Macbeth - When considering the balance of moral responsibility for the death of Duncan, how do dramatic techniques help to shape and direct the audience's responses?

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Charlie Matthews 11C        **                

When considering the balance of moral responsibility for the death of Duncan, how do dramatic techniques help to shape and direct the audience’s responses?

There are three parties in Macbeth who share the balance of moral responsibility for the death of Duncan. Without any one of the three, the murder of Duncan would not have taken place. We can, however, analyse how Shakespeare portrays the characters to ascertain who he wants us to perceive as ultimately responsible. It must be remembered that Macbeth is a play, not a novel.  The playwright, Shakespeare, is able to portray his characters through many forms, rather than just illustrating them through words. Shakespeare is able to manipulate the audience and their views. To decide what Shakespeare wants us to feel about the true culprit, we must analyse each of the three main contributors.

The first characters we are introduced to in the play are the three Witches. Now it must be remembered that Shakespeare’s audience would have taken witches and evil very seriously. In the first scene we can note several aspects of them: They are connected with disorder in nature (not only thunder and lightning but also ‘fog and filthy air’); they can hover; they reverse moral values (‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’) and they presumably foresee the future, since the third Witch knows that the battle will be over by sunset.  We also learn, most importantly, that the Witches cannot directly kill. This proves to be an important factor when considering all arguments.

The third scene shows more clearly what seems to be an ambiguity in the presentation of the Witches. On the one hand, they have features that are typical of the old English ‘witch’, being old women, ‘wither’d’ and with ‘choppy fingers’ and ‘skinny lips.’ But on the other hand they are mysterious and ‘look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ earth’, and they prophecy the future. Then what is the function of this ambiguity? On one level, no doubt, it enabled Shakespeare to draw upon the common belief in an ‘evil’ at work in the English countryside, whilst never reducing the play’s Witches to simply village widows,  etc.  

From the first scene, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of terror and moral chaos. One might ask, why?  Does the fact that the world Macbeth lived in, which was in moral chaos, make us more accepting of his crimes? Does it create more sympathy for Macbeth and lay more blame on the sisters?  The famous line ‘Foul is fair and fair is foul’ is extremely important. It suggests to us that values have been turned upside down, and that appearances, whether of good or evil, cannot be trusted. This line tells us that although witches were imagined to be evil, spirit-worshiping children of the devil, and must therefore be the most responsible for the crime, it may not be so.  One could instead view the Witches as the heroines of the piece. It is they who, by releasing ambitious thoughts in Macbeth, expose a reverence for hierarchical social order for what they may have seen as simply a pious self-deception of a society based on routine oppression and incessant warfare. The Witches are shown to be exiles from that violent order, inhabiting their own sisterly community. It is their riddling and ambiguous speech (they ‘palter us with a double sense’) which promises to subvert this structure: Their teasing word play infiltrates and undermines Macbeth from within, revealing (not creating) a lack which hollows his being into desire.

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The Witches are shown to signify a realm of non-meaning and poetic play which hovers at the piece’s margins, one which has its own kind of truth; and their words to Macbeth catalyse.

(So by dictionary definition: to accelerate an action or process. Acceleration only speeds up something. So in this case we are led to believe that Macbeth must have had the propensity to commit such a crime but his desires and ‘dark side’ has been brought out of him.)

Which thus implies that without hearing the witches’ prophecies, Macbeth would not have thought to kill his ...

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