Zusammenfassung der Ressource
The Themes of Macbeth
- Ambition
- Macbeth seeks power
- Spurred on by his wife
- Causes his downfall
- "I have no spur/ To prick the sides of my intent,
but only/ Vaulting ambition
- Evil
- The urge to destroy whatever is good
- The underlying
presence of
murderous intention
and action
- "Fair is foul, and foul is fair
- Order and Disorder
- The struggle to mantain or destroy social and
natural bonds
- The Destruction of morality and mutual trust
- "Uproar the universal peace,
confound/ All unity on earth
- Appearance and Reality
- Evil lurks behind fair looks
- Deceit and hypocrisy mean
that appearances cannot be
trusted
- Lady Macbeth's "look like
th' innocent flower, / But be
the serpent under 't"
- Guilt and Conscience
- Macbeth knows that what he does us wrong.
- He does it and has to suffer the agonies of
conscience as a result
- "O, full of scorpions is my mind"
- Equivocation
- Telling deliberately misleading half-truths
- "Th' equivocation of the fiend/
That lies like truth"
- Violence and Tyranny
- Warfare, destruction and oppression
- "Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell"
- Man
- The violent feudal society of
hierarchical male power breeds
bloody stereotypes of what it is to
be man.
- "I dare do all that may become a man"
- "But I must also feel it as a man"