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Banquo in Macbeth — character analysis

Macbeth · William Shakespeare · Set text on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Literature (4ET1) · Grade 9 Notes

In one sentence. The road not taken — the same temptation, refused

Banquo is Macbeth's control experiment: co-victor of the same battle, co-hearer of the same prophecy, and the play's proof that the witches compel nothing. He names the danger with perfect precision — 'the instruments of darkness tell us truths… to betray's / In deepest consequence' — and though the prophecy works on him too ('I dream'd last night of the three weird sisters'), he answers temptation with prayer ('Merciful powers, / Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose'). Shakespeare needs him dead by Act 3 precisely because his living integrity is the standing refutation of Macbeth's excuses — and needs his ghost at the feast, and his royal line in the witches' show, because Banquo is the future: the ancestor, legend said, of King James himself.

This study ends with William Shakespeare. Build your reading of Banquo in Macbeth, teach it, then defend it against William Shakespeare.

How Banquo develops

His arc in brief

Act 1: the sceptical witness — 'have we eaten on the insane root?'; he asks the witches for his own fortune 'neither beg nor fear / Your favours nor your hate' — the exact posture Macbeth cannot hold. Act 2: the tested man — sleepless with 'cursed thoughts', he still tells Macbeth he will keep his 'allegiance clear'. Act 3: the suspicious survivor — 'Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, / As the weird women promis'd, and I fear / Thou play'dst most foully for't' — murdered on the road, his son Fleance escaping ('Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly!'). His ghost then presides, silent, over the collapse of Macbeth's public self.

Another reading. Is Banquo entirely clean? He suspects 'most foully' and says nothing to anyone; his silence can be read as prudence, as complicity-by-omission, or as hope for his own prophesied line ('May they not be my oracles as well…?'). Shakespeare — writing for Banquo's supposed descendant — keeps him honourable but leaves this shadow; noting it shows you reading against the play's political grain.

Language & structure: how Shakespeare builds Banquo

Banquo is Macbeth's metrical shadow: he hears the same prophecy in the same scene and answers in a different grammar. Where Macbeth falls into aside and hypothesis, Banquo interrogates — 'can the devil speak true?', 'have we eaten on the insane root...?'. His questions hold the Witches at arm's length grammatically; Macbeth's asides pull them inward.

“oftentimes, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray's / In deepest consequence.” — Banquo, Act 1 Scene 3

The play's thesis on equivocation, delivered by its control subject: 'instruments of darkness' makes the Witches tools, not causes — someone still has to play them. The financial lexis ('win', 'trifles', 'consequence') frames temptation as a rigged transaction. Structurally this speech is the play's warning label, spoken in Act 1 and proved by every act after: quote it wherever you argue Macbeth chose.

Methods: Extended metaphor · Sententia · Foreshadowing

Structurally Banquo works harder dead than alive: the ghost at the feast (3.4) converts private guilt into public spectacle — the banquet, kingship's central symbol of order, dissolves 'with most admired disorder'. And the show of eight kings (4.1) extends him beyond the play into the audience: the line of Stuart kings ends, in 1606 performance, at James himself. Banquo is the only character whose plot resolves in the auditorium.

Grade 9 upgrade. Instead of: Banquo is a foil who shows that Macbeth could have resisted the Witches.

Write: Shakespeare complicates the foil: Banquo's 'cursed thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose' and his silence after Duncan's murder — he suspects ('I fear / Thou play'dst most foully for 't') and does nothing — make him the play's study of passive complicity. He resists temptation and fails the harder test of speech; his integrity is real, and insufficient. That reading also explains why the play punishes him: in this Scotland, even clean hands that stay folded are forfeit.

Context in depth: the worlds behind Banquo

The king in the audience. In Holinshed's Chronicles — Shakespeare's source — Banquo helps murder Duncan. Shakespeare's whitewash is court politics: James I claimed descent from Banquo through the Stewarts, so the ancestor is rewritten as innocence itself, and the 'show of eight kings' with 'two-fold balls and treble sceptres' mirrors James's double coronation and triple crowns. The Grade 9 point is double-edged: the play's most conspicuous act of flattery is also its most conspicuous alteration of history — a reminder that the 'true' chronicle behind the tragedy was itself negotiable.

