Loss+of+Morality+2010

Loss of Morality and Sanity 

I have almost forgot the taste of fears. The time has been my senses would have cooled To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in ’t. I have supped full with horrors. Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts Cannot once start me. // Enter **SEYTON** // Wherefore was that cry? The queen, my lord, is dead. ** MACBETH **She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
 * MACBETH **
 * SEYTON **
 * (V.5.8-28)**



**MACBETH** From this moment The very firstlings of my heart shall be The firstlings of my hand. And even now, To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done!
 * (IV.1.146-149)**

Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood. Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry “Hold, hold!”
 * LADY MACBETH **
 * (I.5.40-54)**



Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain? I see thee yet in form as palpable As this which now I draw. Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going, And such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o' th' other senses, Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still, And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, Which was not so before. There’s no such thing. It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes
 * MACBETH **
 * (II.1.33-49)**

Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One; two. Why, then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to accompt? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.
 * LADY MACBETH**
 * (V.1.32-37)**



Avaunt, and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee! Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold; Thou hast no speculation in those eyes which thou dost glare with!
 * MACBETH**
 * (III.4.94-97)



Analysis ** Morality and Sanity were indirectly proportional to each other because as the characters became less moral they were more sane; however, as the characters became more moral they were less sane. Lady Macbeth illustrates this principle most clearly. When she was supporting the murders and Macbeth's conquest to the throne, she was sane and stable; consequently, whenever she started feeling guilty she went insane. Macbeth, at first, had felt guilty about his actions to the point of hallucination: such as seeing the dagger that had led him to kill Duncan and seeing Banquo's ghost. Once he had become numb and immoral, no death disturbed him, even when he killed a young boy or when his wife committed suicide.

**Discussion:** At the end of the play who seems the most moral? Least moral? Most sane? Least sane?