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Macbeth Negative Influences

Decent Essays

Everyone is influenced by their surrounds, and the people they choose to be around, whether they are being influenced in a positive or negative way, in Macbeth’s case, he was highly negatively impacted. Macbeth starts out as a good person, and good soldier, true to his king, that is, until he meets the weird sisters who predict he himself will be king. With the influence of his wife, he becomes treacherous, and no longer has a know between right and wrong. By the end of the story, Macbeth was so caught up in his ambitious power hungry circle that he ended up getting killed by it, after having just about everyone turn on him. The negative influences that affect Macbeth for the worst throughout the story happen to be his wife, his conscience, and three weird sisters he meets one day in a field; all of these influences change Macbeth for the worst, causing turmoil all throughout the story. Lady Macbeth urged her husband to do some terrible things, but once it got later in the story, Macbeth took control over his own actions on his downhill spiral of treachery. When Macbeth told his wife that the King would be visiting their house, she responded with “... 0, never Shall sun that morrow see!” (Doc B). Not only was this a questionable response, but she then proceeded to force Macbeth to do the physical murder by telling him he was not a real man, and once Macbeth had done the deed of killing Duncan, she told him “My hands are of your colour; but I shame To wear a heart so white” (Doc C). Lady Macbeth soon becomes consumed with guilt, “ Whenever, then, we find that the memory of a criminal act, however successful and enduring in its issues it may have been, awakens a repentance and moral detestation so consuming that for no single instant is it absent from the mind of the criminal, and that self-abhorrence leads to insanity and suicide…”(von Rumelin). Lady Macbeth was the person who pushed Macbeth off the edge causing him to turn to even more tyranny, send him on a killing spree, become full of ambition, and way too power hungry. Not only did lady Macbeth urge her husband to start his terrible journey by killing the king, later she was too overwhelmed with all the guilt knowing she was the cause of many murders,

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