William Shakespeare may have portrayed a self-reflectory image of his own submerged conscience while creating who some literary critics may believe to be the greatest tragic hero in literature.And it would not surprise me in the least given the masculinity in his tragic plays and their, in a sense,glorific depiction.Macbeth,an augment of classic tragedy may be nothing more than an inflection of the self-decay that the dramatist may have been experiencing himself.
But converging on the topic itself-the climax of the play comes in very early in act 2 scene 1 when we see Macbeth along with his dearest partner in grace lady macbeth successful in commiting the murder of king duncan,a point in the play,where symbolically-it all ends,and everything else begins...the locus of no return for Macbeth,furthur eluding him towards his completion of self-transformation..an allusion which began with the witches's equivocating on Macbeth's Heath.now the annotation of the "Heath" to be the extent of Macbeth's ambition as interpreted by some shakespearan critics may a bit vaultingly be a little far fetched in accord to my disposition,but then again i myself is nothing but a mere critic and an ameteur one at that.
But one looks at the play and revives how an ambitious man falls under the servitude of his extreme ambition.and i look at the play,and macbeth and even my fickle-minded conscience prunes at the fact that Macbeth was at all ambitious.In macbeth i find a warrior,a soldier,a poet,a philosopher-a man whose greatness can never be under the shadows of any question but his ambition according to me is definitely.I am not shakespeare.Just one of his million readers.So considering my interpretation to be conclusive would be nothing less than naive.Macbeth indeed may be ambitious.But then where is his ambition before the witches equivocate on before him upon the barren heath...?..then where has this striving enthusiasm been which sees him predicting his own downfall...?....and why not then has he not thought about murdering Duncan before the muttering of the witches's prophecies...?...had the throne no value then...?or did ambition itself needed a provoker more powerful...?...and where is that ambition after he has stolen the Scottish throne...why o why is it then sheathed under the ragged strikings of insecurity....ambition knows no bounds...and an ambitious person can never stop being one,and always has bigger and greater achievements to look forward to...then why is it that this great hero succumbs under the only act of ambition he ever performed..?..and how does that make him ambitious...??..men are ambitious ,thieves are so,polititions are ambitious,murderers are .....but how many of these men have grieved or infact have capitulated under self pity and guilt after just one act of ambition and has faded away under its wreath...?
Macbeth is just a personification of the absoulte extremities of good and evil...of darkness and light..of the morally virtuous and the immoral vile....with lady Macbeth
as their juxtaposition-a nexus,joining the two...we find Macbeth fighing for Duncan,the scottish king against the malice of state's enemy..by Duncan himself he is portrayed as Bellona's bridegroom and the valor's Minion..and here we find the immense respect and love the king has for Macbeth...he fights not for himself..he is no king...just his commander..a ruthless soldier,fighting for the country and the king-whom he considers as close as a father..we are introduced here to a great philosopher...and by his soliloquy in act 1 scene 7 we come to realise that his metaphysicality knows no bounds.
The weird sisters is the first symbolic portrayal of Macbeth's dark compunction, where we find an almost mystical supernaturalism in their very existence--Macbeth's own avarice personified....and their evil is striking enough for Macbeth's conscience to start shattering like the midnight frost...and even at that minimal hint of dillusionment his demur loosens its grip on him...and the sisters--mere harbingers of Heacte who lies on the other side of Macbeth's conscience...indulge him towards the obscure tunnel into darkness...and the bridging tunnel itself--a passage of unrequited passion,bitter irony,vaulting ambition(not for any throne,but for Macbeth himself) and total equivocation...is nothing but a container of the depersonified lady Macbeth..because at the end of all,it is Macbeth who is glorified for his greatness,he himself who commits the crime and who, on commiting evil,becomes darkness himself,compeletely destroying his inner conscience in the process.and in the end we do find a great man.evil yet great.But we find in him no more conflicts or equivocation.He has completely surrendered himself to sin.and evil has flowed through every of his veins...and just before he dies..we do not find a poet in him anymore...He is Great alright...but he is no sinner nomore...he is Sin himself..an epitome of the Devil...
lady Macbeth is nothing but the tunnel that shoves him towards his self transformation...yes ,Macbeth may have been ambitious...because hadn't it been so,he would have never sent a letter to his Wife informing her of the witches's predictions and how he burned in desire to know more..
" This have i thought
good to deliver thee,my dearest partner of greatness,
that thou mightest not loes the dues of rejoicing by being
ignorant of what greatness is promised thee."
and Macbeth is hopeful, more than anything about the future of greatness that is promised to him and his
wife.and when we find lady Macbeth,in her soliloquey,pondering upon the nature of her husband.
