A CRITICAL STUDY OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY

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Macbeth’s statement above suggests that he is already experiencing mental torture and anguish of the soul. Mental pain causes him to feel the pull of his humanity. He becomes paralytic as he contemplates his dastardly deed. Even though Lady Macbeth accuses him of being a coward, he bluntly refuses to enter the guards’ chamber, and tells her plainly:

I’ll go no more.

I am afraid to think what I have done;

Look on’t again I dare not.

Thus, as fear starts to dominate the entire being of Macbeth, he begins to suffer from intense nightmare. According to Knott (1974):

There is no tragedy without awareness.

Richard III is aware of the grand Mechanism.

Macbeth is aware of nightmare. In the world in which murder is being imposed as fate, compulsion and inner necessity, there is only one dream: of a murder that will break the murder cycle, will be the way out of nightmare and will mean liberation. For the thought of murder that has to be committed, murder one cannot escape from is even worse than murder itself.

 

With mutiny and screams against tyranny at home, the desertion of troops, friends and thanes, and the untimely death of Lady Macbeth, Macbeth finds himself in sore need of everything, hence his bitter lamentation:

I have lived long enough: my way of life

Is fallen into sear, the yellow leaf

And that which should accompany old age

As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends

I must not look to have; but in their stead

Curses not loud but deep (Act V, Scene III).

For being her husband’s pillar of support and source of enduring courage, Lady Macbeth has a fair share of retribution in her sleep-walking madness. Overpowered by guilt, she complains:

Here’s the smell of blood still.

All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand

(Act V, Scene I).

Although she threatens to wish away the blood, it is clear to her that “what’s done cannot be undone” (Act V Scene I). The overweening influence of guilt saps away the strength, which ab initio compels her to think that “it is the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil”. Here, “Shakespeare wishes to stress that evil is sterile and self-destructive” (Harvey 42). When Lady Macbeth dies, Macbeth in utter despair, realises albeit belatedly, the futility of unconscionable life. In a death – wish, he sees life as a candle in the wind, and cries:

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 (Act V, Scene V).

Now, his helplessness assumes even a more terrifying dimension when Birnam wood closes in on him. Listen again to the lamentation of a desperate and finished man:

They have tied me to a stake:

I cannot fly.

But bear-like, I must fight the course (Act V Scene VI).

Thus, when Macbeth in a mad battle, loses his head to the avenging sword of Macduff, he suffers in more than like measures, the humiliation and anguish of his victims. “Macduff, not Macbeth, had to win the hand-to-hand combat” (Beckerman, 31), in order to restore equilibrium in the overheated polity. And this equilibrium is maximally attained in the coronation of Malcolm – the heir – apparent.

In conclusion, this unit examines the nature of criminality and retribution in Macbeth. The writer feels that Macbeth is intensely evil, and that his “soul-searching before and after he has embarked on his career of murder are the thoughts of a guilty man whose conscience still troubles him after his will had already consented to a life of evil” (Vargas, 111). However, this study expresses the notion that Macbeth is created to demonstrate, among other things, the consequences of violating the idea of, and belief in, cosmic degree and order, which is very dear to the Elizabethans. Macbeth himself harps on this all-important value-habit of his people in the banquet scene, where he tells the lords:

You know your own degree

Sit at first and last

The hearty welcome (Act III, Scene III).

Similarly, when the ghost of Banquo causes Macbeth to behave in an outlandish way that eventually disrupts the banquet, Lady Macbeth again reminds the lords as they make haste to go, “stand not upon the order of your going” (Act III, Scene IV). This implies that even in social life, the Elizabethans were to observe the idea of degree and order. It is the conviction of this author that Shakespeare, in this dense and concentrated tragedy, puts the concept of degree and order into dramatic action in order to vitalise it. Fraser posits that “intellectual positions, ideas, value-systems are sometimes only fully vitalised and assessable when they issue in action, especially action with grave potential or actual consequences”.

The Elizabethans flaunted the idea of degree and order as an existential dogma, but in their daily existence, they frequently trampled upon it. Shakespeare, therefore, created the character, Macbeth in order to reveal the gulf between what ideally his people would want their society to be, and the turbulent reality of this society.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare deals with violence in a fundamental way. John Fraser argues that any playwright who deals with violence in a manner Shakespeare does in Macbeth, “becomes a kind of nose-rubber or mirror-holder, someone rubbing the spectator’s nose in the disagreeable and holding up a mirror in which he can contemplate the essential filthiness, nastiness, beastliness of mankind, or at least, of unregenerate bourgeois mankind” (p.110). In the main, it is the writer’s view that Shakespeare dramatises the criminal ethos of men of his age, not only to show us some of the disquieting human possibilities, but equally, to “give back to thought, the kind of existential fullness that is normally denied to it by the wrong kind of idealising and abstracting” (p.122).

Although in Macbeth, life experiences appear to parallel expectations, Shakespeare is able to use the play to shed light on one of the maxims, which his people attempted to use to order their society, which frequent political cataclysm and madness appear to threaten. By juxtaposing impressions of world of order and disorder Shakespeare shows us “the flow of images of life as a reflection of a reality that is always shifting”(Serban,p. 43), and asks us to make a choice.

CONCLUSION

This article explains the nature and characteristics of Shakespearean tragedy. Adequate analysis of Macbeth is made in order to reveal Shakespeare’s perception of the tragic view of life. Specifically, the theme of vaulting ambition is examined to show how it helped to clarify the Elizabethan concept of degree and order.

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