of women and politics in the political culture of the period. The female body was a long-established symbol used in political prints, pamphlets, paintings, cartoons, ballads, newspapers, poetry and literature and in political meetings and as a campaigning strategy. For instance, the nation was usually characterized as female, in the figure of Britannia. Theatricality remained an important component of political expression throughout the century and female politicians were mainly effective at utilizing this method of campaigning and activism. Rogers observed the example of Eliza Sharples, an early feminist and supporter of Richard Carlile who, in her public lectures, appeared as a series of female figures to imply the different aspects of her public duties and political theology. “She spoke as Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility and wisdom standing on a floor of white thorn and laurel; as Eve; as Liberty, the symbol of republican tradition; and as Hypatia, to highlight the personal sacrifices demanded by her mission.”

At the end of the century the ideals of the women’s vote movement were dramatized in demonstrations and meetings, songs, plays, poems, novels, banners and paintings. The movement trusted heavily on processions and printed material to convey its message. The white, purple and green colours of the Women’s Social and Political Union ornated flags, rosettes, ribbons and hats imitating strategies used in electoral politics from the eighteenth century. Banners were used extensively, they were imitated and were created from within the movement. Women’s traditional skills were employed in a collective and creative effort. The designs were influenced by the arts movement and designed simple and powerful images of women in the public and domestic territory. The female political figure could also have more negative connotations, for example, the figure of the dissolute woman often means political corruption. The notion of ‘petticoat government’ signified unnatural female influence in public affairs or the domestic setting and was associated with royal women who were viewed as involving in politics. The Queen Caroline affair, Queen Adelaide’s interventions in the reform crisis and the accession of Victoria all resulted in a confusion of popular pamphlets, ballads and images of the queens utilizing the symbolism of the government.

Theatre is a literary genre created to be represented. It is the art of composing dramatic works.

The performing arts deal with everything related to writing, interpretation, production, changing rooms and settings. Drama has Greek origin and it means “to do”, and is associated with the idea of ​​action. It is understood by drama the history that narrates the events of some characters. It has its origin in the dances realized by the primitive man around the fire. These scenes had repercussions in China, Japan and India. At the coronation of the pharaohs, theatrical symbolic representations were made.

The theatre has been used as a complement to religious celebrations, as a means to disseminate political ideas, to spread propaganda, as entertainment and as art. Also known as theatre is the building where the plays are represented.

A representation consists of two essential elements: actors and public. The representation can be mimic or use the language. Characters do not always have to be human beings. The puppets or actors have been very appreciated throughout history. You can enhance a representation through costumes, make up scenery, accessories, lighting, music and special effects. These elements are used to help create an illusion of places, times, different characters, or to emphasize a special quality of representation and differentiate it from everyday experience.

The theatre was born in Athens, Greece, between the 5th and 6th centuries BC. The Athenians celebrated the rites in honour of Dionysius, god of wine and vegetation. These primitive ritual ceremonies eventually evolve towards the theatre, constituting one of the main cultural achievements of the Greeks. Each of the cities and colonies had a theatre.

The first constructed theatre was dedicated to Dionysius. It divided into three parts the orchestra, the place for the spectators and the scene. The first Greek theatres consisted of two forms: a circular space where the statue of Dionysius and the hemicycle for the spectators stood. It was accessed through two alleys. The steps were semi-circular.

The Romans adopted the form and layout of the Greek theatres but built tiers in places where there were no hills.

Theatrical forms of Greek drama were tragedy, satirical drama, comedy, and mime. The first two were considered the most civilized, while the last two were associated with the primitive.

The actors were dressed in their clothes to wear but they wore masks that allowed visibility and helped the spectator to recognize the character's character.

The tragedy is a dramatic representation capable of stirring and causing grief, which has a fatal outcome. They emphasized the writers ESQUILO, SOFOCLES and EURÍPIDES. Here are some characteristics of the tragedy: the works are solemn, written in verse and structured in scenes; the stories are based on myths or ancient stories; they're works of little action.

Aristotle said that the tragedy must be as much as possible under the same period of sun or exceed a little. In little more than a century the Greeks created dramas and comedies that still interest and stir.

Aeschylus has been called the father of the Greek drama because it contributed to that theatrical representations turned into spectacles. His most well-known works are Prometheus Chained and Antigone.

Sophocles was educated, kind and tolerant, and enjoyed great sympathy and popularity. His main works Antigone and Oedipus King are still taking place on stage.

Euripides was reputed to be sullen. His main works are Electra and Orestes, Efigenia in Aulida and Efigenia in Taurida.

