Our Impressions of Macbeth from Acts 1-3

In Macbeth, the protagonist is a murderer from the beginning to the end of the play. However, through the use of soliloquies, aside, dramatic irony, imagery, choice of language and what other characters say about him, Shakespeare sculpts Macbeth into a walking contradiction, leaving the audience to vacillate between contrasting opinions of him. Through out eyes, Macbeth morphs continuously into different characteristics in the space of just a few lines- yet unlike a typical tragic protagonist, he remains as barbaric as he was at the beginning through to the end.

In the first scene, the witched are set in an atmosphere filled with a disturbing evil, reflected in the stormy weather, their fractured iambic pentameter and their use of cantatious rhyming couplets and alliteration- e.g. ‘fair is foul and foul is fair /Hover through the fog and filthy air.’ This possessed evil is shown in Macbeth with the first line he says in he play- ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen.’ This gives the audience mixed feelings because it suggests that Macbeth is corrupt with evil already, as he echoes the witches. However the audience can feel a bit of sympathy because the witched are clearly unnatural and demonic creatures with an eerie power, so the corruption of Macbeth could have been completely out of his control.

When Macbeth first encounters these witches with Banquo, he and Banquo have very different approaches to them. Banquo is quite straight forward, seeing directly through their evil, challenges the witches with ‘If you can look into the seeds of time…Speak then to me.’ Contrary to Banquo Macbeth is speechless and ‘rapt withal’ when he first hears their news. He later questions their omens, with interest ‘Tell me more’. Compared ...

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...wing his passionate desire for the position. His thoughts create a combination of feelings from the audience because they sympathise that he regrets his decisions and has a heart to realise his wrongdoing. On the other hand, however, he nevertheless murdered Duncan to inherit kingship and he had every power not to do so.

As examined, Shakespeare creates a variety of feelings amongst the audience towards Macbeth. The motives of Macbeth’s murder of Duncan seem to be the main stir of the debate, so it’s hard to pin a straightforward opinion on him. He has done a horrible sin, however it was due to the many pressures around him such as his wife and the witches, as well as the social pressures which urged him to lust after kingship. These factors make us question whether Macbeth himself was a vile murderer, or whether the power of evil grasped him beyond his control.