Concetti Chiave
- Macbeth's indifference to his wife's death highlights his emotional numbness from witnessing too many horrors.
- Shakespeare uses the metaphor of life as a meal to emphasize its purely physical and sensorial nature.
- The imagery of a brief candle and walking shadow underscores life's fleeting and fragile essence.
- The comparison to a mediocre actor suggests life is transient and easily forgotten.
- The phrase "a tale told by an idiot" reinforces life's perceived meaninglessness and lack of divine purpose.
A Tale Told By An Idiot
In this passage Macbeth finds out that his wife has passed away but he's careless and doesn't seem to be concerned with that. He explains that he had had the capability of having emotions, but then he saw many horrors and nw he doesn't feel anything because he doesn't care about anything. If he had lives in a balanced way he would feel fear hearing noises and cries. He's touched by nothing and he's not proud of it, he's deprived of any feeling and emotion.
To convey this message he uses the image of supping with horrors. Shakespeare chose to use this verb, also in the comparison of life to a huge meal, in order to give a physical sensorial perception of life, there is no further dimension, only the physical one.In his monologue:
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.
The candle and the shadow are something ephemeral, not lasting, fleating and weak, just like life, another comparison is the poor player, that is to say a mediocre actor who plays upon the stage but when the play is finished, no one remembers him. The message conveyed is that life is meaningless and useless, we are just puppets and then we are forgotten, there is no divine, no further dimension. Moreover the last image, the one of the tale told by an idiot, clinches the fact that life is meaningless, indeed if the tale teller is an idiot, the tale will also be.
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