Macbeth as a Tragic Hero in William Shakespeare's Play

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... ... middle of paper ... ... 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.