Grade 9 Notes: Macbeth

Macbeth

The hero who becomes the tyrant — ambition studied from the inside

Macbeth is Shakespeare's most compressed study of a good man destroying himself. He begins as the kingdom's shield — 'brave Macbeth', 'valour's minion' — and ends as 'this dead butcher'; the play's business is the space between the two names. Uniquely among Shakespeare's murderers, Macbeth sees with total clarity what he is doing, before, during and after: the soliloquies give us a conscience narrating its own defeat. Shakespeare's purpose is not to explain evil away but to dramatise how imagination, ambition and a marriage conspire against a soul that knows better.

Act One — temptation and the unmaking of a hero

We hear of Macbeth twice before we see him: the witches name him in the storm, and the bleeding Captain paints him as a war machine who 'unseam'd' the traitor Macdonwald 'from the nave to th' chops'. Both introductions matter — one plants him in the supernatural's mouth, the other establishes that the man was already magnificent at killing. His first line, 'So foul and fair a day I have not seen', unconsciously echoes the witches' 'fair is foul': before he has met them, his language is already theirs.

“Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires.” — Macbeth (aside), Act 1 Scene 4

The play's light/dark symbolism begins in Macbeth's own mouth: he asks the universe to unsee him. The rhyming couplet gives the wish an incantatory, spell-like quality — he is learning the witches' music — while 'black and deep desires' concedes, this early, that he knows exactly what colour his wish is. He never claims ignorance; that is the tragedy's honesty.

Methods: light/dark imagery · rhyming couplet · aside

“I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself / And falls on th' other.” — Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 7

The 'If it were done' soliloquy is a complete moral audit: Duncan is his king, kinsman and guest; Duncan is virtuous; judgement exists 'here' as well as hereafter. Having dismantled every reason, Macbeth is left with one — and the horse-riding metaphor convicts it in advance: ambition is a rider who jumps clean over the horse and crashes on the far side. He performs the play's entire plot as a figure of speech, then does it anyway. Grade 9 point: Macbeth's clarity is the horror — the play refuses the excuse of blindness.

Methods: soliloquy · extended metaphor · foreshadowing

The scene that follows the audit is the marriage at work: Lady Macbeth meets his 'We will proceed no further in this business' with an attack on his manhood ('When you durst do it, then you were a man') and a plan. His capitulation — 'I am settled' — is sealed with the play's doctrine of concealment: 'False face must hide what the false heart doth know.'

Act Two — the murder and the murdered mind

“Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” — Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 1

The hallucinated dagger is the play's psychology made visible: Macbeth's imagination runs ahead of his will, staging the murder before he commits it. Note the direction of the handle — the vision offers itself for use. Whether the dagger is supernatural or a 'dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain' is left genuinely open — Macbeth himself asks the question — and that undecidability (real evil or projected desire?) is the play's method throughout.

Methods: hallucination · dramatic soliloquy · ambiguity

“Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep'.” — Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 2

Sleep — 'the death of each day's life, sore labour's bath… chief nourisher in life's feast' — becomes the play's symbol of innocence and natural order. To murder a sleeping guest is to murder sleep itself, and the sentence is delivered instantly: Macbeth will 'sleep no more'. Track the motif: Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking is this curse arriving at her door three acts later.

Methods: personification · symbolism of sleep · prophetic voice

“Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No: this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red.” — Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 2

Hyperbole doing theological work: guilt so total that the ocean would turn red before the hand turned clean. The Latinate polysyllables ('multitudinous… incarnadine') swell like the sea they describe, then collapse into plain, short words — 'making the green one red' — as the truth lands plainly. Set against Lady Macbeth's 'A little water clears us of this deed': the couple's two sentences about one blood are the play's two understandings of guilt, and both will be proved wrong ways round by Act 5.

