The purpose of the present text is to analyze an extract from Macbeth act 5 scene 5 by William Shakespeare.

Starting from the layout the reader can recognize the extract to be part of a play. Indeed before every line the name of the speaking character is specified.

After reading the first verse, you can notice it is full of open vowel sounds. This phonetic aspect contributes to make the reader feel distant from the verse’s subject. The speaking voice is Macbeth. Considering the very first line you can recognize he uses the present perfect tense. As a consequence you can understand he is speaking about present results of his past actions. He also uses the past conditional, the typical tense of the third grade if clause, and so you can understand he is referring to something that could have happened in the past but can no more.  Considering the message, Macbeth is saying he has changed. The lines allude to earlier moments when his mind and body (his hair in particular) responded differently to horrifying sounds (such as a night shriek). Now Macbeth has become like a stone: he is without feeling or emotions. The only thing that drives him is his ambition. He adds he is dined full of horrors. The choice of the verb reminds the reader of Macbeth’s banquet in act 3 scene 4 when he had supper with Banquo’s ghost, and so the reader can remember witch horrors he is referring to. His verses end with an answer: he hears a cry and without any fear (because of the reasons said before) he wants to know the reason why the person is crying. 

In the following verse Seyton, a nobleman loyal to Macbeth, announces the king his wife’s death. The reader can notice the short line is full of punctuation. This device slows down the rhythm. Reading it you can feel that Seyton isn’t at ease: he doesn’t know how to give that terrible piece of information to his king. You can also hear the alliteration of letter d, a dental consonant that makes the rhythm sharp.

Considering the last verse of the extract the speaking voice is Macbeth.  In the very first part of his soliloquy he states that his wife should have died later. This statement can have different meaning: the first one is that Macbeth was aware that she would have died sooner or later; the second is that he would have preferred a later death in order to give her proper mourning. An additional meaning is that Lady Macbeth is dead in a very crucial moment and has left her husband in trouble, and so he would have preferred to rely on her.  Going on Macbeth delivers a famous line:”tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”. The word tomorrow can be seen as a metaphor of a meaningless life and its three times repetition expresses the growing madness of the king. In his soliloquy he shows his indifference to the occasion. He starts belittling human being’s lives: it appears meaningless and empty because every day is only a step towards a certain death. This message is conveyed by a triple metaphor: life is a walking shadow and therefore lacks of substance and is brief; it is also a poor actor that hasn’t  have enough time on stage but he does his best anyway and life is also a story told by someone who lacks intelligence and so as a consequence results meaningless.

Taking into consideration all said before we can recognize Macbeth to be a tragic hero. Indeed it is a matter of fact that he has changed from the first part of the play: his series of mistakes are leading him to downfall.