Metaphor Post

Shakespeare shows the audience and reader the characters traits and their ambitions by using metaphors. Also While doing this he creates an atmosphere of tension/anxiety in each scene. In Act 1, Scene 5, Lady Macbeth in her soliloquy does exactly this. Lady Macbeth receives the news that Macbeth is coming back to his castle. At this point she is summoning dark spirits to make her more evil so she can convince Macbeth to kill the king “Come thick night,and pall thee in dunnest smoke of hell,”In this soliloquy, Lady Macbeth first states the night being thick and bringing this upon the real world”Come thick night“She uses the word thick like the consistency of a liquid or its dense with. Night however can not be physically thick, so this a use of metaphor as she’s relating night as an object as thick and dense. The word thick with night sets an atmosphere of what she is thinking and her ambitions. For example when you think of the phrase thick and dense night, many will make a picture of being cold,scared and like the scenery around is hard to see as there’s fog. This gives the impression that she has dark thoughts and ambitions for wanting such chaos to come upon the world.In the play this is true as she wants these darker spirits to come to her like they did with Macbeth and to bring her darker thoughts and to get rid of all sympathy left within her. She then says “and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell” This means cover the world in the smoke of hell. Of course in Christianity hell is a place some will go after you die,so how can the smoke from hell come to earth. Well i would be thinking that she is trying to summon or tempt the evil spirits of the world to come upon her like and the rest of the world like the witch’s did with Macbeth and give her a prediction or let her kill the king as she knows Macbeth would be to kind and could be hard to convince. She would want this as the situation is she is going to have to convince Macbeth to do it and also she clearly wants to start some trouble and become more powerful. This gives very clear and vivid images of her wants. This at the time of being presented this would have of disturbed the audience very much as back at those times most people had deep beliefs that hell was real and if a someone goes wanting to summon evil spirits from such a place people would be feeling the tension in the theater. Also what Lady Macbeth is saying contradicts what Macbeth said a scene back”If chance will have me king,why,chance may crown me without my stir”.This once again is going against fate and that things happen for a reason. This now shows that Macbeth and his wife are now not letting what the witches said to chance but are now going to make it happen. This shows some contrast between Shakespeare plays, as Romeo and Juliet was riddled with references to fate. Macbeth at this stage seems to moving in the opposite direction, or at least so the characters think.

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