Now, that we have read the entire play, read the following propositions. If you are the first person to respond, you must write on the first proposition. If you are the second, the second proposition is yours and so on. Write a response that supports or refutes this proposition. YES, you must take one side and one side only. This isn't Switzerland. No credit will be given if you do not stay on one side of the issue. (The deadline to post a response is midnight, Thursday, Dec. 12, 2013,)
1) Lady Macbeth's problem is that while she understands herself, she does not understand Macbeth.
2) Lady Macbeth is totally evil; she is, in fact, the fiend-like Queen described by Malcolm at the end of the play.
3) The witches so manipulate Macbeth that he has no control over his fate.
4) Shakespeare didn't write the silly Hecate bits, so out they come. If you were producing a performance of Macbeth, explain why you would or would not include the Hecate scenes.
5) The story of a bad man who commits a crime is not a tragedy but a straightforward tale of evil. Macbeth, however, is about a good man who becomes evil and that is his tragedy.
6) Far from being the strong character he is often portrayed as being, Macbeth is essentially a weak man; he allows the witches and Lady Macbeth to manipulate him into an act which, if left alone, he would never contemplate, never mind commit.
2) Lady Macbeth is totally evil; she is, in fact, the fiend-like Queen described by Malcolm at the end of the play.
3) The witches so manipulate Macbeth that he has no control over his fate.
4) Shakespeare didn't write the silly Hecate bits, so out they come. If you were producing a performance of Macbeth, explain why you would or would not include the Hecate scenes.
5) The story of a bad man who commits a crime is not a tragedy but a straightforward tale of evil. Macbeth, however, is about a good man who becomes evil and that is his tragedy.
6) Far from being the strong character he is often portrayed as being, Macbeth is essentially a weak man; he allows the witches and Lady Macbeth to manipulate him into an act which, if left alone, he would never contemplate, never mind commit.
4 comments:
I disagree. I believe that Lady Macbeth does not really understand neither her husband nor herself. In the beginning, she understood how she could convince Macbeth to kill King Duncan, but I think she did not understand why she did anything. Toward the end of the play, Lady Macbeth actually feels guilty and cannot stand to live with that. She even takes her own life. I believe that she did not realize what the consequences of killing the king were and that she did not know what her husband was going through. Lady Macbeth said that, in the beginning, she is innocent in the part of killing the king. She should have told her husband that she was responsible, and she should have comforted her husband as if she understood what he was going through.
I agree. I believe that lady Macbeth is completely and totally evil. From the moment she learns of the possibility of Macbeth becoming king she completely loses control of her conscience. She even goes as far to offer her womanhood and the life of her child as sacrifice in order to be granted good fate and become the queen of Scotland. With that being said, she does have a phase in which she can be seen to feel guilty for what she has done over the past few years, but I do not believe that this completely changes the scope of her as a person. She never went and helped the starving or healed the sickly, but instead, she simply began sleepwalking and would admit to atrocities she would never dare to admit to in a normal state of consciousness. Even though Lady Macbeth took her own life, I do not feel that this changes the image of her from evil to good, whatsoever. There are a large number of evil people that kill themselves when the times become hard. For example: Adolf Hitler killed himself after years of being an evil dictator. Did this make him a good man? No, this made him a dead coward. Lady Macbeth is no different from Hitler in this instance. To me, she is purely evil, but near the end of her life she develops a remorseful conscience and it is unknowable if she would actually change her ways because well... she died.
I disagree. Lady Macbeth is not totally evil. Truly evil people do not feel regret. Lady Macbeth feels so guilty because she thinks she was the cause of so many deaths that she takes her own life. She had what she wanted, so why would she take away her life? Evil people get what they want and live in their evilness as long as they can grasp their positions or material items. Lady Macbeth is not entirely the fiend-like Queen as described by Malcolm because she feels intense sorrow for her wrongdoings.
(Hunter posted one minute before me, but I took a different view. I don't know if that counts, so I'll take number three.)
I agree. The witches definitely cause Macbeth to rely solely on fate and he does not wish to change it because it keeps him safe and in power. Macbeth even announces that he is going to let fate play its role. By means of equivocation, the witches give Macbeth false hope which cause he to let fate run its course. Macbeth has no control over his fate because the witches gave him reasons not to try to control it, so he does not.
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