CONSCIENCE AND AMBITION IN SHAKESPEARE'S MACBETH AND JULIUS CAESAR: POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL TENSIONS

This essay presents an analysis focused on the issues of conscience and ambition as consequences, in part, of the political tensions of the plays Macbeth and Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare. The issue of conscience is closely connected to the problems of ambition and the political problem in the play. As a whole, critics such as Knight (2001), Bradley (1986) and Kott (2003) describe the play Macbeth as the play of conscience. However, they take this idea as taken for granted, without showing the turns and twists of conscience in the play. Nevertheless, they do not point out the nuances of the term conscience in Shakespeare's works. The only study that touches this discussion is by Donald A. Stauffer (1949). Nonetheless, he does not go deeper into the nuances of this problem.