The use of language in Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Shakespeare’s Literary Techniques Used in Macbeth

  

   Few dramatists have betrayed less of their own feelings than Shakespeare.  Therefore, if his plays exhibit some general features of his mind is however natural.  There is a philosophy of life which remains substantially the same in the whole series of Shakespeare’s dramatic works. 

   The tragedies written from 1601 to 1608 (Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear< Anthony and Cleopatra) are all pervaded with the same gloom.  The world is pictured as full of evil forces, and people are being either thoughtless – and in this case they blindly answer the call of elementary passions: jealousy, ambition, irrational love or meditative, and then his meditative turn of mind paralyses his will.  Macbeth, who is not a hardened criminal, is overpowered by the perverse suggestions of Destiny (speaking through the witches) and by the entreaties of his wife.  It was considered that Shakespeare’s plays were originally written for private representations or Court representations, but it is clear that the plays made him a public dramatist, who addresses himself to the demands of a large public.  He successfully applies the poetic utterance both in the delicate romantic comedy and in the rigorous tragedies.

   Macbeth by William Shakespeare is the tragedy of a king’s insomnia, forever damned to a state of awareness, permanently dramatized, and which ends in paroxysm. The lack of sleep becomes fatal, as a reverse of the murder he committed, and the awareness is terrifying because of the continuous agony.

   In such a world where murder is seen as a way to check if the prophecies are real, consequently seen as destiny, as a constraint and unstoppable need, the only escape seems to be a murder that will stop the nightmare of the killings.  Once the murder has been committed, the revolt against it becomes absurd and illegitimate, making “Macbeth” a tragedy of the dark that develops in the night.  For Macbeth the battle between appearance and essence becomes maybe more striking than in “Hamlet”, because it does not subscribe to an intellectual and moral meditation, but it is a psychological one. 

    The characters in the drama are depicted only by their actions, their words and what they are saying in soliloquy.  The words and the actions of the characters don’t always express the true character of the people and this is a proof that we could not entirely accept in order to fully understand what they mean.  Only when they think aloud their true nature and thoughts are revealed and Shakespeare uses the soliloquy in a magnificent way, because in soliloquy lies the truth.  Each and every reader can understand the soliloquy in his own way, depending on his attitude, his ability to see both sides of the story on the way of reaching the final conclusion.

  The action of the play begins in the first act with the witches’ awakening of Macbeth’s ambition and continues in Act II, where Macbeth will do the necessary steps for achieving his mean purpose.  The intrigue brought by this act will generate problems that will be solved in the later acts.  The play ends with the restoration of the stability through the killing of Macbeth by one of King Duncan’s heirs, successfully saved from
Scotland.

    The second act of the play, scene 2, depicts in an intense way the violence of King Duncan’s murder, even if we are not actually witnesses of such action.  It is a technique named Elision, that does not allow us to see the actual murder of King Duncan, and Shakespeare borrowed it from the great Greek tragedians Sophocles and Aeschylus in order to use the power of suggestion to emphasize the violence of the un-seen murder.   Shakespeare intended to draw the attention more on the reaction of Macbeth caused by the murder instead of the murder itself.  The words that describe the bloody scene are more alive in our imagination than any stage effect.  It is the key moment of the play because it will produce a series of murders, and everything that will happen in the play after this moment is strongly related to it.

   The scene takes place at night and the symbol of darkness is used to introduce the unnatural elements like the cruel destiny and the evil.  The entire act is marked by the murder of King Duncan, and it keeps you in suspense by thinking if Macbeth will actually have the courage to kill his king.  While Lady Macbeth is waiting for her husband, the tension of the play slowly begins to increase, as she turns nervous and excited.  The screech of an owl is considered by her a good sign, as the owl represents the nature’s messenger of death, the fatal bellman.  This element of the nature emphasizes in our minds the idea of execution, the idea of death: “He’s at it.”

   The use of words and sounds are focused on creating a strong impact on the reader, by producing images and by strategically place of the words for a maximum effect.  The conflict from act II, scene 2 has two different sides: the interior conflict of Macbeth’s guilt and the conflict of the exterior elements, where the natural order of nature confronts the disorder.  The implications of Macbeth’s murder overcome his interior struggle and affect the natural order of things.  It creates an image of chaos in the external conflict of the nature:  “dark night strangles the traveling lamp.  The strong imagery is created by the stimulation of various senses, with a vivid description of a taste, an odor or a sound, and created the feeling that we are actually there.  It is a technique used especially to highlight the intense conflicts from this act.

   The imagery includes many recurring images, related with many of the themes of the play.  The imagery of sleep, associated with the Nature, the imagery of the Reality and the Appearances and the Witches, the Light and the Darkness are wonderfully merged in Macbeth.  The imagery of Sleep is also associated with the Death as “Macbeth does murder sleep” (II, 2, 44).  Even if there are similarities between the two images, one is the counterfeit of the other.  The contrast between Reality and Appearance is depicted in the act by the fact that Macbeth is presented as a loyal, honest general while the cruel truth is that he is a traitor and a murderer.

   The syntax used by Shakespeare takes us on the sinuous way of the English language simply by changing the natural order of words or by varying the size of the sentences. It is complicated, as well as the diction and the use of tone.  Many literary procedures such as inversions, ellipsis (omitting certain words), the use of metaphors and the antithesis are common to Shakespeare’s language.  The Antithesis creates in this scene an underlining of the courage of Lady Macbeth that increases when she tells herself “what had quench’d them hath given me fire”, while exposing the chamberlains drugged by her drink. 

   The mono-syllabic words are exceptionally valued in the tensionnate staccato dialogue that Lady Macbeth and Macbeth have after the murder:

    Lady Macbeth: “Did not you speak?”

    Macbeth: “When?”

    Lady Macbeth: “Now”

    Macbeth: “As I descend?”

    Lady Macbeth: “Ay”

    Macbeth: “Hark!”

   The metaphor of guilt that has taken over Macbeth and that he can’t escape no matter what he does is brought in the act through the imagery of blood.  The impression created is that we could even smell and see the blood, the power of suggestion being at the highest level.  The scene when Macbeth realizes how full of blood his hands are is memorable:

   “Will all great
Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

     Clean from my hand?  No, this my hand will rather

     The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

      Making the green one red.”

   The Elizabethan theatre didn’t have at that time the necessary resources to obtain the complex stage effects that Shakespeare’s plays required.  That is why the author tried to create the atmosphere and the mood of the play through the use of words, through imagery. The stage effects created by the sound of the thunder and the lightning that occurs in the moment the Witches and the Apparitions come in the stage are meant to induce a state of nervousness and excitement.

   The sounds and the visions are meant to intensify Macbeth’s guilt, especially the guilt-inspired vision of the bloody dagger.  The ringing of the bell and the regular knocking on the castle’s gate increase the excitement of the play by signaling the inevitable.  It is ironic to find out finally that Macduff was the source of the knocking, the person who kills Macbeth in order to re-establish the order of things.

   William Shakespeare’s use of language and stage techniques in “Macbeth” are the extraordinarily used in creating a gradually tension from the moment King Duncan is Killed by Macbeth, followed by a short relaxation and then increasing it again until the climax point of the act of regicide.  The reader is kept in suspense from the beginning of the play until the final scene through the supernatural elements and the sense of indecision, and the art of using the language in the right place and time gives live to the characters.