Macbeth

I studied Macbeth in English this year, and I have a couple of thoughts now.

 

1.      Letting other people rule you can lead to mistakes you will regret for the rest of your life. Macbeth was very reluctant to go through with the murder of his king. It was mainly his wife’s influence that drove Macbeth into the deed, but he cannot be entirely innocent. Despite all his hesitations Macbeth caved to his wife and allowed her to convince him into the murder. We all choose how much influence others hold over us.

 

2.      Sometimes you just have to trust people, but that doesn’t mean go into it blindly. Duncan the king trusted the Thane of Cawdor completely, Cawdor turned out to be a traitor. All the same Duncan trusted Macbeth and all the other characters, even though the Macbeths end up murdering him I think Duncan was one of the happier characters of the plot.
      Macbeth is a little too trusting as well. Macbeth puts complete trust in the prophecy of the witches, three people he knows nothing about, which eventually leads to his death.
       Banquo on the other hand is suspicious of the witches and Macbeth but he never acts on his suspicions.
       Malcolm, I think, is the smartest character in the plot, at least on the issue of trust. Malcolm doesn’t trust Macduff immediately but once convinced however Malcolm commits to trust by taking Macduff into his confidence.

 

3.      Crazy is an overused word these days. “Everyone has a mental disorder” they say, ‘I’m crazy and It’s cool’ we say jokingly to our friends. Then you read Macbeth there are some genuinely crazy people there. By the end of the play your thinking ‘Macbeth is a NUTCASE, he is literally crazy, not a little teenager/young adult crazy, not crazy busy, actually mentally insane. It’s subtle but it’s sad. We watch the fall of a respected man into murder and finally madness and we walk away with the feeling that it could have been us, it could still be us. My mom thinks that it takes a certain level of insanity to take someone else’s life, I think I agree.

In closing I walked away from Macbeth wondering if the sanctity of human life is as sacred as we want it to be. I walked away wondering how I would handle taking a life. I walked away wondering how much to trust people. I walk away from Macbeth with the conviction that there are some lines that cannot be crossed and other lines that are not as solid as I would like them to be.