William Shakespeare's Repeated Reference to Blood to Establish the Theme of Power of Evil in Macbeth

William Shakespeare's Repeated Reference to Blood to Establish the Theme of Power of Evil in Macbeth

"Enter Macbeth, with two bloody daggers"

For me, this stage direction from William Shakespeare's Macbeth was

very effective as it portrayed the power of evil to destroy.

Throughout Macbeth, Shakespeare used many references to blood to

capture the attention of the audience. The repeated reference to blood

was very powerful as we were able to understand the bloodshed, Macbeth

and :Lady Macbeth's guilt and the relationships between the different

characters.

From the beginning, we can see that Macbeth is a man with good

intentions and a good heart. Macbeth's ambition and the persuasion of

his wife Lady Macbeth lead him to commit several horrible deeds. He

aims to become the King, but in order to do this he sees that he'll

have to murder the present King, Duncan. In the end, Macbeth's

excessive ambition leads to a point of no return, and ultimately his

own death. One of the key themes of Macbeth is clearly his ambition to

become King, but there is also the important theme of the power of

evil to destroy, which occurs frequently throughout the play. The

persistent references to blood merge together to present these themes

effectively.

Right from the start of Macbeth, the blood references help us to

understand the play better. The two types of references to blood are

literal and metaphorical. The first literal indication refers to the

bloodshed at the beginning of the play when Macbeth returns from the

battlefield. It then changes to refer to what turned out to be the

first of Macbeth's serial killings. In Act II Scene II, Macbeth...

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...eth boasts that no naturally

born man could ever hurt him, but Macduff warns him that he was born

by caesarean and so had not had a natural birth. He calls Macbeth a

coward,

"Then yield thee coward"

and goes on to explain how he wants to kill him and put him on show

for all to see with a sign saying,

"Here you may see the tyrant"

In Macbeth by William Shakespeare, the audience becomes very aware of

the power of evil to destroy. Throughout the play, the power of evil

is obvious. In the characters of Macbeth and his wife Lady Macbeth we

are shown how their desperate determination to achieve their ambition

leads to a bloody struggle for power. Lady Macbeth comes across as

being the most powerful character in the play and her uncontrolled

ambition results in the untimely deaths of her and her husband.