Regicide In Macbeth

Shakespeare's Jacobean morality play, Macbeth, exemplifies the tragic consequences of committing regicide. First performed in 1604 to please King James I who harboured intense fears of witchcraft and attacks to his throne, the play dramatically portrays the downfall of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth who suffer guilt, madness and ultimately death following their plot to kill the king. Their demise acts as a warning to contemporaries looking to harm their ruler. The play also highlights the gender imbalance of roles within society, and how women who sought greater autonomy and recognition were forced to become more like men and supernatural creatures to have a role within a patriarchal society. In Macbeth, Shakespeare changes the perception of women

Shakespeare allows the three witches to start the play despite it being named after its eponymous male protagonist and attributes them an unusual number of options and roles which was uncommon within their patricidal society. This highlights the notable power and influences that the witches have in the play. The witches enter in "thunder and lightning" (A1, S1) which foreshadows the destruction and chaos that they bring; this further implies that because the witches can change the weather, they can change characters’ actions and the play’s course of events. The witches tell Macbeth that he shall be "Thane of Cawdor" (A1, S3) and "king" (A1, S3); when this first prophecy is quickly fulfilled, he begins to believe the witches which sparks Macbeth’s ambition and in turn exposes his lingering evil that gradually overtakes his rationality throughout the

Even though Lady Macbeth had the upper hand over her husband at the start of the play, she begins to lose her power after she refuses to kill Duncan as he reminds her of her “father” (A4, S2). However, she still treats Macbeth like a child and tells him that he lacks “season of all natures” (A3, S4) to shame his desire to remain ethical. Ironically, this foreshadows how Lady Macbeth later begins to sleepwalk and turn mad, eventually leading to her death. It seems the matters that she goads her husband for later return to haunt her, as an act of moral karma. Sleep is a constant theme in Macbeth and many contemporaries believed that too little sleep can make a person mad and irrational. However, normally sleep is seen as bringing comfort, innocence, and purity – therefore, showing Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking demonstrates that she has upset any remnants of innocence and purity, and now turns into an irrational and mad person suffering from insomnia. In Act 5, Scene 5, the doctor describes Lady Macbeth’s eyes as “open” but [her] “sense is shut” to show how her eyes can no longer see reality and