Ugly Ambition in Shakespeares Macbeth :: Macbeth essays

Ugly inspiration in Macbeth The Bard of Avon saturates the pages of the tragedy Macbeth with ugly feelings of want - unprincipled inspiration which is ready to kill for itself. Lets thoroughly search out the major instances of would-be(prenominal) behavior by the husband-wife team. In Macbeth as the Imitation of an Action Francis Fergusson states the browse of Macbeths ambition in the action of the play It is the phrase to outrun the pauser, ground 2.3, which countms to me to describe the action, or motive, of the play as a whole. Macbeth, of course, literally direction that his love for Duncan was so strong and so swift that it got ahead of his reason, which would bring forth counseled a pause. But in the same way we have seen his avaritia and ambition outrun his reason when he committed the murder and in the same way all of the characters, in the irrational darkness of Scotlands ugly hour, are compelled in their action to strive beyond what they can see by reason alon e. Even Malcolm and Macduff, as we shall see, are compelled to go beyond reason in the action which destroys Macbeth and ends the play. (106-7) Fanny Kemble in Lady Macbeth refers to the ambition of Lady Macbeth . . . to have seen Banquos ghost at the banqueting table ... and persisted in her fierce mocking of her husbands terror would have been impossible to human nature. The guess makes Lady Macbeth a monster, and there is no such thing in all Shakespeares plays. That she is godless, and ruthless in the pursuit of the objects of her ambition, does not make her such. (118) In Memoranda Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons mentions the ambition of Lady Macbeth and its found Re I have given suck (1.7.54ff.) Even here, horrific as she is, she shews herself made by ambition, but not by nature, a perfectly savage creature. The very use of such a tender allusion in the midst of her dreadful language, persuades one unequivocally that she has really felt the enat ic yearnings of a mother towards her babe, and that she considered this action the most enormous that ever required the strength of human nerves for its perpetration. Her language to Macbeth is the most potently silvern that guilt could use.