Month: November 2016

What is Shakespeare trying to communicate about life in this passage spoken by the character Macbeth?

Shakespeare uses different techniques to communicate with his audience about life through Macbeth. First of all in the passage Macbeth says “she should of died hereafter there would have been a time for such a word”. Shakespeare is indicating in this short verse that Life just goes so fast and there is not enough time to fit everything in. The reason why this suggests that Macbeth is saying that is because he just found out his wife has died and he is in a pretty bad situation because there is an outbreak of war coming to him. Therefore he has no time to juggle his wife’s death and mourn for her.

One technique Shakespeare used in this Stanza is a metaphors he used it several verses talking about life. “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more” This is very powerful because in my opinion he is saying when life disappears and you die then you wont be heard no more, the bit where he is talking about just one hour on the stage reflects that he means life is just a short period of time and then your gone time just disappears.

In act 5 scene 5 Macbeth finds out his wife has died and then says that she should of died afterwards because he has no time to mourn her with this upcoming battle he has too much on his mind, he is also saying how life can go within a instant at this point I think Shakespeare is speaking to his audience because I believe he is speaking from his heart, it is true that life can instantly flicker off within in a second so live life because life is to short.

In my opinion I think Macbeth is an equivocator. The reason being is because he is undecided in many things for example when he was going to kill Duncan but he was saying how good he was and how he shouldn’t be killing him in his own house he should be the one protecting him since he is the host. “This even-handed justice commends th’ingredience of our ponion’d chalice to our own lips” in this metaphorical quote he says that it’s a bad deed and he shouldn’t be killing Duncan and that he should do it to himself and not to Duncan because he hasn’t done anything he’s feeling remorse already before killing him.