Methods: hyperbole · Latinate vs monosyllabic diction · juxtaposition

Act Three — the crown without peace

“We have scorch'd the snake, not kill'd it.” — Macbeth, Act 3 Scene 2

Kingship has delivered only 'restless ecstasy' — frantic sleeplessness. The snake metaphor concedes that murder solved nothing: threat regrows. This act pivots the play from ambition to security-through-slaughter; the second murder (Banquo) needs no persuasion from his wife — 'Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck' — and that exclusion is the marriage beginning to die. He now protects her from what she once had to force on him.

Methods: metaphor · role reversal in the marriage

“O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!” — Macbeth, Act 3 Scene 2

The mind as a nest of venomous creatures — the play's psychology of guilt in one image. The endearment 'dear wife' beside 'scorpions' catches the couple's tragedy: tenderness persists inside mutual damnation. Banquo's ghost at the feast then literalises the scorpions: Macbeth's guilt is now hallucinating in public, and the state banquet — order's great ceremony — collapses into 'most admired disorder'.

Methods: metaphor · public vs private self · symbolic banquet

Acts Four and Five — butchery, emptiness, and the end

Act 4 is the moral floor: on the witches' second visit Macbeth demands answers rather than receiving them, and his response to Macduff's flight is the play's one motiveless atrocity — the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her children, ordered on impulse ('The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand'). The killing of a child on stage is Shakespeare's calculated breach of tolerable limits: whatever sympathy the soliloquies have banked is spent here deliberately, so that the audience must hold pity and horror at once.

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day… Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player… It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” — Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5 (on his wife's death)

The nihilism aria. The tripled 'tomorrow' trudges metrically — time itself made tedious — and the theatre metaphor ('a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage') lets Shakespeare's own medium declare meaninglessness from inside a play. This is what the crown bought: not guilt now, but vacancy. Grade 9 reading: the speech is the play's true punishment — worse than death is the discovery that nothing signified. Note what he does NOT say: no word of blame for the witches or his wife; the emptiness is fully owned.

Methods: repetition · metatheatrical metaphor · nihilism · metre as meaning

Yet Shakespeare ends him as he began — fighting. Cornered by the prophecies' unravelling (the wood walking, Macduff 'from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd'), he refuses suicide ('Why should I play the Roman fool?') and dies sword in hand: 'Lay on, Macduff'. The residue of the opening hero is the ending's cruellest touch — the courage survived; everything it should have served did not.

Language & structure: how Shakespeare builds Macbeth

Macbeth's mind is staged in soliloquy — and the soliloquies themselves decay. Act 1's 'If it were done' is intricate hypothetical reasoning, clauses qualifying clauses ('But in these cases / We still have judgement here'); Act 5's 'Tomorrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow' has abandoned syntax for repetition, argument for exhaustion. The shrinking complexity of his private language is the tragedy's graph: a moral imagination burning down to 'Signifying nothing'.

His verse registers what his conscience knows before he does. The line 'why do I yield to that suggestion / Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair' buries murder in circumlocution — 'suggestion', 'image', 'horrid deed'; he cannot say *kill Duncan* in Act 1, and euphemism ('taking-off', 'it', 'the deed') remains his dialect until killing becomes routine — at which point the euphemisms stop, and 'the castle of Macduff I will surprise' arrives in plain, unhesitating future tense. Track the euphemism density and you track the conscience.

“Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires” — Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 4

Rhyming couplet — rare in his early speech — sealing the wish like a spell: he is already borrowing the Witches' incantatory form. The imperative to the 'stars' inverts prayer; light imagery (the play's system for grace and heaven's surveillance) is asked to look away. Lady Macbeth will echo the structure — 'Come, thick night' — before they have even met on stage: the marriage thinks in one imagery system.

Methods: Rhyming couplet · Imperative apostrophe · Light/dark imagery system

Structurally, Shakespeare removes Macbeth's interiority as the play proceeds: after Banquo's ghost he has no full soliloquy of self-examination — decisions arrive pre-made ('The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand'). The audience, made intimate in Acts 1–2, is progressively locked out; our estrangement is engineered to match Scotland's. The Grade 9 structural point: the play doesn't show a man becoming evil; it shows a consciousness closing, scene by scene, until only the body is left fighting.

