Analyse how Shakespeare presents Macbeth's decent into madness

Macbeth is a play about a characters demise. He starts as an ambitious, hungry, and shrewd character with a thirst for power. As he transforms into the King he yearns to be, he is then consumed by the forces he used to gain his power: isolation, paranoia and destiny. It is his isolation that is reflected in how Shakespeare distorts space and time in the form of the prophesy. The prophesy sets out the future before events of the present have been acted out, leaving Macbeth with a distorted and uncomfortable view of the world around him.In a world that upholds the supernatural as an authoritative power, that is manifest in the Three Witches, we can see how Macbeth’s delusions are not only informed from the supernatural world around him, but are directly linked to his own sense of psychological disturbance and paranoia. Both the world around him, that is characterised by violence, and his own trauma work together to form his instability and decent into madness. It can also be argued that Macbeth becomes desensitised to this violent world, as he partakes in the violence within the narrative by killing Duncan, and instead the fear and terror we associate with violence is reversed for Macbeth. It is this reversal of the meaning of violence, the distortion of space and time and the reliance on the supernatural that leads Macbeth to madness.