Impression of Macbeth from the 1st two acts of the play.

Macbeth is a play which attracts superlatives: it is Shakespeare's shortest

tragedy and the fastest moving, the most economical of the tragedies in its use
of language and thematic integration; it has the most pronounced atmosphere of
evil of any of his plays, but also contains the most insistent religious language;
it may be the greatest of morality plays, and was once thought the most
instructive tragedy in the world: it has been called his most timely, his darkest,
his most poetic, most philosophically ambitious play, fantastical and
imaginative beyond other tragedies. Its imagery has been termed ‘more rich and
varied, more highly imaginative than that of any other single play’. While it is
said to depict the happiest married couple in all his work, it is the play in which
Shakespeare addresses himself most pervasively to tragic action. "No other
tragedy has so many strange, disturbing phenomena". In the theatre, it has
accrued a unique aura of superstition, and has often to be referred to as the
Scottish play! Alone of Shakespeare's great tragedies, Macbeth features a hero
who is also a criminal. Shakespeare had tried this before, in Richard III. With
which Macbeth has often been compared, but the great difference is that he
makes Macbeth a character whose commitment to evil causes him enormous
suffering, and it is partly through the depiction of this suffering that the
audience's sympathy is engaged. This engagement is distinctive and, in the
circumstances, paradoxical. For Macbeth becomes a killer early in the play,
overcoming strong moral scruples to do so, and having killed once finds himself
obliged to continue in order to hold on to the power he has gained. He misuses
this power tyrannically, destroying the well-being of his country: the movement
of the action culminates, as it must, in his death. The tragic effect is created
because, in all this. Shakespeare does not allow his audience to become
alienated from his protagonist. It is appropriate for Malcolm at the end to
dismiss his father's murderer as ‘this dead butcher’, but the phrase jars with the
audience's perception. Macbeth is in an odd sense, one of us, as Stephen Booth
says, “the only character... who is our size” (Booth, ‘King Lear’), who stands
apart from those around him because he sees and feels more deeply than anyone
else, and because from the start the audience is encouraged into a kind of
complicity with him. The play puts us inside Macbeth’s head. The moral sense
which makes Macbeth acutely conscious of Duncan as a good man and a king to
whom he owes compelling duties never leaves him. He wants to be part of an
ordered society, to enjoy the golden opinions which he has won through service
to the state and to share them with his ‘dearest partner of greatness’, ‘to live the
lease of nature, pay his breath/ To time, and mortal custom’, only dying after an
old age accompanied by “honour, love, obedience, troops of friends”. He allows
himself to become a murderer but is filled with horror at what he has done and
at once wishes it undone, recognizing that through the deed he has irrevocably
corrupted a sacramental part of his innermost self. He tries to escape thinking of
himself as responsible for what he has done, and pursues fantasies of
invisibility; his eye must wink at the hand that wields the knife. As far as he
can, he tries to disclaim agency. The dagger which he hallucinates becomes
stained with blood apparently of its own volition, and seems to guide him on his
way to Duncan's chamber. As he goes, he begs that the ‘sure and firm-set earth’
not hear his steps.

Not only is the audience made privy to Macbeth's state of mind from the first,
but he is also a character who has an extraordinary susceptibility to strong
feeling. This he registers both through his body and in language of powerful
emotional affect, as in his reaction to the Sisters’ prophecies. He starts fearfully,
as Banquo observes. Then he tries to analyze his reaction:
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings.
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical
Shakes so my single state of man
That function is smothered in surmise,
And nothing is, but what is not
(1.3.132-44)
Macbeth's exploration of his own emotional response to what he immediately
identifies as a key event in his life contributes significantly to the play's larger
tragic effect. He thinks constantly about what he is feeling, and the destructive
effects of his chosen course of action are recorded in both mental and physical
terms. He cannot sleep and is shaken nightly by ‘terrible dreams’, he has fits,
flaws and starts, and his heart throbs. His intense self-consciousness and his
ability to draw the audience into his own perceptual system are largely
responsible for the fact that he comes across not just as a villain but also as a
suffering hero, constantly exposing his own emotional vulnerability.

Audience collusion with Macbeth is encouraged by the way in which he shares

impulses and feelings which are common place, even if they are not always
laudable: the worry and fear of exposure, the sense of having made a bad
bargain, the wish to present oneself publicly in the best possible light. His loss
of control in the banquet scene creates what Emrys Jones has called a feeling of
acute tragic embarrassment puts it, ‘bring it off’.
The motivation for Macbeth's criminal career is a central issue. Macbeth is seen
as “driven along by the violence of his fate like a vessel drifting before a storm”
but this sidesteps the important roles of the women in his life, the Witch Sisters
and his Lady, and the larger questions about choice and agency that their roles
open up. In the opening scene the Sisters are already planning an assignation
with Macbeth, and they are waiting for him when he first appears. His first line
echoes their chant. Their soliciting, as he calls it may be ‘super natural', and it
does appear to chime with his own desires, but at this point he is ambivalent
about their ontological status, and inclined not to take any action: If chance will
have me king, why chance may crown me,/Without my stir (1.3.146-7).
Nonetheless he is so strongly affected by the coincidence between their
predictions for his future and his recent promotion that his ‘single state of man’
is shaken to the core. In the letter to his wife he reports that ‘they have more in
them than mortal knowledge’ (1.5.2-3); further evidence of their powers appears
in the conjuring scene, when they summon up their 'masters', whose oracular
injunctions fill Macbeth with disastrous self-confidence. Their final gesture
exhibits high-level fortune telling powers in producing the show of kings that
represents the future Stuart dynasty; it incites Macbeth, impotent in the face of a
future in which he can have no part, to murderous rage, which he vents on the
family of Macduff. This act makes Macduff into the revenger who in turn brings
about Macbeth's own death.
Evil can act only on those who have the sight in themselves. Witches meeting
with Banquo is incidental but-meeting Macbeth is the incident. They just
prepare to meet him, they set the atmosphere of evil and darkness but Macbeth
himself becomes available to them with the withering height of ambition.
Macbeth's choice to murder Duncan is the tragic action that sets his course
thereafter, a choice prompted by his wife, at whose door the responsibility for
much that follows has often been laid. It is she who not only determines that he
will become what the Sisters have promised but also that this should come
about the nearest way.

This is not to deny the play a structural shapeliness. Macbeth achieves the
throne unhindered, but in the battle between crown and royalty he loose Royalty
but gains the Crown. Crown and Royalty- separated by a thin line of desire and
duty. Macbeth lost his Royalty the moment when his hands which should bow
in a gesture of obedience to Duncan, grab the dagger to decide his (Duncan’s)
the destiny. Macbeth is the victor and the vanquished. The presence of the word
"again" in the first line of the opening scene is a proposal of future impact. By
this it is indicated that the witches will happen again and again whether we see
them or not, they will mark their presence by Macbeth's actions. They perverted
the topography of Macbeth's psychological state. As nemesis unfolds, Macbeth
returns to his first role of warrior, suffering, like the former Thane of Cawdor,
the traitor’s ignominious fate. Yet this ending may not be without some element
of tragic catharsis. Macbeth is killed, justly, by the destined adversary, avoiding
the humiliation of playing the Roman fool. The moral sense that made his
surrender to crime so painful does not desert him.