Oh isnt it ironic that once again we find our king to be in the hands of karma. It just clearly does not work out for kings, especially those with ill intentions or those who kill to be on the throne. Macbeth finds himself at odds with the kingdom and is so overwhelmed that he forfeits Dunsinane Castle. Not only does everyone in the kingdom hate Macbeth so much that they call him a tyrant, but they all think that he is going mad.
When it comes to being cursed Lady Macbeth is also done in. Lady Macbeth is so terrified from the murder that she begins to sleep walk and chant out what she has done. Talk about a loose wire in the mix, Macbeth is doomed by his wife's unstable mind games. Lady Macbeth even begins to see blood on her hands and is so delirious that she scrubs to try to get it off, but it will not go away no matter how hard she tries.
We have seen these cases in so many of Shakespeare's plays. In "Richard II" Richard is unfair to his people of England and completely abuses his power, leaving Boolingbroke to seek revenge on him for the rightful place as king. In the end everyone hates him, so Richard promises his throne to Bolingbroke. Richard ends up having to have an un-ceremony out of losing his crown. As a curse to being a follower of Richard, Amerelle loses his power and title. And we all know that Richard's bad rule ends up having him murdered by Exton at the end of the play.
In Lear's case his greed ended in his death as well as his own daughters. Lear starts of the play by giving away sections of his kingdom away to his daughters based on how well they brag. He assumes that even though he does not have a kingdom anymore that he should still be thought of as a king and treated with the same respect. Then the curse of the kings happened and people lost all respect for him, his knights did not mean anything, and his own daughters did not even want to care for him when it was part of the agreement for the land. He ends up losing everything and becomes completely mad and even ends up homeless for a while.
Of course I have to assume that Shakespeare knows what he is doing here and knows that there is an obvious turn of events in a kings life that either gets him killed, or gets him overthrown. How else can we explain this all too common pattern of kings. I think maybe it is a warning by Shakespeare to all future kings, that if they mess up or become to greedy they are not going to last.
So we can see now that there is a pattern to this curse, and a combination that has an eventual outcome. I would classify it like this; Bad King + Bad intentions = Curse, Good King + Too nice = dead, and Kings who give their kingdom away + people taking too much = disaster. Then there is always the people who end up siding with the bad king who get intertwined in the curse too. It is clear that something is to be said about being king. Perhaps Shakespeare is saying that the only way to be a king is to be a queen.
4 comments:
I completely agree with you. Macbeth kills Duncan ruthlessly and Macbeth will be killed in the same way. I love the last line of your post because Shakespeare tends to put women in power but in many plays, the Queen does not have a big role. Only in Lear and Macbeth is there a strong queen (From what we read in class) I was thinking while I was reading the post, what is the equation for a successful king or queen? What would Shakespeare do to Queen Elizabeth in one of his plays? Or, what about Henry V? He is a successful king and has a strong following. He manages to eliminate all of his enemies and survive in battle. Shakespeare seems to take each king or story and put his own twist on the story.
This is a marvelous set of connections between our plays. I wonder about what King James thought of this play--did he see it as a warning (as Nicole suggests here), or is Shakespeare successful at showing the Macbeths to be such figures of evil that there is no danger of comparing them?
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