Shakespeares Macbeth - Macbeths Dark Quality :: Macbeth essays

Macbeths Dark Quality It is obvious to the hearer of Shakespeares disaster Macbeth that there are varying types and degrees of evil in the drama. We shall look at this in detail within this paper. L.C. K nights in the essay Macbeth describes the moral darkness into which Macbeth lowers himself The main theme of the reversal of values is given out precisely and clearly in the first scene - Fair is foul, and foul is amusement park and with it are associated premonitions of the conflict, disorder and moral darkness into which Macbeth will plunge himself. (95) Charles give birth in On the Tragedies of Shakespeare comments on the images of night and their impact on the audition The state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by those images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he entertains the time cashbox the bell shall strike which is to call him to murder Duncan, - when we no longer read it in a book, when we have give n up that vantage-ground of abstr motion which exercise possesses over seing, and come to see a man in his bodied shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit a muder, if the fermenting be true and impressive as I have witnessed it in Mr. Ks performance of that part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to counter it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing semblance of reality,give a pain and an uneasiness . . .. (134) Roger Warren states in Shakespeare Survey 30 , regarding Trervor Nunns counselling of Macbeth at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1974-75, how the witches represented the darkness of black magic overmuch of the approach and detail was carried over, particularly the clash between religious chastity and black magic. Purity was embodied by Duncan, very infirm (in 1974 he was blind), dressed in white and accompanied by church pipe organ music, set against the black magic of the witches, who even chanted Double, double to the Dies I rae. (283) In Macbeth as the Imitation of an Action Francis Fergusson states the place of darkness in the action of the play It is the phrase to outrun the pauser, reason 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 hygienic and so swift that it got ahead of his reason, which would have counseled a pause.