The Dark Side of Shakespeares Macbeth :: Free Essay Writer

The Dark Side of Macbeth Can any reader of Shakespeares tragedy Macbeth not feel the dark hand of death hovering over his decimal point? Why does this sensation occur? Charles Lamb in On the Tragedies of Shakespeare comments on the images of night and their impact on the audience The state of sublime sensation into which we are elevated by those images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that unplayful prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to speak him to performance Dun rat, - when we no longer read it in a book, when we piddle given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seing, and come to date a man in his bodily shape before our eyeball actually preparing to commit a muder, if the acting be true and eye-popping as I expect witnessed it in Mr. Ks performance of that part, the painful solicitude about the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the wit hal close pressing semblance of reality,give a pain and an uneasiness . . .. (134) Roger rabbit warren states in Shakespeare Survey 30 , regarding Trervor Nunns direction of Macbeth at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1974-75, how the witches equal the phantasm of black conjuring Much of the approach and detail was carried over, curiously the clash between religious purity and black magic. Purity was corporate by Duncan, very infirm (in 1974 he was blind), dressed in sportsmanlike and accompanied by church organ music, set against the black magic of the witches, who even chanted Double, double to the Dies Irae. (283) In Macbeth as the Imitation of an save Francis Fergusson states the place of darkness in the action of the play 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 fore of his reason, which woul d have counseled a pause. But in the same 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 strive beyond what they can see by reason alone.