Macbeth REVISED Shakespeare's tragedy of Macbeth is, in some ways, the story of a disaster that everyone can see coming. After all, it opens with characters -- the Three Witches -- who can see the future. When Macbeth encounters them, the witches offer what Shakespeare terms "strange intelligence" or "prophetic greeting" -- predicting that he will attain the titles of Thane of Cawdor, Thane of Glamis, and King of Scotland (I.iii).

Shakespeare is, above all, a dramatist whose characters are defined by their language: the language they use and how they are affected by language. There is no singular discourse that unites all of the characters of the play: rather the witches, Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth all share in a particular way of rendering language which begins with the witches' incantation at the beginning of the text and follows through to

Their inability to come to terms with the facts of their success and the actions they were required to take to achieve it becomes, in many ways, the focus of the film, and becomes the true heart of the story Polanski is trying to tell in this film. Character Changes The violence and psychological crumbling it causes is not only accentuated in Polanski's Macbeth by these added scenes, but also in

Lady Macbeth's plan to reach the throne includes the manipulation of her husband. She is well aware that he loves her, respects her opinion, and wastes no time using this information. The fact that she would manipulate her husband this way is a tragedy because Macbeth cannot see what she is doing to him. She attacks when he conveys a sense of uneasiness in regard to killing Duncan. She states: Art

Macbeth and the Spanish Tragedy Viewed Through Female Eyes Women and power are often viewed as anathema in the conventional view of Jacobean drama, although ironically the dramatic form reached its height during the reign of Elizabeth. Lady Macbeth is often cited as proof positive that women in tragedy are seen as sources of negative, rather than positive power when they exercise statesmanship and personal choice. But Shakespeare's Lady and also

Macbeth In Act I Scene 2 of the tragedy of Macbeth, Shakespeare -- after giving a brutally graphic description of how Macbeth "unseam'd…from the nave to the chaps" an enemy soldier -- makes his hero's name rhyme with the word "death" at the scene's conclusion (64-5). Of course the technique of the play is to combine psychological realism with densely-written poetic language. Yet I hope that an examination of the play's