Macbeth Act 4
I personally found Act 4 a little slower and more boring than Acts 1 and 2, which now makes sense since it sort of acted as a liaison between the action in the beginning of the play and the action I assume is coming up in Act 5 considering Act 4 ended with Macduff and Malcolm preparing to fight Macbeth. One of my favorite parts of Act 3 was definitely in the first scene where the witches somehow display eight different kings to Macbeth, insinuating to him that he will lose his throne to Banquo's children in the end. While reading this part, I was really curious as to how this aspect of the scene would have been portrayed onstage in Shakespeare's time without modern technology.
Something I appreciated about the decrease in the amount of action in Act 3 was that it gave me more of an ability to focus solely on the language and less on the obvious plot. Throughout the act, I began to really notice the importance of light vs. dark imagery and the themes that it portrays. Since I've always thought of light as a way of portraying good, innocence, and optimism and dark as portraying negativity, evil, and pretty much all things bad, I interpreted a lot of the imagery as a way to relate Macbeth and his reign to darkness and light as optimism of getting Scotland freed from his tyranny. This idea became pretty clear to me in the last line of the entire act where Malcolm states that "The night is long that never finds the day"(IV.iii.282), meaning that Scotland will be in darkness (i.e. misery) until they kill Macbeth. This was by far my favorite line of the entire play so far.
Something I appreciated about the decrease in the amount of action in Act 3 was that it gave me more of an ability to focus solely on the language and less on the obvious plot. Throughout the act, I began to really notice the importance of light vs. dark imagery and the themes that it portrays. Since I've always thought of light as a way of portraying good, innocence, and optimism and dark as portraying negativity, evil, and pretty much all things bad, I interpreted a lot of the imagery as a way to relate Macbeth and his reign to darkness and light as optimism of getting Scotland freed from his tyranny. This idea became pretty clear to me in the last line of the entire act where Malcolm states that "The night is long that never finds the day"(IV.iii.282), meaning that Scotland will be in darkness (i.e. misery) until they kill Macbeth. This was by far my favorite line of the entire play so far.
I thought Act 4 was more interesting than the Acts prior to it because the dialogue was easier to follow, and the witty wordplays were a bit easier to catch. The light vs. dark imagery is cool. I didn't really think of it as it related to that last line though, I thought of it more as it relate to Macbeth's character; Macbeth was originally a model servant of the king, the good guy, the "light" if I may, and he descends into moral depravity, or "darkness."
ReplyDeleteI agree with Joshua that Act 4 was, at least in terms of analysis, much more interesting than the previous acts. We are given a whole new set of prophecies to decipher by the witches, as well as we see a very interesting conversation between Malcolm and Macduff where Macduff's loyalty was tested. This act begins to fully flesh out its theme of the nature of power , and it sets up well the conflict that we see in Act 5, where Macbeth's ferocity and malice go head-to-head with Macduff's moral righteousness.
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