Light And Darkness In Macbeth Essay

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Over the course of the play, Shakespeare uses light and darkness imagery to develop Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as foils to one another. In the beginning of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is depicted as a cold hearted, power hungry woman seeking to use her husband to gain power. When plotting King Duncan’s murder, she says, “Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark” (1.5). In this scene, Lady Macbeth asks God to provide her with a dark cloudy night the day Duncan arrives at Inverness, that way her and her husband can essentially commit their crime unseen. This shows that she embraces the dark and reveals her inner demons. However, as Lady Macbeth gains more …show more content…
(5.1). The Gentlewoman replies, “Why, it stood by her: she has light by her continually; ‘tis her command” (5.1). At this point Lady Macbeth has gone nearly insane and is about to meet her inevitable doom. She begins to frantically spew out information about her and her husband’s crimes during her sleepwalks, symbolizing her guilty conscience. Robert Thomas Fallon shares a similar viewpoint on Lady Macbeth’s development. In his book, A Theatergoer’s Guide to Shakespeare’s Characters, Fallon says,“When we first encounter Lady Macbeth, she is a resolute woman, a forceful influence on her husband, shaming him into carrying out their plan to murder King Duncan. When we last see her, she is a pitifully troubled woman who walks in her sleep, muttering all the while a rambling recital of her husband’s crimes” (Fallon 175). Lady Macbeth’s development throughout the play is drastically different from that of her husband. Initially, Macbeth is depicted as a war hero and a genuine man. When his wife suggests he murder the king, Macbeth is extremely skeptical and has a severe internal struggle over whether or not to execute the
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