The great Greek tragic established the characteristics of the theater that has become the literary genre we all know.

The comedy developed around the middle of the 5th century BC. The oldest comedies that are preserved are those of ARISTÓFANES. They have a very careful structure derived from the ancient rites of fertility. His comedy consisted of a mixture of satirical attacks on public figures. By the fourth century BC, comedy had replaced tragedy as a dominant form.

Then came a type of local comedy, called "new". In the works of MENANDRO, the great author of new comedies, the plot revolves around a complication or situation that has to do with love, money, family problems and the like.

The Roman theater did not develop until the third century BC. At first it was associated with religious festivals, but the spiritual nature was soon lost. As the number of festivals increased, the theater became an entertainment. It is not surprising that the most popular form was comedy.

The period of Roman dramatic creation began in the 2nd century BC and was dominated by the comedies of PLATO and TERENCIO, which were adaptations of the new Greek comedy. The works were based on a local intrigue. This first period is called classical, because it comprises the theater of classical civilizations, Greece and Rome, and the works are written in Greek or Latin.

Around the end of the second century AD, literary theater went into decline and was replaced by other popular entertainment and entertainment. The Christian Church attacked the Roman theater and contributed to the decline of the theater as well as to consider the people who participated in it as immoral. With the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD, classical theater declined in the West and did not resurface until 500 years later. Only the popular artists, known as minstrels and troubadours, survived and provided a nexus of continuity.

The European theatre, arises linked to the religious cult. The Mass is itself a drama, a representation of the death and resurrection of Christ. It will be the clergymen who believe the first theatrical dialogues: the tropes, with which they staged some relevant episodes of the Bible. These representations, became longer and spectacular giving rise to a type of religious theater that was the medieval theater par excellence. Little by little profane and comic elements were added to these types of representations that, for reasons of decorum, ended up leaving the churches and began to take place in public places.

In the fourteenth century, the theater was emancipated from the liturgical drama to represent itself outside the churches and evolved into cycles that could count on up to 40 dramas. Some scholars believe that cycles arose independently. They were produced by a whole community every four or five years. Representations could last from two days to a month. As the interpreters were amateur and illiterate, the works were written in easy-memorized copla form.

The Protestant Reformation was the end of religious theater in the sixteenth century, and profane theater took its place. Although cars and cycles seem to be a long way from the dramas of Shakespeare and Moliere, the themes of the lower middle ages, the shift to more secular themes and more temporary preoccupations, and the reappearance of the comic and the grotesque contributed to the new form Of doing theater. The participation of professional actors in the works was replacing amateur enthusiasts.

The earliest examples of Renaissance theater in Italy date back to the 15th century. The first works are in Latin, but they end up being written in vernacular language and were based on classic models. This theater was not an evolution of religious forms. It was an academic process. They were works thought to be read, although by several readers and in public, and for didactic purposes.

The elaborate stage exhibitions and the allegorical stories of the intermezzi, and the continuous attempts to recreate the classic production, led to the creation of the opera at the end of the 16th century. Although the first classical court theater had a limited audience, the opera became very popular. In the middle of the seventeenth century, great opera houses were being built in Italy. While the elite amused themselves with the theater and the spectacle of classicist style, the general public was amused with the commedia dell'arte, a popular and vibrant theater based on improvisation.

At the end of XVIth century, it was popular in France a type of comedy similar to the farce. This phenomenon made difficult the establishment of the Renaissance drama. At that time there were no buildings dedicated to the theater in Paris, using enclosures intended for ball games. The Italian influence in France led to popularizing representations that were called ballets.

Molière is considered the great French playwright. Their farces and comedies of customs receive for the most part a direct influence of the commedia dell'arte, but go beyond their specific objective and can be considered as observations on the limitations and errors of the human race. Many of his works are imbued with a certain bitterness. His main works are The Tartufo, The Miser, The Imaginary Sick and The Precious Ridiculous.

Molière was also an exceptional comic actor in his time, and worked with the aim of altering the histrionic and bombastic style that then dominated the French scene.

