How violence in the play is so excessive that is ceases to have any effect on the audience.' To what extent do you find the violence in the play excessive?.
Response.
The violence presented on stage in "Macbeth" is merely just an element to distress the audience. It is suggested that "violence in the play is so excessive that it ceases to have any effect on the audience". However, through the use of violence, Shakespeare not only serves the purpose of lending the play to the gothic genre, but the quantity of violence works as an effective catalyst in order to unease the audience. Firstly this gothic drama is titled after the protagonist "Macbeth" proposing that this character is the mechanism of "violence." This suggests from the start of the possible constant occurrence of brutality. Violence is heavily used to represent a plethora of causes to why it is enacted. It is associated as an evil within society, which is seen in the opening of "Macbeth" on the battlefield: "[thunder and lightning]" the scene setting of a violent storm of nature. Shakespeare purposely uses violent imagery to set up the audience for future events in Macbeth: King Duncan's death. Violence is only a force, the motion of matter. There can be no inherent moral value to such a thing. The only moral value is what the characters attach to the force themselves, and what they attach to that force is based on their own thoughts, their purposes and such. Yet, Macbeth uses a dagger to act on Duncan which can be agreed of how 'excessive' the violence appears: "such an instrument I was to use." In his soliloquy it is clearly imposed that the dagger represent Macbeth's cruelty and his ambition of being king. The constant use of "blood" within the play has been overstated.
Features of horror such as the 'blood' and death render the reader incapable of resolution and subject the reader's mind to a state of ineffectiveness due to the over used of violence.