Mental illness is a serious societal problem today, and has been for a long time. People who have a mental illness often end up hurting other people mentally and physically. When someone has a mental illness, they might also end up hurting themselves or cause suffering for themselves. Also, it is sometimes difficult for them to understand things clearly, and they might be unsure of things in their life. All of these problems are shown in a person who is mentally ill. Macbeth hears his prophecy from three witches which starts his mental illness, along with Lady Macbeth pressuring him to kill the king. After Macbeth kills the king, things start to get out of hand; Macbeth gets over ambitious and wants to kill more people, whatever it takes. Lady Macbeth asks for her womanhood to be taken so that she will not feel guilty, but ends up feeling more guilty than ever. Subsequently, she kills herself to escape the guilt, and causes her husband great pain. These tragic examples and many others show that mental illness is a societal issue, and it is shown throughout the story of Macbeth. With a mental illness, people may easily hurt other people intentionally or unintentionally. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth causes Macbeth to go crazy, and kind of lose his mind. Macbeth says on page 40… “I pray you, STOP! I dare to do only what is proper for a man to do. He who dares to do more is no man at all.” This shows that Macbeth is begging for his wife to stop pressuring him into doing things he does not want to, and stop pressuring him to harm someone. Macbeth then kills the king, and says… “I have done the deed” (Page 83). When he says this, he is ashamed of what he has been pushed to do, and starts showing signs of his mental illness. Also, Macbeth... ... middle of paper ... ...by killing the king, who trusted him, and hiring someone to kill his best friend in fear of his children taking the throne. Lady Macbeth can not take the mental strain of the illness and guilt, and ends up hurting herself by taking her life. Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth see and think things that are not really there. Macbeth has hallucinations of his dead best friend, and of bloody daggers floating through the air. Lady Macbeth however, thinks that there is still blood on her hands that will never go away. As you can see from my many examples, mental illness is a serious societal issue and can negatively affect people in multiple ways. In my opinion, someone with a mental illness is still human, and just needs some help or someone to talk to for help when they are down. A mental illness will not always make someone harm others or themselves, but this happens often.
Macbeth’s tragic downfall into insanity could be modernly diagnosed as the mental disorder schizophrenia. Many of the actions carried out by Macbeth during the play lead the reader to believe that Macbeth is crazy. However, by today’s medical standards, Macbeth falls into several of the categories under the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is defined as, "a psychotic disorder characterized by loss of contact with the environment, by noticeable deterioration in the level of functioning in everyday life, and by disintegration of personality expressed as disorder of feeling, thought, and conduct."
“...Seize upon Fife, give to th' edge o' th' sword His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls That trace him in his line” (4.1.170-174). In act four of Macbeth, Macbeth demands Macduff’s entire castle be murdered in full resolve and utter insanity. He becomes the very personality he disdains from the start of Macbeth. However, it cannot be simply chalked up to a shift in heart but, instead, a diagnosable disorder that contributes to his full-fledged lunacy. It is easy to assume that Macbeth was only influenced into his craziness; but upon further inspection Macbeth had, without a doubt, developed Bipolar Disorder. He quickly changed from a virtuous and proud warrior to a liar and thief of the crown once Lady Macbeth had pressured him into killing Duncan. From thereon out, Macbeth quickly made his descent into madness; a combination of manic episodes, delusions,
Macbeth, one of the darkest and most powerful plays written by Shakespeare, dramatizes the disastrous psychological effects that occur when evil is chosen to fulfill the ambition for power. Throughout the play, Macbeth’s character loses mental stability and becomes enthralled with the idea of being king. Empowered by the three witches, this situation consumes Macbeth’s consciousness until his mental state becomes deranged. This mental deterioration is evident in what he says and does as he evolves into a tyrannical ruler attempting to protect himself from enmity and suspicion. In an attempt to fulfill his ambition for power, Macbeth displays mental deterioration and becomes increasingly bloodthirsty.
William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a tragedy in which the main characters are obsessed by the desire for power. Macbeth’s aspiration for power blinds him to the ethical implications of his dreadful acts. The more that Shakespeare’s Macbeth represses his murderous feelings, the more he is haunted by them. By analyzing his hallucinations it is possible to trace his deteriorating mental state and the trajectory of his ultimate fall. Throughout the play Macbeth is never satisfied with himself. He feels the need to keep committing crime in order to keep what he wants most: his kingship. The harder Macbeth tries to change his fate the more he tends to run into his fate. His ambition and struggle for power was Macbeth’s tragic flaw in the play. Macbeth’s rise to the throne was brought about by the same external forces that ensure his downfall.
William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth is intense and horrifying, with Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, planning to kill the king so that Macbeth can take his position. Lady Macbeth is the master mind behind all of this. She is in his ear telling him what to do and how to do it. Under all of this pressure from his wife, Macbeth starts to go insane. In the play, Macbeth shows symptoms of bipolar disorder due to his lack of sleep, agitation, and activeness.
Lady Macbeth is really quite insane“Out damned spot! Out, I say!...Yet who would have thought the old man have had so much blood in him?”(Scene 1, act 5)But she isn’t the only one with an unstable mental state .In Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth, Macbeth’s mental state quickly deteriorates. We can trace Macbeth's mental deterioration by his actions leading up to his death at the end of scene V, such as when he saw the floating dagger, or when Macbeth sends the three murders to murder his best friend Banquo,and when he started to talk to somebody that nobody else could see at the banquet.
