Blood In Macbeth

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Often, when people make significant moral decisions in their life, the decision to stray from or follow what is morally right shapes them as a person. In Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, blood is a motif that follows many of the characters throughout the play. It’s most simple description being a bodily fluid essential to life and key to being alive and human. In Macbeth, the nation of scotland is humanized as well. However as the play progresses, the idea of blood evolves into not only a marker of one’s humaneness, but also as a symbol of the moral or immoral choices they have made, ultimately leaving proof of the intractable consequences. blood is used to represent both the moral and immoral sides of human nature, showing that everyone has …show more content…
In Macbeth, blood is used metaphorically but also literally, to show that blood is a very physical and human trait .At the very beginning of the play, the battle scene begins with a bloody soldier talking of the bloody enemy, setting the tone for the rest of the play:
What bloody man is that? He can report,
As seemeth by his plight, of the revolt
The newest state…
For brave Macbeth with his brandished steel…
Which smoked with bloody execution, carved out his passage
Till he unseamed [a slave] from the nave to th’ chops, (1.1.1-3).
The graphic image of the bloody soldier immediately brings to mind the idea of blood, and how it is a very physical property. In the case of the soldier, he is a hero, admired for his actions. From the enemy's standpoint, this initial dialogue also talks about the blood shed on the other side, even the ‘unseaming’ of an enemy by Macbeth, bringing up a bloody image. From the soldier's point of view, Macbeth is a hero for his ‘bloody execution’ to the …show more content…
which cannot be reversed. At the beginning of the play, Macbeth is regarded as a hero, and as he goes against his morals and makes bad decisions, he still struggles because he knows what the morally right thing to do would be. However, after he sees Banquo’s ghost, he changes his position on making moral
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