The main soliloquy in Act 1 Scene 7 shows Macbeth fighting with his own conscience. He is weighing up the pros and cons of killing Duncan. He realises that committing this crime will result in vengeance and heaven itself will abhor the deed. Only ambition spurs him on. Throughout the speech he does not say the word ‘murder’ directly but uses other phrases such as ‘horrid deed’ and ‘surcease’. This indicates that at this point Macbeth is still fighting with his conscience and does not want to think of himself as a cold-blooded murderer. In Act 2 Scene 1; the dagger scene shows that Macbeth’s mind is still struggling to come to terms with the idea of murdering Duncan. This causes Macbeth much fear and insecurity. They appear as a result of his agitated mind, and mark the beginning of his madness. In Act 3 Scene 1 Macbeth proves his willingness to go through with the murder when organises the death of his best friend Banquo by hiring assassins to murder him. His aspiration to remain king is so great that he feels he needs to break all emotional bonds to acquire it. In Act 2 Scene 2 Macbeth is falling apart as he is obsessed by Duncan’s murder. Dramatic devices are used to effect to portray his insecurities and attraction to evil to the audience; just before Macbeth enters, an owl shrieks which in Shakespeare’s time, was often associated with death and evil. When a knocking sound is heard, Macbeth gets frightened and his wife has to take charge and pull him together Macbeth also goes on about a voice he heard when he killed Duncan, saying ‘Sleep no more’ and ‘Glamis hath murdered sleep.’ The characters that he believes are obstacles on his path to the throne trigger Macbeth’s ultimate descent into evil. Slowly he kills them all because of his own obsessive fears and troubles.
Another influential part in Macbeth’s spiral downward is Lady Macbeth and who is the one who triggered the whole process. From the moment she receives the letter, she begins to plot Duncan’s death. She makes a reference in a monologue in Act 1 Scene 5 to make herself more like a man and eliminate all her female kindness, ‘unsex me here’. In Shakespeare’s times, women were considered to someone who stayed at home bringing up children and were not supposed to be strong figures. They believed that men had willpower and resolve and were to do all the ‘manly’ things like killing. This would have been strange when the play was first performed that the roles were reversed. To get what she wants Lady Macbeth uses a number of different strategies, the most effective one being when she questions Macbeth’s manliness. She makes him feel like a coward unless he carries out the murder. This is a common weakness in all of the male gender; no man likes to feel inferior, as they believed women were, and will do almost anything to prove their manhood and courage. Macbeth was a great warrior and had killed many men in battle before. We already know that Macbeth is a brave man with many honours but Lady Macbeth constantly preys on his fear of being unmanly, which then leads him to kill Duncan.
The idea of the supernatural in the play Macbeth plays also an important role in his downfall. In the first scene of the play the witches are awaiting Macbeth. If they were not present in the play, Macbeth would not have received a glimpse of the future and therefore, maybe his ambition wouldn’t have arisen. Macbeth uses the line; ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’ by the witches and later when he says, ‘so foul and fair a day I have not seen’. This means that appearances can be deceiving and from the start connects Macbeth to the witches. After the witches vanish Banquo realises that they might not be all they seem, and says that no good can come from such an impure source, ‘Win us with honest rifles, to betray’s in deepest consequence’. This means that the witches tell the truth about small matters but lie about the great ones. Macbeth, however, is hypnotised by what they tell him about his own future prosperity. Whenever the three witches are together, they speak in rhyming couplets, especially when they are casting their spells. This creates the scene so that the audience knows for sure that the witches are evil, ‘double, double, toil and trouble’. In those times what they could not understand was pinned upon religion with everything being either an Act of God or more commonly an Act of Evil. Therefore witches were thought to be dangerous and the servants of Satan. Today’s society is more orientated to science and technology than in Elizabethan times, so the idea of witches is dismissed as we try to explain everything through science and witches are laughed at as a old fear of the past. One example of this is the successful Harry Potter series.
In conclusion it is clear that there are many possible reasons why Macbeth may have behaved in the way that he did. Although the witches and Lady Macbeth played a large part in the change, it seems to me that Macbeth’s ambition is the most responsible for his ruin. His only desire was to be in a position of power i.e. King, and his aspiration drove him to get there. However his ambition also caused him to murder consistently to ensure his place on the throne and although at first the murders seemed to haunt him, after a while it becomes obvious that it no longer affects him. This is shown as he threatens the messenger with death in Act 5 Scene 5, ‘If thou speaketh false, upon the next tree thou shall hang alive.’ His insecurities and fears were born because of his dream, and it was his paranoia and ambition that led to his downfall in character and eventually, his death.