Grade 9 upgrade. Instead of: Macbeth's soliloquies show his guilt and ambition through dark imagery.

Write: Shakespeare gives Macbeth the play's best poetry and its worst deeds and refuses to let either cancel the other — the audience is made to think inside the murderer ('If it were done'), then progressively evicted as soliloquy dries up. Our shifting access is the moral instrument: sympathy is granted while conscience lives and withdrawn as it dies, so the audience's own distance measures his damnation.

Context in depth: the worlds that made Macbeth

1606: a play for a king who survived a regicide. Written months after the Gunpowder Plot (November 1605) for the company patronised by its target. James I traced his line from Banquo; his Daemonologie (1597) argued witches were real agents of Satan; his political writings (Basilikon Doron, The True Law of Free Monarchies) taught divine right — the king as God's lieutenant. The play flatters, warns and investigates all three at once: regicide is staged as cosmic rupture ('the heavens... troubled with man's act'), yet the regicide is the most humanly understood character on the stage. That doubleness — orthodoxy in the plot, subversion in the sympathy — is the play's permanent scandal.

Equivocation: the Plot's word on trial. At the trial of Father Henry Garnet (spring 1606), the doctrine of equivocation — answering under oath in words true in a private sense — became a national obsession. The Porter admits 'an equivocator... who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven'; the Witches are equivocators in verse, 'palter[ing] with us in a double sense'. A Grade 9 answer hears the whole tragedy as an equivocation structure: every prophecy is true in the sense that destroys.

The overreacher: Faustus, Eden, Lucifer. Macbeth descends from Marlowe's Dr Faustus — the man who trades his soul for power and meets the bargain's small print — and behind both stand Lucifer ('Stars, hide your fires' petitions the sky like a falling angel) and Eden: a temptation, a persuading partner, a fall, an expulsion from sleep instead of paradise. Milton's Satan (Paradise Lost, 1667) is the family's later portrait — which is why 'better to reign in hell' reads like a line Macbeth earns at Dunsinane. Deployed in one clause, this lineage turns 'ambition' from a character flaw into a theological tradition the play joins.

Tragic theory: Aristotle, Seneca, Bradley. Through Aristotle: hamartia (the error, not merely 'flaw' — the yielding to 'suggestion'), peripeteia (the feast that seats a ghost), anagnorisis ('And be these juggling fiends no more believed'). Through Seneca — the Roman tragedian Elizabethan playwrights actually read — the play inherits tyrant-psychology, night invocations and blood that cannot be washed. A. C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904) made Macbeth the poet-hero whose imagination is his conscience; L. C. Knights's mocking reply ('How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?', 1933) insisted the play is a poem, not a biography. Citing that critical quarrel — in a clause — shows the examiner you know interpretation itself has a history.

Relationships

• Lady Macbeth — The play's true double act: she supplies will where he has scruple (Act 1), he supplies secrecy where she needed partnership (Act 3), and they die apart — her offstage, him mid-battle. Track the pronouns: 'we' in Act 1, 'I' by Act 4.
• Banquo — The control experiment: same prophecy, opposite response. Banquo names the danger ('instruments of darkness tell us truths… to betray's / In deepest consequence') and does nothing wicked — which is why Macbeth must kill him and why his line will reign.
• Duncan — King, kinsman, guest — the triple bond the murder violates. Duncan's trustfulness ('There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face') makes him the play's sacrificial innocence, not its political lesson.
• Macduff — The avenger built as Macbeth's mirror: both warriors, but Macduff 'must also feel it as a man' — feeling before fighting, the ethic Macbeth abandoned. Born by caesarean, he is the prophecy's loophole made flesh.
• The witches — They never command — they announce. Every action is Macbeth's own inference. That is the theological precision of the play: temptation supplies the map, never the legs.

