macbeth supernatural essay conclusion

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The Role of the Supernatural in Macbeth

(my prediction is this is 50% likely to be the 2023 question).

This is a student essay which I have lightly edited to make sure it is Grade 9. It is the same student who wrote about kingship in yesterday’s post. She’s busy revising in the best way - writing essays.

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Whilst the supernatural can be deemed as largely influential in Macbeth's downfall, the " weird sisters' " ambiguity throughout the play, as well as their struggle for power in a patriarchal society, suggest Shakespeare may not have only implemented the supernatural in his play to appease King James I who was his patron. Shakespeare was more interested in the psychology of the characters; the supernatural were simply a symbol of temptation that Macbeth was consumed by. 

Shakespeare introduces the witches in the very first scene of the play which gives them large structural significance. They chant “Fair is foul and foul is fair” . This paradoxical chiasmus is a logical inconsistency that introduces the play's strong underlying theme of corruption and the supernatural. The witches speak in trochaic tetrameter which is distinguishes them from the other characters who typically speak in iambic pentameter. This would unsettle a Jacobean audience who were largely scared of the supernatural. King James was especially interested in it - shown by his book Daemonologie and the witch hunts he organised. The weird sisters continue to use equivocation, declaring “ when the battle’s lost and won”, unsettling the audience with its ambiguity by flipping the conventional order of “won” first. This alludes to the idea of Macbeth’s downfall coming first. 

However, Shakespeare could be diminishing the influence of the witches in the events of the play as they speak in an almost childlike manner due to their short sentences, simple rhymes and choral speech, as if they were children playing a game. This undermines their credibility as it shows the audience their game does not have any real power; they only serve as a mirror for the recognition of each character's true self. 

Shakespeare demonstrates how temptation and the supernatural invokes an irreversible change in character, subverting the audience’s expectations as he implies that a person’s poor qualities are amplified by the crown and supernatural. Macbeth becomes paranoid, but the weird sisters simply reveal his true self, as a killer.

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Supernatural in “Macbeth” Play by Shakespeare Essay

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In William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth , the supernatural plays a crucial part in inspiring Macbeth’s actions. Supernatural elements create dramatic tension, with the witches’ predictions in Scene 3 of Act 1 as a critical instigating incident. Macbeth’s desire to replace Duncan as Scotland’s monarch is driven by otherworldly forces. The presence of the supernatural encourages the protagonists to feel superior and arrogant. The supernaturally manufactured predictions lure Macbeth and Banquo with the idea of power, leading Macbeth to plot the cruel murder of Duncan. Macbeth believes that by murdering his close friend Banquo, he will finally be able to live up to the prophecy that he will become king. At an earlier gathering that night, he had a supernatural encounter with the ghost of a recently departed friend. The prophecies of the three witches inspire Macbeth’s desire to murder Banquo, but he digs himself into a deeper hole in the process. The play’s sense of mystery is enhanced by Macbeth’s use of the bizarre (Hibbs and Hibbs 275). The play’s supernatural aspects drive the plot and elevate its tragic elements by leading the protagonist further away from the passage of the typical hero.

Any supernatural effect on his choices, particularly those involving murder, is purely voluntary. It is only fair that he takes some responsibility for the many failures and catastrophes he is brought on by depending on them. On the other hand, without the supernatural, it is unlikely that Macbeth would even have the courage to consider such notions, much alone act on them. Macbeth begins his journey of murder when he tells Lady Macbeth about the witches. He recalled how “these Weird Sisters hailed me and pointed to the advent of time with ‘Hail, the king that shalt be,’” as he put it (Shakespeare). The influence of the supernatural on his wife, Lady Macbeth, drove him to murder King Duncan; had he not informed her about his vision, events could have turned out differently. Once he reveals to Lady Macbeth the divine prophesy he got, he loses all chance of returning to his former noble life. The supernatural plays a significant role in Macbeth’s universe.

In Scene 1 of Act IV, Macbeth returns to the Weird Sisters and demands to see visions of his future. Macbeth is warned of Macduff’s vengeance by a severed warrior’s head. In the second scene, a little boy, covered in blood, promises Macbeth that no man “of woman born” can kill him. Macbeth will not be beaten in battle, the young king swears, as long as Birnam wood is physically transported to Dunsinane. Upon learning of these impossibilities, Macbeth exclaims, “reign in this kingdom?” (Schojbert 1). The witches have Banquo leading a ghostly parade of imaginary kings. This only infuriates Macbeth more, and he goes so far as to admit to the audience that he wants to murder the whole Macduff family because of his pride.

