Macbeth - How Shakespeare Keeps the Audience Guessing

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William Shakespeare had a unique way of moving his story along. Instead of making what happens next in a story blatant and obvious, he would incorporate different symbols and new characters to send messages to both the reader and the characters in the story. In one of his most famous plays, “Macbeth” the main character whom the story is named after is visited by three examples of these symbols, foreshadowing the rest of the play, as well as providing somewhat of a flashback to what has been read to enable the reader to see a previous event in a new light as the story progresses.

In Act IV scene I, Macbeth encounters the three witches that the reader has been introduced to earlier in the story. They inform Macbeth and Banquo of their prophecies in the first act, and now, they are using their fortune deciding skills to repel any doubt in Macbeth’s mind, causing him to become over confident, leading to his hamartia which is foreshadowed in the talks between Hecate and the witches. Macbeth walks in on the witches adding very odd ingredients to their cauldron when Macbeth walks in and ...

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