Guilt and Madness in The Tell-tale Heart and Macbeth

There are stages for a human to lose control of themselves and descent into madness. Macbeth is a cautionary tale written by William Shakespeare in 1606. The Tell-Tale Heart is a short horror-fiction written by Edgar Allen Poe in 1843. These two texts explore the same idea of guilt and descent into madness in two different ways, Shakespeare’s play explored these two themes with a story of a nobleman falling to madness after killing the king. Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart explored the narrator murdering his old man and later fell into a mind of guilt. These two texts will be compared by investigating the purpose, literary techniques and stylistic features used by the authors.

Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in 1606 during the times when King James I and Queen Elizabeth I reigned England. Shakespeare wrote Macbeth to please King James during the time of The Gunpowder Plot in 1605 which was a failed assassination attempt against King James. Shakespeare was inspired by this and he represented King James into his play by adding a character called King Duncan who was a noble king that everyone respected. Shakespeare referred to the Gunpowder Plot in his play by having the main character Macbeth carry out an assassination on King Duncan. The intended audience Shakespeare wrote Macbeth for was King James as it was inspired and written for him but can be watched by anyone who is interested in tragedy and murder. The Tell-Tale Heart was written in the mid-19th century American Society. Poe was inspired to write The Tell-Tale Heart in 1843 when he read and heard of other stories about real life tragedies. The audience is for anyone since its only a short story but is intended for people who like tragedies and gothic fiction.

Macbeth and The Tell-Tale Heart share similar structural conventions. In both texts, the narrator from The Tell-Tale Heart and Macbeth both fell into madness after committing a crime or as said in both texts, “doing the deed”. In the play Macbeth fell into madness after murdering a well-respected King Duncan for the throne and power. After committing the deed Macbeth started to feel the sense of guilt. He encountered his wife after murdering King Duncan and described his hands that were full of blood to be capable of staining the whole ocean red. Macbeth then tried to wash the blood of his hands but he was unable to get his hands clean which symbolised his sense of guilt towards the crime he committed. Despite obtaining what he so desired, becoming the King of Scotland, Macbeth still wanted more. His descent into madness started to suspense when he ordered Banquo and his son to be murdered since the witches foreshadowed that earlier in the play Banquo’s children would be the one to take the crown away from him. In the Tell-Tale Heart, Poe’s unnamed narrator was already in a state of madness and wanted to murder the old man because of “his eye”. This led the unnamed narrator to madness as the eye of the old man bothered him and he wanted no more of it. After he murdered the old man and chopped his body up and hid it under the wooden floor planks, the police were informed and came to inspect the murder. As the unnamed narrator calmly talked to the police while he was sitting on a chair just above where he put the old man’s corpse, he started to hear the old mans heart beating. This was symbolism of his sense of guilt for committing the crime which led him to lose his conscience revealing that he was the one that murdered the old man.

Macbeth and The Tell-Tale Heart both have special language features used to draw the attention of the audience to the idea of guilt using symbolism. In Macbeth, an example is the dagger he sees before committing the deed and the blood. Blood played an important role in the play as it symbolised the guilt Macbeth was feeling. Just after he had killed King Duncan and encountered Lady Macbeth, he was told by her to return and smear the blood over the guards but he refused because he feared the blood would later implicate him. After he killed the guards, Macbeth immediately removed the blood of his hands which showed how uncomfortable he was with having blood on his hands since it symbolises his sense of guilt. The dagger he saw before he murdered King Duncan was not real but it was Macbeth imagining and he thought that it was a symbol for him to proceed to murder the king using a dagger. Shakespeare’s use of symbolism enticed the audience making them think of the uses of symbolism such as the dagger and blood. In the Tell-Tale Heart the symbols were “the eye” of the old man and the beating heart. The unnamed narrators’ reason of murdering the old man was because of his eye, which bothered him. He described the eye to be “the eye of the vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it”. The narrator was frightened of the eye, he said “whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold, and so by degrees – very gradually”. Since the eye frightened him, he decided to murder the old man and thus rid himself of the eye forever. The beating heart symbolised the sense of guilt of the narrators doing which he then later admitted to.

William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart are two very famous literary examples that explore the themes of descent into madness and guilt. They both are written using conventions and stylistic language features that entices the audience with the theme of madness and guilt. Techniques such as symbolism were used to draw the audience into the story by making them think of the meanings of the techniques used which engages them even further. Overall, both texts are significant pieces of literature and both represent the themes of descent into madness and guilt in similar ways.