Play Macbeth Essay

Submitted By samhop96
Words: 438
Pages: 2

In the play Macbeth, written by William Shakespeare, includes many themes in its entirety, one of them being the theme of marriage. The marriage between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth progresses from the latter is the dominant one in the relationship to Macbeth becoming the dominant one by the end. Macbeth gets too much power as the play progresses and Lady Macbeth loses the dominance she had over him. By the end of the play, Macbeth is so drunk with the power he has that nothing else means anything to him.

In the beginning of the play, Lady Macbeth had the upper hand in her relationship with Macbeth and she exercised that power by convincing her husband to murder Duncan in her conquest for power. One of the ways she used it was by trying to guilt him into in, by saying, “What beast was’t then that made you break this enterprise to me?... I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed his brains out, had I sworn as you have done to this” (Act 1, Scene 7, Lines 47, 48, 57, 58, 59). This quote is saying that Lady Macbeth, when given her word, would even kill her own child rather than break what she said to her husband. She is attempting to prove how loyal she is to him and guilt him into doing what she wants, using her advantage of power over him in the marriage. As the play continues, the power sort of switches from Lady Macbeth to her husband, Macbeth was very weary of power when the play first began but became too engrossed in it nearing the end.