Furthest from Kind-Hearted
William Shakespeare’s’ The Tragedy of Macbeth is a great representation of tragic heroes. Shakespeare takes this loving, imaginative, and ambitious tale and transforms it into this powerful story of good and evil. Throughout this play the wife of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth comes off as the loving wife who’s nice and caring. The people of the play never think of Lady Macbeth as anything other than good-hearted, and pleasant, but soon enough she becomes this mad woman who craves having power. Doing whatever means necessary to get and hold this power. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth do a wonderful job of fooling the people of Scotland into thinking of them as people they truly are not. Furthermore as the readers keep reading this tragedy they will soon learn that Lady Macbeth is evil.
In this time period tragic heroes are looked upon as someone who occupy a high status position, someone who is not perfect, one who’s downfall is somewhat their own fault, a person that realizes what they have done is wrong and dies at the end. Lady Macbeth having all these characteristics may have readers to see her as a hero and not evil. “What, will these hands ne’er be clean? No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that. You mar all with this starting” (V.i.45-47). Lady Macbeth is sleep walking and having nightmares about the wrong doing she has done, she is starting to feel guilty which is a sign of being a tragic hero. “The queen, my lord, is dead” (V.v.19-). By Lady Macbeth dying soon after she is enlightened at the end of the play, gives yet another example for someone to think of her as being a tragic hero.
This deep, pitiless, unmerciful soliloquy by Lady Macbeth shows how evil she wants to become and what she is willing to do to become this. “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direct cruelty. Make thick my blood. Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse¬¬, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake fell purpose, nor keep peace between th’ effect and it. Come to my woman breasts and take my milk for gall”