Look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under it” (1.5.59-62). In other words, she desperately needs Macbeth to transfer over to his evil, cruel side. Lady Macbeth is power hungry; she desires wealth and fortune, so she manipulates the dubious Macbeth into a cruel, man-eating machine. Cruelty drives Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to do terrible deeds throughout the play. These acts of cruelty include the ambush of Banquo, the slaughtering of Lady Macduff and her children, and the poorly treated servants.
As it dawns on him that it is only a figment of his imagination, he begins to worry that his guilty conscience and “heat-oppressed brain” (II.I.51) is making him see things. When Macbeth sees “dudgeon gouts of blood” (II.I.58) on the dagger, he decides that the dagger is an omen and that it means he should go along with the plan to kill Duncan. Shakespeare uses ominous and eerie images in the later part of the passage to show how Macbeth is getting seduced by the idea of killing Duncan, saying that “Nature seems dead and wicked dreams abuse the curtain’d sleep” (II.I.62). The allusions to evil people and practices in the passage suggest
Dramatic Irony Critical Analysis For my critical analysis of dramatic irony in Hamlet I chose when Hamlet learns that his father was poisoned by Claudius. This situation is dramatic irony because Hamlet and the reader know that it was Claudius was the one that killed Hamlet’s father, but the rest of Denmark believes that King Hamlet was bitten by a snake. The rest of Denmark believes this because Claudius started this rumor to cover-up what he had done. This scene also manipulates the audience’s sympathies. This scene does this in two ways, making the reader sympathise with Hamlet and making the reader feel apathetic toward Claudius.
True masculinity is a conceptual fallacy. Macbeth’s hamartia is his indulgence in the concept of masculinity. Lady Macbeth, the main female protagonist demasculinizes Macbeth throughout the play for his lack of assertiveness. Manipulatively, she states to Macbeth, “What beast was’t then, /That made you break this enterprise to me? / When you durst do it, then you were a man” (1.7.47-49).. She defines manhood as stark aggression to achieve power in any means necessary such as killing Duncan.
The ghost, having Claudius’s erosive and unethical ways in mind, vocalizes how these qualities will be undesirably executed in Denmark. “A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark…rankly abused…the serpent that did sting thy
Shakespeare developed Macbeth's role through three stages. The first stage covers the murder of Duncan the King and it is done tragically. Shakespeare succeeded in shifting the guilt to the witches and their prophesies and lady Macbeth who appears in the first act to be so evil. It is the prophesies of the witches that awakened the ambition which was sleeping in the soul of Macbeth. It is the appearance of their second prophesy "thane of Cawdor" which misleads him and blurs his vision.
With the tension building, Banquo leave Macbeth alone; Macbeth in his isolation and growing hysteria, he contemplates murder, sees a dagger. With this apparition of a dagger in front of Macbeth, he proclaims, “And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, / Which was not so before. There's no such thing: It is the bloody business which informs / Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld / Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse 50 / The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates / Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder”(Shakespeare 2.1.41-47). This illusion is one of the witches, sowing the seeds of murder in Macbeth, and ultimately, immediately after he murders Duncan.
Banquo illustrated Macbeth’s subconscious belief that he was an undeserved kin, for he has played “foully.” Shakespeare uses Macbeth’s conscience to show how even the idea of power can be strongly manifested in someone’s mind and slowly corrupt any existence of principles and integrity, once again emphasizing the idea that “absolute power corrupts absolutely. “Another example of Shakespeare using Macbeth’s internal conflict to depict the theme, “absolute power corrupts absolutely” was after Duncan’s regicide. After hearing the witches’ prophecy, Macbeth contemplates on committing regicide on the King but once again his conscience constricts him from doing so. However, he is clearly vacillating with the thought of murder when he says, “if chance will have me king, why chance may crown me without stir. His inner conflict is shown explicitly in act 1, scene 7 when he weighs not only the detrimental political consequences of the murder but also the moral values involved.
While the people in the play believe the veil of lies that the king has spread, the audience knows that in reality, Claudius was the one to kill Old Hamlet. We learn this when the Ghost appears before Hamlet and tells him, “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life now wears his crown.” This ignites Hamlet’s desire for revenge which in turn fuels the play. The main theme can be seen here as well, “How strange or
Shakespeare prolongs metaphors in order to emphasise the amoral society of Hamlet’s Denmark. Hamlet enunciates to the audience in his soliloquy his view of the corruption of this society of Denmark: “`tis an unweeded garden” (1.2.135). The ghost uses metaphors to characterise its perspective of Polonius as “the serpent that did sting thy father’s life Now wears his crown” (1.5.38). Shakespeare states in hamlet’s soliloquy “o that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew” (1.2.129). In this statement, there is symbolism of flesh ‘melting’ and becoming a ‘dew’, which parallels Hamlet’s desire for a transfigured state of