ACT 1, SCENES 3-4 OF MACBETH (Güneş and Ada)
Main themes:
DESTINY/FREEWILL:Had he not killed king Duncan would he still have become king himself?
He’s struggling between good and evil. And the good is that he is named thane of Cawdor, and that the prophecy is true (he’s got this position without an effort). It’s a gift to him, but at the same time he imagines killing Duncan; (the rightful King) which is evil. Good and evil coexist within him. But still he goes beyond that to become king of Scotland, instead of letting things take their natural course. He takes destiny in his own hands and so manipulates the situation. “Let not light see my black and deep desires” (line 51, scene 4, act 1) ACTION/CONSEQUENCE:
Note: The theme of consequences that follow actions is a very common theme in theater. (One other example would be: “Faust” makes a deal with the devil for his soul)
Like all say:
You reap what you sow
Apple seeds give you apple trees J
The themes crime and punishment are parallel to the themes action and consequence, or they could even be seen as a subtitle of action and consequence (whereas crime is the action that is done and the punishment is the consequence of that action).
“Is the execution done on Cawdor? Or not. Those in commission returned yet?”
After punishing the thane of Cawdor, Duncan names Macbeth as the new thane of Cawdor. By putting Macbeth in the place of someone he punished for being ambitious, he causes Macbeth to grow that same ambition. Therefore although a punishment followed a crime, it also lead to a new crime (Just something to think about J )
ACT 1 SCENE 7 & ACT 2 SCENE 1 (Melih and Ayberk)
Destiny X Freewill: Macbeth was told that he will be the King of Scotland. Is killing the king his destiny or his freewill?
Guilt X Consciousness: Macbeth considers killing King Duncan. At the same time he feels guilty.
Ambition: Lady Macbeth has no cold feet about killing King Duncan. Tough Macbeth has second thoughts because of his conscience, Lady Macbeth tries hard to convince him to do that by despising him and blaming him for being a coward.
Appearance X Reality: Macbeth murders his king, appearantly because it is his destiny, but it is more likely that he killed him because of his and his wife’s ambitions.
Act 2, Scenes 2 and 3 (Gülnaz and Yağız)
Nature and the Unnatural
In medieval times, it was believed that the health of a country was directly related to the goodness and moral legitimacy of its king. If the king was good and just, then the nation would have good harvests and good weather. If there was political order, there would be natural order. Macbeth shows this relationship: when he disrupts the social and political order by murdering Duncan and usurping the throne, nature goes haywire. Incredible storms rage, the earth tremors, birds cry, animals go insane.
The unnatural events of the physical world emphasize the horror of Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s acts, and reflects the warping of their souls by ambition.
Also note the way that different characters talk about nature in the play. Duncan and Malcolm use nature metaphors when they speak of kingship – they see themselves as gardeners and want to make their realm grow and flower. In contrast, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth either try to hide from nature:
“Stars, hide your fires! Let not light see my black and deep desires” (act 1 scene 4);
or to use nature to hide their cruel designs:
“Look like the inocent flower, but be the serpent under it.” (act 1 scene 5)
The implication is that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, once they have given in to the extreme selfishness of ambition, have themselves become unnatural.
As Lady Macbeth waits for Macbeth to murder King Duncan and return to her, she says of the king's grooms, "I have drugg'd their possets, / That death and nature do contend about them, / Whether they live or die" (2.2.6-8). Here she uses the word "nature" in the sense of life, which struggles with death.
Later in the scene, after Macbeth has killed the king, he frets that he has murdered sleep and that he will never sleep again. He speaks of sleep as "great nature's second course, / Chief nourisher in life's feast" (2.2.36-37). The second course of a meal was the main course, not the appetizer or the dessert, and so the "chief nourisher." Macbeth feels that he will never again be nourished by kindly nature.
Manhood
Over and over again in Macbeth, characters discuss or debate about manhood: Lady Macbeth challenges Macbeth when he has second-thoughts about murdering Duncan, Banquo refuses to join Macbeth in his plot, etc.
Through these challenges, Macbeth questions and examines manhood itself. Does a true man take what he wants no matter what it is, as Lady M believes? Or does a real man have the strength to restrain his desires, as Banquo believes? All of Macbeth can be seen as a struggle to answer this question about the nature and responsibilities of manhood.
Ambition
Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth want to be great and powerful, and sacrifice their morals to achieve that goal. By contrasting these two characters with others in the play, such as Banquo, Duncan and Macduff, who also want to be great leaders but refuse to allow ambition to come before honor, Macbeth shows how naked ambition, freed from any sort of moral or social conscience, ultimately takes over every other characteristic of a person. Unchecked ambition, Macbeth suggests, can never be fulfilled, and therefore quickly grows in to a monster that will destroy anyone who gives into it.
Fate
From the moment the weird sisters tell Macbeth and Banquo their prophecies, both the characters and we are forced to wonder about fate. Is it real? Is action necessary to make it come to pass, or will the prophecy come true no matter what one does? Different characters answer these questions in different ways at different times, and their answers are ambiguous – just as fate always is
Unlike Banquo, Macbeth acts; he kills the king. Macbeth tries to master fate, to make fate conform to exactly what he wants. But, of course, fate doesn’t work that way. By trying to master it once, he puts himself in the position of having to master it always. At every instant, he has to struggle against those parts of the prophecies that don’t favor him. Ultimately, he becomes so obsessed with it that he becomes delusional: he becomes unable to see the half-truths behind the prophecies. By trying to master fate, he brings himself to ruin.
Violence
In the process of all the bloodshed in the play, Macbeth makes an important point about the nature of violence: every violent act, even those done for selfless reasons, seems to lead inevitably to the next violent act. The violence through which Macbeth usurps the throne makes way for others to use violence to try to take over it. Violence leads to violence, a vicious cycle.
Visions and Hallucinations
Are these sights and sounds supernatural visions or figments of his guilty imagination? There is no definitive answer, which is itself actually an answer: They’re both. Macbeth is a man at war with himself, his innate honor battling his ambition. Just as nature goes crazy when the normal natural order is ruptured, Macbeth’s own mind does the same when it is forced to fight against itself.
Blood
Blood is always linked to violence, but here, it comes to symbolize something else: guilt. Killing and death happen in an instant, but blood remains, and stains. At the times when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth grow most guilty, they despair that they will never be able to wash the blood – their guilt – from their hands.
Telling Malcolm and Donalbain of their father's murder, Macbeth says, "The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood / Is stopp'd; the very source of it is stopp'd" (2.3.98-99). Here, the primary meaning of "your blood" is "your family," but Macbeth's metaphors also picture blood as a life-giving essence. In another second, blood appears as the precious clothing of a precious body, when Macbeth, justifying his killing of the grooms, describes the King's corpse: "Here lay Duncan, / His silver skin laced with his golden blood" (2.3.112).
In this scene, the last mention of blood comes from Donalbain, who says to his brother, "the near in blood, / The nearer bloody" (2.3.140-141), meaning that as the murdered King's sons, they are likely to be murdered themselves.Sleep
Symbolizes innocence, purity and peace of mind. And in killing Duncan, Macbeth actually does murder sleep: Lady M begins to sleepwalk, and Macbeth is haunted by his nightmares.
Equivocation
In the scene in which Macduff discovers the bloody corpse of King Duncan, the Porter, still suffering the effects of a night of drinking, pretends that he is the gatekeeper of hell. Among the sinners that he pretends to welcome into hell is an "equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale" (2.3.8-9). This passage is often considered to be a reference to Henry Garnet, a Jesuit of Shakespeare's time who wrote a "A Treatise of Equivocation." He wrote the "Treatise" in order to tell other Catholics how to deal with dangerous questions from Protestant inquisitors. If the Catholics admitted that they were Catholics, they would be in serious trouble with the Protestants. On the other hand, it was a sin against God to lie under oath. The solution to the problem, Garnet said, was equivocation. A Catholic equivocater could lie and tell the Protestants what they wanted to hear, but God would know that what the Catholic said was really the truth in another sense. Later in the play, the Witches, serving the devil, equivocate with Macbeth. For example, they tell him that he has no need to fear until Birnham wood comes to his castle. It sounds like they mean that he will never have a reason to fear, because trees can't walk, but it turns out that men can carry branches they have cut, so that the "wood" comes to the castle in that sense.
Act 3, Scene 2 (Berk and Doruk)
The supernatural: “Come, seeling night, scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day and with thy blood and invisible hand, cancel and tear to pieces that great bond which keeps me pale.”
Macbeth
Ambition:“But in them nature’s copy’s not eterne.”
Lady Macbeth
Lady Macbeth
Destiny: “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.” Macbeth
Act 5 Scene 1 (Ezgim and Hilal)
The Change of Lady Macbeth:
She is now
- sleepwalking
- trying to wash continuosuly because of the imaginary blood from her hands
- talking in her sleep about murder.
From these quotes...
- “Wash your hands. Put on your nightgown. Look not so pale.—I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried; he cannot come out on ’s grave.”
- “To bed, to bed. There’s knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come. Give me your hand. What’s done cannot be undone.—To bed, to bed, to bed!”
We can understand that she is trying to soothe herself.