"art not without ambition,but without
the illness should attend it"
and what she says next is of titanic importance indeed
"what thou wouldst highly,
that wouldst thou holily"
which cleary gives an account of how weak his ambition really is as compared to his honor,morality,respect and love.And had lady Macbeth not been there,he would have definitely not murdered Duncan.but lady Macbeth is part Macbeth himself..she is non-existent without her husband,and this fragment of Macbeth's soul turns his promising hope into ravishments of ambition.lady Macbeth has definitely not infused ambition into Macbeth as we already see him to be an ambitious man,which swarmed up even more as Duncan annoucned his elder son to be the talisman to the scottish throne..but wasn't that inevitable?...didn't Macbeth already know that he had no legitimate way to the throne..?..and wouldn't he have accepted the reality,however rottenly painful and hopeless it would have been had not the witches triggered the visions of his own avarice...and catalysed his ambition in the process?...and even after this wasn't his ambition too circumspect to even utter the word "murder" let alone commit it...and had not lady Macbeth acted a promoter to his inner reaction. wouldn't he have surely terminted this enterprise..?..how can an ambitious man sermoinze about his own ambition...?...you may hate your obsession,but if it is strong enough you cant sacrifice it for moral quaints..but didn't Macbeth do so at the end of his soliloquy in act 1 scene 7..??...didn't then lady Macbeth--Macbeth's own Dark Passenger, defeat the laments of his rich morality, which may have been great but omissisibly weak....here we see lady Macbeth as a figment of Macbeth's own mind,more stronger in nature than Macbeth himself--and the Valor's Minion crumbles under the precarious evil of a part of his Own Mind..and pushes his potentials to the verges of insanity...and truly indeed...Macbeth is too great to be influenced by an other mind..here we see a man,a great warrior losing himself in the labyrinths of his own psyche...and turning into a ruthless moster..a retrospect of something i once heard..
we either die a hero,
or live long enough
to see ourselves become the villian
Macbeth as i said is too great to be possessed by someone else...he is too magnanimous to surrender himself to someone else other than Himself...and didn't he do that..??..his decision to murder Duncan apparantly may not have been influenced by lady Macbeth Herself, but didn't the Bellona's bridegroom - the Valour's minion - the man with golden poetry surrender himself to the tyrannical and heinous Devil ,till Macbeth Himself ,like Shakespeare ,who himself ended up personifying Love,Beauty,Time and Decay, ends up personifying SIN till he became a shadow Satan himself....?....and the transformation is complete when at the end of act 3 scene 4 the ghost of Banquo depart,taking with itself the remainder of Macbeth's moral soul...and the next scene observes a completely different Macbeth....doubtful no more of his actions..no more grief inside of him..no regret or guilt..a complete Monster of Evil...who is still as Great...as he himself conjures up the evil in the form of the three sisters as if their Master..he does not succumb under the tensions of sin...he accepts it..and masters it...we never see him addressing the witches as superiors...because he knows--He is greater...
we find him despising the witches;a paradox indeed..the wiches exalt and rejoice..on seeing the evil they have conjured from among the darkness...the old Macbeth is dead...what we see is a reincarnation...and here ends his relationship with lady Macbeth--for once,maybe he doesn't even recognize her form anymore..the form he had once loved...or Maybe...lady Macbeth---the personification of Macbeth's ambition, is not needed anymore....maybe she was--
an ambition's ladder,
whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
but when he once attains the upmost round,
he then into the ladder turns hisback,
looks in the clouds,scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend...
He throws her away, knowing that she herself was that fragment of him which created this monster,which showed him the way towards the dungeon of evil but she maybe His only chance of getting back..she may be his only manifestation for salvation..she is the bridge between good and evil inisde of him...she is the tunnel wich seperates his two facets and when he disposes her out of his life---the only path to his previous self....we can ensure one thing..there is no coming back for Macbeth...
we see Lady Macbeth suffering without Macbeth...which gives us an ironical indication of how the existence of lady macbeth without Macbeth is alien..and we see her realizing how she has equivocated with her own self and tried to become what she was not..her overestimation of herself has cost her dear,and now we understand that the ambition inside macbeth was solely for the throne..but the ambition in lady Macbeth's heart was never for Duncan's throne but for her own Husband....she is nothing without him...and inside him,she was a part of him..an ambitious morsel inside Macbeth who did nothing except catalysed His own desires,cravings and yearnings giving impetous to His frenzied ambitions..
we see lady Macbeth to be a crude contradiction to Macbeth...
lady Macbeth's-
"come, thick night,
and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
to cry,"hold,hold"
is a more intensified and powerful approach
than Macbeth's-
stars hide your fires,
Let not light see my black and dark desires,
The eye not wink at the hand.Yet let that be,
Which the eye fears when it is done to see.
which is a more meager form of facination and infatuated frenzy than ambition,the latter we see in lady Macbeth's proposition...
while Macbeth provides us with a personification of ambition without Potency and Vehemence..which leaves us with nothing but pulsating desire... lady Macbeth symbolizes a more ruthless manifestation of Violent ambition...
inferring thus,lady macbeth's(who herself is nothing but a fragment of macbeth's own mind) ambition for Macbeth is far superior than Macbeth's ambition for the throne...although the perspective of both their ambitions differ-lady Macbeth's is directed towards Macbeth's glorification..and Macbeth's towards Duncan's throne...the former being much more decisive than the latter...and Macbeth's weak treaty is metamorphosized by lady Macbeth into a more virulent force to be reckoned with, thus killing Duncan....and in the process entering the tunnel of uncertainty which leads towards Macbeth's evil...
Because absurdity is but a dream..you only need to fall asleep...as another effigy of evil had once quoted,
I took your "White Knight",
and brought him down to our level.
It wasn't hard. See, madness,
as you know, is like gravity:
all it takes is a little push!
and Macbeth makes a villian of himself...and as the evil that men do lives after them...Macbeth lived even after his death,not as a golden warrior,but as a manifestation of the depersonified lady Macbeth.Tyranny and Evil epitomized.
And live to be the show and gaze o' the time.
We'll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted on a pole, and underwrit,
"Here may you see the tyrant.
Because in act 2 scene 1..as Macbeth stands infront of the sleeping Duncan,don't you think the obsessed dark figment of lady Macbeth takes over the metaphysical disposition of the weak-hearted Hero?