Guilt In Macbeth

Macbeth is confused as he is arguing with himself on what he should do. He states reasons not to kill Duncan, because Macbeth is his noble kinsmen and the act would bring dishonor. However, he also states reason why he should kill him, because Macbeth will then become king and fulfill the witches ' fortune. Lady Macbeth, who appears in the beginning as the driving force for the murder of King Duncan, also develops internal conflict. At first, Lady Macbeth seems to be a woman of extreme confidence and will. But, as situations become more and more unstable in the play, guilt develops inside her. For instance, she exclaims; "Wash your hands. Put on your nightgown. / Look not so pale. I tell you again, Banquo 's / Burried; he cannot come out on 's grave" (Shakespeare V, ii, 65-67). Lady Macbeth sleepwalks and frets about her evil wrongdoings because she is extremely guilty of her influence on Macbeth to commit the murder. Lady Macbeth reacts emotionally and dwells on her actions as guilt eats at her soul.

Macbeth, a tragedy written by William Shakespeare and edited by Maynard Mack and Robert Boynton, displays the many ways in which guilt manifests itself and the effects it has on its victims. Throughout the play, characters including Lady Macbeth are deeply affected by guilt in ways they had never expected. Macbeth takes its audience on a journey through the process in which guilty gradually eats away at Lady Macbeth and forces her to do what she thinks is best. Though Lady Macbeth may have initially seemed unaffected by the murders she had been involved in, her desires eventually faded and were replaced with an invincible feeling of guilt which eventually took her life.

A deadly combination of ambition and guilt poisons both Macbeth and his wife and leads to their deaths in the end. Ruined by her desire for power, Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness is more vivid and guilt seems to affect her more than her husband, even though he is responsible for more crimes. Her request to the spirits to “unsex [her] here,/ And fill [her], from the crown to the toe, top-full/ Of direst cruelty!” is contrasted as the more guilty she feels, the more weak and sensitive she become, a polar opposite of her usual masculine and bold self (1.5.44-46). As a result, she is unable to cope with the guilt and meets her ultimate demise by taking her life. This has an immediate effect on Macbeth: the almost always apparent tension of ambition and guilt disappears. He does not seem interested in living and is ready to face death in a manner more relatable to his former self rather than the murderer he has become. Moreover, Macbeth’s final remark is “Arm, arm, and out!”,

Lady Macbeth’s strength of will persists through the murder of King Duncan as it is she who tries to calm Macbeth after committing the crime by declaring confidently that, “a little water clears us of this deed,” (2.2.67). Afterward, however, Lady Macbeth’s strong and ambitious character begins to deteriorate into madness. Her first sign of weakness occurred when she confessed that she could not have killed the king, revealing a natural woman’s feelings, “had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done’t” (2.2.13-14). Just as ambition has affected her before more so then Macbeth before the crime, the guilt plagues her now more effectively afterward as she desperately tried to wash away the invisible blood from her sin, “Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfume of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” (5.1.48-49). Lady Macbeth’s

Guilt is a very strong and uncomfortable feeling that often results from one’s own actions. This strong emotion is one of the theme ideas in William Shakespeare, “Macbeth”. Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth feel guilt, but they react in different ways. Guilt hardens Macbeth, but cause Lady Macbeth to commit suicide. As Macbeth shrives to success guilt overcome’s Macbeth where he can no longer think straight. Initially Macbeth planned was to kill Duncan but it wasn’t enough he also had to kill Banquo and Macduff’s family. On the other hand Lady Macbeth had to call upon the weird sister to unsexed her so she had no true feeling towards anything as if she was a man. However, the true guilt of the murder

Nicholas Rowe once said that “Guilt is the source of sorrows, the avenging fiend that follow us behind with whips and stings”. Nicholas Rowe states that guilt causes pain and grief through the conscience/mind. After feeling guilt, the guilt will cause pain each day following one around, Nicholas Rowe uses a metaphor to emphasise the pain that guilt can cause. Even kings, evil beings and murderers can not beat guilt. In the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare and the short story “Tell Tale heart” by Edgar Allen Poe shows that, the beginning of one’s guilt is ignored but after, it comes to haunt one until the point of insanity or death. Macbeth and lady Macbeth are both serious victims of guilt, but guilt did not hit

When Macbeth first learns of his prophecy of becoming King of Scotland, he sends a letter to Lady Macbeth, who immediately thinks of the quickest way to get Macbeth onto the throne. She calls on the dark spirits to help her plan the murder of King Duncan and hopes that the darkness can be in her. She wishes so that she may be able to commit the murder with her husband and be free of the guilt afterwards. Lady Macbeth never doubts these murderous thoughts, showing that she is ambitious and power-hungry. She is also characterized as clever when she persuades Macbeth into committing the murder when he is unsure of doing the deed. Her strong-willed mind is also shown when she takes the daggers from Macbeth, who is too shaken up by what he had done, and she puts them back in Duncan’s chambers. After the murder, Lady Macbeth seems the least guilty of the two, and she can feel as if nothing has happened. Her character starts to change, however, when she feels unhappy in her position as queen. She starts to feel the regrets of killing King Duncan, and she begins to doubt herself. Lady Macbeth soon feels so guilty that she sleepwalks, talking in her sleep about her and her husband’s horrible deeds. This takes away from her powerful characterization in the beginning. Lady Macbeth goes from being a ruthless, dark woman to a guilt-burdened sleepwalker with little

