OPPapers.com

Macbeth

Macbeth essay

Is Macbeth responsible for his own downfall?

Argue your point, referring to key ideas in the play and the conventions of tragedy, integrating textual features (techniques) and appropriately chosen quotations.

Tragic Conventions
Quotes
Techniques/Textual features
Themes – Key Ideas

- Character Flaws – Ambition, hubris, Weak (lets people influence him)
- He had a choice – Banquo, Macduff (Lady Macbeth, witches…etc. had no direct control – still had a choice)
- Ignores his conscience/morality/ethics/guilt

In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macbeth is a tragic hero responsible for his own actions which ultimately cause his downfall. His unwillingness to listen to his own conscience and his fatal character flaw, overriding ambition, are made known to us early on in the play in his soliloquy, where he says, “I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself” before murdering Duncan. He is a conventional tragic hero who falls from a high, noble ranking to insanity due to his fatal flaw. In Act 1, he is described as “valiant” and “noble” even before we meet him, but by Act 4, he begins to be described as a “villainous tyrant”. Throughout the play, it is evident that his weak character allows other forces to influence him and that he is indeed responsible for his own downfall.

It is without doubt that Lady Macbeth, the witches and other forces have influenced Macbeth in the course of action he took in his rise to power, but ultimately, he must bear the major responsibility for his fate as these forces had no direct control over his actions. After hearing the witches’ prophecies at the beginning of the play, when they said Macbeth “shalt be king hereafter,” Macbeth was faced with a choice: to act on these prophecies or to let them occur naturally. Ultimately, Macbeth chose the tempting path of darkness – to act and “play most foully for [his position as king]”. Banquo, who was also faced...