Short stories and Other Whatnots

My junior essay #3

MACBETH

In the play of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is the one who is more willing to do the evil than Macbeth himself who is the only one who gets something out of killing the King. In my opinion, I think Lady Macbeth is willing to kill the King because when he dies Macbeth will be a successor of the throne according to the Three Witches, so if Macbeth will be King it allows Lady Macbeth to be either Queen Regent or Queen Consort meaning that she will reign in the same way Macbeth will be. If Macbeth is King and she Queen Regent, they will have the same rank and have equal rights to rule but if Lady Macbeth had secret plans to kill Macbeth herself, she will be the one and only ruler of the country. So in a way, Lady Macbeth is the one who is more willing to kill the king for Macbeth so when he is King she can kill him and she becomes the only ruler if she had the plans to kill Macbeth of course. Lady Macbeth already suffered and dealt with her actions, after the King died as she planned to happen, her conscious got to her and later on committed suicide.

Macbeth is not a moral play, it’s not a play meant to teach lessons in morality.  Relatively, it presents the tragedy of a man (Macbeth) who could have been great if he hadn’t let his ambitions overcome his life. Such scenes in Macbeth are the evil that humanoid ambition can yield, the damaging power of guilt and the wreckage that fear can do. One might call it a play of morals if one says it addresses certain matters which can be well-thought-out as right and wrong. Though justice is not fully served in Macbeth, the King was murdered by the ambitious and power-hungry Macbeth who was ordered by Lady Macbeth who was just as determined, Banquo was killed on the order of Macbeth and his paranoia and the family of Macduff was wiped away and again, on the order of Macbeth. In the end of course, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth seized to exist, meeting both tragic ends as the rightful King of Scotland is restored to Malcolm, and justice is served in the end.

The meaning of Macbeth’s visions and hallucinations might be a product of his innermost guilt towards what he’s done so far to achieve his ambitions. Similar to Lady Macbeth, he is also on the path of self-damnation to the point he feels paranoid from the start of his plans to take the throne and to end of his reign. He was pushed by his own wife to kill the king, he murdered his loyal friend Banquo and he wiped out the entire family of Macduff in his own castle; how can one not be guilty of such? Macbeth was bound to go mad, to lose his sanity and have guilt eating him alive. Macbeth’s vision and hallucinations, in my opinion, are bits and pieces of what his future is. He starts hearing voices in his sleepless nights before he murdered the king, these voices are possibly from Lady Macbeth who pressured him to do so. Macbeth then sees the ghost of Banquo in his banquet, possibly an apparition from his guilt of setting his men to kill him.