The Prince of Cumberland! – That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap,
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires!
Let not light see my black and deep desires;
Act 1 scene IV
He obviously now is looking to see how he can become king of Scotland. Macbeth is not sure of the way that he will become king so he carries on being noble and loyal to his king but is not committed to what he is saying. The things that he says are lies he no longer is so loyal he is scheming how he can become king. As he says in this speech he does not mean it:
The service and the loyalty I owe.
Your highness’ part
Is to receive our duties: and our duties
Are to your throne and state, children and servants;
Which do but what they should, by doing everything
Safe toward your love and honour.
Act 1 scene IV
Macbeth maybe brave but his wife knows his weaknesses and if she wants him to do something then she works on this area as she does in the play. Shakespeare puts her across as a wife who manipulates her husband to go against what he believes. She is a wicked woman who pushed her husband. She challenges his manhood for her own benefit she homes in on his weaknesses:
Come you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-fill
Of direct cruelty!
Act 1 scene V
She changing so she feels nothing of what she will do to convinced Macbeth into a tyrant who only works for his own good and to do what he should not.
Shakespeare puts Lady Macbeth across as one of the most evil people in the play as she seduces her husband into killing the king for her own glorification. She has control over Macbeth she tells him what to do:
Your face, my thane, is as a book, where men
May read strange matters.
Bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower
But be the serpent under ’t.
You shall put
This night’s great business into my despatch;
Act 1 scene V
It is Lady Macbeth that puts thoughts into his head and she who encourages him to think in that way.
Shakespeare slowly lets the reader know more and more about Macbeth so that you have different thoughts about Macbeth as the play goes on you don’t have one opinion of him the whole way through the play. The people around him affect him; he believes what he wants to believe. The influence of the witches on him through out the play shows that he wants to know what will happen so he can affect it to his glorification he even goes back to them when he becomes king. Shakespeare is showing that he doesn’t like having to let time tell he will do anything he can to make the end the happiest for himself. After being told by the witches that he will be king he takes on life a different way. He still has the control of a noble but the rebel in him starts to shine through.
Macbeth during the play orders the killing of Macduff’s family to be killed all of his children and servants even his wife. This act by Macbeth shows that he wants to keep control over his people Shakespeare is showing that Macbeth is not as secure as he should be and also that Macbeth doesn’t feel confident in what he did.
Shakespeare also shows that she cannot sustain this evil that she has driven herself to. She started to regret the evil she has done. Shakespeare is showing that how ever much evil anyone carries out they will always have to pay for it. First of all she starts to try and cover up what she has done by getting up wile asleep and washes her hands. The evil she has done doesn’t let her sleep peacefully until she dies during her sleep and Shakespeare shows that you can never undo the wrong that has been done until you die.
Macbeth is extremely confident in what he has been told by the witches he is so confident that what they have said that he is over confident that no person can defeat him that he says:
I will not yield,
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet,
Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last:
Act 5 scene VIII
This shows that he is confident that he can sit in his castle and he will not be defeated because Birnam wood in his mind will not come to Dunsinane. He is so confident of this because everything else that the withes have said became true as well so far but he has not realised that the witches would not have said it if it was not going to happen. Even when he is fighting Malcolm he believes that he will not die and that he will kill Malcolm what he does not think about the true possibilities. He has become so closed minded about the fact that it is possible to move Birnam wood to Dunsinane and it is possible to be born not of a woman.
