Tone Of Macbeth's Soliloquy

Lady Macbeth then says, ?Come you spirits? and asks them to ?unsex? her there and fill her ?from head to toe, top full of direst cruelty?. ?unsex me here? suggests that she wants her female characteristics to be taken away to follow through in killing king Duncan, indicating that she sees female characteristics as too soft and as a weakness especially when it comes to killing someone. These statements also refer back to the beginning of scene 5 when she is analysing Macbeth and says that he is ?too full o?th milk of human kindness? (which also indicates that she feels human kindness is a weakness).

I consider Macbeth’s dagger soliloquy from Act Two, Scene One to be one of the most revealing speeches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. This is because it demonstrates the effect that a character’s actions have on the way they think about moral issues. The speech takes place while Macbeth is on his way to kill King Duncan. At the beginning of the speech, Macbeth is feeling guilty about what he is about to do. This is shown by the fact that he is seeing a dagger that is not there. His use of rhetoric in the statement “Is this a dagger I see before me, / the handle towards my hand?” shows the reader that Macbeth is uncertain about the substantiality of the dagger. Macbeth has clearly been thinking about the effects of the murder so much his conscience has presented him with an image of that which he is dreading. His statement “heat-oppressed brain” also tells the reader he has been so wrought up about the murder, he is hallucinating

The writer, Shakespeare, illustrates to the audience that the consequences do not just affect the person who have the ambitions, but it also affects the people around them. He does this by expressing the ambition through the characters of Macbeth and his wife Lady Macbeth. Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are shown to be ambitious and their ambition feeds off of each other. Macbeth is initially shown to the audience as a brave and selfless soldier who is loyal to his king till the day he dies. But, once Macbeth hears the prophecy of the three witches’, (that he will become the King of Scotland), Macbeth changes. He develops a deep, dark and horrible ambition of ruthlessly murdering the king and taking his place. Macbeth then writes to Lady Macbeth telling her of his ambitions. This leads to Lady Macbeth provoking Macbeth’s ambitions instead of telling him to forget about it. As she provokes Macbeth the audience can clearly see that this woman is bad news. “Was the hope drunk?Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?... and wakes it now, to look so green and pale which thou esteem'st the ornament of life, and live a coward in thine own esteem, Letting 'I

We see her as a suppressed female clawing to power through men. The most notable scene where Shakespeare conveys this is Act 1 Scene 5. He has Lady Macbeth say, “unsex me here”, demanding elimination of all womanly attributes. She also says, “take my milk for gall”. This demonstrates she does not want to be a nurturing, mother figure. Lady Macbeth thinks her femininity is useless and that she could accomplish more as a male. In the Elizabethan/Jacobean era, women were often subjugated – made to submit to and follow men, regarded as weak and in need of protection. Given no control, women were forced to stay home and bear children. Lady Macbeth yearns liberation from these stereotypes and ideal standards of her time. Her authority cravings lead her to tell Macbeth, “Leave all the rest to me” – seeking dominance. Her husband is essential to succeed so she can be interpreted as somewhat manipulating him into committing larger crimes – namely

Lady Macbeth persuades Macbeth to slay the King of Scotland. On Act I, Scene V, Lady Macbeth states,¨Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under ‘t.” We can get an idea that lady Macbeth wants to kill the king but hiding their purpose of killing the king . This scene processes to get darker. In act 1, scene 5, Lady Macbeth quotes,¨Unsex me here.¨ What she means by that she removes all her feminine qualities to make her more evil. This lead to the audience being mortified due to her wanting to asking to be stripped of feminine weakness and invested with masculine resolve.

The struggle for power is encountered through the interactions between Lady Macbeth and Macbeth. When initially introduced to the character of Lady Macbeth, she reads a letter addressed to her from Macbeth in which he states his plans to kill King Duncan and assume the throne. Lady Macbeth responds with a speech signifying her agreeance and calls for the strength to carry on with the plan: “Come, you spirits/ That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/ And fill me from the crown to the top-full/ of direst cruelty” (1.5.47-50). Here, she is denouncing her femininity to take on a more masculine role and to be filled with nothing but motivation for the cruel crime. Shakespeare uses this scene to foreshadow the event in which the crime will be committed. While Macbeth begins to have second thoughts and uneasiness towards the situation, Lady Macbeth tells him: “What beast was ’t,/ then, / That made you break this enterprise to me?/ When you durst do it, then you were a man;/ And to be more than what you were, you would/ Be so much more the man” (1.7.53-58). Lady Macbeth is emasculating her husband her by questioning his ability to be a man and how he hesitates to make the move towards power while she is confident in her decision. Shakespeare makes a choice to have a woman be the one to urge the death of Duncan to show the reversal of gender roles and to expose Lady Macbeth’s character. The playwright

While Lady Macbeth believes that men are superior when it comes to power and warfare, the effect that she has on Macbeth’s actions manages to change the outcome of the entire play. This speech illustrates a prominent power relation in the text - Lady Macbeth and the power that she has over her husband. While Macbeth is the one carrying out the deeds, Lady Macbeth, at least at the beginning of the play, is the brains behind the operation and manages to maintain a certain amount of control over him. “When you durst do it, then you were a man.” - Lady Macbeth. Being a man is something Macbeth cares about strongly, and Lady Macbeth manages to harness this desire of Macbeth’s to keep the power in their relationship. This speech is revealing because it manages to expose the inner workings of the relationship between the two

In Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, Shakespeare displays acts of violence and ferocity to distract the miserable life everyone was living in England. Macbeth is a man who becomes hungry for power and desires to take control by murdering everyone who gets in his way of kingship. Macbeth discovers, from a prophecy given to him by three witches, that he will become king. When Macbeth's ambition vanquishes his moral judgement, he gruesomely slaughters the current king and fulfils the prophecy.

