Character Analysis

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  • Character analysis
    • Macbeth
      • Both Machiavelli and Macbeth see eye-to-eye as they must always have a plan, creating opportunity in changes, and prefering to be feared than loved.
      • The tragic hero of the play, many women seem to manipulate him using his fatal flaw of ambition
        • So easily manipulated by women in this play, conveying a sense of lovesickness.
      • Shakespeare depicts unscrupulous politicians that Machiavelli described through Macbeth's development
      • Macbeth and Machiavelli's perspectives differ on the basis that Macbeth is selfish, whereas Machiavelli believes in ruthlessness for one's country.
        • Shakespeare shows that ( corresponding with Machiavelli's views) this level of immorality is ineffective, through Macbeth's execution as a punishment for disrupting the order at the start of the play.
    • Lady Macbeth
      • Shakespeare depicts the wide belief that women could not handle power safely; hence why Lady Macbeth becomes mentally ill.
        • Lady Macbeth has aligned herself with the witches, allowing darkness to take over her. Due to her subversion to the domestic sphere, she becomes an outsider to the Jacobean audience.
          • *"Out, damned spot! Out: I say! *
      • Shakespeare uses this particular character to demonstrate how Jacobeans punished powerful women
        • During the witch trials, women who served no purpose were often judged.
      • Lady Macbeth makes Macbeth possibly lovesick for her, shattering the Great Chain of Beings as she now dominates him. This cosmic chaos must end in the death of the protagonist.
      • At the time, mental illness was demonised, and therefore Macbeth abandons her.
      • *Dunnest smoke of Hell*
      • *"Give me the daggers"*
    • The Witches
      • Shkespeare instantly makes it clear that the witches are the outsiders of the play.
      • The trio create a sense of unsease in the audience as they speak in 'riddles' of troche, and are strange in appearance.
        • Shakespeare hereby presents the Jacobean stereotype that women who rejected the domestic sphere through gaining power had to obtain a level of mascuinity in order to assert control in order to avoid insanity.
      • Within post-colonial literature, the outsider was always one who spoke the mothertongue of the country, and was seen as an outsider due to their language barriers.
        • Separate religions to Christianity were depicted as 'witchcraft', 'heresy' and 'black magic' in the eyes of colonisers,
      • Shakespeare uses the witches to critique these ideas, as the witches are able to twist Macbeth, soon gaining utmost control of him.
      • Language used to describe outsiders.. appropriation of language, counter discourse or discourse, devaluing of the native culture.
    • Macduff
      • By the end of the play, Macduff has stated that he wishes only to avenge the lives of his family, and no more.
      • It is through Macduff that Shakespeare constructs purity and order in the play, as Macduff is the sole character who remains untainted by Macbeth's tyranny throughout the Acts.
      • *"and more I beg not"*

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