What Macbeth stands for

• Blood — from honour's badge (the Captain's report) to guilt's indelible stain to the sea itself: one substance, three meanings, in strict sequence.
• Sleep — innocence and natural order; murdered in Act 2, avenged through insomnia and sleepwalking.
• Ill-fitting clothes — 'borrow'd robes', a 'giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief': stolen office never fits the usurper.
• Light and darkness — asked to hide him ('Stars, hide your fires'), darkness obliges until Birnam Wood moves by daylight.

Why Shakespeare made Macbeth

• To anatomise ambition from inside — the soliloquies make the audience complicit witnesses of a conscience losing.
• To dramatise the Jacobean nightmare: regicide as a wound in nature itself (horses eating each other, darkness at noon), written within a year or two of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
• To flatter and warn a royal patron: James I traced his line to Banquo, believed in witches (he wrote Daemonologie), and had survived assassination — the play stages his cosmology and his enemies' fate.
• To test the tragic form itself: a protagonist who does the worst and keeps the audience's imaginative company to the end.

The strongest quotations

“I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er.” — Macbeth, Act 3 Scene 4

Blood as a river crossed on foot: the image where momentum replaces choice. The chilling word is 'tedious' — moral categories have decayed into effort calculations. This is the hinge between the guilty Macbeth and the numb one.

Methods: extended metaphor · moral deadening

“this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen” — Malcolm, Act 5 Scene 9 (the play's final speech)

The victors' epitaph — and a test the play sets its audience. 'Butcher' and 'fiend' are politically necessary and experientially false: we have heard the butcher's soliloquies and watched the fiend sleepwalk. Whether Malcolm's summary is adequate is the essay question the whole play has been preparing.

Methods: epithet · dramatic irony against the speaker

Macbeth: all 12 quotations in the Macbeth quote bank, analysed →

Other readings

• Fate or choice? The witches predict but never compel; nothing they say requires murder (Cawdor arrived unmurdered). Yet the play's atmosphere makes evil feel ambient, almost weather. The strongest essays hold both: prophecy as temptation's instrument, action as Macbeth's own.
• A study in trauma? Some modern readings root Macbeth's violence in the battlefield he comes from — a killer trained by the state, then condemned by it. This reframes the opening 'hero' as the same man in a licensed context.
• Victim of the marriage? Played one way, Lady Macbeth's assault on his manhood is decisive coercion; played another, it merely licenses what 'black and deep desires' had already chosen. The text supports both stagings — say so.

Essay arguments

• Macbeth's tragedy is clarity without restraint: the soliloquies prove he sees every consequence before incurring it, so Shakespeare locates evil not in ignorance but in the will's defeat by imagination and ambition.
• Shakespeare charts the murder's cost through motif-sequences — blood, sleep, clothes, light — each transformed act by act, so the play's imagery IS its moral argument.
• The marriage is the play's engine: persuasion in Act 1, exclusion in Act 3, separate deaths in Act 5 — ambition consumes its partnership, and the pronouns tell the story.

In theme essays

• Ambition: he is the theme — use the 'vaulting ambition' audit as your anchor and the 'tomorrow' speech as its receipt.
• The supernatural: his readings of the witches (against Banquo's) show prophecy operating on a prepared mind.
• Kingship: his reign defines tyranny by contrast with Duncan before and Malcolm's promised order after.
• Guilt: dagger, voice, ghost, scorpions — his guilt is the play's special-effects budget.

Questions that get asked

• How does Shakespeare present Macbeth as a character who changes?
• 'Macbeth is a tragic hero rather than a villain.' How far do you agree?
• How does Shakespeare present Macbeth's ambition?
• How does Shakespeare present guilt through Macbeth?