In this play, the supernatural aspect is genuine or verifiable. Since both Macbeth and Banquo see the witches, their presence is confirmed. The supernatural aspect adds to the drama by validating and concretizing the hero’s internal struggles. Therefore, Macbeth’s witches represent the guilt deep within his psyche. However, the supernatural aspect does not exert an overbearing force, and the hero is never made helpless or absolved of responsibility for his actions. Although it is only suggestive, the hero is under no obligation to act upon it. The supernatural plays a vital role in accelerating the hero’s demise and elevating the tragedy within the play but ultimately teaches the weight of responsibility for personal actions.

Works Cited

Schojbert, Haley. The Supernatural, the Demonic, and Witchcraft in Early Modern English plays: Macbeth, the Witch, the Witch of Edmonton, and Doctor Faustus . 2020. The State University of New York at New Paltz, MA thesis.

Hibbs, Thomas, and Stacey Hibbs. “ Virtue, Natural Law, and Supernatural Solicitation: A Thomistic Reading of Shakespeare’s Macbeth .” Religion and the Arts, vol 5, no 3, 2001, pp. 273- 296, Web.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Wordsworth Classics, 1992.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 0 )

Macbeth . . . is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other. There is nothing but what has a violent end or violent beginnings. The lights and shades are laid on with a determined hand; the transitions from triumph to despair, from the height of terror to the repose of death, are sudden and startling; every passion brings in its fellow-contrary, and the thoughts pitch and jostle against each other as in the dark. The whole play is an unruly chaos of strange and forbidden things, where the ground rocks under our feet. Shakespear’s genius here took its full swing, and trod upon the farthest bounds of nature and passion.

—William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

Macbeth completes William Shakespeare’s great tragic quartet while expanding, echoing, and altering key elements of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear into one of the most terrifying stage experiences. Like Hamlet, Macbeth treats the  consequences  of  regicide,  but  from  the  perspective  of  the  usurpers,  not  the  dispossessed.  Like  Othello,  Macbeth   centers  its  intrigue  on  the  intimate  relations  of  husband  and  wife.  Like  Lear,  Macbeth   explores  female  villainy,  creating in Lady Macbeth one of Shakespeare’s most complex, powerful, and frightening woman characters. Different from Hamlet and Othello, in which the tragic action is reserved for their climaxes and an emphasis on cause over effect, Macbeth, like Lear, locates the tragic tipping point at the play’s outset to concentrate on inexorable consequences. Like Othello, Macbeth, Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, achieves an almost unbearable intensity by eliminating subplots, inessential characters, and tonal shifts to focus almost exclusively on the crime’s devastating impact on husband and wife.

What is singular about Macbeth, compared to the other three great Shakespearean tragedies, is its villain-hero. If Hamlet mainly executes rather than murders,  if  Othello  is  “more  sinned  against  than  sinning,”  and  if  Lear  is  “a  very foolish fond old man” buffeted by surrounding evil, Macbeth knowingly chooses  evil  and  becomes  the  bloodiest  and  most  dehumanized  of  Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists. Macbeth treats coldblooded, premeditated murder from the killer’s perspective, anticipating the psychological dissection and guilt-ridden expressionism that Feodor Dostoevsky will employ in Crime and Punishment . Critic Harold Bloom groups the protagonist as “the culminating figure  in  the  sequence  of  what  might  be  called  Shakespeare’s  Grand  Negations: Richard III, Iago, Edmund, Macbeth.” With Macbeth, however, Shakespeare takes us further inside a villain’s mind and imagination, while daringly engaging  our  sympathy  and  identification  with  a  murderer.  “The  problem  Shakespeare  gave  himself  in  Macbeth  was  a  tremendous  one,”  Critic  Wayne  C. Booth has stated.

Take a good man, a noble man, a man admired by all who know him—and  destroy  him,  not  only  physically  and  emotionally,  as  the  Greeks  destroyed their heroes, but also morally and intellectually. As if this were not difficult enough as a dramatic hurdle, while transforming him into one of the most despicable mortals conceivable, maintain him as a tragic hero—that is, keep him so sympathetic that, when he comes to his death, the audience will pity rather than detest him and will be relieved to see him out of his misery rather than pleased to see him destroyed.

