‘All hail, Macbeth! Thou shalt be king thereafter’.
This shows that maybe the seed had already been planted, and the witches helped the see to grow, and with the persuasion of Lady Macbeth finally come flourish.
The power from knowledge creates discomfort and Macbeth’s new knowledge makes him uncomfortable. He realises the implications. His first thoughts of killing Duncan scare him as he had always stood by the King and in the sixteenth century killing a king was the worst crime. First came your God, then your king. Macbeth says he should be killing murderer not be one himself. This shows that he is not evil. If he were, his kinship and duty to the king would offer no obstacle to his decision to murder him. Because of this I do not think the first part of Malcolm’s condemnation is correct. When Macbeth goes to Duncan’s room and the dagger appears pointing to Duncan’s room, I think this is supposed to represent Macbeth’s conscious. After the murder, Macbeth is agitated and frightened. When Macbeth’s castle is being attacked in the final stages of the book he feels so secure. So secure that he holds back on killing Macduff because he thinks all people are born of women and he still feels upset for killing the rest of the Macduffs:
‘My soul is too much charged with blood of thine already’.
Later on we find out that Macduff was ‘from his mothers womb, untimely ripped’ and Macbeth realises the three witches prophecy is correct, and he is going to be killed by Macduff. After this we begin to see the soldier whom we saw in the opening lines, valiant, and not being scared of death. However Macbeth isn’t the same person we saw in the opening lines of the book. When his wife dies he simple answers ‘she would have died sometime’, showing that at the end he is a soldier, but a soldier without feelings.
Lady Macbeth is partly to do with this change within Macbeth and she is often thought of evil and maybe as a fiend. If she weren’t present in the play, Macbeth probably wouldn’t have killed Duncan. Lady Macbeth is not an evil person and does have some good in her, and however hard she tries, she cannot get rid of it, she asks for demons to ‘unsex’ her and fill her to ‘the top with direst cruelty’. She wants to trade in her feminism for evil, she wants to ‘pluck the baby from her nipple and smash his head on the ground’. Lady Macbeth was a loyal wife with ambitions for her husband. She believed that Macbeth deserved to be king, but thinks that he was too nice to do anything about it. She didn’t think Macbeth could kill Duncan by himself. She was supportive of Macbeth, and was willing to do what she could to help him get what he wanted. When Macbeth was in doubt in murdering Duncan, Lady Macbeth uses moral blackmail, saying if he loved her he would do it, and questioning his manhood. It is Lady Macbeth who is calm and logical and tells Macbeth what to do. After Duncan’s murder, when Macbeth’s hands are covered in blood, Lady Macbeth supports him by saying a ‘little water will clear us of this deed’. Macbeth also felt very tense and suspicious so Lady Macbeth tried to take away the focus of attention of Macbeth and faints, to try and protect him. As the play goes on, Macbeth gains power and begins taking over the situation. He kills Macduff’s family without telling Lady Macbeth. Malcolm describes Lady Macbeth as a ‘fiend’ and I fell this is an exaggeration. Lady Macbeth couldn’t bring herself to kill Duncan, because she thought he looked like her father, hardly signs of a devil or fiend.
Overall I do not find the comment very satisfactory; Macbeth isn’t anymore a butcher at the beginning of the play than at the end. It is very likely that by labelling Macbeth and his wife as a butcher and fiend, he is trying to solidify his position as king. Also the comment is purely based on what Malcolm knows, i.e. Macbeth killing Banquo, the King not the things Macbeth and his wife said or did. Because we are in the audience, we can see that maybe Macbeth and Lady Macbeth aren’t as evil as first seems. They used to be a loving couple, but were both torn apart by ambition. The sleepwalking Lady Macbeth and the suicide show that she does have feelings, and the Macbeth death proves he is still the die-hard soldier we saw in the first act. Saying that however, how can someone like Macbeth fight people by chopping off various parts, then come home and expect to be a perfect gentleman? If I had to blame anyone it would be the witches. It was them who started the growth of the idea and therefore the downfall of the Macbeth’s was down to them.
