Tanner Novak MacBeth essay draft

Tanner Novak

2nd Block

English 11a 2nd Block

19 February 2016

MacBeth

Although MacBeth was portrayed as a valiant, loyal, and clever man at the beginning of the play it is clear that through moral guilt, curiosity, and greed molds into the man he sould soon become.

At the beginning of the play MacBeth is a sensible good man who knew how to take

care of himself, and decide what is a good or bad decision. MacBeth himself talks about his loyalty, “The service and loyalty that I owe… love and honor”(1:iv,22-27). He was such a good man that his own wife said, “Your face, my thane, is like a book… look like the innocent flower”(1:v,60-64). And how good a man and valiant a man MacBeth has the ability to say, “Why do you seem to fear things that sound…”(1:iii,51).

During the play MacBeth has the character trait of moral guilt slowly come over him. He

is so full of guilt that he confesses to his wife that, “O, full of scorpions my mind, dear wife”(3:ii,36-37). He regrets the action of killing the king to become king. He explains himself by saying, “There’s one did laugh in's sleep and one cared murder”(2:ii,22-24). With the guilt of killing with king still on his mind his wife notices and says, “Sleep no moral- MacBeth does murder sleep- the inocent sleep”(2:ii,34-36).

MacBeth falls to curiosity of being king and this makes him wonder what life would be

like if he was king, and of course things seem pretty good but he has no clue what was to come. His curiosity brings him to this quote, “To be thus, is nothing, but to be safely thus..”(3:i,48-50).

He then goes to the three wierd sisters again after the first scene of the play, and they tell him 4 visions, “Beware MacDuff, bloody baby and born of woman, baby holding tree, and 8 kings and Banquo”(4:ii,71-103). He is also curios of what his enemy MacDuff might do and he has just heard word that he is looking to attack and MacBeth takes action by saying, “Sieze upon fife, his wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls…”(4:i,151-154).

One of the biggest themes in this play and the most recurring one has to be greed.

MacBeth kills his own king and even though later he feels regret he says, “Will all great opportune… clean my need”(2:iii,59-62). His curiosity goes hand in hand with his greed, it might be that the major curiosity he had about being king caused him to have all the greed i. The world. He had everything he wanted but felt nothing and wanted more.

MacBeth was a very depressed man at the halfway point of the play he is a shell of what

he was and he doesn’t know what to do for himself by the end of the play. The killing of the king and his friends on his mind corrupted his mind as a man. His wife is dead, he has no children, his scholars are against him, he has nothing left. He is a lonely powerful king that has gone crazy. He has lost all sense of thought and only acts on what he hears first. He even say, “I have almost forgot the taste of fears”(5:iv, 8).