Tragedy- Macbeth FINISHED

Passage: Act 1, Scene 5

The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements.
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it!
Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief!
Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!'

This soliloquy by Lady Macbeth is perhaps one of the most recognized and important passages in the entire play. In this quote, she is calling upon the evil spirits to inhabit her body, to take away her nurturing and compassionate feminine features and transform her into a strong, powerful, ruthless character with the power to convince Macbeth to kill Duncan. It is central to the play's theme of gender role reversal. Because Macbeth is too compassionate and weak-willed to kill King Duncan, even if his own future as king depends on it, so Lady Macbeth must assume the responsibility of plotting and carrying out the plan to kill Duncan to ensure that the prophecy of the Three Witches will become reality and Macbeth will become king. Because Lady Macbeth comes up with this secret plan to have Duncan murdered, she and Macbeth eventually becomes obsessed with it and begin envisioning permanent blood on their hands and seeing ghosts. The significance of this quote is that it shows that the power of Lady Macbeth over the male characters in this novel ultimately contributes to the deaths of everyone involved, includingherself.

Commentary on the tragedy genre:

This Shakespearean genre is characterized by its plots that always involve every major character dying a horrible death by the end of the play. All Shakespeare's tragedies convey a central message that a character's actions cannot be changed or forgotten about; even if all the characters are dead by the end, the events leading up to their deaths will never change. Essentially, tragedies simply dramatize the inevitable reality of every human existence: no matter how rich, powerful, or heroic a person is, no one can escape the defeat of death. While certainly not all deaths in real life occur as they do in Shakespearean plays, through bloody battles, poisoning, or anything else of that horrific nature, the graphic and extreme presentation of the deaths of both heroes and villains definitely emphasize this central message of tragedies.

Personal Reflection:

Tragedies are by far my least favorite genre of Shakespeare plays. The major reason for this is that it is always known before the play even begins that somehow, every single character is going to die some horrible death, and no one will be left at the end to give the play any closure. The two tragic Shakespeare plays that I have read are Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, and I found both (particularly Macbeth, since I had no knowledge of the plot prior to reading it) to be some of the hardest works of literature to get through reading, not because of the language or the complexity of the plot itself, but because I just found the events to be so ridiculous and repetitively terrible. In Macbeth, Macbeth is portayed as an evil murderer even though he really should have been considered a hero. Macduff should really be the character who leaves his legacy as the villain because he kills the "tragic hero." I found that the play, like most other tragedies, did not give any of the characters justice based on their roles throughout the course of the play, whether they were portrayed as good or evil.