Principally, words have to be placed thoughtfully and images primarily aim on creating a certain effect. Imagery served as an important tool for this. Therefore, the atmosphere and mood had to be created by words only. In Shakespeare’s time, the right use of language was essential to compensate for the missing stage effects. The concise use of words and sounds can create a strong impact on the reader especially the production of a number of images makes a written piece of art vivid. To present this tragedy of Macbeth to his readers, Shakespeare exploited language to a great extent. To the reader, Macbeth seems to be a man who is tragically overthrown by the world and defencelessly handed over to the consequences of his failed aspirations (Long 117). During this progress, Shakespeare wants the audience to become emotionally engaged when looking closer at the image of a man in ill-fitting garments who tries to manage his life (Muir 66). Shakespeare allows the reader to seek an explanation for the protagonist’s disaster by making Macbeth run through “a progress, a development, a course” (David 275). The playwright made Macbeth a hero who suffers merely from his own vice, not from external issues (Stauffer 228). To analyse the power of language on an example, the following essay will examine how Shakespeare’s language creates the notion of tragedy in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth.

The playwright had to compensate for the missing instruments on stage which could normally help convey the atmosphere and setting of a play. These two facts are major reasons why William Shakespeare had to create a rich word scenery his plays. Instead, the audience was looking at the stage from different angles (Suerbaum 66f). Props were hardly used for supporting a scene a backdrop simply did not exist since there was no central perspective due to the three open sides of the stage. Furthermore, it was rather difficult in the Elizabethan Theatre to set up a scenery. Playwrights had to consider that performances took place only during the day this means for example that there was no lightning but that daylight had to be sufficient as an instrument for setting the mood. When a playwright such as William Shakespeare wrote a new play which was supposed to be performed on stage in a London theatre at the beginning of the seventeenth century, he had to bear in mind how the conditions on site looked like.

Macbeth drama by william shakespeare