From the Second World War the theater of the absurd was born, which lacks logic, which in no way can be linked or related to a dramatic text or a scenic context. Realistic theater continued to live in the commercial realm, especially in the United States. The objective seemed to be psychological realism, and unrealistic dramatic and dramatic resources were used for this purpose. There are works based on memory, sequences about dreams, purely symbolic characters, projections and other similar resources. They incorporate poetic dialogues and a carefully orchestrated sound background to soften the crude realism. The scenery was more suggestive than realistic. In the 1920s musicals emerged from a free association in the form of a series of songs, dances, short comic pieces based on other stories, which were sometimes serious, and were told through dialogue, song and dance. A group in charge of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II perfected this form in the decade of 1940. Already during the decade of 1960 much of the show had left the musical to become something more serious. At the end of the following decade, possibly as a result of growing political and economic problems, the musicals returned under a sign of excess and luxury, emphasizing song, dance and easy comedy. There are few notions of what the stage manifestations of pre-Columbian peoples might have been, since most of these consisted of religious rituals. There is a unique Mayan dramatic text, discovered in 1850, the Rabinal-Achi, which narrates the combat of two legendary warriors who face death in a ceremonial battle. Its representation depends on different spectacular elements like the costumes, the music, the dance and the corporal expression. From the colonial era, the theater is based on models from Spain.

The English Renaissance theater was developed during the reign of Isabel I at the end of century XVI. At that time, academic tragedies of neoclassical character were written that were represented in the universities. Most Elizabethan poets tended to ignore neoclassicism, or used it selectively. Unlike continental theater, English theater was based on popular forms, on the vital medieval theater, and on the demands of the general public.

The plays were performed during warmer months in circular and outdoor theaters. Under the influence of the climate of political and economic change in England at the time, as well as the evolution of language, playwrights such as Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe gave birth to a dynamic, epic and unrestrained theater that culminated In the varied and complex work of the greatest genius of English theater, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

Works by William Shakespeare as Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Othello or A Midsummer Night's Dream, are still represented with the same vividness as when they were written.

Romanticism appeared in Germany, a country with little theatrical tradition before the eighteenth century. Around 1820, romanticism dominated theater in most of Europe.

The Spanish romantic theater sought inspiration in medieval themes and features an individual hero dominated by passions. The forms and structures of the theater of the Golden Age are recovered. The swallowed voice and the resounding verse triumph in the Spanish romantic theater. His great figure is Jose Zorrilla, the author of Don Juan Tenorio. The subject of the mocker is taken up again with great freedom by Zorrilla, and in his romantic enthusiasm, it is love that redeems the seducer. The strength and charm of this character and work has ensured that he has never stopped representing himself in some Spanish theater.

The same forces that led to romanticism also, in combination with various popular forms, led to the development of melodrama, the most rooted dramatic genre in the nineteenth century. Melodrama as literature is often ignored or ridiculed, at least disdained by critics, because it brings images of villains who wear mustaches or heroines subject to railroad tracks.

He proposed a recreation of the local and the life in the home. The viewer must have the impression of attending a real event and to this came the three-stage scenario with the aim of the audience looking through the imaginary fourth wall.

In the mid-nineteenth century the interest in realistic detail, the psychological motivations of the characters, concern for social problems, led to naturalism in the theater. Going to science for inspiration, naturalists felt that the goal of art, like science, should be to improve our lives. Playwrights and actors, like scientists, began to observe and portray the real world.

Naturalism is largely responsible for the emergence of the figure of the modern theater director. Although all theatrical productions throughout history were organized and unified by an individual, the idea of ​​a director who interprets the text, creates a style of acting, suggests sets and costumes and gives cohesion to production, is something modern.

The works show social problems such as genetic disease, the ineffectiveness of marriage as a religious and social institution, and women's rights, but they are also valuable because of their convincing studies of individuals. From the Renaissance onwards, the theater seems to have striven for total realism, or at least in the illusion of reality. Once that goal was reached in the late nineteenth century, an antirealist reaction at various levels burst into the world of the scene.

In the twentieth century the theater takes a renewing impulse. Naturalistic, symbolic, realistic, impressionistic and neo-romantic ideas have added their influence to that of cinema.

The symbolists called for an instability of the theater, which translated into stripping the theater of all its technological and scenic obstacles of the nineteenth century, replacing them with the spirituality that had to come from the text and interpretation. The texts were loaded with symbols of difficult interpretation, rather than suggestions. The pace of the works was generally slow and resembling a dream.

The expressionist movement had its apogee in the first two decades of the 20th century, mainly in Germany. He explored the most violent and grotesque aspects of the human mind, creating a nightmare world on stage. From a scenic point of view, expressionism is characterized by distortion, exaggeration and a suggestive use of light and shadow. Perhaps it is due to the influence of Antonin Artaud the appearance of a series of theater groups during the decade of 1960. From the Second World War the theater of the absurd was born, which lacks logic, which in no way can be linked or related to a dramatic text or a scenic context.

