Guilt In Macbeth

William Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, is about a man and his wife who rose to worldly power in exchange for their spiritual attributes. The characters Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s moral standards drastically shift within the story because of ambition. The core themes of this Shakespeare play are the overbearing and ever-present motifs of guilt, irony, and the meaning of life. Guilt is a theme seen throughout the story and ambition changes how Macbeth and his wife deal with their guilt. Because only the “innocent sleep” (2.2.48), Macbeth cannot experience the “ball of hurt minds [sleep]” (2.2.51) and the guilt of murdering Duncan weighed so heavily upon him that he heard a voice saying “Macbeth does murder sleep- sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep

Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, views that the blood on her hands, after murdering Duncan, can easily be washed off with a sprinkle of water (2.2.85). In the latter parts of the story, ambition for securing the kingship grew as the feelings of guilt, so felt in Macbeth, faded away. However, Lady Macbeth, who seemed unaffected and unfazed by Duncan’s death, eventually realized that the blood of the countless people killed to secure the kingship, could never be washed off (5.1.45) and that they could not even be masked with “all the perfumes of Arabia” (5.1.53-55) Wong 2 The character shifts between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are ironic because they traded their morals. At the start of the rising action, where Macbeth kills Duncan, he exclaims to his wife, “I am afraid to think what I have done. Look only again, I dare not” (2.2.66-67) and this supports Lady Macbeth's assumption that he is “too full of the milk of human kindness”(1.5.17). This early scene is later contrasted by Macbeth dully saying that he “almost forgot the taste of human fears- Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, cannot once start