Think you understand Macbeth? Teach it, then defend it against William Shakespeare →

Lady Macbeth

The partner in greatness — willpower's rise and collapse

Lady Macbeth enters reading her husband's letter and diagnosing him in a sentence — 'too full o' th' milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way'. Her function in Act 1 is to be the will her husband lacks; her tragedy is that the same imagination she suppressed in him destroys her instead. Shakespeare builds her from the Jacobean stage's most transgressive materials — a woman commanding spirits, directing her husband, planning regicide — and then spends three acts showing the bill arriving: exclusion, insomnia, madness, and an offstage death 'by self and violent hands' (as Malcolm reports it — the play keeps even her end at a distance).

Act One — the invocation and the plan

“Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty.” — Lady Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 5

An invocation in the witches' own register — she calls on spirits unprompted, where Macbeth only met them by accident. 'Unsex me' asks for the removal of everything her culture codes as female (pity, milk, remorse) because she accepts her culture's equation of cruelty with masculinity; the speech is therefore both her boldest moment and her deepest submission to the gender logic she seems to defy. Note 'tend on mortal thoughts': murderous thinking has attendants, as royalty has servants — she is staffing her own damnation.

Methods: invocation/apostrophe · gendered imagery · dramatic irony

“Look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't.” — Lady Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 5

The doctrine of appearance the play tests to destruction — and an image with a public echo: a medal struck after the Gunpowder Plot showed a serpent among flowers. For a 1606 audience this is not just marriage advice; it is the vocabulary of the age's worst treason.

Methods: antithesis · topical allusion · deception motif

“I have given suck, and know / How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums / And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you / Have done to this.” — Lady Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 7

The most violent image in the play — deliberately: she outbids any horror Macbeth can imagine, converting infanticide into a rhetoric of oath-keeping. The tenderness ('smiling in my face') is the point; she proves her will precisely by knowing the full value of what she claims she would destroy. The speech also drops the play's quietest mystery — she has nursed a child; the Macbeths have none — feeding the childlessness that haunts the whole play (Banquo's line, Macduff's 'He has no children').

Methods: shock imagery · rhetoric of persuasion · the childlessness motif

Acts Two and Three — competence, then exclusion

“Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done't.” — Lady Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 2

One conditional sentence undoes the 'fiend' reading: the woman who asked to be unsexed cannot kill a sleeping old man because he looks like her father. The invocation failed; the humanity she resigned was never surrendered. Quote this beside 'unsex me' in any Lady Macbeth essay — the gap between the two is her character.

Methods: dramatic irony · psychological realism

Her Act 2 competence is real — she returns the daggers, smears the grooms, faints (or performs a faint — editors and directors divide) at the perfect moment. But Act 3 begins her disappearance: 'Nought's had, all's spent' is her own audit of the crown, delivered alone; Macbeth plans Banquo's murder without her ('Be innocent of the knowledge'); at the banquet she manages his collapse brilliantly — her last public act — and then the play simply stops giving her scenes. The partnership she killed for is the first casualty of its success.

Act Five — the sleepwalking and the silence

“Out, damned spot! out, I say!… Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” — Lady Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 1

The sleepwalking scene is the play's sentence on her, executed through its own motifs: the sleep she murdered now performs her guilt nightly; the 'little water' that cleared the deed has become a spot no ocean shifts; the woman of iron prose speaks in broken, unmetred fragments — Shakespeare strips her of verse itself. Her language is a collage of the play's crimes replayed out of order (Duncan, Lady Macduff, Banquo): conscience as a stuck loop.

Methods: prose vs verse · motif reversal · fragmented syntax

“All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” — Lady Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 1

Her answer to his 'multitudinous seas': he imagined blood dyeing the world; she smells it on one 'little' hand forever. The adjective is the heartbreak — the hand has shrunk back from instrument of empire to a woman's small hand, and the sigh the Doctor hears ('What a sigh is there!') is beyond medicine: 'More needs she the divine than the physician.'