Realistic theater continued to live in the commercial realm, especially in the United States. The objective seemed to be psychological realism, and unrealistic dramatic and dramatic resources were used for this purpose. There are works based on memory, sequences about dreams, purely symbolic characters, projections and other similar resources. They incorporate poetic dialogues and a carefully orchestrated sound background to soften the crude realism. The scenery was more suggestive than realistic.

In the 1920s musicals emerged from a free association in the form of a series of songs, dances, short comic pieces based on other stories, which were sometimes serious, and were told through dialogue, song and dance . A group in charge of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II perfected this form in the decade of 1940. Already during the decade of 1960 much of the show had left the musical to become something more serious. At the end of the following decade, possibly as a result of growing political and economic problems, the musicals returned under a sign of excess and luxury, emphasizing song, dance and easy comedy.

Chapter III

Reflections of Macbeth in cinematography. Classic vs. modern in cinematography

Macbeth is the story of a fearless warrior and ruler inspired by ambition and desire. A thrilling interpretation of dramatic realities in moments and a reimagining of what must have been during the war, one of the most famous and compelling characters of Shakespeare, a tale of passion and ambition that destroy everything, set in a Scottish landscape affected by war.

Over time, Macbeth, the play written by William Shakespeare, published in 1606, has seen many screenings. Besides those adapted for society today, namely Joe Macbeth, directed by Ken Hughes and published in 1955, or according to the culture of the country of origin of the director in this category, being able to remember Throne of Blood, a masterpiece of Japanese artist Akira Kurosawa published in 1958, and less known Maqbool of Indian director Vishal Bhardwaj, the famous tragedy known fidelity and fame, once in 1948, thanks to Orson Welles, and again in 1971 in another film directed by Roman Polanski, Justin Kurzel’s decision to bring to the public’s attention a new cinematic Macbeth seemed, at least initially, the wrong one. And how wrong it seemed to me when the project gets the green light, it seems inspired to be now. Especially since the Australian director has managed to do what no one has managed before: to create the best film adaptation of the play, keeping Shakespeare’s verse, but passing, however, the text imposed, and exploring the universe provided . Cinema made adaptation by Adam Arkapaw, who made several memorable shots of Lore (2012) or True Detective first season (2014), is excellent, managing to cut your breath several times. The symmetry, color and details of each sequence are amazing, and the times in slow-motion and freeze-frames do nothing to end with mastery in one of the most beautiful aesthetically movies ever made.

It has brought insane characters which are interpreted impeccable by Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, the 2015 version, which you get to repulse in their struggle for power. Most replicas of the original have been retained, and Shakespeare’s poetry made music by Jed Kurzel manages to increase and so strange an atmosphere prevailing since incipit. Bloody, innovative and intense new aesthetic masterpiece Macbeth is uncompromising and manages to amaze the immensity and the sound of muffled rage of a final dreamy, haunting piece.

Macbeth 1971

Right after Polanski lost his wife in the hands of the Manson family in 1969, he released this dark version after Shakespeare’s masterpiece. A very interesting version of William Shakespeare’s classic, directed by a harsh Roman Polanski, still recovering from the savage murder of his beautiful wife at the hands of the infamous clan of Satanist Charles Manson, that fateful August 9, 1969.

The unfortunate incident of Sharon Tate and the unborn son of the couple was the well-known trigger for a devastated Polanski to take the work of the greatest playwright of the English language and transform it into a rampant and exacerbated spiral of violence .

The film has the typical atmosphere of the Polish director, with his usual subjectivism and taste for detail, especially if he carries the macabre element in the middle, that unhealthy fascination exemplified in key moments of the work and also the magnificent script of the own Polanski and Kenneth Tynan, as the prelude to the assassination of King Duncan, Macbeth’s machinations to get rid of Banquo, or the dreamy passage predicting the misfortune of the ambitious Scottish monarch.

In the starring role is a furious and disturbing Jon Finch, the same as ‘Frenzy’ by Alfred Hitchcock, a sadly underrated actor, accompanied by the beautiful and manipulative Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth. Tuesday Weld was selected for the role, but left the production after refusing to make a scene ‘as God brought it to the world’ and is that speaking of nudes, the tape went down in history as the first to be produced by the franchise.

The incidents on the film set were no less chilling than the film itself. On one occasion, some members of the technical team expressed their disagreement with one of the bloody deaths that happen throughout the film, to which a frigid Polanski sarcastically replied: ‘I know the violence, they should have seen my house in the summer past’.

