Examples Of Mental Illness In Macbeth

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William Shakespeare wrote many plays during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that featured characters who suffered from mental illnesses. Macbeth was one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays that had this feature. Many have agreed that not only Macbeth, but also his wife, Lady Macbeth, suffered from mental illnesses. When a member of Shakespeare’s audience watched these characters in Macbeth or another play that discussed mental illness, he or she probably connected the behavior of that character to multiple different things. Due to the little knowledge known about mental illness during that time period, Shakespeare’s references to mental illnesses were not typically understood the same way by everyone.
In the modern world, anyone can search the internet and immediately find out information on any topic. For example, if someone looked up the definition of ‘mental illness’, …show more content…
They lived by this saying: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (Mac. I. I. 11). So, they thought that anything bad was good and anything that was good was bad. The sisters ultimately triggered the start to Macbeth’s mental illness by tricking him into thinking he was destined to be king. This fortune they presented him with went to his head, and it began changing his ideas and morals. Macbeth became willing to do anything in order to get this, and sometimes the things he had to do caused his mental state to worsen. For example, after he killed Duncan with Lady Macbeth, he began to feel the guilt and it cause many things to happen. He began to believe anything and everything the witches told him. He let the tricks take over his entire mind. Because witchcraft was such a popular reason for mental illnesses during Shakespeare’s time, the audience probably assumed that the magic was the cause of Macbeth’s illness. The scenes in Macbeth even helped strengthen the ideas that witchcraft was the

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