Shakespeare is not doing that just to give his audience some extreme theatre violence: he is doing it to horrify us, expose Macbeth’s depravity and wrench us away from him so that whereas less than an hour before we were in sympathy with him we are now on the side of his opponents. Then, right in the middle of the play, Shakespeare does something absolutely extraordinary – something we are used to after four hundred years but which must have been shocking to every mother and father and every other person in his audiences: he has Macbeth’s murderers slaughter a child onstage, with the child crying for his mother. Then he commits the murder and slowly, we begin to hear the voices of other characters talking about him and presenting him in a different light, and we start seeing him through the eyes of others rather than from exclusively inside his head. That is reinforced by the way he is described – as a hero – by others. In reading or watching the play, this goes on for some time, and we are party to the internal tension that preoccupies him.īeing inside his mind and experiencing what he is, we sympathise with him, and we are on his side. In this post we dig into the character of Macbeth – what kind of a man was he?įrom the moment the Macbeth character is told by the three witches that he is going to be king we find ourselves inside his mind, unable to see things in any other way. Macbeth is the lead character in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order. Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15.
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