Unlike Richard III, Iago, or Edmund, Macbeth is less a virtuoso of villainy or an amoral nihilist than a man with a conscience who succumbs to evil and obliterates the humanity that he is compelled to suppress. Macbeth is Shakespeare’s  greatest  psychological  portrait  of  self-destruction  and  the  human  capacity for evil seen from inside with an intimacy that horrifies because of our forced identification with Macbeth.

Although  there  is  no  certainty  in  dating  the  composition  or  the  first performance  of  Macbeth,   allusions  in  the  play  to  contemporary  events  fix the  likely  date  of  both  as  1606,  shortly  after  the  completion  and  debut  of  King Lear. Scholars have suggested that Macbeth was acted before James I at Hampton  Court  on  August  7,  1606,  during  the  royal  visit  of  King  Christian IV of Denmark and that it may have been especially written for a royal performance. Its subject, as well as its version of Scottish history, suggest an effort both to flatter and to avoid offending the Scottish king James. Macbeth is a chronicle play in which Shakespeare took his major plot elements from Raphael  Holinshed’s  Chronicles  of  England,  Scotland  and  Ireland  (1587),  but  with  significant  modifications.  The  usurping  Macbeth’s  decade-long  (and  largely  successful)  reign  is  abbreviated  with  an  emphasis  on  the  internal  and external destruction caused by Macbeth’s seizing the throne and trying to hold onto it. For the details of King Duncan’s death, Shakespeare used Holinshed’s  account  of  the  murder  of  an  earlier  king  Duff  by  Donwald,  who cast suspicion on drunken servants and whose ambitious wife played a significant role in the crime. Shakespeare also eliminated Banquo as the historical Macbeth’s co-conspirator in the murder to promote Banquo’s innocence and nobility in originating a kingly line from which James traced his legitimacy. Additional prominence is also given to the Weird Sisters, whom Holinshed only mentions in their initial meeting of Macbeth on the heath. The prophetic warning “beware Macduff” is attributed to “certain wizards in whose words Macbeth put great confidence.” The importance of the witches and  the  occult  in  Macbeth   must  have  been  meant  to  appeal  to  a  king  who  produced a treatise, Daemonologie (1597), on witch-craft.

The uncanny sets the tone of moral ambiguity from the play’s outset as the three witches gather to encounter Macbeth “When the battle’s lost and won” in an inverted world in which “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Nothing in the play will be what it seems, and the tragedy results from the confusion and  conflict  between  the  fair—honor,  nobility,  duty—and  the  foul—rank  ambition and bloody murder. Throughout the play nature reflects the disorder and violence of the action. Opening with thunder and lightning, the drama is set in a Scotland contending with the rebellion of the thane (feudal lord) of Cawdor, whom the fearless and courageous Macbeth has vanquished on the battlefield. The play, therefore, initially establishes Macbeth as a dutiful and trusted vassal of the king, Duncan of Scotland, deserving to be rewarded with the rebel’s title for restoring peace and order in the realm. “What he hath lost,” Duncan declares, “noble Macbeth hath won.” News of this honor reaches Macbeth through the witches, who greet him both as the thane of Cawdor and “king hereafter” and his comrade-in-arms Banquo as one who “shalt get kings, though thou be none.” Like the ghost in Hamlet , the  Weird  Sisters  are  left  purposefully  ambiguous  and  problematic.  Are  they  agents  of  fate  that  determine  Macbeth’s  doom,  predicting  and  even  dictating  the  inevitable,  or  do  they  merely  signal  a  latency  in  Macbeth’s  ambitious character?

When he is greeted by the king’s emissaries as thane of Cawdor, Macbeth begins to wonder if the first predictions of the witches came true and what will come of the second of “king hereafter”:

This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is But what is not.

Macbeth  will  be  defined  by  his  “horrible  imaginings,”  by  his  considerable  intellectual and imaginative capacity both to understand what he knows to be true and right and his opposed desires and their frightful consequences. Only Hamlet has as fully a developed interior life and dramatized mental processes as  Macbeth  in  Shakespeare’s  plays.  Macbeth’s  ambition  is  initially  checked  by his conscience and by his fear of the unforeseen consequence of violating moral  laws.  Shakespeare  brilliantly  dramatizes  Macbeth’s  mental  conflict in near stream of consciousness, associational fashion:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly. If th’assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease, success: that but this blow Might be the be all and the end all, here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases We still have judgement here, that we but teach Bloody instructions which, being taught, return To plague th’inventor. This even-handed justice Commends th’ingredients of our poison’d chalice To our own lips. He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, Who should against his murderer shut the door, Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off, And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself And falls on the other.

