Macbeths Atmosphere :: Macbeth essays

Macbeths Atmosphere There are many another(prenominal) questions concerning the atmosphere in William Shakespeares Macbeth that this essay will answer Is it realistic or unrealistic? Are there two atmospheres - one of justice and one of black magic? And many other questions. Roger Warren comments in Shakespeare Survey 30 , regarding Trervor Nunns direction of Macbeth at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1974-75, on opposing imagery used to support the opposing atmospheres of purity and black magic Much of the approach and detail was carried over, particularly the clash between religious purity and black magic. Purity was embodied by Duncan, rattling infirm (in 1974 he was blind), dressed in white and accompanied by church organ music, set against the black magic of the witches, who even chanted Double, figure of speech to the Dies Irae. (283) L.C. Knights in the essay Macbeth mentions equivocation, unreality and unnaturalness in the play - contributors to an atmosphere that may not be very realistic The equivocal nature of temptation, the commerce with phantoms sequel upon false choice, the resulting sense of unreality (nothing is, but what is not), which has yet such power to smother vital function, the unnaturalness of evil (against the use of nature), and the notification between disintegration in the individual (my single state of man) and disorder in the larger social organism - all these are major(ip) themes of the play which are mirrored in the speech under consideration. (94) Charles Lamb in On the Tragedies of Shakespeare comments on the atmosphere surrounding the play The state of wondrous emotion into which we are elevated by those images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to bode him to murder Duncan, - when we no longer read it in a book, when we have given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seing, and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit a muder, if the acting be true and impressive as I have witnessed it in Mr. Ks performance of that part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing delusion of reality,give a pain and an uneasiness . . .. (134)