The decisions you make in life can lead you down a good or bad path, your life is in your own hands. Lady Macbeth creates a crazy personality in the first scene. She and Macbeth do all they can for the fame of being queen and king. Lady Macbeth is a huge insticator of Macbeth’s actions. “Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here”(Macbeth 1.5.38-39). The quote above shows the Lady Macbeth isn’t happy with her life, She wants to become a man. As reading the first scene, Lady Macbeth shows her true colors. “Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between th’ effect and it! Come to my woman’s breast and take my milk for gall”(Macbeth 1.5.44-46). Lady Macbeth wants a change in Scotland, even if it means no peace. Scotland is about to have a huge change, that

First off, Lady Macbeth is a character very much rooted in ambition. The authors use of masculinity versus femininity furthermore portrays the extent to which Lady Macbeth will go to ensure the success of her plan to kill the King. Her hunger for masculinity is first clearly portrayed through her use of the phrase “come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.” This quote exemplifies her willingness to give up her femininity in exchange for masculine cruelty, which would ensure her success in carrying out the murder of King Duncan. Through this quote, Lady Macbeth directly opposes the Elizabethan expectation of women to be feeble, nurturers of life. Lady Macbeth did not believe that her husband had the means to become a strong

Upon this realization, Lady Macbeth indicates a newfound desire to be rid of her feminine qualities, seeking instead to replace them with masculine counterparts. Crying out, Lady Macbeth declares, “Come, you spirits. That tend on mortal thought! Unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top full of direst cruelty” (1. 5. 38-41). Her abstinence towards the limitations of gender thus set her down the road to madness.

With the visit to King Duncan, the King announces that his son Malcolm will be heir to the throne. In Macbeth’s mind, all he can think about is murdering the King and all that will come along with it. Macbeth sends a letter to his wife telling of all that has happened and to prepare for the King’s visit. In order to keep the murder in her mind she doesn’t want anything to get in her way, so she even goes to the point of seeking evil and not wanting to be a women-afraid of the feminine ways which will interfere in the murder. When Lady Macbeth says, “Come, you spirits/ That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full/ Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood; (I v ll. 44-47) it shows how far Lady Macbeth is willing to go to make sure her husband and herself gets to the top. She even goes to the point to call upon the spirits to unsex her and fill her with cruelty to make sure that here feminine ways don’t cause the plan to go wrong.

Lady Macbeth is the driving force that encourages Macbeth to overcome his strong sense of guilt and take action on the prophecies. She is plotting for King Duncan’s murder to get the throne of Scotland. She is stronger, ambitious, and greedy than her husband. Lady Macbeth persistently taunts her husband for his lack of courage and challenges Macbeth to commit murder of King Duncan. Specifically, she mocked the masculinity of Macbeth in order to commit the murder. She said “But screw your courage to the sticking-place, And we'll not fail”. In this regard, Lady Macbeth appears to switch characters with Macbeth midway through the play. Although most famous for her cruelty and lines such as "unsex me here," the decline of Lady Macbeth is also of great interest and certainly a mysterious aspect of Macbeth.

“In the mind of Lady Macbeth, ambition is represented as the ruling motive, an intense overmastering passion which is gratified at the expense of every just and generous principle, and every feminine feeling.” (Jameson, 191). Lady Macbeth is a very ambitious woman with a relentless hunger for power, longing to satisfy her role among the high society. She urges her husband Macbeth to commit a murder, and comes up with a plan for him to kill the king while he sleeps, then blame the kings’ guards. “Lady Macbeth, upon receiving word that King Duncan of Scotland will be arriving that night, begins sharpening her talons. She isn’t sure there’s enough manhood to go around between herself and her husband, so she calls scheming spirits to ‘unsex me here.’” (Macrone, 1). When Lady Macbeth says “unsex me here”, she is basically saying that she wants power. “But having evoked her husband’s murderous ambition, having dared him to stop being a child, she suddenly finds that when he is a man, she is powerless.” (Orgel, xli). Act 3, Scene 4, is when the king is found dead and Lady Macbeth makes a scene by saying, “Help me, hence, ho” (Orgel, 35). She then pretends to faint, hoping to divert the attention from the king’s murder, and all of the men immediately refocus their attention on her. It is very obvious that Lady Macbeth is not worried about the murder at all, when she tells her husband that “a little water clears us of this deed”

Lady Macbeth’s burning ambition to be queen drives her to the point of insanity. She stops at nothing to gain power and uses Macbeth as the enforcer for her plans. This power is clearly illustrated as her husband follows her command to kill the king of Scotland, she constantly taunts Macbeth bringing him even further under her control. She is quite the opposite of how we generally assume feminine characters to act, and even begs the gods to remove her femininity at one point, “...Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here...Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers...” (Shakespeare 12). As Lady Macbeth expresses her desire to become unsexed, we see the link that clearly exists between masculinity and murder. She believes that since she is a woman she cannot be capable of committing such evil deeds, and her reference to her breasts which is generally linked to the idea of nurture, is called upon in reference to her desire to do quite the opposite. Lady Macbeth presents a very strong character throughout the play, and through her actions a very clear picture of a manipulative wife is painted. Though Macbeth is the one to carry out many of the deviant plans, Lady Macbeth’s role is clearly portrayed as the evil mastermind behind the murders.