The Pent-up Guilt in Macbeth :: Macbeth essays

The Pent-up Guilt in Macbeth There is hardly any emotion in William Shakespeares tragedy Macbeth that outweighs that of depravity. two doll Macbeth and Macbeth are seriously compromised by the impact of this emotion. Clark and Wright in their Introduction to The Complete Works of William Shakespeare explain how guilt impacts Lady Macbeth Lady Macbeth is of a better and more delicate nature. Having fixed her eye upon the end - the attainment for her husband of Duncans crown - she accepts the inevitable means she nerves herself for the terrible nights work by unsubstantial stimulants yet she cannot strike the sleeping king who resembles her father. Having sustained her weaker husband, her own strength gives way and in sleep, when her will cannot control her thoughts, she is piteously afflicted by the fund of one stain of blood upon her little hand. (792) In Fools of Time Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy, Northrop Frye sees a relationship between Macbeths guilt and his halluc inations The future here and now is the moment of guilt, and it imposes on one, until it is reached, the intolerable strain of remaining innocent. . . . We notice that anyone who is forced to brood on the past and expect the future lives in a world where that which is not present is present, in other words in a world of hallucination. Macbeths capacity for seeing things that may or may not be in that respect is almost limitless, and the appearance of the mousetrap play to Claudius, though more easily explained, has the same dramatic point as the appearance of Banquos ghost. (90) Fanny Kemble in Lady Macbeth asserts that Lady Macbeth was unconscious of her guilt, which nevertheless killed her Lady Macbeth, even in her sleep, has no qualms of conscience her remorse takes none of the tenderer forms akin to repentance, nor the weaker ones allied to fear, from the pursuit of which the tortured soul, desire where to hide itself, not seldom escapes into the boundless wilderness of ma dness. A very able article, published some years ago in the National Review, on the character of Lady Macbeth, insists much upon an opinion that she died of remorse, as some palliation of her crimes, and mitigation of our detestation of them. That she died of wickedness would be, I think, a juster verdict. Remorse is consciousness of guilt .