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People have a hard time getting what they want; in fact, the things they want can be incompatible with each other. A German physicist named Werner Hinesburg discovered an analogous phenomenon with his uncertainty principle. Studying matter at the atomic level, quantum physics, he realized that the act of measuring affected the object being measured. As a result, one could never accurately determine both position and momentum of an electron with precision.
The attempt to reach one of these goals hurt the other, and a similar phenomenon is found in our everyday lives. In William Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606), Scene II, the protagonist is lured to murder the king, Duncan, by the desire for power, an appetite whetted by witch's prophecies and his wifes encouragement. But when he reaches the kingship, he finds himself insecure. He attempts to remove threats that decrease his security, including his companion Banquo and his son France, prophesied to be king. His lords grow angry and revolt successfully, after witches lure Macbeth into a false sense of security by further foretelling.
In Macbeth, we see that, despite appearances of paradox, mans goals of comfort and power are forever opposed in increment, though the two may decline together. Firstly, the power from knowledge causes discomfort. As often has been said, ignorance is bliss. After Macbeth is promised the throne, Banquo asks why Macbeth is less than ecstatic. "Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?" (Act I, Scene 3, p. 332) Macbeth's new knowledge makes him uncomfortable, as he realizes the implications. His first thoughts considering murdering Duncan appear, and he is scared. After he commits the murder, Macbeth says, "To know my deed, 'there best not know myself. " (Act II, Scene 2, p. 347) Knowing that has committed such a vile act makes him uncomfortable.
It will be difficult to act innocent and to deal with his guilt. The security provided by the second set of predictions is only fleeting. Feeling there is no threat to his power, Macbeth acts wildly, bringing his downfall and loss of both comfort and security. The problem with knowledge was that it was power resulting in a decline in comfort. Secondly, using technique of not allowing us to see the actual murder. Act II, scene 2 is singularly concerned with the murder of Duncan.
But Shakespeare here relies on a technique that he uses throughout Macbeth to help sustain the play's incredibly rapid tempo of development: elision. We see the scenes leading up to the murder and the scenes immediately following it, but the deed itself does not appear onstage. Duncan's bedchamber becomes a sort of hidden sanctum into which the characters disappear, and from which they emerge powerfully changed. The effect on Lady Macbeth of her trip into Duncan's bedroom is particularly striking. She claims that she would have killed Duncan herself except that he resembled her father sleeping. This is the first time Lady Macbeth shows herself to be at all vulnerable.
Her comparison of Duncan to her father suggests that despite her desire for power and her harsh chastisement of Macbeth, she sees her king as an authority figure to whom she must be loyal. Finally, Macbeth's trepidation about the murder is echoed by several portentous sounds and visions, the famous hallucinatory dagger being the most striking. The dagger is the first in series guilt-inspired hallucinations that Macbeth and his wife experience. The ringing of the bell and the knocking at the gate, both of which have fascinated audiences, also marks the murder.
The knocking occurs four times with a sort of ritualistic regularity. It conveys the heavy sense of the inevitable, as if the gates must eventually open to admit doom. The knocking seems particularly ironic after we realize that Macduff, who kills Macbeth at the end of the play, is its source. Macbeth's eventual death does indeed stand embodied at the gate.
Also the motif of blood, established in the accounts of Macbeth and Banquo's battlefield exploits, recurs here in Macbeth's anguished sense that there is blood on his hands that cannot be washed clean. For now, Lady Macbeth remains the voice of calculating reason, as she tells him that the blood can be washed away with a little water. But as Lady Macbeth eventually realizes, the guilt that the blood symbolizes needs more than water to be cleansed away. Her hallucinations later in the play, in which she washes her hands obsessively, lend irony to her insistence here that "a little water clears of us this deed. " In conclusion, Act 2 scenes ii and I deal with the degeneration of the tragic hero, Macbeth, into a murderer and the increasing disparity between public and private faces as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth prepare to commit regicide. We observe Macbeth, murderer-to-be, as he embraces evil. Shakespeare allows the audience to share the growing sense of mounting suspicion and suspense as we observe them interacting with Banquo, with each other and as they deliver their soliloquies.
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