MACBETH

BY William Shakespeare

Macbeth is a play written by Shakespeare, it is a tragedy,

and in my opinion is one of the most remarkable plays ever to
be written. It is based on the same problem that the world has
had and will have forever: the betrayal and the power struggle.
The play was firs written more than 400 years ago. The
main

source

for Macbeth was

Holinshed's Chronicles about

Macbeth. The first idea came from Hector Boece who wrote the
Cotorum Historiae, in 1527. But as a genius Shakespeare has
changed some details to be original and to bring to light some
of the main characters qualities and weaknesses.

So, he

created a masterpiece that will last forever and peoples all over
the world are going to enjoy it.
Macbeth is an old name that comes form of the Old
Gaelic personal name MacBeatha translating as 'the son of
(mac) life (beatha)' or 'a man of religion'. This was the name of
an 11th-century Scottish king; an alternative proposed is that
the origin of the name comes from macc-bethad meaning "one
of the elect"
At first, Macbeth is presented to be a brave and loyal
warrior. Although he is a brave man, he is not so upright. He is
easy to manipulate, and that we learn from the fact that he is
fully controlled by the witches and his wife. In my opinion he
was not a bad person, but he had bad influence, and after that
he went crazy for power.

I think that one of the main ideas of this play is the fact
that we should not be influenced by the first impression of a
person, and nor of his or hers name. The origin of his name
should have made Macbeth a good person, and everybody
trusted him. But was that a good thing? Maybe the name was
chosen to show the opposite, and to emphasize the flaw of the
main character.
Macbeth was going through a difficult period. He had to
choose between his wife-who was the person that he truly
loved, and his friend the actual king. Although he was a loyal
warrior he considered that his wifes ideas were good, so he
didnt wait until the predictions of the witches to become true,
he tried everything possible to make them true.
In fact we can say that the witches only told him what they
thought, and he has done everything possible to make the
predictions become real.
After murdering the king, he became another person.
Nowadays there are a lot of people that are able to do
everything, even killing themselves not only the others, to have
the power. It is interesting that there are a few people that are
honest and are in possession of a sort of power. Everywhere
there are people doing bad things to make themselves better. I
think that this is in our nature, and I dont blame Macbeth for
trusting his wife, he has done just the way she told him, and
after doing a murder it became easy to do the others. I think
that this
Tragedy is also a philological story.

Macbeth is himself considered to be a tyrant and a

horrifying character, and this idea can be also found in
Macbeths invocation to night: come sealing night, /scarf up
the tender eye of pitiful day.
Every time something bad is happening the nature feels,
and the image of the nature is presented to be horrifying:
thunder, lightning and great storms are threatening that
something evil is going to be produced.
Another interesting thing, in Shakespeares tragedy, is
the fact that all the women that appear in this story are bad, or
are having a bad influence on Macbeth. It is clear that if there
were no woman there would be no conflicts. The witches are
evil, and at those times, there were rules against them, and
everybody blamed them for being supernatural persons.
Think about those times, and after that try to understand the
message and how they were presented. They were bad person
who predicted the future of the three men that they first met,
and they even predict the fact that they will meet again. There
are different ways of understanding the message, for the first
public, they were something bad, supernatural and malicious.
But for us, they could be just some persons who tried and
managed to create chaos. Nowadays people dont believe in
witches and they can think that they were trying to influence
Macbeth to do the things they predicted. But for Shakespeares
time that wasnt the same, they were just supernatural persons
who predict the bad and disastrous future. In those times the
witches were killed, and everybody who was believed to be a
witch was punished and accused of witchcraft.

Another bad woman was Macbeths wife, she convinced

him to commit the crime. She is presented just in relationship
with Macbeth. We can deduce that she was an educated woman
who wanted so much to become the queen. For that reason she
managed to convince Macbeth to do the murder. That is the
moment when we find that he was not a bad person, he just
listened to his wife, and the idea of becoming the king and
having all the power, made him capable of this.
The fact that he listened and obeyed his wife denotes
that he loved her. She used her mask to seduce and blame the
guards, but finally she was not able to sustain the mask of
cruelty, and she committed suicide. After becoming what she
really wanted to, she felt guilty, because she didnt want her
husband to be so cruel and detached of all the murderers.
This is in my opinion the reason why Macbeth became so
involved in the power struggle. The moment when he lost his
wife was a crucial moment for the story. Behind him, she was
the person who controlled him, and she could manipulate him
as she wanted to. But after remaining alone, Macbeth lost his
mind, and he had done everything instinctively.
For those times she was believed to be a ruthless and
ambitious woman. She had something that women those time
did not have, she had a soul of a warrior. She was a cruel
woman, more cruel than her husband.

She managed to

manipulate her husband in a very convincing way; he thought

that that was the only way to prove himself to be a real man.
The difference between her and the women nowadays is the

fact that there are few women in the world known to have
influenced a man in the power struggle.
In my opinion the fact that lady Macbeth is one of the
most frightening female characters in all the world literature.
She had no supernatural power but she does the same things as
the witches from those times were doing. She manipulated her
husband, proved that she was brave; she was like a warrior in
everything that she has done, but finally her weakness and quilt
determine her to commit suicide. This is one of the hardest
decisions a person could ever do, but this one she decided as
fast as all the others, like a warrior.
On the other hand the fact that all the women in this play
are bad and have a sort of supernatural power is based on the
problem of that time. There were a lot of Shakespeares
feminine characters presented in the same way.
This was the issue of those ages, the women place was
not a certain thing, and this idea was created by the religion,
the events of those times, and by the fact that women were not
so brave. A woman who was in control was a sign on the
disaster, and it was completely unnatural.
The Medieval Church transmitted a wrong idea that a
woman was good, only if she was pure like the Virgin Mary. So
the women should be kind and puny to be good. And another
character presented by church was the Whore of Babylon, and
so an independent woman, who felt free to do things that were
not so ethical, was a bad sign. Maybe Bloody Mary was another
example of bad woman being in fully control, and this one was

in those time history. This is why Macbeth is believed to be such

a misogynistic play.
Shakespeare was living with the fear of disorder that is
expressed in many of his plays. He admits finally that achieving
the ideal order is impossible. Although in this play, the order is
established after the end of Macbeths reign of tyranny, after
Macbeth was murdered, the good king came back to the power.
Also Shakespeares idea of order is followed by a period of
disorder, and after that another period of order. The king
Duncan who was a brave and good king was killed, and so it
began the tyranny of Macbeth wich was finally interrupted by
Malcolm, who reestablished the order in the kingdom, for the
exhilaration of the people who lived there.
The death of Macbeth is presented as the final confrontation,
and it reveals the second prediction of the witches, because an
unnatural born man kills the king.
The main theme of Shakespeares tragedy is the betrayal
and the power struggle. This is the problem that nowadays
society has also. This is an issue often used in movies, novels,
and historical poems. It was part of our country history and this
tragedy is a life lesson that everybody should assume. We have
to do everything that is possible to live in a better world, and to
not be influenced by the possession of any kind of power,
because not every story has a happy final.

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