Theme Of Reality In Macbeth

What is reality? Where does it exist? Who defines it? What may be very real to you may be entirely different to someone else. Does reality need to be objective and exist in the outside world, or can it be subjective and exist within the mind? In William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth the way that things appeared versus the way that they were in reality did not always match up. It 's a world where nothing is what it seems. It 's a world where you 're never sure whether it 's a real dagger or an apparition, a mirage, or the ghost of Banquo. Within the universe of the play, while the characters think they are being led in a direction of glory, tragedy creeps up behind them and breaks them and all of their ambitions. Using both traditional and

The otherworldly witches that kick off the production already set a surreal tone to the entire play opening the play to the supernatural. Speaking in their double language, and saying that famous line “Fair is foul and foul is fair” sets the course for a major theme that appears throughout the play. The line points to the play 's concern with the discrepancy between the difference between how someone seems and how someone is. Macbeth, when he almost quotes the line verbatim on his first entrance, following his victory comments on the weather: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” The weather is "foul" but the day meaning "the outcome of the battle" is "fair". The day is foul and fair at once. Foul is fair. Fair is foul. It 's a world where you can 't trust anyone, a world where everything that you assume to be true can really be the reverse. What seems good is really bad, meaning Macbeth; and what seems bad is really good reinforced by when Malcolm flees Scotland when his father dies and looks guilty, but he is only trying to protect

A possibility burning within him left to stew, and a glimmer of it revealed only a few lines later. Very often when we want to do something wrong, it takes only the smallest of proofs to make us think that it is the right course of action in order to justify for ourselves what it is we want to do. The way that he responds to the revelation of this prophecy possibly coming true, his speech is full of what will now become his trademark — questioning, doubting, weighing up, and seeking to justify: "This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill; cannot be good". Nevertheless, however much he reasons, Macbeth cannot reconcile the fact of the truth of the first prophecy with his "horrible imaginings." He admits to being so shaken by the news that he feels that his reason has been taken over by his imagination. The line "Nothing is, but what is not" is ambiguous. The expression could indicate confusion between the world we think of as real and the world of dreams. The entire thought process reflects the twisting surface perceptions with the underlying truth where Macbeth needs to argue that the prophecies are neither evil nor good, and accept that nothing that exists has any existence