Macbeth’s “spur” comes in the form of Lady Macbeth, who plays on her husband’s selfimage of courage and virility to commit to the murder. She also reveals her own shocking cancellation of gender imperatives in shaming her husband into action, in one of the most shocking passages of the play:

. . . I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this.

Horrified  at  his  wife’s  resolve  and  cold-blooded  calculation  in  devising  the  plot,  Macbeth  urges  his  wife  to  “Bring  forth  menchildren  only,  /  For  thy  undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males,” but commits “Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.”

With the decision to kill the king taken, the play accelerates unrelentingly through a succession of powerful scenes: Duncan’s and Banquo’s murders, the banquet scene in which Banquo’s ghost appears, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, and Macbeth’s final battle with Macduff, Thane of Fife. Duncan’s offstage murder  contrasts  Macbeth’s  “horrible  imaginings”  concerning  the  implications and Lady Macbeth’s chilling practicality. Macbeth’s question, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” is answered by his wife: “A little water clears us of this deed; / How easy is it then!” The knocking at the door of the castle, ominously signaling the revelation of the crime, prompts the play’s one comic respite in the Porter’s drunken foolery that he is at the door of “Hell’s Gate” controlling the entrance of the damned. With the fl ight of Duncan’s sons, who fear for their lives, causing them to be suspected as murderers, Macbeth is named king, and the play’s focus shifts to Macbeth’s keeping and consolidating the power he has seized. Having gained what the witches prophesied, Macbeth next tries to prevent their prediction that Banquo’s descendants will reign by setting assassins to kill Banquo and his son, Fleance. The plan goes awry, and Fleance escapes, leaving Macbeth again at the mercy of the witches’ prophecy. His psychic breakdown is dramatized by his seeing Banquo’s ghost occupying Macbeth’s place at the banquet. Pushed to  the  edge  of  mental  collapse,  Macbeth  steels  himself  to  meet  the  witches  again to learn what is in store for him: “Iam in blood,” he declares, “Stepp’d in so far that, should Iwade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

The witches reassure him that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” and that he will never be vanquished until “Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him.” Confident that he is invulnerable, Macbeth  responds  to  the  rebellion  mounted  by  Duncan’s  son  Malcolm  and  Macduff, who has joined him in England, by ordering the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her children. Macbeth has progressed from a murderer in fulfillment of the witches predictions to a murderer (of Banquo) in order to subvert their predictions and then to pointless butchery that serves no other purpose than as an exercise in willful destruction. Ironically, Macbeth, whom his wife feared  was  “too  full  o’  the  milk  of  human  kindness  /  To  catch  the  nearest  way” to serve his ambition, displays the same cold calculation that frightened him  about  his  wife,  while  Lady  Macbeth  succumbs  psychically  to  her  own  “horrible  imaginings.”  Lady  Macbeth  relives  the  murder  as  she  sleepwalks,  Shakespeare’s version of the workings of the unconscious. The blood in her tormented  conscience  that  formerly  could  be  removed  with  a  little  water  is  now a permanent noxious stain in which “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten.” Women’s cries announcing her offstage death are greeted by Macbeth with detached indifference:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears: The time has been, my senses would have cool’d To hear a nightshriek, and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in’t. Ihave supp’d full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, Cannot once start me.

Macbeth reveals himself here as an emotional and moral void. Confirmation that “The Queen, my lord, is dead” prompts only the bitter comment, “She should have died hereafter.” For Macbeth, life has lost all meaning, refl ected in the bleakest lines Shakespeare ever composed:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Time and the world that Macbeth had sought to rule are revealed to him as empty and futile, embodied in a metaphor from the theater with life as a histrionic, talentless actor in a tedious, pointless play.

Macbeth’s final testing comes when Malcolm orders his troops to camoufl  age  their  movement  by  carrying  boughs  from  Birnam  Woods  in  their march toward Dunsinane and from Macduff, whom he faces in combat and reveals that he was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d,” that is, born by cesarean section and therefore not “of woman born.” This revelation, the final fulfillment of the witches’ prophecies, causes Macbeth to fl ee, but he is prompted  by  Macduff’s  taunt  of  cowardice  and  order  to  surrender  to  meet  Macduff’s challenge, despite knowing the deadly outcome:

Yet I will try the last. Before my body I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

Macbeth  returns  to  the  world  of  combat  where  his  initial  distinctions  were  honorably earned and tragically lost.

