Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Are you satisfied that Lady Macbeth is revealed in this state at the beginning of Act 5, or do you think that she should have had more scenes...

I do not fully agree with the answer posted here. Lady
Macbeth, in my opinion, should not be seen as a wicked and fiendish woman. To
see her and Macbeth like that is to do injustice to the moral nuances which are at the
core of this play. In a play, which is so centrally about the indistinctions between
good and evil and about the mutual convertibility of the two, one should not reduce Lady
Macbeth to a witch-like figure at all.


In my opinion, she
too, like Macbeth is a tragic character and hers is primarily a tragedy of love. It is
her desire to be more important to Macbeth and of course to see her husband as the king
that she does all this. But ironically enough, the crowning only alienates her from
Macbeth, as she poignantly admits in the 'nought's had all's spent'
speech.


The sleep-walikng scene, I think, makes the
audience feel sympathetic towards her. Her sad ruined state of mind is painfully tragic
indeed. As for the psychological suffering as a passive suffering, I do not think so. In
the modern age of psychoanalysis, I do not think calling psychological suffering
'passive' is tenable at all.


If she is made to suffer in
the mind and Macbeth in the body, that further attests Freud's basic thesis about the
couple as representations of two different aspects of a unitary
being.


It was Macbeth who had done the deed and Lady
Macbeth had planned it for him. So, in the very nature of their contributions to the
crime, there was always the physical-mental ratio, if I may put it like
that.

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