Can someone please mark by Macbeth Essay on ambition?

In Shakespeare’s moralistic and tragic play, he presents ambition as a destructive and chaotic tool to cause harm and create failure. He presents Macbeth’s fate as a cautionary tale to other nobles in King James’ court. Macbeth can be viewed as a tale of propaganda to deter royals from trying to usurp the throne from King James especially after the Gunpowder Plot. Therefore, Shakespeare wants to teach and advise others that excess ambition can easily lead to downfall and decline of your reputation and destroy the ones he loves, like Lady Macbeth.

At the start of the play, Macbeth is entranced by the witch's prophecy, that will seemingly allow him to gain multitudes of power and success from being ‘king’. Already, the audience can see how Macbeth is ambitious since the thought of killing King Duncan ‘unfix[es] his hair and makes [his] seated heart knock against his ribs’. We can see how Macbeth is physically excited and fuelled by his ‘black and deep desire’ to gain power, even risking his relationship with the king as his loyal subject. However, Macbeth’s ambition at requiring power is plagued with guilt since his body begins to feel physical effects, like a rush of adrenaline. Therefore, Macbeth’s ‘valiant’ and violent nature is starting to utilise itself as a tool of destruction and chaos to fuel his ambition further. The juxtaposition between Macbeth’s valiant nature and his ambition portrays him as a morally grey character since he starts to imagine the unforgivable act of killing the king. However, Macbeth appears strong-willed and manages to cast away his dark thoughts and listen to his guilt rather than his ambition since ‘he has no spur to prick the sides of [his] intent’. He manages to reason with himself and control his ambition and realises that ‘vaulting ambition which overleaps itself and falls on the other’. This metaphor reflects how Macbeth acknowledges that his ambition is destructive and will inevitably end in misfortunate and disaster which it will fall back down due the fact that it makes him act illogically and irrationally, making him succumb to his dark desires of killing the king. The metaphor of horse-racings shows that Macbeth’s philosophy of life is structured by gaining power and viewing life as a competition to win power. The use of the animal imager further implies that Macbeth is not in control of his logic and his reasoning. The Jacobean audience would recognise that if Macbeth loses his reasoning and logic he would turn into a savage beast since the only thing separating humans and animals was reasoning which is destined when he is described as a ‘hell-hound’ at the end of the play. Therefore, Shakespeare tries to show that ambition is a chaotic tool and tries to warn others from its ability for destruction and to proceed with caution when gaining power.

In the extract, Shakespeare shows how ambition affects women also. Lady Macbeth is presented as a Machiavellian villainess with her insatiable appetite for power. However, one can argue that her desire for other is due to her lack of purpose in her life, which causes excess ambition to brew in her. Lady Macbeth’s violent nature when she criticises Macbeth for being ‘too full of the milk of human kindness’ shows how she views Macbeth as weak-willed and feminine. The connotations of the noun ‘milk’ allude to breastfeeding a child and paints a motherly image of care and nurture. Therefore, by saying Mabeth is full of ‘milk’ she emasculates him and belittles him for his feminine traits of care and kindness. The Macbeths have lost a child and Lady Macbeth cannot fulfil her purpose of becoming a mother, which in society, was a woman’s purpose. So therefore, she feels like she must find another purpose and gain power since she cannot fulfil her society-bound one. Therefore, Shakespeare could be criticising the patriarchal society that women are forced to endure and shows how the restraining and superficial expectations of motherhood causes evil and ambition to arise. Lady Macbeth’s sinful nature is present when she wants to ‘pour [her] spirits in thine ear and chastise with the valour of her tongue’. Her duplicitous nature and desire to manipulate Macbeth to elevate her power is a result of her corruption from her ambition to have a purpose in life. Lady Macbeth’s traits seem masculine and violent like ‘valour’ and ‘chastise’ which shows how she disregards the constraints of her gender role and seeks out power like a man in the Jacobean era. In the patriarchal society, men would have to assert their dominance and status by their violence and capability to kill without remorse, therefore when Lady Macbeth shows these qualities, Shakespeare could also warn the Jacobean audience of how the patriarchal society could lead to women becoming overly ambitious and corrupted for power therefore he presents ambition as a cautionary tool.

The effects of ambition are evident in Macbeth when throughout the play, his morality and health declines. Macbeth yields to his ambition by the hallucination of the dagger which he responds by ‘come let me clutch thee’. The imperative command shows how Macbeth embraces his ambition and dark thoughts and succumbs to it, showing how manipulative and destructive his nature is. However, when Duncan is murdered, Macbeth regrets his temptation and turns to a god, ‘Neptune’. Exclaming ‘whether all of Neptunes oceans will wash the blood clean from his hands’. By listening to his ambition, Macbeth is plagued with guilt and remorse for his actions. Furthermore, since Macbeth has disregarded his faith by committing the sin of regicide, he can no longer say ‘Amen’. In the Jacobean Era, religion was an important factor of life, and many individuals found their purpose in life through God or the Great Chain of Being. Since Macbeth has disrupted the order by committing regicide, he no longer has the support or protection from God and the Jacobean audience would reject Macbeth and lose their sympathy since he has lost his faith from God. This shows how ambition can be fatal and can be a dark curse sent by God to test their faith and loyalty to the king, therefore educating the nobles at court and ordinary people, that King James is appointed by God and to rival him is the rival your fate. By calling out to ‘Neptune’ Macbeth is desperate for some consultation and forgiveness for his deed but God has forgotten him. This weak-willed nature of Macbeth aligns with Lady Macbeth’s conclusion that Macbeth is ‘too full of the milk of human kindness’ and makes Macbeth appear weak due to not overcoming the consequences of ambition.

At the end of the play, Macbeth has disregarded his guilt and fully succumbed to his hamartia, his bloodlust fuelled and driven by ambition. His moral decline has caused him to kill his wife indirectly due to his bloodlust as she is unable to cope with the guilt and finally acknowledges her damnation when she states that ‘hell is murky’ and ‘out damned spot’ The word damned explicitly links to her dread at entering hell for her crimes that she has committed. Furthermore, she asks ‘will all of arabias perfumes sweeten this little hand’ The words ‘little’ and ‘sweeten’ connote to femininity. The semantic field of femininity contrasts her ‘valour’ and deceit previously which shows that due to her gender, she is bound by the limits of her guilt and inherent motherly values of guilt and kindness, thus resulting to suicide. As for Macbeth, his valiant nature has now become nihilistic as he curses life as a ‘tale told by an idiot’ therefore calling God an idiot and committing blasphemy. He refuses to acknowledge the warning signs of guilt that ambition provides and instead blames fate for his actions and for God for making him overly ambitious in nature. Therefore, he is now reduced to a ‘dead butcher’ who ‘taught bloody instruction’ and immortalised by his bloody and violent acts instead of power and Lady Macbeth is now his ‘fiend’. This cautionary tale echoes the fact that ambition is a force of destruction and chaos when used excessively and for malicious acts.