Ugly Ambition in Shakespeares Macbeth :: Macbeth essays

Ugly Ambition in Macbeth The Bard of Avon saturates the pages of the tragedy Macbeth with ugly feelings of desire - unprincipled ambition which is ready to kill for itself. Lets thoroughly search come in the major instances of ambitious behavior by the husband-wife team. In Macbeth as the Imitation of an Action Francis Fergusson states the place of Macbeths ambition in the action of the play It is the phrase to outrun the pauser, flat coat 2.3, which seems to me to describe the action, or motive, of the play as a whole. Macbeth, of course, literally means that his love for Duncan was so strong and so swift that it got ahead of his reason, which would feature counseled a pause. But in the homogeneous way we have seen his greed and ambition outrun his reason when he committed the murder and in the same way all of the characters, in the irrational darkness of Scotlands evil hour, are compelled in their action to strive beyond what they can see by reason alone. Even Malcolm and Macduff, as we shall see, are compelled to go beyond reason in the action which destroys Macbeth and ends the play. (106-7) Fanny Kemble in Lady Macbeth refers to the ambition of Lady Macbeth . . . to have seen Banquos apparition at the banqueting table ... and persisted in her fierce mocking of her husbands terror would have been impossible to human nature. The hypothesis makes Lady Macbeth a monster, and there is no such thing in all Shakespeares plays. That she is godless, and ruthless in the pursuit of the objects of her ambition, does not make her such. (118) In Memoranda Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons mentions the ambition of Lady Macbeth and its effect Re I have given suck (1.7.54ff.) Even here, horrific as she is, she shews herself made by ambition, but not by nature, a perfectly savage creature. The very use of such a tender allusion in the midst of her dreadful language, persuades one unequivocally that she has really felt the motherly yearn ings of a mother towards her babe, and that she considered this action the most enormous that ever required the strength of human nerves for its perpetration. Her language to Macbeth is the most potently eloquent that offense could use.