Ambiguous Situations in Shakespeares Macbeth :: Macbeth essays

Macbeths Ambiguous Situations The audience finds in William Shakespeares tragical drama Macbetha number of developments and words and situations which are equivocal, unclear, unintelligible. This essay will look and analyze these parts of the play. L.C. Knights in the essay Macbeth mentions equivocation, unreality and other practicable causes of ambiguity within the play The equivocal personality of temptation, the commerce with phantoms event upon false choice, the resulting sense of unreality ( nonhing is, precisely what is not), which has yet such power to smother vital function, the unnaturalness of evil (against the use of disposition), and the relation between disintegration in the individual (my single republic of man) and disorder in the larger social organism - whole these are major themes of the play which are mirrored in the voice communication under consideration. (94) In his book, On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy, H. S. Wilson comments on the ambigu ities ring the Weird Sisters Scholars have been much exercised to determine the status of the Weird Sisters but again theirs seems to be a case interchangeable that of the Ghost of Hamlets come the ambiguities concerning these creatures are deliberate and meant to enhance our sense of their mystery without determining hardly what they are. They are something like the Norse fates in Holinshed, a good diffuse like ordinary English witches, and suggestive, besides, of a projection of Macbeths ambition and his event fears . . .. (72-73) In Everybodys Shakespeare Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies, Maynard Mack comments on the purposeful reconditeness in which Shakespeare keeps the three Witches The obscurity with which Shakespeare envelops their nature and powers is very probably deliberate, since he seems to intend them to body forth, in a physical presence on stage, precisely the mystery, the ambiguity, the question mark (psychological as well as metaphysical) that lies at the root of human wrong-doing, which is always both local and explicable, universal and inexplicable, like these very figures. (185-86) In Macbeth as the Imitation of an Action Francis Fergusson explains the irrational nature of the actions of Macbeth and his wife - a cause of ambiguity I do not need to remind you of the great scenes preceding the murder, in which Macbeth and his Lady take up themselves together for their desperate effort. If you think over these scenes, you will notice that the Macbeths fancy the action which begins here as a competition and a stunt, against curtilage and against nature.