Her guilt is seen through the blood on her hands and is proven through her horrible mental state at the conclusion of the play. Lady Macbeth has arguably one of the most tragic downfalls in the play. From a strong, independent woman who believed that she was on top of the world, to a shell of the woman she once was. Her actions were so dreadful, that her consequences were that much worse. Dawning from an overflowing feeling of guilt, Lady Macbeth’s demise is a painful one. Blood is seen when her collapse is at its climax. She begins to sleepwalk and hallucinate without stop. During these hallucinations, she pretends to vigorously wash her hands to clean Duncan’s blood from them but to no avail. The blood on her hands represents guilt, but the actions she was trying to wash from her own soul could not be erased. Lady Macbeth says, “Out damned spot! Out, I say!-One, two. Why, then,/’tis time to do’t. Hell is murky!” (V.I. 25-26). Lady Macbeth proclaiming, “Out damned spot!” reffers to the guilt she cannot wipe from her moral slate. The bloody guilt that is engraved in her conscience, unable to be erased. Ultimately her downfall leads to suicide, showing how difficult it is to clean the guilt from your conscience and wash away the actions that have already been

Macbeth who committed a sin by murdering King Duncan and taking the throne gets overwhelmed with guilt as his life progresses as King. By becoming King, he is engulfed with power, but he was never happy about the position he held. The guilt of taking King Duncan’s power has to lead him to be unsatisfied with his wealth since he didn’t truly deserve it. His ambition for the gain of power prevailed when he decided to murder King Duncan causing him to be more ambitious for power in the form of killing. By seeing the ghost of Banquo and hiding the death of King Duncan makes Macbeth mentally unstable and causes him to make irrational acts of killing and decision making, such as to kill Macduff’s family solely on the reason that he’s afraid of Macduff. Both Lady Macbeth and the Witches try to control Macbeth through persuasion, prophecies, and apparitions lead to Macbeth being unsatisfied with his doings and his murders because Macbeth believes that there is always more power to gain from killing. In Macbeth, the symbol of guilt is shown through the substance of blood that is portrayed by

Following Duncan's murder, Lady Macbeth suffered from hallucinations and during the evenings she slept walked and talked, frequently speaking about a "damned spot" that she could not wash clean from her hands. The physician who evaluated her crazed state, stated the following: "The heart is sorely charged" and with regard to her treatment he said, "This disease is beyond my practice. " This represents the illness of her mind and her inability to overcome the guilt that plagued her conscience. 

We can conclude from this quote that Lady Macbeth is now beginning to suffer from the mental trauma that was previously plaguing her husband. We can reasonably infer that the hand-washing motions she is making mimics what she was doing to clean herself from the King’s blood after the murder. She was also unconsciously confessing to her part in the murder of King Duncan by saying that who she murdered was an old man. Ultimately, what Shakespeare is revealing through his tragic play is that if someone has too much guilt, they will start to suffer to the point of

As a result, she stated the following, “Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.” Through this she begs the spirits to take away any sympathy within in her in order to have the wit, desire, and drive her husband lacked of in order to become royalty. Through Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare shows there’s no such thing as impossible on the way to getting what one wants. In addition to giving up her femininity, Lady Macbeth also sacrifices her morals by convincing her husband to kill the king, when failing to do so; she states, “When you durst do it, then you were a man.” In other words she convinces Macbeth to kill King Duncan, despite knowing what a horrid crime that was. The struggle to go through anything standing in her way caused her to lose herself as well as her sanity. After realizing what she had caused, she began to lose her mind. She would constantly see her hands covered in blood by those who had been murdered along the way. Unable to get rid of the image in her head, led her to eventually commit suicide.

However the consequences drive Lady Macbeth insane, to the point in which she commits suicide. This development shows that she is completely overpowered by the sense of guilt and remorse. On the other hand, Macbeth overcomes the guilt he was plagued by earlier on in the play.

Guilt is rushing through his veins while his hands are drenched in blood. There's a loud, mysterious, pounding knock coming from the castle’s door and Macbeth is brimming with regret. The guilt of Duncan’s murder gets into his head and influences decisions later in the play. Macbeth starts to slowly fall apart getting torn up by the guilt and all the lies that he just kills more and more people so it just keeps adding up. This one murder eventually destroyed his life over time and left him isolated with only the devil as his friend.

Lady Macbeth had told her husband, “We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail.” (I, vii, 59-61). This divulges to the audience that both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are mentally volatile, as they arrogantly believe that their plans are infallible, and that reality will always act in accordance to their desires. Once Macbeth commits the murder of Duncan, he immediately demonstrates exorbitant remorse. This affirms that the Macbeth’s plan was not infallible, as it failed to anticipate the accumulation of guilt and mental deterioration that it would entail. At first, Lady Macbeth does not suffer as a result of her guilt like her husband did. However, later on in the play, the agglomeration of guilt on her conscience acts as the direct cause of her suicide. Lady Macbeth says during her sleepwalk: