Murder at Dunsinane

§ The Tragic Hero :The tragic hero carries a touch of

greatness (fierce determination, fixed ideas, which stirs not
only sympathy and pity, but also admiration, terror, and
awe.

§ Tragic heroes contribute to their own destruction by acts in

which the reader sees a flaw in their character. The flaw
Elements of often takes the form of obsession.

Shakespearean § The Tragic Flaw :Examples- Macbeth’s obsession with

Tragedy
power
§ The Tragic “Story” :1. The tragic story leads up to, and
includes, the death of the hero.
2. The suffering and calamities that befalls the hero are
unusual and exceptionally disastrous.
 § Shakespeare occasionally represents abnormal
conditions of mind: insanity, hallucinations etc.

§ Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural: ghosts

and witches who have supernatural knowledge. The
supernatural elements cannot be explained away as an
illusion in the mind of one of the characters. It does

The Supernatural, contribute to the action, but it is always placed in the

closest relation with the character.
Fate/Fortune/Chance
§ Shakespeare, in most tragedies, allows “chance” in
some form to influence some of the action. Finally,
chance is a prominent feature in life. That men may start
a course of events but can neither calculate nor control
it, is a tragic fact.
 § Internal Conflict
§ Shakespeare’s tragic hero, though he pursues his fated
way, is, at some point, torn by an inward struggle.

Tragic Conflicts
§ A comparison of the earlier and later tragedies show
this struggle is most emphasized in the later tragedies.
 § In Macbeth,William Shakespeare's tragedy about
power, ambition, deceit, and murder, the Three
Witchesforetell Macbeth's rise to King of Scotland but
also prophesy that future kings will descend
from Banquo, a fellow army captain. Prodded by his
Overveiw ambitious wife, Lady Macbeth, he murders King
Duncan, becomes king, and sends mercenaries to kill
Banquo and his son. His attempts to defy the prophesy
fail, however; Macduff kills Macbeth, and Duncan's
son Malcolm becomes king.
 § Major Thematic Topics:
§ fall of man; gender roles;
§ fortune; fate; free will;
Shakespearean § kingship/natural order;
Tragedy § ambition; love of self
 § Macbeth’s ambition is his tragic flaw. Devoid of any
morality, it ultimately causes Macbeth’s downfall. Two
factors stoke the flames of his ambition: the prophecy of
the Three Witches, who claim that not only will he be
thane of Cawdor, but also king, and even more so the
attitude of his wife, who taunts his assertiveness and
manhood and actually stage-directs her husband’s

Ambition and its actions.

§ Macbeth’s ambition, however, soon spirals out of

consequences control. He feels that his power is threatened to a point
where it can only be preserved through murdering his
suspected enemies. Eventually, ambition causes both
Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s undoing. He is defeated
in battle and decapitated by Macduff, while Lady
Macbeth succumbs to insanity and commits suicide.
 § The main theme of Macbeth—the destruction wrought when
ambition goes unchecked by moral constraints—finds its most
powerful expression in the play’s two main characters. Macbeth is a
courageous Scottish general who is not naturally inclined to
commit evil deeds, yet he deeply desires power and advancement.
He kills Duncan against his better judgment and afterward stews in
guilt and paranoia. Toward the end of the play he descends into a
kind of frantic, boastful madness. Lady Macbeth, on the other hand,

The Corrupting pursues her goals with greater determination, yet she is less
capable of withstanding the repercussions of her immoral acts.

Nature of Power One of Shakespeare’s most forcefully drawn female characters, she
spurs her husband mercilessly to kill Duncan and urges him to be
strong in the murder’s aftermath, but she is eventually driven to
distraction by the effect of Macbeth’s repeated bloodshed on her
conscience. In each case, ambition—helped, of course, by the
malign prophecies of the witches—is what drives the couple to
ever more terrible atrocities. The problem, the play suggests, is
that once one decides to use violence to further one’s quest for
power, it is difficult to stop. There are always potential threats to the
throne—Banquo, Fleance, Macduff—and it is always tempting to
use violent means to dispose of them.
 § “False face must hide what the false heart doth know,”
Macbeth tells Duncan, when he already has intentions to
murder him near the end of act I.
§ Similarly, the witches utterances, such as “fair is foul and
foul is fair”, subtly play with appearance and reality. Their
Appearance and prophecy, stating that Macbeth can’t be vanquished by any
Reality child “of woman born” is rendered vain when Macduff
reveals that he was born via a caesarean section. In
addition, the assurance that he would not be vanquished
until “Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill Shall
come against him” is at first deemed an unnatural
phenomenon, as a forest would not walk up a hill, but in
reality meant that soldiers were cutting up trees in Birnam
Wood to get closer to Dunsinane Hill.
§
 § Would Macbeth have become king had he not chosen
his murderous path? This question brings into play the
matters of fate and free will. The witches predict that he
would become thane of Cawdor, and soon after he is
anointed that title without any action required of him.
Fate and Free The witches show Macbeth his future and his fate, but

