Macbeth Opening Scene Essay

The opening scene of Macbeth has an emotionally orienting function. First, there is the thunder and lightning, triggers for fright. Moreover, unnatural figures such as the witches are likely to provoke at least anxiety, if not fear.
There was also the physical appearance of the witches, which prepares us for disgust. The witches conclude their colloquy with the well-known lines, “fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air”. When they say “foul and “filthy air” Shakespeare is associating the scene with disgust. Moreover, what is crucial for our present concerns is that these images introduce one of the most common cognitive models activated in shame, being soiled.
Lady Macbeth later characterizes the blood of murder as “filthy witness that one must “wash”.

In the second scene, Shakespeare takes up both blame and disgust when the Leader refers to the rebel, Macdonwald , explaining “The multiplying villainies of nature, Do swarm upon him”. The reference to villainies clearly points toward aversive acts. Through its
I distinguished three types of self-blaming emotion. In the first one, we are concerned primarily with prudential consequences of the act, such as being caught by the police and punished, this can be seen as regret and fear. A second type of aversion relates to our sense of our qualities or achievements relative to others or to our own self-expectations, by this we could feel disgust to ourselves when for example we fail a test in school or loosing a race in the Olympics, the response for this is self-blame which would produce shame. The third one, is one’s past actions, the empathic feeling one has with regard to victims of these acts. This is “guilt” which is bounded up with