The Pent-up Guilt in Macbeth :: Macbeth essays

The Pent-up Guilt in Macbeth There is hardly any emotion in William Shakespe ars tragedy Macbeth that outweighs that of guilt. Both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are seriously compromised by the impact of this emotion. Clark and Wright in their Introduction to The Complete workings of William Shakespeare explain how guilt impacts Lady Macbeth Lady Macbeth is of a finer and to a greater extent delicate nature. Having fixed her eye upon the end - the attainment for her husband of Duncans crest - she accepts the inevit fitting means she nerves herself for the terrible nights work by imitation stimulants yet she cannot strike the sleeping king who resembles her father. Having sustained her weaker husband, her own intensiveness gives way and in sleep, when her will cannot control her thoughts, she is piteously afflicted by the memory of one stain of blood upon her little hand. (792) In Fools of snip Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy, Northrop Frye sees a relationship between Macbeths guilt and his hallucinations The early moment is the moment of guilt, and it imposes on one, until it is reached, the intolerable strain of remaining innocent. . . . We tick off 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 nomenclature in a world of hallucination. Macbeths capacity for seeing things that may or may not be there is almost limitless, and the appearance of the mousetrap play to Claudius, though more easily explained, has the same dramatic foretell as the appearance of Banquos ghost. (90) Fanny Kemble in Lady Macbeth asserts that Lady Macbeth was unconscious(p) of her guilt, which nevertheless killed her Lady Macbeth, even in her sleep, has no qualms of conscience her self-reproof takes none of the tenderer forms akin to repentance, nor the weaker ones allied to fear, from the pursuit of which the tortured soul, seeking where to overlay itself, not seldom escapes int o the boundless wilderness of madness. 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 mitigation 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 .