Macbeth And Hamlet Comparative Essay

In William Shakespeare's two most popular works of art, Macbeth and Hamlet, several parts of the plays are similar. These two plays can be compared easily because Shakespeare used the same formula for each of his tragedies. These tragedies consisted of deeper concepts of the natural struggles that face mankind. The tragedies use supernatural incidents to intrigue the reader's interest and included in the play is a hero who has a tragic flaw, which eventually causes him to make a fatal mistake. Throughout both of these plays, Shakespeare uses the leitmotif of poison, death, ambition, and appearances can be deceiving. Therefore, each play during these seventeen years has a tragic motive, this stems from Shakespeare's concentration on the
A major difference is that today there are feminist movements out to abolish gender inequality whereas during Shakespeare’s time, women were fully aware of their role in society and generally shared the same viewpoint as the men did. Despite that the recent precedents of Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth, they shared the age’s distaste…for the notion of women’s involvement in politics. There was a hierarchy of sexes and each had their own role in society. Men were masculine, they were not ruled by emotion, they were strong and hard working. Women belonged in the home, they were ruled by men and by their emotions and therefore were thought to often make bad decisions. By blurring the lines between sexuality and gender in his plays, Shakespeare deconstructs these norms to display their ambiguity. Masculine men can play effeminate women roles (which they did on stage) and effeminate women can play masculine men roles. Shakespeare sought to defeat these norms, he sought to show that sexuality and gender are ambiguous and mutable. One reason may be that Shakespeare found their traditional attributes of modesty, intuition and high-spiritedness highly suitable material for his comedies, and in varying blends and degrees, all his comic heroine’s have these characteristics. They never go beyond what an Elizabethan audience would have found acceptable in a woman: it is rather that Shakespeare exalts the positive, rather than the negative traits.He could be viewed as a feminist in today’s standards because of his attempt to deconstruct the unwritten rules about gender and sexuality in society. Shakespeare also uses sexuality and gender roles as a tool of manipulation. The manipulator uses sexuality and