Will Duncan’s murder is a matter of Macbeth’s own free will,

and, after Duncan's assassination, the further
assassinations are a matter of his own planning. This
also applies to the other visions the witches conjure for
Macbeth: he sees them as a sign of his invincibility and
acts accordingly, but they actually anticipate his
demise.
 § In the play, Duncan is always referred to as a “king,” while Macbeth
soon becomes known as the “tyrant.” The difference between the
two types of rulers seems to be expressed in a conversation that
occurs in Act 4, scene 3, when Macduff meets Malcolm in England.
In order to test Macduff’s loyalty to Scotland, Malcolm pretends that
he would make an even worse king than Macbeth. He tells Macduff
of his reproachable qualities—among them a thirst for personal
power and a violent temperament, both of which seem to
characterize Macbeth perfectly. On the other hand, Malcolm says,

Kingship Vs
“The king-becoming graces / [are] justice, verity, temp’rance,
stableness, / Bounty, perseverance, mercy, [and] lowliness”
(4.3.92–93). The model king, then, offers the kingdom an
Tyranny embodiment of order and justice, but also comfort and affection.
Under him, subjects are rewarded according to their merits, as
when Duncan makes Macbeth thane of Cawdor after Macbeth’s
victory over the invaders. Most important, the king must be loyal to
Scotland above his own interests. Macbeth, by contrast, brings only
chaos to Scotland—symbolized in the bad weather and bizarre
supernatural events—and offers no real justice, only a habit of
capriciously murdering those he sees as a threat. As the
embodiment of tyranny, he must be overcome by Malcolm so that
Scotland can have a true king once more.
 § Macbeth
Macbeth is a Scottish general and the thane of Glamis who is
led to wicked thoughts by the prophecies of the three
witches, especially after their prophecy that he will be made
thane of Cawdor comes true. Macbeth is a brave soldier and
a powerful man, but he is not a virtuous one. He is easily
tempted into murder to fulfill his ambitions to the throne, and
once he commits his first crime and is crowned King of
Scotland, he embarks on further atrocities with increasing
Characters ease. Ultimately, Macbeth proves himself better suited to the
battlefield than to political intrigue, because he lacks the
skills necessary to rule without being a tyrant. His response
to every problem is violence and murder. Unlike
Shakespeare’s great villains, such as Iago in Othello and
Richard III in Richard III, Macbeth is never comfortable in his
role as a criminal. He is unable to bear the psychological
consequences of his atrocities.
 Macbeth’s wife, a deeply ambitious woman who lusts for
power and position. Early in the play she seems to be the
stronger and more ruthless of the two, as she urges her
husband to kill Duncan and seize the crown. After the
bloodshed begins, however, Lady Macbeth falls victim to
guilt and madness to an even greater degree than her
Lady Macbeth husband. Her conscience affects her to such an extent that
she eventually commits suicide. Interestingly, she and
Macbeth are presented as being deeply in love, and many
of Lady Macbeth’s speeches imply that her influence over
her husband is primarily sexual. Their joint alienation
from the world, occasioned by their partnership in crime,
seems to strengthen the attachment that they feel to each
another
 The brave, noble general whose children, according to
the witches’ prophecy, will inherit the Scottish throne. Like
Macbeth, Banquo thinks ambitious thoughts, but he does
not translate those thoughts into action. In a sense,
Banquo’s character stands as a rebuke to Macbeth, since
he represents the path Macbeth chose not to take: a path
Banquo in which ambition need not lead to betrayal and murder.
Appropriately, then, it is Banquo’s ghost—and not
Duncan’s—that haunts Macbeth. In addition to embodying
Macbeth’s guilt for killing Banquo, the ghost also reminds
Macbeth that he did not emulate Banquo’s reaction to the
witches’ prophecy.
 The good King of Scotland whom Macbeth, in his ambition
for the crown, murders. Duncan is the model of a virtuous,
King Duncan benevolent, and farsighted ruler. His death symbolizes
the destruction of an order in Scotland that can be
restored only when Duncan’s line, in the person of
Malcolm, once more occupies the throne.
 A Scottish nobleman hostile to Macbeth’s kingship from
the start. He eventually becomes a leader of the crusade
Macduff to unseat Macbeth. The crusade’s mission is to place the
rightful king, Malcolm, on the throne, but Macduff also
desires vengeance for Macbeth’s murder of Macduff’s
wife and young son.
 § What does the witches’ prophesy reveal about
Macbeth’s intentions?

§ Compare Banquo vs Macbeth’s reaction, what doe sit

say about their characters?

§ How does the witches’ prophesy act as a temptation to

Macbeth?

Discussion § What is your impression of Lady Macbeth?

Questions § What is the difference between Macbeth and his wife?

§ What is Lady Macbeth's role in Duncan’s murder?
§ What is your reaction to Duncan’s death?
§ How does Macbeth struggle to be a loyal friend?