Methods: sensory imagery · diminution · juxtaposition with Macbeth's hyperbole

Grade 9 insight. Her death happens offstage, mid-scene, and Macbeth's eulogy is the nihilism speech. Argue this as structure: the play punishes her not with a death scene but with the DENIAL of one — the woman who directed Act 1's theatre exits without an audience.

Language & structure: how Shakespeare builds Lady Macbeth

Her Act 1 verse is frighteningly regular: 'The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements'. The controlled pentameter is the psychology — will imposed on metre as on husband. Her speech-acts are imperatives: 'unsex me', 'Come, you spirits', 'look like th' innocent flower', 'Give me the daggers'. Count her commands in Acts 1–2 and her questions in Act 5; the grammar reverses as the power does.

The collapse is written as formal breakdown: the sleepwalking scene is her only prose — the verse that enacted control abandoned; fragments, questions and echoes replace imperatives ('The Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?'). Even the childish internal rhyme ('Fife'/'wife') sounds like a mind regressing to nursery patterns. Where Macbeth's damnation is a closing consciousness, hers is a disintegrating syntax.

“A little water clears us of this deed: / How easy is it, then!” — Lady Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 2

The play's most devastating structural callback: this dismissal is answered three acts later by 'Out, damned spot!' and 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand'. The word 'little' migrates from the water to the hand; washing becomes the compulsion that replays the crime nightly. This is anaphoric structure as poetic justice — the woman who priced guilt at 'a little water' pays it in perpetual washing — and 'proleptic irony' names it: her confidence writes the script of her breakdown.

Methods: Structural callback · Proleptic irony · Motif (washing/blood) · Poetic justice

Her greatest scene is rhetorical warfare: in 1.7 she wins a lost argument in under sixty lines — rhetorical questions ('Was the hope drunk...?'), manhood redefined ('When you durst do it, then you were a man'), and the infanticide image ('dash'd the brains out') deployed not as memory but as proof of oath-keeping: she offers the most unnatural act conceivable as the standard of commitment. Note the *hypermetrical* strain as Macbeth capitulates — 'If we should fail?' / 'We fail?' — two speakers sharing one broken line, persuasion audible in the metre itself.

Grade 9 upgrade. Instead of: Lady Macbeth's imperatives show she is dominant at the start, but she goes mad from guilt by Act 5.

Write: Shakespeare builds her out of speech-acts that fail: the spirits she commands never confirm arrival; the 'unsexing' never takes ('Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done 't'); the sleepwalking scene replays her own Act 2 sentences back to her in ruins. Her tragedy is that language was her only instrument of power — and the play makes language itself the thing that breaks.

Context in depth: the worlds that made Lady Macbeth

Jacobean womanhood and the scandal of 'unsex me'. Renaissance orthodoxy — from conduct books to sermons on the Great Chain of Being — defined woman as subordinate by nature: obedient, fertile, governed by the milder humours. 'Unsex me here' asks demonic power to strip that assigned nature — exchanging milk for gall, the body's emblem of nurture for poison. For a 1606 audience this is not strong-mindedness but category violation: a wife commanding her husband, a woman commissioning regicide, a body renouncing maternity. Shakespeare then completes the orthodoxy's revenge — the repressed 'feminine' conscience returns and kills her — while letting the audience notice that the men's world made her ambition expressible only through her husband.

Machiavelli: The Prince in a dress. Machiavelli's The Prince (1532) — scandal-text of Renaissance politics — taught that a ruler must 'learn how not to be good': seem pious, act as necessity demands. Lady Macbeth speaks pure Machiavelli: 'look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under 't' is *seeming* weaponised into method. The Elizabethan stage villain was literally nicknamed the Machiavel; her originality is that she applies the doctrine domestically — coaching her husband's face ('Your face, my thane, is as a book'). The play then refutes the doctrine on its own terms: the seeming cannot be sustained, because in Shakespeare's moral physics the inner state leaks — through dreams, sleepwalking, and blood that will not wash.

