The Puppetmasters in repect to Shakespeares Macbeth and Othello the Moor of Venice.

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Airica Rushing        

English 316        

Shakespeare

April 10, 2003

THE PUPPETMASTERS

        A puppet master is always in complete control of the puppet.  In time, the master soon speaks for the puppet, acts for the puppet, and eventually feels for the puppet. Often in Shakespearian tragedy this analogy is critical to its very plot and theme, and therefore many of Shakespeare’s characters are well developed as well as complex. This type of manipulative situation arises in both Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Othello the Moor of Venice. Such is the case with Othello’s Iago and Lady Macbeth each enter the battlefields of passion as they emotionally claw their way through their sinister ways.

        There exists in Lady Macbeth a revelation of one of Shakespeare’s most fearsome women.  Lady Macbeth portrays a domineering, selfish character that uses cruelty as a guise.  She forces herself to become cruel in order to convince Macbeth to further his ambition stating to herself “Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here” (I, IV, 40-41).  At this point, she wishes that she were not a woman so that she can commit the murder herself.  Lady Macbeth continues to charge her husband further in saying “When you durst do it/ then you were a man/ and to be more than what you were, you would be so much more a man” (I, vii, 49-50).  Whereby, essentially she irks him by challenging his masculinity.  

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        In the tragedy, Shakespeare illustrates how Lady Macbeth truly controls the entire play.  Lady Macbeth is sly and artful as she fills Macbeth’s mind with delusions of grandeur and urges him to kill the king.  She is particularly treacherous when she continually urges him to shake off his torments by saying “A little water clears us of this deed; / how easy is it then!” (II, ii, 64-65).  Lady Macbeth desperately wants Macbeth to forget their trespasses and simply wash them away.  The final result of the many evil deeds that she participated in was death.  She went completely insane ...

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