Destructive Ambition in Shakespeares Macbeth Essay -- Macbeth essays

Destructive Ambition in Macbeth William Shakespeares tragic play Macbeth presents the fizzled drive of an ambitious husband and wife. This show is the story of their destructive ambition. Fanny Kemble in Lady Macbeth refers to the ambition of Lady Macbeth . . . to have seen Banquos ghost at the banqueting table ... and persisted in her fierce vexing of her husbands terror would have been impossible to human nature. The hypothesis makes Lady Macbeth a monster, and there is no such thing in all Shakespeares plays. That she is godless, and ruthless in the pursuit of the objects of her ambition, does not make her such. (118) In Memoranda Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons mentions the ambition of Lady Macbeth and its effect Re I have given pull (1.7.54ff.) Even here, horrific as she is, she shews herself made by ambition, but not by nature, a perfectly savage creature. The very use of such a tender allusion in the midst of her dreadful language, persuades on e unequivocally that she has really felt the maternal yearnings of a mother towards her babe, and that she considered this action the most enormous that invariably required the strength of human nerves for its perpetration. Her language to Macbeth is the most potently eloquent that guilt could use. (56) Clark and Wright in their Introduction to The Complete Works of William Shakespeare interpret the of import theme of the play as intertwining with evil and ambition While in Hamlet and others of Shakespeares plays we feel that Shakespeare refined upon and brooded over his thoughts, Macbeth seems as if struck out at a heat and imagined from first to last with rapidity and power, a... ...of Critical Essays. Alfred Harbage, ed. Englewwod Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964. Johnson, Samuel. The Plays of Shakespeare. N.p. n.p.. 1765. Rpt in Shakespearean catastrophe. Bratchell, D. F. New York, NY Routledge, 1990. Kemble, Fanny. Lady Macbeth. Macmillans Magazine, 17 (February 186 8), p. 354-61. Rpt. in Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, eds. Manchester, UK Manchester University Press, 1997. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. http//chemicool.com/Shakespeare/macbeth/full.html, no lin. Siddons, Sarah. Memoranda Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth. The Life of Mrs. Siddons. Thomas Campbell. London Effingham Wilson, 1834. Rpt. in Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, eds. Manchester, UK Manchester University Press, 1997.