Everybody is driven by guilty conscience in our life. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth feel guilty at different times and different ways. Macbeth feels guiltier than Lady Macbeth after the murder of Duncan. During the Banquet, Mecbeth is very upset and nervous after seeing the ghost, But Lady Macbeth is making an excuse about her husband’s fear, and she doesn’t show any guilt. At the end of the play, the opposite is true: Lady Mecbeth feels guiltier than mecbeth.. Guilt is responsible for the death of Lady Macbeth and Macbeth.
In Act II, Scene ii, Macbeth regrets the murder of Duncan as soon as he kills the king. He finds it impossible to pray after Duncan’s two sons waken from a nightmare pray and fall back to sleep : “I had most need of blessing, and “Amen” / Stuck in my throat.”(II;ii;32-3) On the other hand Lady Macbeth tells him to forget about the murder because if they keep thinking of the crime, it will make them both crazy:
Consider it not so deeply.
…/These deeds must not be thought
After these ways; so, it will make us mad.(II;ii;30-35)
Because Lady Macbeth kills herself at the end of the play, these lines also foreshadow her future.
In Act III scene 4, Macbeth is going to be crazy after seeing Banquo’s ghost. He got so scared when he sees the ghost walking in the Palace and sitting in his place: “thou canst not say I did it: never shake thy gory locks at me.”
This quote shows how scared he is, and Lady Macbeth is making an excuse to hide her husband’s fear:
Sit, worthy friends: my lord is often thus,
And hath been from his youth: pray you, keep seat;
The fit is momentary, upon a thought
He will again be well. If much you note him,
You shall offend him, and extend his passion;
Feed, and regard him not. Are you a man?
This quote explain to the guest that why Macbeth has acted in that way, and how Lady Macbeth hide her husband’s fear of the ghost. In act V scene1, 50: Lady Macbeth is so upset about the fact that they committed such a horrible crime and she can’t erase it. And that is not what she felt at the beginning of the story, she says:
Feminist Performance and the Silence of Isabella in Measure for Measure
Feminist Performance and the Silence of Isabella in Measure for Measure
In a chapter entitled “When Is a Character Not a Character?” Alan Sinfield presents the argument that the female figures in Shakespeare’s plays are not really “characters” at all, since they do not possess continuous and psychologically consistent interior lives. Although such roles as that of Desdemona, Olivia, and Lady Macbeth are written so as to suggest the presence of uninterrupted interior consciousness, this impression collapses under the pressure of the plot’s movement toward closure, which reveals the figures to represent nothing more than a “disjointed sequence of positions that women are conventionally supposed to occupy”(53). In order to preserve a textual organization that sustains a particular gender hierarchy, female characters abruptly shift from one stereotypical version of femininity to another without coherent linkages between them. For instance, despite their volubility throughout the early acts, at the conclusions of the plays, as Sinfield notes, Shakespeare’s women often “fall silent at moments when their speech could only undermine the play’s attempt at ideological coherence” (73). Thus, “the point at which the text falls silent is the point at which its ideological project is disclosed” (74). One of the most prominent of such silences appears at the end of Measure for Measure, where Isabella, “the bold woman silenced most spectacularly when marriage is proposed” (74), fails to react verbally to the Duke’s two offers of wedlock. According to Sinfield, this lack of response occurs because Isabella is suspended between two conventional female roles, and the disjunction between them makes manifest the agenda of the text’…
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