The Recurring Elements Of Blood In Macbeth By William Shakespeare

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In the play, Shakespeare uses the recurring element of blood to illustrate Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s guilt and its lasting power. Early on, Lady Macbeth urges evil spirits to remove the feminine, what she sees as the “kind” part of her and turn her into a cruel and unforgiving character. She goads the spirits to “make thick [her] blood. Stop up th’access and passage to remorse” (Shakespeare I. v. 50-51). The general belief in the era of the play’s setting was that the heart was the source of human emotion and compassion. The fact that Lady Macbeth wants her blood to be more viscous means that the circulation that is based on her heart will be prevented, and she will not be able to feel regret. This, centering around the idea of blood, sets …show more content…
Scientifically, sleep is a time of relaxed consciousness for the brain to process and interpret the data thrust upon it throughout the waking hours. It is where the subliminal mind takes control and catches up with the awake brain. This fits what the characters in the play experience, how they feel the repercussions of their actions in sleep, often in a bad way. For example, in the lasting emotional wake of Duncan’s murder, Macbeth describes how he will be “in the affliction of these terrible dreams that shake us nightly. Better be with the dead, whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace, than on the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy” (III. ii. 21-25). Macbeth grasps that killing Duncan, to understate it, may not have been the best and most prudent of his ideas. Now, one of the main ways his guilt affects him is in sleep, where through vision and hallucination, the anguish he experiences may defeat him. Ultimately, as he sleeps, Macbeth’s raw human emotions take charge, and he pays for his offenses psychosomatically. Shakespeare persistently uses sleep to show how Macbeth and Lady Macbeth still bear the ramifications of their crimes, as a period where human feeling is exposed. This contributes to the theme in the play that things are not always as they seem, and sleep makes Macbeth and his wife vulnerable to their wrongdoings culminating in an …show more content…
For example, in a coincidentally excellent illustration of the motif of naturally occurring phenomena matching plot events, thunder rumbles as the witches give their prophecy to Macbeth. The form of an infant apparition appears, telling Macbeth that nobody “of woman born shall harm Macbeth” (IV. i. 91-92). The message gives Macbeth confidence that he is indefatigable. However improbable, at this point a reader acquainted with occasional plot predictability is certain knowledge of a character that evades this axiom will materialize in time. The fact that a baby informs Macbeth of this serves to parallel the idea of the inherited monarchy, that progeny will potentially take the throne, and possibly seal the fate of Macbeth. The current king tries to eliminate future obstacles, but eventually, just as the “worm” that survives will grow into a serpent (this is not how developmental biology works, but as a hyperbolic representation of the buildup of capability, it works), the person who was not born of a woman (but extracted, knowing the end of the plot, so this is somewhat like an editor’s note) will defeat Macbeth, and the children that will have grown up shall succeed the ruler immediately subsequent to Macbeth. The idea of children, and the complex roles they play symbolically and objectively in Macbeth, exemplify the nature of increasing familial and sovereign disorder in the story. Children

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