Lady Macbeth Essay

The tragic downfall of Shakespeare’s Macbeth can be attributed to his forceful ambition which leads him to commit terrible deeds, selfish greed and weakness that allows him to be easily manipulated. These influencing factors are nourished and encouraged by the three witches and the deceitful Lady Macbeth. Macbeth’s actions of murdering innocent children and women and his damning act of genocide show that he is primarily responsible for his own demise. Macbeths ‘ambition which overleaps itself’ leads him to commit heinous crimes that show his depravity and ultimately leads to his downfall. Macbeth lets his ‘ambition’ rule him and his decisions; his ambition comes before everything else. When he hears that Malcolm will be crowned prince of Cumberland he says ‘that is a step which I must fall down or else o’er leap, for in my way it lies’ this suggests that it is just a stepping stone on the way for him to become king. This ambition leads him to kill king Duncan without any real reason ‘I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition’ and this act of genocide results in a downward spiral to his ruin. Macbeth’s selfishness causes him to be demanding with the witch’s supernatural powers and his own authority, when his greed for knowledge leads him to tell the witches to ‘stay you imperfect speakers, tell me more. ’ And demand them to speak to him a second time ‘speak I charge you’. The power that he has ‘played most foully for’ allows him to do what he wants as he thinks of it stating ‘the very firstlings of my heart shall be the very firstlings of my hand’. Once Macbeth realises he will be ‘king hereafter ‘ he wants nothing more than to kill king Duncan revealing in a soliloquy ‘stars hide your fires, do not let light see my dark and seep desires’. Once Macbeth gains power he will cease at nothing to guard it, he cannot stop his greed, and he is so caught up in his own selfishness that he does not even mourn his own wife. When he hears of her death he states ‘she should have died hereafter’. It is this selfishness that leads him to kill and leaves him with nothing to live for, becoming ‘the walking shadow’ that gives him the consequence of his ultimate downfall. Macbeth’s weakness in character causes him to be easily controlled and egged on by Lady Macbeth. He does not have the strength to resist against Lady Macbeth’s attacks on his manliness ‘when you said you will kill him then you were a man’ and her ockingly asking ‘art thou afeard? ’ as a result; Lady Macbeth influences Macbeth about the murder as well as scolding him. For instance, after she calls him a â€Å"coward† and compares him with herself in a humiliating manner, Macbeth decides to commit the dreadful murder. This shows his weakness in character, because his mind is conflicted; yet, his decisions, which result in a great tragedy, are his own but are heavily influen ced by his scheming wife. At the end of the play, the moral weaknesses of Macbeth are totally revealed along with his mental weaknesses. He is no more the worthy warrior of battle fields. Indeed, he is a paranoid king who copes with guilty hallucinations and tries to secure himself by killing innocent people. For example, in the banquet scene, he sees the ghost of Banquo whose death was ordered by Macbeth and the guests start to suspect his mental health and talk unpleasantly of him. This character flaw of Macbeth makes his manifesting downfall even more tragic. In sum it is Macbeths overriding ambition that rules him and allows him to think of nothing else, selfishness and weak character allows him to be played like a pawn by Lady Macbeth and shows that he is his own enemy with character traits that are taken to the limit and exploited until he became nothing but a shell of his previous self. If Macbeth did not have such domineering traits he would not have met the same fate of eternal damnation that he did.