Soliloquy is the art of talking to oneself, whether silent or aloud. In drama it denotes the convention by which a character, alone on the stage, utters his or her thoughts aloud. Playwrights have used this device as a convenient way to convey information about a character’s motives and state of mind, or for purposes of exposition, and sometimes in order to guide the judgments and responses of the audience. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth the readers get glimpse of the innermost workings of the character’s mind through their soliloquies.
“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”. Macbeth who appears as a valiant hero in Act 1 Scene2 begins to project a perversion of his mind ( Act 1 Scene 3, Line 128) after the first prophecy of the witches come true. His speech is full of what will now become his trademark — questioning, doubting, weighing up, and seeking to justify: "This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill; cannot be good" (130-131). Nevertheless, however much he reasons, Macbeth cannot reconcile the fact of the truth of the first prophecy with his intense and unnatural fear, or what he calls his "horrible imaginings." He admits to being so shaken by the news that he feels that his reason has been taken over by his imagination. The line "Nothing is, but what is not" is quite contemplative in the sense that Macbeth is capable of accepting that nothing that exists has any existence or meaning. This interpretation could open Macbeth to dangerous and unjustifiable deeds. If he can make himself believe that "Nothing is, but what is not," then Macbeth's respect for order, for hierarchy, for the King, is also nullified. He can, literally, get away with murder. In his next aside (Act 1 Scene 4) Macbeth’s “black and deep desires” of committing a deed “which the eye fears” is further evoked at the news of Malcolm's investiture as Prince of Cumberland.
In his second and longest soliloquy(Act 1 Scene 7) Macbeth ponders the deed that he is about to...