Olivia Zerno Mr. Belluscio ELA IV 3 April 2024 The Effect of Mental Disorders in Macbeth William Shakespeare was a very talented artist and has made very historical writings. In one of his most famous plays, “Macbeth”, the main character becomes consumed by ambition. This ambition came from three witches who told him he would become king in the near future. Influenced by his wife, he resorts to murdering the current king to fulfill the witches' prophecies. As the play goes on, you can tell Macbeth’s ambition overpowers him and it gets out of control. Macbeth’s wife, Lady Macbeth, is a significant character in this play and this paper. As the play progresses, readers can see that her personality changes drastically. Lady Macbeth is the one character who is significantly …show more content…
For example, Catherine E. Thomas mentions it in an article, “On the darker side, throughout the 1800s, Lady Macbeth is compared with witches, demons, viragos, snake-women, and iconic "evil women" like Medea.” “(Un)sexing Lady Macbeth: gender, power, and visual rhetoric in her graphic afterlife.” (Un)sexing Lady Macbeth. In this article, Lady Macbeth is portrayed as a dark and eerie person. Starting from the beginning of the play she has a very interesting monologue, “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty.” (Shakespeare 1.5.39-42). This quote is much longer, but this is showing that she was not mentally okay from the beginning of this play. Catherine E. Thomas backs this up in the same article saying, “She is powerful, clearly, but that power is dangerous and otherworldly. She is even more threatening because she is able to mask her true nature from the court until the end of the play when she drifts into madness.” With this unusual behavior, others view her as a threat already from the start of the