Macbeths Atmosphere :: Macbeth essays

Macbeths Atmosphere There ar many questions concerning the line in William Shakespeares Macbeth that this try will answer Is it realistic or phantasmagoric? Are there two atmospheres - one of purity and one of contraband 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 employ to support the opposing atmospheres of purity and abusive magic Much of the admission and detail was carried over, particularly the clash between religious purity and black magic. Purity was embodied by Duncan, very infirm (in 1974 he was blind), garmented in white and accompanied by church organ music, imbed against the black magic of the witches, who even chanted Double, double to the Dies Irae. (283) L.C. K iniquitys in the essay Macbeth mentions equivocation, unreality and unnaturalness in the exemplify - contributors to an atmosphere that may not be very reali stic The equivocal nature of temptation, the commerce with phantoms consequent upon off choice, the resulting sense of unreality (nothing is, but what is not), which has yet such(prenominal) power to smother vital function, the unnaturalness of evil (against the use of nature), and the copulation between disintegration in the individual (my single state of man) and disorder in the larger social organism - all these are major 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 sublime 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 process the bell shall strike which is to call him to murder Duncan, - when we no longer empathize it in a book, when we have given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which culture possesses over seing, a nd come to see a man in his corporeal shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit a muder, if the playing 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 resist it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing semblance of reality,give a pain and an uneasiness . . .. (134)