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Lady Macbeth Is To Blame For The End Of The Play

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Lady Macbeth Is To Blame For The End Of The Play
According to Wayne Booth, in Macbeth, Shakespeare takes a “noble” man full of “conscience” and “milk of human kindness”, and makes of him a “dead butcher”, yet maintains in him a tragic hero with full stature, commanding our sympathy to the end. Is the above statement valid? Or invalid? Is Macbeth solely to blame for his actions? If so, then why sympathize with him? Or do we need to sympathize with him because he was manipulated by the Witches and/ or Lady Macbeth? Do Lady Macbeth and the Witches absenteeism from the end of the play allows Macbeth to die as ‘brave Macbeth’?
“Maybe we all have a dark place inside of us, a place where dark thoughts and darker dreams live, but it doesn’t have to become who we are.” – Mary E. Pearson
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Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!” Upon hearing those words we saw that Macbeth was intrigued of the remark and wanted to know more. Act 1, scene 3, lines 128 – 142 allows us to learn that Macbeth is ambitious but also had a tendency to doubt himself. When the witches prophecy of Macbeth becoming ‘Thane of Cawdor’ came through, sparks something in him that allowed him to see that becoming King is not impossible. Upon arriving home, Lady Macbeth triggers Macbeth’s lust for the throne. Act 1, scene 7, we see that Macbeth has a conscience and that he did not want to kill Duncan, “We will proceed no further in this business.” Shakespeare reveals to us that Macbeth is like any other human being. We all may have ambition to become greater, to achieve greatness but to what extent will we go to get this done. Our …show more content…
He even kills Banquo, his closet friend and orders the death of Macduff’s family because he was scared they would take his position away from him. It can be seen that he slowly went crazy. Although, his craziness started even before the death of the King, when he was hallucinating the dagger and speaking to it. “Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand?” (Act 2, scene 1) Lady Macbeth slowly started to disintegrate from the play and from Macbeth leaving him to succumb to his guilt. Booth’s statement that Shakespeare made Macbeth into “dead butcher” is accurate. Here one can be indecisive on whether sympathy should be awarded to Macbeth because noone forced him to kill anyone else but then again it can be debated that his madness took over and the Great, Brave, Vialant Macbeth we met at the beginning was no longer incontrol, he was unable to deal with the emotional and mental consequences of his crime. When he saw the ghost of Banquo, is another example of his guilt and his inability to control his psychic. The death of Lady Macbeth, is another example of how Macbeth’s life was falling apart and his response to her death can be surprising but then again throughout the play the strength of their bond slowly disintegrated. “She should have died hereafter,” shows how heartless

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