Another curious (and painful), in a scene that involved a group of children after being massacred, the distressed director approached a little girl in order to explain his role in the plot, while bathed in several liters of false hemoglobin, Polanski, in kindness, asked the little blonde four years old what was her name, to which she replied: Sharon.

Without being a film, and despite the long duration, this version of Polanski is more enjoyable than Welles, and therefore is more interesting from a cinematic point of view. Here we take a much better advantage of photography (in color, with a very interesting use of natural light), narration (the murders are explicitly shown, the voiceover offensively whispers) and staging (a good budget, which Not scandalous, allows a more ‘epic’ tone in the final part); And although interior interpretations and monologues remain somewhat theatrical, overaccounting is less.

It is also to be grateful for the gibberish that Polanski used to print in those days, thanks to which we can see the decrepit naked witches, Lady Macbeth showing us her beautiful innards, the old doorman pondering the effects of alcohol, rolling heads and blood spilling over everywhere.

As in Blood Throne (A. Kurosawa, 1957), Polanski opens the film with the background described (through dialogue) by Shakespeare. Macbeth (Jon Finch) and Banquo (Martin Shaw), defeated the army of the rebel Macdonwald (in the Japanese film, we learn of the avatars of war through the messengers that the Lord receives without leaving any scene of the battle). Polanski does what it does is hide it behind a layer of fog while leaving the titles of credit. When they finish, the fog disappears and the remains of the battle remain. An equal cash resource used by Kurosawa to count without showing.

Earlier, three witches buried on the Scottish beach a piece of rope with a hangman’s dock and an arm grasping a dagger. In this version there will be a greater importance to necromancy. Although the witches of Shakespeare are real in that unlike other appearances like the specter of Banquo are part of the mind of the personages, they are still a form of human subconscious that triggers the tragedy. Shakespeare used divine or evil beings to get the human soul torn. Polanski commits to my judgment, the first failure to give a greater active part in history to such beings. In exposing them more, it eliminates that possible duality that Shakespeare intended. It is in the second encounter that Macbeth has with the witches, where we can most appreciate the real existence of magic (the scene of the pot of mouse tails and snake loins) avoiding the possible allegories that these characters acquire. In fact, the work, Banquo himself comes to ask after the meeting whether or not they were real:

But were they

Indeed those forms in the wilderness,

Or the infamous root we have liked

That smacks of reason in the brain?

On the contrary, in this version Polanski are not few the moments in which it is obvious. Again Banquo after the encounter with the witches says:

"Often, in order to draw us to our destruction, the agents of darkness prophesy truths to us. They seduce us with innocent trifles to drag us to the most terrible consequences "

If I already said that Jeanette Nolan is not a good Lady Macbeth in Welles’ version (more because of Welles himself than her), worse is the interpretation in the same role of Francesca Annis for this version. But in this version, neither Macbeth himself is up to the record. Only Martin Shaw (Banquo), makes a meritorious interpretation of the work.

Polanski’s version has not by far the intensity of the versions of Welles and Kurosawa but is the darkest and bloody version. Recall that The tragedy of Macbeth is in fact one of the most violent and bloodthirsty works of Shakespeare. Macbeth is the film that Roman Polanski made after Charles Manson murdered the filmmaker’s pregnant wife.

Macbeth may not have the greatness of other Shakespearean characters, such as Hamlet, or Richard III. He always seemed to me a petty lord, possessed by his own ambitions, and a skinhead of his wife's wishes. However, that is its deep meaning, and as such it must be valued.

Shakespeare introduces us to the exact type of human being who loses his simple happiness by ambition and to achieve in an ignoble way plots of power, a power that will soon burn him in the hands and the precipitate to a disaster announced. A mysterious force, even stronger than his own remorse, the dry brake and his own self-destruction.

What to say of that woman, in a fragile appearance, that incites a husband with a horrendous crime in the middle of the night and in his own house, a bouncer with blood what were favors of a generous king with them and confident of his Hospitality

I am always amazed by Shakespeare’s insight to describe pettiness, rudeness, selfishness, the worst of ourselves.

I was interested in his version that Orson Wells did in 1948, but now I see that Roman Polanski filmed in 1971 with Jon Fich, the actor little valued and who over the years worked excellent works from texts by English author and Brazilian actress Francesca Annis, incarnated the main characters. They are sober, especially him, although she is well-matched and fits the feminine stereotype that Polanski has always admired. There is no best Polish film, but there is rigor, talent and respect for the essentials of the text. They say he approached this company shortly after the tragic death of Sharon Tate, his pregnant wife in that horrible episode starring Charles Manson, and some of that commotion and horror is conveyed in the film.

