To Consider the Impact of Guilt across the Shakespeare´s Macbeth and J.B. Priestley´s An Inspector Calls

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To consider the impact of guilt across the play

Both “Macbeth and “An Inspector Calls” by William Shakespeare and J.B. Priestley both explores the impact of guilt on their characters. For Shakespeare whose novel was set in Medieval Times and written in 1606 Jacobean Times, he writes the play for King James 1 of Scotland in order to gain patronage from King. However, Priestley (a socialist) whose novel was 1912 and written in 1945 (the end of WW2), he focuses on a capitalist family in Brumley just to promote the view of socialist to the audience in 1945. Despite the differences of the play, the overall impact of guilt are the same in both play but used in different ways. In this essay I will be focusing on a character in Shakespeare’s play called Lady Macbeth as her character clearly showed guilt at the end of play due to her sleepwalking (unnatural- madness) and dying as she cannot handle her guilt. This could therefore, be compared to Sheila in “An Inspector Calls” because her character has clear similarities to Lady Macbeth as she does not feel any guilt at the beginning but changes to realise her social responsibility and felt guilty at the end of the play. However, some of the characters in “An Inspector calls” does not show any guilt at all for example, Mr and Mrs Birling.

At the start of “Macbeth” Shakespeare uses imagery to present the cruel nature of Lady Macbeth but in masculine way (unfeminine) through her speeches. By using Shakespeare’s more formal language, Lady Macbeth feels that Macbeth’s kindness makes him a coward and very weak to achieve his ambitions his ambitions where she says Macbeth “too full of o’th’ milk of human kindness”. By using the word “milk” shows us that Macb...

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...ting to study Lady Macbeth as a character as we see a massive change from the beginning to the end. The impact of guilt of the character Lady Macbeth is very supernatural as she goes mad and dies. However, in “An Inspector Calls” we see only two characters (Sheila and Eric) develop and also changes massively as they accepted to be responsible for other people and accepted their guilt whilst the rest of the family like Birling want to carry on in his old ways and not accepting responsibility . In both these plays, the central female characters play a significant role in their plays unlike the other characters in their plays which were very unlikely during their different eras. This therefore makes it more interesting.

BY: ERIC KWAME BOATENG

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