![]() After all, Macbeth is just a player on an English stage, and his statement undercuts the suspension of disbelief that the audience must maintain in order to enter the action of the play. a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage” can be read as a dark and somewhat subversive commentary on the relationship between the audience and the play. These words reflect Macbeth’s feeling of hopelessness, of course, but they have a self-justifying streak as well-for if life is “full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing,” then Macbeth’s crimes, too, are meaningless rather than evil.Īdditionally, the speech’s insistence that “ife’s. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” he says grimly,Ĭreeps in this petty pace from day to dayĪnd all our yesterdays have lighted fools Indeed, Macbeth’s speech following his wife’s death is one of the most famous expressions of despair in all of literature. Yet, his indifferent response reflects the despair that has seized him as he realizes that what has come to seem the game of life is almost up. Macbeth seems numb in response to the news of his wife’s death, which seems surprising, especially given the great love he appears to have borne for his wife. Like Duncan’s death and Macbeth’s ascension to the kingship, Lady Macbeth’s suicide does not take place onstage it is merely reported. His and Lady Macbeth’s sleeplessness was foreshadowed by Macbeth’s hallucination at the moment of the murder, when he believed that a voice cried out “Macbeth does murder sleep” (2.2.34). Her belief that nothing can wash away the blood is, of course, an ironic and painful reversal of her earlier claim to Macbeth that “ little water clears us of this deed” (2.2.65). “Out, damned spot,” she cries in one of the play’s most famous lines, and adds, “ho would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (5.1.30, 33–34). Lady Macbeth, her icy nerves shattered by the weight of guilt and paranoia, gives way to sleepwalking and a delusional belief that her hands are stained with blood. ![]() We see the army’s and Malcolm’s preparation for battle, the fulfillment of the witches’ prophecies, and the demises of both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth. The rapid tempo of the play’s development accelerates into breakneck frenzy in Act 5, as the relatively long scenes of previous acts are replaced by a flurry of short takes, each of which furthers the action toward its violent conclusion on the battlefield outside Dunsinane Castle.
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