Gender Roles In Macbeth

Outside the struggles people face for power, Macbeth presents the genre of gender roles – a relevant topic both in historical and modern contexts. Shakespeare chooses to oppose his context’s ideologies of woman’s roles and rights by presenting ideas and perspectives from the woman’s point of view. This is most prominent through Lady Macbeth’s overwhelming desire for power, undermining Macbeth’s and manipulating his actions to raise their social standing to that of queen. Even during the patriarchal Elizabethan era, queens still held immense political power, with Queen Elizabeth I being an indicative patron that Shakespeare recurringly drew on. Despite this, Shakespeare explored further through the dissatisfaction woman continuously faced with

The extent of female representation can be felt through both the known and unknown world of the supernatural. The supernatural are witches that control destiny and diverge from the natural world through unique chanting of “double, double toil and trouble.” Whilst this may be interpreted as pure evil, Shakespeare deliberately chooses the witches to speak in trochaic tetrameter and in apostrophe to symbolise the ultimate corruption the witches were believed to bring with the sound and rhythm complementing each other in blank verse. This brings a commonly recognised dark tone in Macbeth which in retrospect, supplements “toil and trouble” as an indicator that Macbeth himself will be in big trouble for killing his way to royalty. The dark tone also seems to elude that the witches know what will happen to Macbeth, strengthening the historical idea that witches are the purest of evil whilst simultaneously demonstrating the immense power woman have as they act as a catalyst to Macbeth’s plot. This pushes Shakespeare’s boundaries of gender expectations that leave a resonant message for the modern

Shakespeare depicts how little actions of violence snowball overtime to destruct a character. Macbeth is the prime example of this, as during the opening acts we’re fed the ideologies of a seemingly humbled hero who’s twisted into a violent and murderous tyrant. After initial hesitance, Macbeth concedes to his dark ambitions, killing King Duncan and starting the violence. This forces Macbeth to continue killing through lust and anxiety to maintain his position as king, consequently inciting others against his rule. Macbeth is seemingly consumed by murder and darkness evoking a callousness that is inert in the nature of society. Macbeth acts as a rhymed couplet to “fair is foul and foul is fair” whereby Macbeth’s initial heroicness and fallen hero tragedy demonstrates the oxymoron: what seems good (foul is fair) is bad (foul is fair) and vice versa. By extension, Macbeth is the image of the couplet as his trajectory pivots from a man hesitant to kill in Act 1, to a tyrant promoting the order to “hang those who talk in fear” in Act 5, referring to the innocent civilians afraid of the war he created. Shakespeare raises a powerful message and one that remains relevant to any society struggling with