Saturday, July 14, 2018

Critically examine the form of Macbeth.

Macbeth (original title: The Tragedy of Macbeth) is a tragedy written in five acts by famed English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare. The play tells the story of a megalomaniac army general named Macbeth, who manages to rise to power and become the tyrannical King of Scotland but ultimately fails and loses everything because of his selfishness, greed, and blind ambition. Thus, the play carries a powerful message.
Macbeth has a poetic form, as most of the play is written in blank verse or unrhymed iambic pentameter. This means that each line has five iambs and doesn’t follow a particular rhyme scheme. An iamb is a metrical foot which consists of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one.
The witches who foresee Macbeth’s fate are the only characters who speak in trochaic tetrameter. This means that instead of iambs, we have trochees; a trochee is a metrical foot which consists of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented one, and trochaic tetrameter means that each line consists of four trochees.
Finally, there are some parts in Macbeth which are written in prose; this is usually the case with the common folk, as Shakespeare deliberately uses prose to write their lines, in order to separate them from the nobles.

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