Macbeth: A Truly Tragic Man

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MACBETH ESSAY

Macbeth is a truly tragic man. Discuss.

Macbeth, the protagonist of Shakespeare’s tragic play Macbeth, is a man, whose fortune is directly proportional to his desires and ambitions - as he gets more and more carried away with thoughts of future glory, his luck seems to lessen - which makes the play a tragedy. In the start of the play “brave Macbeth” shows himself as a great soldier and king Duncan’s right hand, for which he receives the honor of being Thane of Glamis and Cawdor. However, in any tragedy piece the character must be showing positive as well as negative traits of his character, in case of Macbeth, later in the play becoming the direct opposite to the righteous man he was at the start - his weakness undermined his strengths, his fatal ambition and wrong choices he was manipulated, fooled,
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He is introduced to us as a decorated general, and is described as brave - one of the soldiers explains that “well he deserves that name” for nabbing the traitor Macdonwald. Macbeth is a happily married man, calling his wife, Lady Macbeth, his “dearest partner of greatness”, which shows how much of a strong bond relationship him and his wife had. The protagonsist was also loved to an honorable extent by his king - king Duncan, who says “valiant cousin! Worthy gentleman” when Macbeth recieved the title of Thane of Glamis and Cawdor, and then even decided to stay at Inverness for a night with Macbeth and his wife. Everything is going well for the new Thane of Cawdor, until he faced the first obstacle, that made him re-evaluate his understanding of good and bad, which is the course play has to take to portray the idea that we are all both good and bad. His first meeting with the witches was the event that made him weak against the dark urges within him, unveiling his true-self, “yielding to the suggestion”, after the “filthy hags” gave him a prophecy of him becoming

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