Examples Of Ambition In Macbeth

Throughout the story Macbeth, by Shakespeare, many of the characters show their ambition. The two characters that were the most ambitious in the story was Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. They both saw what they wanted, and went to get it no matter what they had to do. Even though Macbeth had ambitions, Lady Macbeth had the ideas and controlled Macbeth to get what she wanted. There has been many arguments about who has been more ambitious in the story, Macbeth or Lady Macbeth. In my opinion, I think Lady Macbeth is more ambitious because, she wishes that she was born an man so she could kill King Duncan. She was crying out saying things like “take my milk for gall” (poison), and “stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose…”. What I got from those 2 quotes is that, she doesn’t want to be able to produced kids and, that her breast milk becomes poison so she can’t feed her kids. She is willing to do anything to become an man because she thinks that Macbeth is a coward.

In Act 1 Scene 5 (14-29) it says “Yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great, art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly, that wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, and yet wouldst wrongly win.” Lady Macbeth says that he is too much of an coward to become king because, he usually backs out of whatever he has to do to become king and to stay as king. Even though Macbeth killed Duncan, it doesn’t make him more ambitious, because he didn’t want to kill Duncan. After he killed Duncan he started to regret what he did. He wasn’t determined to become king like Lady Macbeth. She was the reason that he got to be king earlier than he