To consider the impact of guilt through the play “Macbeth and “An Inspector Calls” by William Shakespeare and JB Priestley both explore the impact of guilt on their characters. For Shakespeare, whose novel is set in medieval times and written in 1606 during the Jacobean era, he wrote the play for King James I of Scotland in order to gain the king's patronage. However, Priestley (a socialist) whose novel dates from 1912 and written in 1945 (end of World War II), focuses on a capitalist family in Brumley just to promote the socialist vision to the public in 1945. Despite the differences in the play, the overall impact of guilt is the same in both games but used in different ways. In this essay I will focus on a character in Shakespeare's play called Lady Macbeth because her character clearly showed guilt at the end of the play due to her sleepwalking (unnatural madness) and death as she couldn't deal with his guilt. This could therefore be compared to Sheila in "An Inspector Calls" as her character has obvious similarities to Lady Macbeth as she feels no guilt at first but changes to realize her social responsibility and feels guilty by the end of the play . However, some characters in “An Inspector Calls” show no 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 his speeches. Using Shakespeare's more formal language, Lady Macbeth believes that Macbeth's kindness makes him a coward and very weak to achieve 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 paper ......ting study Lady Macbeth as a character as we see a massive change from beginning to 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 see only two characters (Sheila and Eric) develop and change massively as they come to terms with being responsible for others and accept their guilt while the rest of the family like Birling wants continuing in his old ways and not accepting responsibility. In both of these plays, the central female characters play an important role in their plays unlike the other characters in their plays who were very unlikely in their different eras. So that makes it more interesting.BY: ERIC KWAME BOATENG