The play concludes with order restored to Scotland, as Macduff presents Macbeth’s severed head to Malcolm, who is hailed as king. Malcolm may assert his control and diminish Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as “this dead butcher and his fiendlike queen,” but the audience knows more than that. We know what  Malcolm  does  not,  that  it  will  not  be  his  royal  line  but  Banquo’s  that  will eventually rule Scotland, and inevitably another round of rebellion and murder is to come. We also know in horrifying human terms the making of a butcher and a fiend who refuse to be so easily dismissed as aberrations.

Macbeth Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

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The Influence Of The Supernatural In Macbeth

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Works cited

• Shakespeare, W. (2017). The Tragedy of Macbeth. Simon & Schuster.
• Bradley, A. C. (1991). Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. Penguin UK.
• Kranz, D. (2017). Supernatural Soliciting in Shakespeare. In A. Hadfield (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists (pp. 163-176). Cambridge University Press.
• Asp, C. (2015). The Supernatural in Shakespeare's Macbeth. GRIN Verlag.
• Wilson, J. (2012). The Essential Shakespeare Handbook. DK Publishing.
• Holland, P. (2013). Shakespeare Survey: Volume 66, Working with Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press.
• Greenblatt, S. (2018). Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. W. W. Norton & Company.
• McEachern, C. (2019). Shakespeare, The Tragedies: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
• Honigmann, E. A. J. (2016). Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies Revisited: The Dramatist's Manipulation of Response. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Nuttall, A. D. (2015). Macbeth: A Guide to the Play. Macmillan International Higher Education.

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‘Macbeth’ Grade 9 Example Response

Grade 9 – full mark – ‘Macbeth’ response

Starting with this extract (from act 1 scene 7), how does Shakespeare present the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth?

In Shakespeare’s eponymous tragedy ‘Macbeth’, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s relationship is a complex portrait of love, illustrating layers of utter devotion alongside overwhelming resentment. Though the couple begins the play unnaturally strong within their marriage, this seems to act as an early warning of their imminent and inevitable fall from grace, ending the play in an almost entirely different relationship than the one they began the play with.

In the exposition of the play, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth initially appear immensely strong within their marriage, with Macbeth describing his wife as ‘my dearest partner of greatness’ in act 1 scene 5. The emotive superlative adjective ‘dearest’ is a term of endearment, and acts as a clear depiction of how valued Lady Macbeth is by her husband. Secondly, the noun ‘partner’ creates a sense of sincere equality which, as equality within marriage would have been unusual in the Jacobean era, illustrates to a contemporary audience the positive aspects of their relationship. Furthermore the lexical choice ‘greatness’ may connote ambition, and as they are ‘partner(s)’, Shakespeare suggests that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are equal in their desire for power and control, further confirming their compatibility but potentially hinting that said compatibility will serve as the couple’s hamartia.

However, the strength of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s relationship falls into a rapid downward spiral in the subsequent scenes, as a struggle for power within the marriage ensues. This is evidenced when Macbeth, in act 1 scene 7, uses the declarative statement ‘we will proceed no further in this business’. Here, Macbeth seems to exude masculinity, embracing his gender role and dictating both his and his wife’s decisions. The negation ‘no’ clearly indicates his alleged definitive attitude. However, Lady Macbeth refuses to accept her husband’s rule, stating ‘when you durst do it, then you were a man’. She attempts to emasculate him to see their plan through. The verb ‘durst’ illustrates the risk taking behaviour that Lady Macbeth is encouraging; implying an element of toxicity within their relationship, and her harsh speech makes the cracks in their relationship further visible to the audience. It is also probable that a contemporary audience would be made severely uncomfortable in the presence of Lady Macbeth’s unapologetic display of power, and it is possible that Shakespeare attempts to paint Lady Macbeth as the villain of the play, playing upon the audience’s pre-determined fears of feminine power. Though Lady Macbeth appears to be acting entirely out of self-interest, another reader may argue that she influences her husband so heavily to commit the heinous act of regicide, as she believes that he crown may as a substitute for the child or children that Shakespeare suggests she and Macbeth have lost previously, and in turn better Macbeth’s life and bring him to the same happiness that came with the child, except in another form.

