Ugly Ambition in Shakespeares Macbeth :: Macbeth essays

Ugly Ambition in Macbeth The Bard of Avon saturates the pages of the tragedy Macbeth with queasy feelings of ambition - unprincipled ambition which is ready to kill for itself. Lets thoroughly avocation out the major instances of ambitious behavior by the husband-wife team. In Macbeth as the Imitation of an Action Francis Fergusson states the place of Macbeths ambition in the action of the forgather It is the phrase to outrun the pauser, reason 2.3, which seems to me to describe the action, or motive, of the play as a whole. Macbeth, of course, literally means that his love for Duncan was so strong and so swift that it got ahead of his reason, which would pretend counseled a pause. But in the said(prenominal) way we have seen his greed and ambition outrun his reason when he committed the murder and in the same way all of the characters, in the irrational darkness of Scotlands evil hour, are compelled in their action to gain beyond what they can see by reason alone. Even M alcolm and Macduff, as we shall see, are compelled to go beyond reason in the action which destroys Macbeth and ends the play. (106-7) place Kemble in gentlewoman Macbeth refers to the ambition of Lady Macbeth . . . to have seen Banquos ghost at the banqueting table ... and persisted in her fierce mocking of her husbands terror would have been impossible to human nature. The hypothesis makes Lady Macbeth a monster, and there is no much(prenominal) thing in all Shakespeares plays. That she is godless, and ruthless in the pursuit of the objects of her ambition, does non make her such. (118) In Memoranda Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons mentions the ambition of Lady Macbeth and its effect Re I have given immerse (1.7.54ff.) Even here, horrific as she is, she shews herself made by ambition, but not by nature, a perfectly savage creature. The very use of such a tender allusion in the midst of her dreadful terminology, persuades one unambiguously that she has really felt the maternal yearnings of a mother towards her babe, and that she considered this action the roughly enormous that ever required the strength of human nerves for its perpetration. Her language to Macbeth is the most potently eloquent that guilt could use.