Witchcraft, James I and the fourth witch reading. Under the 1604 Witchcraft Act invocation of evil spirits was a capital crime; James I had personally interrogated the North Berwick witches. Lady Macbeth's 'Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts' is, in that legal frame, an act of witchcraft performed on stage — which grounds the critical reading of her as the play's fourth witch: like them she meets Macbeth with prophecy-shaped persuasion, and like them she vanishes from the play once the temptation is complete. Signal it as interpretation, then note what it explains: why her end (offstage, reported, possibly 'by self and violent hands') is staged like an exorcism rather than a death.

Original sin and the Eve pattern. The theological deep-structure is Genesis: a woman persuades a man to the forbidden act; both fall; the garden becomes exile. Jacobean sermons blamed Eve for the Fall, and the play both uses and complicates the pattern — Lady Macbeth is tempter, but the 'serpent' vocabulary attaches to both spouses, and Macbeth had already spoken his own 'black and deep desires' (an aside in 1.4) before her first line in 1.5. A Grade 9 essay can argue Shakespeare stages the misogynist script and its inadequacy simultaneously: she is blamed as Eve by the play's world, but the play's evidence convicts the marriage, not the wife.

Freud's afterword. Freud ('Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work', 1916) read her among those 'wrecked by success' — collapse arriving not at failure but at the wish fulfilled; 'Nought's had, all's spent' is his thesis in her own words three centuries early. One clause of Freud, attached to that quotation, converts a 'she goes mad' observation into an argument about desire itself being the disease.

Relationships

• Macbeth — 'My dearest partner of greatness' — the letter's phrase is the marriage's high-water mark. She reads him perfectly in Act 1 and loses all access by Act 3; the tragedy is mutual and asymmetric: he hardens as she cracks.
• Duncan — Her 'honour'd hostess' performance is the serpent-under-flower doctrine executed flawlessly — and her father-resemblance line quietly restores the human bond her hospitality betrayed.
• The witches — No meeting, but a rhyme: her invocation answers their idiom so closely that productions often stage her as the fourth witch — an interpretation, not a fact, and worth flagging as such.

What Lady Macbeth stands for

• The femme forte inverted: Jacobean drama's fear of the commanding woman, followed to its punitive conclusion.
• Milk against blood — her own images: nurture resigned in favour of cruelty, avenged when blood proves unwashable.
• The candle she carries sleepwalking — 'she has light by her continually' — the woman who invoked 'thick night' now cannot bear the dark.

Why Shakespeare made Lady Macbeth

• To split the tragedy's labour: Macbeth carries conscience-before, she carries conscience-after — between them the audience sees guilt whole.
• To dramatise persuasion: Act 1 Scene 7 is the play's masterclass in rhetoric, and its target is masculinity itself.
• To stage, and then discipline, female transgression for a Jacobean audience — while writing her human enough that the discipline reads as tragedy, not justice.

The strongest quotations

“What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed.” — Lady Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 1

Her Act 3 comfort to Macbeth ('what's done is done') returns with one word changed — 'cannot be undone' — pragmatism curdled into despair. The tripled 'to bed' is a lullaby sung to herself: the persuader's last audience is her own broken mind.

Methods: self-echo · repetition · irony of return

Lady Macbeth: all 12 quotations in the Macbeth quote bank, analysed →

Other readings

• Fiend or scapegoat? Malcolm's 'fiend-like queen' suits the victors; the sleepwalking scene refutes it. A balanced essay argues Shakespeare frames her for the crime while writing her incapable of bearing it.
• Feminist readings: her power operates only through a man — she can plan but not stab, command spirits but not armies. Her 'strength' in Act 1 is the only agency her world permits, which makes the punishment of it double-edged.
• Did she plan Duncan's murder before the letter? 'Too full o' th' milk of human kindness' suggests long acquaintance with the ambition; some readings hear a plan already rehearsed. Signal it as speculation the text invites but never confirms.

