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Greed In William Shakespeare's Macbeth

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Like myself, you might have been a little bit apprehensive about reading Macbeth. You probably thought about how reading such a long play will be of any interest to you, written in a very difficult style. What will you even learn about it? And perhaps like myself you realized how wrong you were. Amongst many things one of the things that make you think is his personality. What led what seemed to be a nice enough person become such a greedy and ambitious person that made led him to commit many atrocities? And why, even though his best friend heard similar great things didn’t make him do the same things as Macbeth? Let’s find three different places where we get to learn about Macbeth’s personality and motivation.
We first encounter the character very early in the play. When the three witches appear, his curiosity, a natural human characteristic, compelled him to continue listening to the witches, and here we see the start of a personality change …show more content…

We can see how greed starts to take root in their hearts. They both clearly had a comfortable position. We can say this because not just anyone gets to be close friends with the King and have posh titles. But their wanting more, that greed and ambition, caused them to plot and carry a hideous crime, of murdering a human being, and then lie and blame it on someone else, not saying anything for years. And yes, at the moment Macbeth felt extremely guilty, but this guilt did not move him to at least come clean and try to fix things. This constant lying made it easier for him to act as if it had never happened, for a long time he kept this secret. He then felt threatened by his own friend Banquo, remembering that great things were to happen to him as well. Again, he let the greed, and the want to have all the power and recognition for himself, control his decisions by ordering the murder of Banquo and his

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