Lady Macbeth suffered from the effects of bipolar and schizophrenia. First lady Macbeth showed bipolar disorder by showing the symptoms of inflated self-esteem. Lady Macbeth believed she should be queen. Lady Macbeth was already a noble wife. She wants the Queens crown so bad, she would do anything to make sure she got that crown.
After a long and hard battle, the Sergeant says to King Duncan, “For brave Macbeth,-well he deserves that name,- disdaining fortune, with his brandish’d steel, which smok’d with bloody execution , like valour’s minion carv’d out his passage till he fac’d the slave;” (1.2.16) . This quote shows that Macbeth is viewed as a valiant soldier and a capable leader. However, it does not take long for the real Macbeth to be revealed- a blindly ambitious man, easily manipulated by the prospect of a higher status. His quest for power is what drives his insanity, and after having been deemed the Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth’s ambition can immediately be seen. In a soliloquy, Macbeth says, “Present fears are less than horrible imaginings; my thought, whose murder yet is but fantastica, shakes so my single state of man that function is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is but what is not” (1.3.140). Macbeth has just gained more power, and his immediate thought is of how to gain an even higher status as king. He imagines how to kill Duncan, and then is troubled by his thoughts, telling himself it is wrong. This inner struggle between Macbeth’s ambition and his hesitation to kill Duncan is the first sure sign of his mental deterioration. Although Macbeth does kill Duncan, he questions whether or not he should to do so, which is far different from how Macbeth feels about murder later in the play. Macbeth becomes king, and this power leads
What causes people to become schizophrenic? One possibility, in Macbeth and his wife’s case is guilt. Macbeth, in trying to become king, kills some people he knew very well and was loyal to at one time. He really did not want to have to Banquo, but he felt he had to so that he could become king. He said to his wife, "We will proceed no further in this business: He hath honored me of late." (I.7.31-32) Lady Macbeth feels guilty, too. For example, after she smeared the King’s blood on one of the drunken attendants to frame him, she says, "My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white." (II.2.63-64) Their conscience could be condemning them so loudly that it drove them crazy, literally. Or, another cause of their schizophrenia could be their passion. They strove so hard to make Macbeth king that they became totally obsessed with it. It became all they thought about and their whole being revolved around it. When Lady Macbeth finds that Macbeth has been prophesized to be king, she does not believe he is capable of fulfilling the prophecy alone. So, she says to herself, " Hie thee hither, that I may pour my spirits in thine ear, and chastise with the valor of my tongue which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem to have thee crowned withal.
In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth (1909), the author develops that Macbeth’s mental illness causes the resulting corruption in order to express that a mental illness is all-encompassing and leads to self-destruction.
In the play “Macbeth” the most important character that had to do with Macbeth going completely insane was his wife Lady Macbeth. As said by Johnson in a character analysis of Lady Macbeth, “Lady Macbeth fulfills her role among the nobility and is well respected like Macbeth. King Duncan calls her "our honored hostess."” (Johnson) She is a very loving woman to her husband, and she is also very concerned with his success. Lady Macbeth was the first to suggest the idea to kill King Duncan so her husband has a better chance at being king without getting overthrown. Lady Macbeth is very manipulating in her words to get him to kill the king. “After this, it's really all over. Lady Macbeth wins. Macbeth asks what happens if they fail, and his wife pooh-poohs the very idea. She will get King Duncan's two attendants drunk, so they won't be able to protect him, and th...
The play “Macbeth” by William Shakespeare, involves a character, Lady Macbeth, whose character changes all through the entire play. She was a evil woman. A very manipulative person, whose selfishness was the reason why her character came to a downfall. At the start of the play, Lady Macbeth used her manipulative ways to persuade her husband of murder, convincing him murder was the only option in getting what he wanted. As the play advanced and the murders continued, Lady Macbeth started to wonder if the murders were even relevant. Regretfully, but yet understanding, Lady Macbeth committed suicide from the on going questions that led her to her insanity.
.... His insanity was a result of ambition taken much too far, ambition mutated and converted into evil by internal as well as social conflict; Macbeth’s wife did nothing to prevent Macbeth’s sickness and actually helped the problem develop. From his ambition came actions that filled his mind with conflict, dread, suspicion and guilt. It could be said that Macbeth was insane from the beginning, from the moment that the witches appeared to him in the third scene of the play or even from when he carved out his bloody passage in battle. Whether Macbeth was insane his whole life or just from the moment he first saw the imaginary dagger, it is indisputable that his visions and hallucinations only helped to supplement his lunacy.
In this world a person is suffering from stress put on his shoulder. Due to the amount of stress, naturally a person cannot sleep with a mind empty of worries. Sometimes a person gets disconnected from God. The disconnection from God along with the increasing amount of stress and of lack of sleep could lead a person to depression and losing hope in life. In Macbeth, the leading character, Macbeth suffers the same symptoms with an over stressed person in real life. Moreover, these symptoms begin when Macbeth kills King Duncan. Therefore, after killing King Duncan Macbeth, the noble character, suffers from serious problems that lead him into losing the hope of living.
I decided to analyze Act II, Scene II in MacBeth using Psychoanalysis. I have previously examined the passage using Marxism and Queer Theory, so I thought it might be beneficial to scrutinize the scene from yet another angle. However, I will also discuss another scenes, as well, in order to fully, yet briefly, demonstrate MacBeth’s two opposing psychological constructions.