Providence and patience. Banquo's 'In the great hand of God I stand' places him in the period's doctrine of providence: wrongs are redressed by God's time, not man's hand — the orthodox answer to tyranny that Macbeth's 'If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me' parodies and abandons. His waiting ('But hush, no more') is theologically correct and dramatically fatal — the play's quiet demonstration that in a fallen polity, orthodoxy has no survival value.

Fleance and the unfinished future. Fleance's escape is the plot's open circuit: the prophecy 'Thou shalt get kings' remains unfulfilled inside the play — no Stuart is crowned on stage; the fulfilment is the audience's own history. Shakespeare ends Macbeth's line ('a fruitless crown... a barren sceptre') and leaves Banquo's growing — the planting imagery Duncan began ('I have begun to plant thee') literally outgrowing the play.

Relationships

  • Macbeth — Brothers-in-arms turned murderer and victim: Macbeth's soliloquy on him ('in his royalty of nature / Reigns that which would be fear'd') is half envy, half elegy — he kills the man he wishes he had been.
  • Fleance — The escaping son is the prophecy's future tense: 'Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none' survives the ambush, and Macbeth knows it — 'the worm that's fled / Hath nature that in time will venom breed'.

What Banquo stands for

  • Conscience kept — the play's baseline of ordinary decency against which Macbeth's fall is measured.
  • Lineage and time: his line stretches 'to th' crack of doom' in the show of kings — the future Macbeth cannot murder.
  • The ghost: guilt's guest at order's table, visible only to the guilty eye.

Why Shakespeare made Banquo

  • To dismantle determinism: same prophecy, free response — the theology of the play in one contrast.
  • To honour the patron: James I's Stuart line claimed descent from Banquo; Shakespeare converts chronicle (where Banquo is Macbeth's accomplice) into innocence.
  • To supply the feast scene: the play's great public unmasking needs a specific, silent accuser.

Banquo — the strongest quotations, analysed

“But 'tis strange: / And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray's / In deepest consequence.” — Banquo, Act 1 Scene 3

The play's user manual for temptation, delivered in real time: small true gifts (Cawdor) purchase belief in the large fatal one (the crown). Quote it in any supernatural essay as the reading Macbeth hears, understands and ignores.

Methods: aphorism · foreshadowing · dramatic irony

“Merciful powers, / Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose!” — Banquo, Act 2 Scene 1

Banquo's honesty about temptation is the point: he HAS 'cursed thoughts' — the prophecy works on him too, in dreams — and his response is prayer where Macbeth's was invocation ('Stars, hide your fires'). The two apostrophes are the play's moral fork in matched grammar: one man asks heaven to restrain the desire, the other asks darkness to hide it.

Methods: apostrophe/prayer · structural parallel with Macbeth · psychological honesty

“Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, / As the weird women promis'd; and, I fear, / Thou play'dst most foully for't.” — Banquo (soliloquy), Act 3 Scene 1

The play's only accurate accusation, spoken to no one: the tricolon of titles audits the prophecy item by item, and 'play'dst most foully' names the crime in a gaming metaphor — kingship as a match won by cheating. That Banquo then stays silent (and wonders about his own 'oracles') is the shadow the essay should name: integrity that suspects and does not act.

Methods: soliloquy · tricolon · gaming metaphor

Banquo: all 8 quotations in the Macbeth quote bank, analysed →

Readings you could defend

More than one reading of Banquo can win the debate. These are the credible alternatives — argue one, and know the others.

  • Foil or mirror? The standard reading (foil) stresses contrast; a darker one notes he dreams of the sisters, stays at court, and waits. Both are arguable; the exam rewards arguing rather than choosing timidly.

Essay arguments

  • Banquo converts the witches from fate to test: his refusal proves the prophecy's power lay in the hearer, not the words — the essay-spine for any 'supernatural' question.
  • His murder marks the play's moral frontier: Duncan's killing needed persuasion, Banquo's only fear — Shakespeare uses the second murder to measure the first's corrosion.
  • As ghost, he is guilt's dramaturgy: the private hallucination made public spectacle, ending Macbeth's ability to perform innocence.

Banquo in theme essays

  • Supernatural: his 'instruments of darkness' speech is the anchor quotation.
  • Kingship/lineage: the show of eight kings makes him central to the play's political ending.
  • Guilt: the feast scene — his silent ghost against Macbeth's public collapse.

Questions that get asked

  • How does Shakespeare use Banquo in the play?
  • How does Shakespeare present the differences between Macbeth and Banquo?
  • What is the significance of Banquo's ghost?

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