The Overwhelming Atmosphere in Macbeth :: Macbeth essays

The Overwhelming Atmosphere in Macbeth The atmosphere looms heavy in William Shakespeares tragical play Macbeth. However, there are some brief, contrasting moments. In this paper we shall dwell on this dimension of the playwrights work. A.C. Bradley in Shakespearean Tragedy comments on the contribution of the imagery to the atmosphere of the play The vividness, magnitude, and violence of the imagery in some of these passages are characteristic of Macbeth almost throughout and their influence contributes to coordinate its atmosphere. Images like those of the babe torn smiling from the breast and dashed to death of pouring the sweet milk of concord into hell of the earth thrill with fever of the frame of things disjointed of sorrows striking heaven on the face, so that it resounds and yells out like syllables of dolour of the mind lying in vigorous ecstasy on a rack of the mind full of scorpions of the chronicle told by an idiot, full of sound and fury -- all keep the visua l sensation moving on a wild and violent sea, while it is scarcely for a moment permitted to dwell on thoughts of peace and beauty. (309) Charles Lamb in On the Tragedies of Shakespeare comments on the atmosphere surrounding the play The state of sublime sense into which we are elevated by those images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that portentous prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to phone call him to murder Duncan, - when we no longer read it in a book, when we take in given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seing, and come to discipline a man in his bodily shape before our eyeball actually preparing to commit a muder, if the acting be true and fulgurant as I have witnessed it in Mr. Ks performance of that part, the painful apprehension about the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the alike close pressing semblance of reality,give a pai n and an uneasiness . . .. (134) In Fools of Time Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy, Northrop Frye shows how the atmosphere is altered for the better at the end of the play This theme is at its clearest where we are most in sympathy with the nemesis. Thus at the