The main cause to the tragic parts of this play are due to four women, we know them as the three witches and Lady Macbeth. The witches are extremely evil and use riddles and equivocations to describe Macbeth’s future, giving him ideas that without which he wouldn’t have committed any of the murders. The witches are the catalyst for both Macbeth’s greed and the greed and ambition of his wife as well. This makes them a catalyst to the murders. They start it all off at the beginning. Firstly the witches hail him by the right name, Thane of Glamis. Then, however, they also called him the Thane of Cawdor and finally say thyat he will be king. Later Ross and Angus give the title of Thane of Cawdor as he was one of the rebels that Macbeth helped to quash. This starts Macbeth thinking and also makes him lead onto the belief that he could be king.
Macbeth then writes a letter to Lady Macbeth telling her of everything that had happened. Lady Macbeth loves popularity and wants to be in power desperately so she jumps at the opportunity of being a queen. You can see she really wants to be queen when she casts a spell on herself to make herself manlier and therefore more confident. This spell is on Act 1 Scene 5 Lines 37-52. After she commits the spell she talks with Macbeth about Duncan’s impending visit. She knows what she wants to do and what Macbeth is having thoughts about and tells her husband ‘Look like th’innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t.’ This appearance over reality occurs many times during the course of the play. Eventually she takes control over Macbeth and says she will kill Duncan for him. I believe that his puts Macbeth under more pressure, it hurts his manliness because his wife will do something that he is unable to do. All of this ties into making Macbeth a tragic hero because it shows that this once great hero has descended to a lower form, which in my view is very tragic.
Macbeth also has many hallucinations. He sees a floating dagger and a child and the heads of previous kings. He often talks to the audience and does at this point to work over his troubled mind. The murder haunts him and he suffers from lack of sleep.
Once Macbeth has killed King Duncan he returns to Lady Macbeth and tells her what he had just done. He says along with the loss of Duncan’s life, so too has his sleep and some of his sanity along with it. The murder was bloody and a lot manages to get on his hands. He says ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?’ Meaning he may have the blood off in reality, but in his mind it still remains, but as guilt.
Macbeth’s banquet is the point at which he cracks and where his subjects start to doubt him. He acts extremely strangely and is now plagued by guilt as he has now had Banquo murdered as well. Lady Macbeth is able to cover for him by saying he is very ill. However we see that Macbeth is changing from his once noble and great character into a king that is mentally ill. Again in my view that is tragic. The mental illness caused Macbet to have Banquo and Fleance (not dead) to be murdered. Banquo’s children were going to be king, according to the witches’ predictions and Macbeth didn’t want this to happen. This shows his ambition to have his blood flowing in royalty always.
However, kings are supposed to be the next step down to God and so it would be to go against nature to kill a king. Macbeth did this and so nature was in revolt, with storms occurring, horses eating one another and hawks being killed by their usual preys. Therefore the people become sick of Macbeth and an army marches on him. He believes he is invincible due to the witches’ new predictions however he isn’t as yet again the witches trick him into a false sense of security.
During the play we see that the character of Macbeth changes greatly and that he was a tragic hero. In my view he started as an excellent hero but was changed, by ambition, greed, pride and prominently the influence of others.
