Unprincipled Ambition in Shakespeares Macbeth :: Free Macbeth Essays

Unprincipled Ambition in Macbeth The Bard of Avon saturates the pages of the tragedy Macbeth with ugly feelings of opposition - unprincipled ambition which is mend to kill for itself. Lets thoroughly search out the major instances of ambitious behavior by the husband-wife team. Samuel Johnson in The Plays of Shakespeare explains the place of ambition in this tragedy The danger of ambition is well described and I know not whether it may not be said in defence of some parts which now look improbable, that, in Shakespeares time, it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions. The passions are directed to their true end. Lady Macbeth is merely detested and though the courage of Macbeth carry on some esteem, yet every reader rejoices at his fall. (133) Blanche Coles states in Shakespeares Four Giants that the protagonists ambition was not the usual narrow, in the flesh(predicate) ambition He has admitted to a spring ambition. We have no other eviden ce of own(prenominal) ambition except, possibly, his own word in this speech. Onrushing events crowd the thought out of his mind and out of our view. We do have ample evidence of his ambition for his family, ambition for a son who might succeed him. . . . We think normally of ambition as a personal thing, but it is not always so. Macbeths stupendous imagination, as revealed later in the play, gives him a breadth of vision altogether out of keeping with a narrow, personal ambition. (50-51) In Memoranda Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons mentions the ambition of Lady Macbeth and its effect Re I have given suck (1.7.54ff.) Even here, horrific as she is, she shews herself made by ambition, but not by nature, a perfectly savage creature. The very use of such a tender allusion in the middle of her dreadful language, persuades one unequivocally that she has really felt the maternal yearnings of a mother towards her babe, and that she considered this action the most enormous that ever required the strength of piece nerves for its perpetration. Her language to Macbeth is the most potently eloquent that guilt could use. (56) Clark and Wright in their Introduction to The Complete Works of William Shakespeare interpret the main theme of the play as intertwining with evil and ambition