Macbeth as a Tragic Hero in William Shakespeare's Play
The play ‘Macbeth’ gives us many opportunities to consider the reasons
for Macbeth’s actions. In this essay I will be considering the factors
that have made Macbeth behave in such a way that he goes as far as
killing his King, his companions, his companions’ families and drove
his wife Lady MacBeth to commit suicide. I will also be talking about
the techniques that Shakespeare has used to write this play.
Shakespeare uses lots of similes, which is a technique that gives the
audience a direct access to the characters inner thought as the other
characters cannot hear him. Macbeth has three main soliloquies in the
play, which are all related to someone being murdered. Shakespeare
also uses dramatic irony which is when the audience knows something
that the characters don’t know, an example of this is in act 1 scene
4, when Duncan says “there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in
the face: He was a gentlemen on whom I built an absolute trust”. This
is said when Duncan passes on the position of Thane of Cawdor to
Macbeth as he has faith in him and says that you can never trust a
person by the way someone looks or the expressions on their faces,
this is when the prophecies have already been made and Macbeth has
already thought of the King being murdered. Also he uses the technique
of making people who talk in rhyme to be unnatural beings like the
witches and the royal family. He uses soliloquies so that the audience
may know what a character is thinking and what is about to happen,
which often leads on to dramatic irony. He also uses lots of imagery
and metaphors in his play to d...
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... such a way and that there were factors along the way that made his
life like as it is. But he had the option of believing in the
prophecies or not believing in them and he could have left fate to
take its own place at its own time. If the witches hadn’t told him the
prophecies, then Macbeth wouldn’t have turned out like that because he
wouldn’t have been so ambitious of becoming king as he wouldn’t have
known that it was going to happen. So I believe that the witches were
the main factors that influenced the way he behaved. Macbeth follows
Aristotle’s concept of a tragic hero of a man that decrease
deteriorates from a wealthy loyal ma to an evil person that dies at
the hands of a fellow soldier. We may feel sorry for him at the end as
Macbeth realises what he has done. In conclusion, I agree with this
statement.