It is a version, at the same time, very recognizable within the universe of the director, with its times, its handling of the camera and expository subtlety. With that mix of showmanship and intimacy, make the son so grateful and in which he presents himself so recognizable. Able to move with the big (The pianist) or with the near (The knife in the water). It is great in the thick stroke, but also in the fine, in the psychological approach, in the meticulous direction of the actors.

Macbeth 2016

Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth was the last film to be shot in the official competition of the last Cannes Film Festival and although nu was exactly received with enthusiasm by part of the International Critics Association, or a servant caused a more than wonderful IMPRESSION . And it is that, nu is the first time that we see the Tragedy of William Shakespeare taken to the cinema, but never we saw it so visually overwhelming and so far from the most theatrical proposals that we have seen in the cinema through the years, and even though, the Essence of betrayal, manipulation and craving for power that the life of the floods of Scotland’s king.

Starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, who seem to know how to choose their roles as nobody else, Macbeth is co-produced between England, France and the United States and is backed by the all-powerful Weinstein Company. Justin Kurzel is faithful to the work of Shakespeare and composes a staging, accompanied by a spectacular direction of photography by Adam Arkapaw, who make Macbeth one of the most modern and refreshing versions of Shakespeare’s work the last times.

Adapted from one of the most emblematic tragedies of the British playwright William Shakespeare, the film starts when Macbeth, Duke of Scotland, receives a prophecy of a trio of witches that says that one day will become king of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and power-seeking, it will be his own wife who will encourage him to use the dark arts for the purpose of securing the throne of King Duncan.

All of Shakespeare’s work has been taken to the cinema on countless occasions and Macbeth may be one of the works that has been seen most often on the big screen, having his first adaptation in a mute version dated from 1911.

The director surprised by taking a look at the biography and filmography of the Australian Justin Kurzel and discover that Macbeth is his second feature after his praised debut feature, the unknown in our country Snowtown in 2011, based on the real history of the crimes of Snowtown and that earned him numerous awards, including the one of the best direction by the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts.

After this great letter of introduction, Kurzel arrives to Macbeth, that ends up being an ambitious project carried out by two stars of the international cinema. His good work with Macbeth and the great relationship he establishes with his two protagonists – Fassbender and Cotillard – lead him to direct what will be one of the most anticipated films of next year.

Michael Fassbender is almost an absolute protagonist of one of this adaptation of one of the most famous tragedies of the universal literature. His visceral interpretation, full of mud and blood, seems to come out of his guts and international criticism affirms and reaffirms that he was born to play the ambitious King of Scotland in Kurzel’s version. But … for what role has he played throughout his career has not Michael Fassbender been born? Without going any further, his other great work of the year, Steve Jobs (Danny Boye, 2015), which gives life to the founder of Apple, has already won numerous awards, Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in Drama and An almost certain Oscar nomination. And who does not know Michael Fassbender at this point? Although his first film was 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007), it will not be until next year that he embarrassed critics with Hunger (2008), the first feature by British Steve McQueen, with which he would repeat on two more occasions – in Shame (2011) and 12 Years of Slavery (2013) – and collaborating together would be some of the biggest milestones in their career, with various nominations for the Globes of Gold and the Oscars.

Apple, has already won numerous awards, Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in Drama and An almost certain Oscar nomination.

But every king of Scotland needs his queen, and Kurzel’s version has nothing less than the queen of French cinema in the hands of the manipulative Lady Macbeth: Marion Cotillard. Undoubtedly, Cotillard is the most international and best-valued French actress outside her country, although she is criticized as well as Penélope Cruz. Winner of an Oscar for her astounding performance in Life in Pink (Olivier Dahan, 2007), Cotillard was again nominated – and deservedly – for Two days, one night (Deux jours, un nuit, Jean- Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 2014) although he remained at the door with Deux jours, un nuit, Jacques Audiard, 2012).

But his international recognition has cost him effort and work. Coming from a family of artists – his father is a renowned theater director in France – Cotillard made a very young debut in cinema, although it would not be until Taxi (Gérard Pirès, 1998) when he began to draw attention to his first nomination The Caesar to the Best Actress Revelation. And in 2003 her definitive settlement arrived with Quiéreme si te darre (Jeux d'enfants, Yann Samuell), where she would coincide with the one who would later become her husband and the father of her children, the actor Guillaume Canet.