As the play progresses, Shakespeare creates more and more distance between the characters, portraying the breakdown of their relationship as gradual within the play but rapid in the overall sense of time on stage. For example, Lady Macbeth requests a servant ‘say to the king’ Lady Macbeth ‘would attend his leisure/ for a few words’. Here she is reduced to the status of someone far lesser than the king, having to request to speak to her own husband. It could be interpreted that, now as king, Macbeth holds himself above all else, even his wife, perhaps due to the belief of the divine right of kings. The use of the title rather than his name plainly indicated the lack of closeness Lady Macbeth now feels with Macbeth and intensely emotionally separates them. This same idea is referenced as Shakespeare develops the characters to almost juxtapose each other in their experiences after the murder of Duncan. For example, Macbeth seems to be trapped in a permanent day, after ‘Macbeth does murder sleep’ and his guilt and paranoia render him unable to rest. In contrast, Lady Macbeth takes on an oppositional path, suffering sleepwalking and unable to wake from her nightmare; repeating the phrase ‘to bed. To bed’ as if trapped in a never-ending night. This illustrates to the audience the extreme transformation Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s relationship undergoes, and how differently they end up experiencing the aftermath of regicide.

In conclusion, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth begin the play almost too comfortable within their marriage, which seems to invite the presence of chaos and tragedy into their relationship. Their moral compositions are opposing one another, which leads to the distancing and total breakdown of their once successful marriage and thus serves as a warning to the audience about the effects of murder, and what the deadly sin of greed can do to a person and a marriage.

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gcseenglishwithmisshuttlestone

Secondary English teacher in Herts. View all posts by gcseenglishwithmisshuttlestone

9 thoughts on “‘Macbeth’ Grade 9 Example Response”

wheres the context

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It is also probable that a contemporary audience would be made severely uncomfortable in the presence of Lady Macbeth’s unapologetic display of power, and it is possible that Shakespeare attempts to paint Lady Macbeth as the villain of the play, playing upon the audience’s pre-determined fears of feminine power.

Also ref to ‘divine right of kings’

Thank you! This is a brilliant response. Just what I needed. Could you also please include the extract in the question.

We will proceed no further in this business. He hath honored me of late, and I have bought Golden opinions from all sorts of people, Which would be worn now in their newest gloss, Not cast aside so soon.

—> until end of scene

She did (Act 1 Scene 7)

Another great resource for grade 9 Macbeth analysis https://youtu.be/bGzLDRX71bs

In order to get a grade 9 for a piece like this would you need to include a wide range of vocabulary or could you write the same thing ‘dumbed down’ and get a 9.

If the ideas were as strong then yes, but your writing must AT LEAST be ‘clear’ for a grade 6 or above.

This is really great, I’m in Year 10 doing my Mock on Thursday, a great point that i have found (because I also take history) Is the depiction of women throughout the play, during the Elizabethan era, (before the Jacobean era) many people had a changed view of women as Queen Elizabeth was such a powerful woman, glimpses of this have been shown in Jacobean plays, in this case Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is depicted as powerful although she had to be killed of to please King James (as he was a misogynist) women are also depicted as evil in the play, such as the three witches, I also found that the Witches are in three which could be a mockery to the Holy Trinity.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Macbeth — Macbeth: A Tragic Hero Analysis

Macbeth: a Tragic Hero Analysis

• Categories: Macbeth Tragic Hero

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Words: 619 |

Published: Mar 16, 2024

Words: 619 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

The definition of a tragic hero, macbeth’s tragic flaw: ambition, the influence of the supernatural, moral decline and guilt, the tragic end.

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Macbeth Essays

There are loads of ways you can approach writing an essay, but the two i favour are detailed below., the key thing to remember is that an essay should focus on the three aos:, ao1: plot and character development; ao2: language and technique; ao3: context, strategy 1 : extract / rest of play, the first strategy basically splits the essay into 3 paragraphs., the first paragraph focuses on the extract, the second focuses on the rest of the play, the third focuses on context. essentially, it's one ao per paragraph, for a really neatly organised essay., strategy 2 : a structured essay with an argument, this strategy allows you to get a much higher marks as it's structured to form an argument about the whole text. although you might think that's harder - and it's probably going to score more highly - i'd argue that it's actually easier to master. mainly because you do most of the work before the day of the exam., to see some examples of these, click on the links below:, lady macbeth as a powerful woman, macbeth as a heroic character, the key to this style is remembering this: you're going to get a question about a theme, and the extract will definitely relate to the theme., the strategy here is planning out your essays before the exam, knowing that the extract will fit into them somehow., below are some structured essays i've put together., macbeth and gender.

Macbeth Analytical Essay

• Arts & Humanities