Dark Imagery in Macbeth

            William Shakespeare, a well known author, wrote over 36 different plays including Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Macbeth. Each and every play has a theme and atmosphere of its own. Macbeth a Shakespearean tragedy, contains a lot of evil actions, blood, and dark settings and moods. It is a gloomy play, full of darkness and evil.
             Throughout the play evil is present in many forms, destroying whatever good there is. When Lady Macbeth is preparing for Duncan's murder, she calls on the spirits of darkness and evil:.
             "The raven himself hoarse.
             That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan.
             Under my battlements. 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 my milk for gall, you murdering 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!" ( II, v, 41-57).
             Lady Macbeth wants the spirits to replace all her nurturing, feminine qualities with remorseless cruelty, by changing her blood - slowing it down and making it cold. Macbeth is planning an evil deed, in which he will murder one of his closest friends, Banquo. He sends for two murderers and says:.
             "So he is mine, and in such bloody distance,.
             That every minute of his being thrusts.
             Against my near'st of life: and though I could.
             With barefaced power sweep him from my sight.
             And bid my will avouch it, yet I must not,.
             For certain friends that are both his and mine,.
             Whose love I may not drop, but wail his fall.
             Who I myself struck down: and thence it is.