The Dagger Was Always His
The motion: “Macbeth is entirely responsible for his own downfall.”
Your opponent: William Shakespeare · Course: Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Literature (4ET1) · Assessment objectives: AO1, AO2, AO4
The witches told him what would happen. They never told him to do it. Which of those facts is the play about?
What you are asked to argue
Argue for or against — but you must decide, and your reading of the witches, Lady Macbeth and the soliloquies must serve that decision.
What the specification expects you to bring
- The sequence: prophecy, Duncan's murder, Banquo, the apparitions, Birnam Wood
- The dagger soliloquy and 'If it were done when 'tis done' — what Macbeth already knows before he acts
- Lady Macbeth's 'unsex me here' and her collapse in the sleepwalking scene
- Jacobean beliefs about kingship, regicide and the divine order (AO4 on this specification)
Positions that are defensible
Disagreeing with the figure is not an error. Any of these can score full marks if argued well:
- That the witches' knowledge makes the murder inevitable, and the play is a tragedy of fate
- That Lady Macbeth's agency is the decisive cause, and Macbeth's guilt is genuine but secondary
- That the play deliberately refuses a single cause, and the refusal is the meaning
- That the responsibility is Macbeth's but the play still condemns the political order that rewards violence
Common misconceptions this debate is built to expose
- Wrong: The witches tell Macbeth to kill Duncan.
The correction: They tell him he shall be king. They never name a means, and Banquo hears the same prophecies and does nothing. - Wrong: Lady Macbeth is simply evil and Macbeth is her victim.
The correction: Macbeth has already written to her about the prophecy and has already imagined the murder ('why do I yield to that suggestion') before she speaks a word. - Wrong: Retelling what happens counts as analysis.
The correction: The examiner rewards how the writing works — the verse, the placing of a scene, the word chosen over its near-synonym.
What passing it proves
A sustained conceptual argument about responsibility, built on the writer's methods, that states the strongest opposing reading and answers it.
Why them?
Read the life before you argue with it — the case you are about to meet was built by a real person, over a real career:
- The life of William Shakespeare — Playwright · Poet · Man of the Theatre · Playwright of London · 1564–1616