This article seeks to explore the different strategies the Bard uses in order to
evoke sympathy in the reader for Macbeth who is so persistent in the path of evil. What
strategy does Shakespeare use in order to provoke such a deep emotional response from
his readers? By using paradoxes in the play, the Bard creates a world of illusion, fear and
wild imagination. The paradoxical world in Macbeth startles us into marvel and fear,
challenges our commonly held opinions, and reshapes our thought in the process (Platt
8). As the text involves the reader in the formation of illusion and the simultaneous
formation of the means whereby the illusion is punctured, “reading reflects the process
by which we gain experience. Once the reader is entangled, his own preconceptions are
continually overtaken so that the text becomes his present while his own ideas fade into
the past. As soon as it happens, he is open to the immediate experience of the text” (Iser,
The Implied Reader 290). Mesmerised by Macbeth’s powerful imagination and poetic
language, the reader engages in a dialogical interaction with the play and eventually
finds light in the murky world of the text. Regardless of Macbeth’s diabolical world, the
reader ventures into it, shares it with him and ultimately wakes up from its dizzying
stupor. In reading Macbeth, the reader leaves behind the familiar world of his experience
in order to participate in the adventure the text offers him. The edifying effect of the
tragedy in the end is the reward the reader reaps after eventually waking up from the
nightmarish dream of the text