Macbeth Act 2 Scene 1 Soliloquy Analysis

Macbeth is a play written during the 16th century by William Shakespeare. As similar to other plays written by Shakespeare, the play is not totally original. They came from facts and events that are happening during the time it was written (“Background to Macbeth”). Macbeth can be seen as a dark play as it portrays the idea of evilness through characterization and have events like murder happening throughout the story. Throughout the play, Shakespeare inserted various features to make his writing more powerful. In this essay, I will be analyzing literary elements, linguistic features and structural features that are present in Act 2 Scene 1 from lines 39 to 72, Macbeth soliloquy. The main plot that happens in this soliloquy is that Macbeth is working on his plan to murder King Duncan so he could become King according to the witches’ prophecy in Act 1 Scene 1. Within this soliloquy, Shakespeare added numerous amounts of literary devices with the purpose of give a visual imagery to the

This is an example of a paradox from the text. The purpose of this paradox is to stress how Macbeth is when he was committing the murder. The hallucination of the dagger feared him making him confused of himself. Besides paradox, Shakespeare also uses metaphor as comparison between two unlike object to create a more intense figure in the reader’s mind such as “A dagger of the mind, a false creation” (2.1.46) and “Nature seems dead” (2.1.58). “Nature seems dead” (2.1.58) is also a hyperbole found in the text with the purpose to emphasize on how nature has become still and that it seems to be dead. Another example of a hyperbole found in this text is “Now o’er the one halfworld” (2.1.57). This line is basically foreshadowing that one half of the world is being deceived from this plan. It isn’t actually half the world but the majority of people in the area. This hyperbole exaggerates the amount of people Macbeth is