Motifs in Macbeth

• Motif #1. Predictions. One of the powerful motifs in the play is the prediction of the witches.
• Motif #2. Violence. Although violence is not the dominant motif, it is still an ensuring motif.
• Motif #3. Gender.
• Motif #4. Weather.
• Motif #5. Sleep.
• Motif #6. Blood.
• Motif #7. Equivocation.
• Motif #8. Light and Darkness.

guilt

As a tragedy, Macbeth is a dramatization of the psychological repercussions of unbridled ambition. The play’s main themes—loyalty, guilt, innocence, and fate—all deal with the central idea of ambition and its consequences.

Key themes of Shakespeare’s Macbeth include: good versus evil, the dangers of ambition, the influence of supernatural forces, the contrast between appearance and reality, loyalty and guilt.

The main theme of Macbeth —the destruction wrought when ambition goes unchecked by moral constraints—finds its most powerful expression in the play’s two main characters. Macbeth is a courageous Scottish general who is not naturally inclined to commit evil deeds, yet he deeply desires power and advancement.

The wife of the play’s tragic hero, Macbeth (a Scottish nobleman), Lady Macbeth goads her husband into committing regicide, after which she becomes queen of Scotland. She dies off-stage in the last act, an apparent suicide.

However, we can hypothesize that Lady Macbeth suffered from dissociative amnesia (AD) as well as depression (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

Duncan

Yes this is a good point, but Lady Macbeth is guilty for more than just persuading Macbeth to commit the crime of murdering Duncan. First, she is guilty because she made an outright killing machine out of Macbeth.

She couldn’t bear the remorse and guilt. Lady Macbeth changes a lot throughout the play and starts as a cold heartless women and later starts to regret her foolishness. She has a lot of remorse which leads to her suicide in the end of the play.

Lady Macbeth is also guilty when she is learning about Duncan’s murder. She is so shocked by the discovery that she faints and is tended to. The biggest factor to Lady Macbeth’s guilt though is her sleepwalking. She is sleepwalking and trying to wash her hands of the blood from Duncan’s murder.

Macbeth’s vision of the ghost reveals his guilt over ordering the murder of Banquo and his young son. His sense of guilt is so powerful that he loses his sense of reality and cannot be sure whether he is having a vision or not.

Macbeth, guilty of the murders of Macduff’s family, urges him to turn away. Macduff reveals that he was removed from his mother’s womb, and therefore not, in fact, born of a woman. Macbeth understands at last the witches’ equivocation, and dies by Macduff’s sword.

Macduff fights and kills Macbeth by decapitating him. True to the Witches’ prediction, he is not of woman born . He was born by way of Caesarean section, so was not born in the normal sense of the word.

candlestick

“Come you spirits, That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.” Although oft-quoted, this can be used to kick-start an intriguing discussion over the difference between Lady Macbeth and the Weird Sisters.

Lady Macbeth reads her husband’s letter about his meeting the witches. She fears that Macbeth lacks the ruthlessness he needs to kill Duncan and fulfill the witches’ second prophecy.

Lady Macbeth, sleepwalking in her chamber, ‘rubs her hands’ for ‘a quarter of an hour’, lamenting ‘what, will these hands ne’er be clean’. She can still smell blood: ‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’. Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing is the sign of guilt.

Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth as a powerful woman right from her first appearance in the play. She is given a soliloquy which reveals to the audience that she is determined to make herself as powerful as possible in order to support her husband in gaining the throne.

Malcolm

Shakespeare did not coin the phrase; it is actually a derivative of the early 14th-century French proverb: Mez quant ja est la chose fecte, ne peut pas bien estre desfecte, which is translated into English as “But when a thing is already done, it cannot be undone”.

Deleting a node is just another action where “This action cannot be undone” is displayed. It’s typically displayed when some data is permanently removed from the database (rather than just being hidden, as when you unpublish a node).

What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again. I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains. Whoever is happy will make others happy too.

‘O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! ‘ Macbeth uses a metaphor to explain that his guilty conscience is attacking and stinging him. Macbeth uses a simile to say that he would rather deal with wild animals than Banquo’s ghost which he has just seen.

Macbeth

What does Lady Macbeth “fear” in her husband’s nature? She fears he is too kind, “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” (line 17) and good: he wants to become king “holily” and will not “play false” (line 22).

In response they summon for him three apparitions: an armed head, a bloody child, and finally a child crowned, with a tree in his hand. These apparitions instruct Macbeth to beware Macduff but reassure him that no man born of woman can harm him and that he will not be overthrown until Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane.

The Witches warn Macbeth to “beware Macduff, beware the Thane of Fife” (4.1. 81–82). However, they inform Macbeth that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” (4.1.

The three witches greet Macbeth as “Thane of Glamis” (as he is), “Thane of Cawdor,” and “king hereafter.” They then promise Banquo that he will father kings, and they disappear.

The Birnam Oak is an iconic tree on the outskirts of the Perthshire village and celebrated in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The Birnam Oak and its neighbour the Birnam Sycamore are thought to the sole surviving trees of the great forest that once straddled the banks and hillsides of the River Tay.