Macbeth Universal Themes

In every one of Shakespeare’s plays there are themes that are connected as a whole. This is known as a universal theme defined as a matter “concerning all” (World Book 2285 & 2173). In Shakespeare’s tragedies, he captures thousands of emotions from his audience throughout every play. As well as capturing emotions that also help to tie everything in with different themes. In Macbeth, the three universal themes that are important throughout the play include guilt, ambition, and death.
Guilt is a famous theme emphasized greatly and more than once throughout the play. Shakespeare writes “Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more Macbeth does murder sleep”- the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, the death of each

In Act 2, this is after Macbeth and Lady Macbeth finish killing king Duncan, and Macbeth is starting to be overwhelmed with his guilty conscience. He starts acting really odd, and he starts talking about sleep. He explains that he “murdered” his sleep. Which is just in translation of when he killed king Duncan, he can no longer sleep because the guilt is catching up to him. Without sleep, lots of people start to go mad, and have hallucinations and once they are actually able to sleep their minds get a rest and when they awake, they are normal. This proves more of the point of sleep is important to function. In an essay titled “An Embodied View of Misunderstanding in “Macbeth...”, Ellen Spolsky compares a time in the play where Lady Macbeth was

In Act I, Lady Macbeth expresses her thoughts to the audience about the letter she had received from her husband, “Come, you spirits that tend on moral thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, stop th’ access and passage of remorse that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between Th’ effect and it!” (Shakespeare 334). Here, Lady Macbeth is literally saying that she wants “spirits” to drain her of the emotion remorse. She wants to be a brick wall and feel nothing. She actually ends up convincing herself and she loads up on ambition and she uses that with manipulation tied in to her actions. Lady Macbeth says in her thought “unsex” by definition biologically is the deprivation of gender, or sexuality. An idea of what she means is, she wants to feel the masculinity of a man. She wants the qualities. This is best described in an essay by Kevin Williamson titled “Give sorrow words”. In the essay Williamson writes “Lady Macbeth appeals to the super natural (“Come, you spirits… you murdering ministers sightless substance”), but in reality her concern are strictly biological: “Unsex me here.” There is a certain irony there: Treason and assassination are a man’s work. She may be eager to cajole her husband into stepping out of the feminine world of manipulation into the masculine