Macbeth

Compare and comment on the ways in which Macbeth and Lady Macbeth respond to the murder in act 2 scenes 1 & 2

    Macbeth, a brave and ambitious warrior struggles with his conscience before and after killing the king. He knows that killing Duncan is wrong and has doubts about the plan, therefore he decides not to do it in act 1 scene 7: ‘We will proceed no further in this business’. However, Lady Macbeth manages to change his mind by saying: ‘Wouldst thou have that which thou esteem’st the ornament of life, and live a coward in thine own esteem’. Here Lady Macbeth is encouraging Macbeth to kill the king by calling him a coward. She’s saying it seems like Macbeth wants something, but he’s too cowardly to take it. Lady Macbeth carries on pressurising him and holds him to his vow to kill the king, hoping that he hasn’t changed his mind by telling him that she would kill her own baby if she’d sworn to do it, like Macbeth has sworn to kill Duncan: ‘I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this.’. In act 1 scene 5, Lady Macbeth also says: ‘shalt be what thou art promised; yet do I fear thy nature, it is too full o’th’milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way’. Here Lady Macbeth is saying how Macbeth will be king but she’s worried that he’s too feeble to sort it out. She knows that he is not capable of killing the king by himself, that’s why she puts a lot of pressure on him. This shows how easily swayed he is. He’s trying to be manly and brave, but if he was truly brave, he’d have stood up for what he knew was the right thing to do.
    Before going into the king’s chamber to kill him, Macbeth hallucinates, seeing a bloody dagger in mid-air that leads him to the king’s bedside: ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?’   The dagger was either just Macbeth’s imagination, or something supernatural. This shows how disturbed he...