Macbeth True Man Analysis

The play Macbeth, written by William Shakespeare in the early seventeenth century, recounts the story of Macbeth who, after hearing a prophecy by three devious witches, decides with his wife to kill the King in order to seize the throne. In the play, Macbeth’s wife, Lady Macbeth, played a big role in convincing her husband to commit the treacherous act, by telling him that it was the only way he will be a “real man”, and by killing the king, he could become the “True Sovereign”. However, her claims that helped Macbeth decide to murder King Duncan were false, since in the world view that dominated that time period, her definitions of those terms were incorrect.
To begin, Lady Macbeth mentions often that Macbeth needs to prove he is a True Man …show more content…
Being a True Man is being able to control your animal desires and ambitions, and listen to the higher part of yourself, the one that makes you human. To further explain this, Lady Macbeth does not see that when Macbeth decides to follow his selfish goals, he is indeed letting his animal side take over and decides to take immediate pleasure first. Macbeth then gets further away from being a True Man, to the point where he cannot go back. A true man will be able to control his impulses and think rationally, which is something Macbeth does not do; he does not listen to his conscious, he shuts it out instead. Lady Macbeth does not see this, so she preaches false ideas, and makes Macbeth believe they are reasonable. Macbeth cannot possibly be a True Man by murdering the king, because it is something that a coward would do, for he did not deserve it as he listened to his primitive side instead of his more human self. Listening to the animal part of himself cannot be the path to becoming a true man, since it leads to Macbeth’s own destruction in the end. “Ring the …show more content…
This is again false, as Lady Macbeth is wrong about what it means to be a “real” king. In the world view of that time, Macbeth could not possibly ever be a True Sovereign by killing King Duncan, since the monarch was thought to be picked by God, and thus should not be rebelled against. Macbeth used his own selfish passions to overthrow the legitimate king, so he could never become anything more than a false ruler wearing “borrowed robes”. He followed his passion, and the rule of passion is a dishonest one, and thus Macbeth could never become the “True Sovereign”, like Lady Macbeth thought he would become. Macbeth, by committing this act of treason, went against the natural order of things and caused a civil war. Macbeth rebelling and killing the king can be paralleled to the war going on inside of him, as the animal side overthrew his human side. As mentioned earlier, the human side is the one that belongs to the “higher” part of ourselves, the one that has reason and consciousness; the animal side is the one that follows selfish desires. In this case, Macbeth chose to let his animal side dominate, but this lower part of himself should not be the one controlling him. The same way, Macbeth killed the “higher ruler” and took the throne for himself, even if he is not the one that should be ruling; Macbeth