As the storm approaches around him, King Lear goes mad, tortured by the pain of the turn his life has received. The madness is the understandable reaction to a life that has no meaning or purpose. Mad can also be used to describe upset and deranged. People seen King Lear this way quite often but some didn’t understand why. My mom has always said “For every action, there is a reaction.” I believe that all the “madness” that is going on is all for a reason.
Macbeth is scared by the blood of Duncan. However, the blood may not be seen by others since it is only figurative. It is the eternal reminder to those characters of the terrible sin that they have committed. This symbol functions as a figurative tattoo that may not be removed from the hands. It drives Lady Macbeth to insanity that will eventually bring her to her collapse.
This is demonstrated by her imagining her hands stained by blood and her constantly trying to clean the “damned spot” away and rid her sole of the guilt. The subconscious actions of Lady Macbeth illustrate how the guilt tears apart at her integrity and ultimately destroys her with the taking “off her life”. Guilt engulfs and destroys the lives of the characters within Macbeth which showcases to the responder the true extent of guilt and impacts the audiences understanding of the play. The closing scenes of Macbeth illustrate to the responder that harmony can be restored following doom. Throughout the play the character of Macbeth selects unethical ways of climbing the social and royal hierarchy and ultimately causes chaos.
I believe Macbeth shows many signs of a bipolar disorder, one of the worst disorders. It causes one’s mind to change, to have bad mood swings to think the need everything or deserve it. Because of Macbeth’s mental disorder he devised his own demise. Macbeth shows signs when he shows signs of anxiety and violence. When he can’t make up his mind on what he wants to do.
Hamlet has a lot of Chaos in it. From the beginning of the play we see Chaos, or at least the beginning of it, in the form of the ghost. He disrupts normal life and then he asks his son for revenge. The task that has been asked of Hamlet brings chaos into his life. Hamlet struggles with himself, he begins to act strangely.
Although Ophelia does go insane and ultimately commits suicide, the central lunacy of the play revolves around Hamlet himself. Hamlet's plan to act mad is completely unexplained. It is safe to assume that he is pretending to be mad so he can get away with saying and doing things that would not ordinarily be tolerated. Also, if people think that he was crazy, they would not pay any attention to him in his plot to kill Claudius and avenge his father's death. This plan backfires though, because his family and friends bend over backwards to find the cause of his madness.
Insanity in King Lear is most evident in the portrayal of Lear himself, his mind is haunted and unsettled by the cruel treatment he receives at the hands of his daughters. At the core of this play is a paradox, when Lear is seen as sane, his logic is foolish and ridiculous, however throughout the play as his descendant into madness progresses, he seems to have shards of awareness amongst the gibberish he speaks. At the beginning of the play, Lear would be considered as clinically sane, however his logic is complete madness. He declares his abdication and to determine what each daughter will receive, he devised a contest for them, to see who declared their love for him the greatest. “Which of you shall we say doth love us most.” The verb “say” reflects Lear’s lack of rationality as love cannot be measured with words.
William Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, is not in fact a play of fate, but a tragedy that happens because of all the uncontrollable greed and need for power by the main character, Macbeth, and his wife. Throughout the play, the audience witnesses the changes in Macbeth’s character. His uncontrollable need for power causes him to make sinister decisions that lead him into madness and misery. His greed for power constructs a maze to his own deathbed. After many twists and turns, it becomes a challenge for him to be tolerated by others; he turns his friends and subjects away from him and enters a dark world ruled by greed.
The witches were the driving force of Macbeth’s guilty ambition and were the prophecies that would play on his mind continually. “All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King hereafter,” (Act One, Scene 3, Line 53). Following this, readers are introduced to Lady Macbeth, another character that encounters an ambitious discourse. The audience witnesses Lady Macbeth and Macbeth’s ambitious discourse being ruined when they conclude that the only way to be on the throne is to commit the murder of the loyal King Duncan. The murderous actions of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth lead to their guilty ambition influencing each other to commit deeds that would not only ruin their clean conscience, but also their cultural assumptions.
No one to blame but Macbeth Decisions can be impacted by a number of factors; but in the end we have to be the ones to take responsibility for our actions. This is demonstrated when we see Macbeth transform from a brave soldier to a power-hungry murderer, feared by all his subjects. Macbeth is the one to blame for his own descent into cruelty and murder because he let his ambition, arrogance and greed take over his mind. While some may claim that Macbeth is to blame for his actions, others argue that it is the force of the supernatural that leads to his demise. Early on the witches reveal prophecies to Macbeth suggesting his rise to power.