Recurring Motifs and Themes: "Macbeth"

* Ambition and Betrayal. Thematically, Macbeth is seen as warning of the dangers of ambition, showing that ambition can be a morally corrupting agent. Ambition can be seen as Macbeth's tragic flaw: it consumes him - ironically, by the end of the play, it consumes him in the other sense of the word. Betrayal goes hand-in-hand with ambition, and it is another theme: Macbeth betrays both his own king and his friend by killing Duncan and …

…Internal Struggle. In the first two acts of the play, Macbeth struggles with morality and ambition, trying desperately to reconcile the two. After act two, he struggles instead to reconcile with his regicidal 'new self,' finally failing the task and falling into utter moral darkness and completely abandoning all optimistic perspective, his old "greatness" decaying until his "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" speech, when he has given up on all hope of self- reconciliation.