Sunday, September 7, 2014

What does the following quote mean? "Thou wouldst be great; Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it. What thou...

This quote comes from scene five of the second act of Macbeth, when Macbeth sends a letter to his wife to tell her about the prophesy the witches have made about his rise to power. The speech Lady Macbeth gives here shows the intensity of her character's great ambition for power, as well as how thoroughly she plans on pushing Macbeth towards murder. To better understand this section, let's take a look at each line (I'm going to break some of the lines up too, so the meaning is easier to follow):


"[...] thou wouldst be great,"



"Wouldst" here means "would like to" so Lady Macbeth is saying that Macbeth wants to be great. 



"Art not without ambition,"



"Art" means "are," so Macbeth does have ambition enough to be a great man and even a king. However...



"but without / The illness should attend it." 



Macbeth is lacking "the illness" or the streak of ruthlessness (and a bit of madness) that needs to go with ambition in order for it to be effective. 



"What thou wouldst highly, / That wouldst thou holily;"



The things that Macbeth wants to do, he wants to do in a good or holy way.



"wouldst not play false, / And yet wouldst wrongly win."



He doesn't want to cheat ("play false"), but he does want to gain something that is not his ("wrongly win").



"Thou'ld’st have, great Glamis ...]" 



Lady Macbeth is continuing on here in the same way, basically saying that yes, Macbeth does want to be king, but he doesn't have the guts to do the dirty work needed to make it happen. She calls him "Glamis" in this line because he is the thane (like a noble ruler) of Glamis, which is a region of Scotland. 

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