Treachery In Macbeth

William Shakespeare’s famous play, The Tragedy of Macbeth, is one of the most well-known pieces of work of his time, and even today. Like his other plays, Macbeth has many memorable scenes and passages that make up the play, solidify characters, and leaves a mark on the audience. To many audiences and readers, the play’s main character, King Macbeth, is often seen as the main villain of the story, and the play’s scapegoat; somebody that the audience can blame for everybody’s problems in Macbeth. In casual readings of the play, Macbeth is usually the scapegoat due to the fact that he committed murder and performed acts of treachery. To the average audience, Shakespeare’s play is meant to set up King Macbeth to be the story’s villain, but Macbeth’s

This view, of course, is completely justified as he is finally realizing his mistakes throughout the play, and just lost his wife, perhaps the only person he could trust at that point of the play, which completely causes him to lose all of his pride and optimism. This is mainly one of the reasons why the final soliloquy proves to be important; After the play’s buildup to the murder of King Duncan, and his placement on the throne, Macbeth has ultimately lost all of his hope, pride, and bravado after he hears of his wife’s death. He essentially snaps back to reality and realizes there is no hope left for him. Thus, leading to his speech of pessimism and gloom. In the last part of his speech, Macbeth mentions how the people of life are all actors on a stage, and how “[i]t is a tale told by an idiot.” (Shakespeare 5.5.28) This illusion and viewpoint is known as Theatrum Mundi, which literally means “the world stage”, (Page) according to Inquiries Journal author Jeremy S. Page. Theatrum Mundi is the notion that the human life is a drama as told by a screenwriter or director, and that whatever happens to a human is meant to happen, as it is their assigned role in life. Therefore, comparing humans to the actors of

In the middle of the speech, Macbeth personifies the word “yesterday,” by stating that “all our yesterdays have lighted fools” (5.5.22) which essentially means that that each day that goes by brings everybody closer to their demise and fall, like with what happened to his wife, Lady Macbeth. This then leads to one of the most famous parts in Macbeth’s final speech is his repetition of the word “tomorrow” in the very beginning of the soliloquy. (5.5.19) The repetition of “tomorrow” is obviously used to highlight the word as important and create a powerful effect towards the audience, but it is also used as an effect to show the audience how meaningless life is. With the repetition of tomorrow, Macbeth is trying to state that humans of life will live through a countless amount of generic days, and all it leads to is the “the last syllable of recorded time,” as the humans of Earth are the only ones that record history and data, so the repetition of days will lead to the death of everybody, and will lead to a “dusty death” (5.5.19-23) Although it is not as obvious when reading the play of Macbeth to yourself in your head, the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” portion of the soliloquy is repeated to give us the feeling of a never-ending sentence; it is specifically repeated with long spaces between