Considering the impact of guilt through the play Both “Macbeth” and “An Inspector Calls” by William Shakespeare and JB Priestley both explore the impact of guilt on their characters. For Shakespeare, whose novel was set in the Middle Ages and written in 1606 in the Jacobean period, he writes the play for King James 1 of Scotland to gain the king's patronage. However, Priestley (a socialist), whose novel is from 1912 and written in 1945 (the end of the Second World War), focuses on a capitalist family in Brumley only to promote the socialist's vision to the public in 1945. Despite the differences of the play, the overall impact of guilt is the same in both plays but is used in different ways. In this essay I will focus on a character from Shakespeare's play called Lady Macbeth as her character clearly showed guilt at the end of the play due to her sleepwalking (unnatural madness) and her death as she couldn't handle her sense of guilt. She could therefore be compared to Sheila in "An Inspector Calls" because her character has clear similarities to Lady Macbeth as she does not feel guilty at first but changes to realize her social responsibility and feels guilty at the end of the play. However, some of the characters in "An Inspector Calls" do not show any guilt, for example, Mr. and Mrs. Birling. At the beginning of "Macbeth" Shakespeare uses imagery to present Lady Macbeth's cruel nature but in a masculine (unfeminine) way through her speeches. Using Shakespeare's more formal language, Lady Macbeth believes that Macbeth's kindness makes him a coward and very weak in realizing his ambitions, where she says that Macbeth is "too full of the milk of human kindness." The use of the word "milk" shows us that Macb...... middle of the card ...... is trying to study Lady Macbeth as a character as we see a huge change from the beginning to the end. The impact of Lady Macbeth's character's guilt is very supernatural as she goes mad and dies. However, in "An Inspector Calls" we only see two characters (Sheila and Eric) develop and change enormously as they accept that they are responsible for other people and accept their guilt while the rest of the family like Birling want to move on in their lives. old ways and not accepting responsibility. In both these plays, the central female characters play a significant role unlike the other characters in their plays who were very unlikely during their different eras. So that makes it more interesting. BY: ERIC KWAME BOATENG