The Curious Atmosphere of Macbeth :: Free Essay Writer

The Curious Atmosphere of Macbeth The Bard of Avon created a complex gloriole in his writing of the tragedy Macbeth. Lets give detailed consideration to this aspect of the drama in this paper. In Fools of Time Studies in Shakespe arean Tragedy, Northrop Frye shows how the breeze is adapted for the better at the end of the play This theme is at its clearest where we are most in sympathy with the nemesis. Thus at the end of Macbeth, after the promulgation the time is free, and of promises to make reparations of Macbeths tyranny Which would be planted newly with the time, there will be a renewal not only of time but of the whole rhythm of nature symbolized by the word measure, which includes both the music of the spheres and the dispensing of human justice . . .. (94-95) In his book, On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy, H. S. Wilson explains why the atmosphere is so important in Macbeth Macbeth is a play in which the poetic atmosphere is very important so important, indee d, that some recent commentators give the fancy that this atmosphere, as created by the imagery of the play, is its determining quality. For those who pay most attention to these powerful atmospheric suggestions, this is doubtless true. Mr. Kenneth Muir, in his introduction to the play - which does not, by the way, ensure it simply from this point of view - aptly describes the cumulative effect of the imagery The contrast amidst light and darkness is part of a general antithesis between good and evil, devils and angels, evil and grace, hell and heaven . . . and the infirmity images of IV, iii and in the last act clearly reflect both the evil which is a disease, and Macbeth himself who is the disease from which his country suffers.(67-68) L.C. Knights in the essay Macbeth mentions equivocation, unreality and unnaturalness in the play - contributors to an atmosphere that may not be very realistic The equivocal nature of temptation, the handicraft with phantoms consequent upon f alse choice, the resulting sense of unreality (nothing is, but what is not), which has yet such power to smother vital function, the unnaturalness of evil (against the use of nature), and the relation between disintegration in the individual (my single state of man) and disorder in the larger social organism - all these are major themes of the play which are mirrored in the speech under consideration.