Essay arguments

• Lady Macbeth's arc is an inversion of her husband's: she begins where he ends (resolved, unscrupled) and ends where he began (haunted, human) — Shakespeare crosses their trajectories at the banquet and never lets them touch again.
• Her power is rhetorical, and rhetoric is exhaustible: once the deed is done and words can no longer shape it ('what's done cannot be undone'), the play has no further use for her — a structural cruelty worth naming.
• Through her, Shakespeare interrogates the equation of masculinity with violence: every character who accepts it (she, Macbeth) is destroyed; the man who refuses it ('I must also feel it as a man') wins.

In theme essays

• Guilt: pair 'a little water' with 'perfumes of Arabia' — the play's neatest reversal, gift-wrapped for a guilt essay.
• Gender: 'unsex me' and 'when you durst do it' make her the theme's centre; Macduff's grief is the counter-case.
• Ambition: hers is ambition FOR another — 'the golden round' is always his crown — which complicates the theme usefully.
• Appearance vs reality: the innocent flower doctrine is hers; its collapse is hers too.

Questions that get asked

• How does Shakespeare present Lady Macbeth as a powerful woman?
• 'Lady Macbeth is more responsible than Macbeth for Duncan's murder.' How far do you agree?
• How does Shakespeare present the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth?
• How does Shakespeare present Lady Macbeth's decline?

Think you understand Lady Macbeth? Teach it, then defend it against William Shakespeare →

Banquo

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.

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.

The strongest quotations

“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 →

Other readings

• 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.

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?

Think you understand Banquo? Teach it, then defend it against William Shakespeare →

The Witches

'Imperfect speakers' — the play's engine of ambiguity

The Weird Sisters open the play in thunder and never explain themselves. They prophesy but do not command; they answer questions with riddles and vanish 'into the air'. Their power over the play is linguistic: paradox ('fair is foul'), equivocation (truths that function as lies), and rhythm (trochaic chant against the play's iambic norm) — they speak a different music, and Macbeth learns the tune. 'Weird' derives from Old English 'wyrd', fate — but everything fated in the play arrives through human hands, and Shakespeare is scrupulous about the gap.

Their three appearances, and what each does

Act 1: they meet Macbeth 'upon the heath' with three titles — Glamis (true), Cawdor (in progress), 'King hereafter' (the hook) — and Banquo's paradoxes ('Lesser than Macbeth, and greater'). Act 4: sought out this time, they stage the apparitions — the armed head, the bloody child ('none of woman born'), the crowned child with a tree — and the show of Banquo's kings; the riddling now on a grand scale. Act 5 belongs to their consequences: every riddle unknots (Birnam Wood marches as camouflage; Macduff was 'untimely ripp'd'), and Macbeth names the mechanism when Birnam Wood begins to move (5.5) — 'th' equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth' — then, facing Macduff, curses the 'juggling fiends' that 'palter with us in a double sense'.

equivocation: Saying what is technically true in a way designed to deceive. A charged word in 1606: at the trial of Father Henry Garnet after the Gunpowder Plot, the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation — misleading answers under oath — was publicly infamous, and the Porter's 'equivocator' jokes wink straight at it. The witches are equivocation personified: every prophecy is kept to the letter and fatal in the keeping.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.” — The Witches, Act 1 Scene 1

Seven words that program the entire play: value inverted, boundaries dissolved, weather as morality. The trochaic chant (stress-unstress: 'FAIR is FOUL') runs against the play's iambic heartbeat — the witches are metrically alien, and when Macbeth's first line echoes their words, his metre stays human while his meaning has already crossed over.

Methods: chiasmus/paradox · trochaic metre · motif inauguration

Language & structure: how Shakespeare builds the Witches

The Witches speak a different metre from every other character: trochaic tetrameter, often catalectic — 'DOUble, DOUble, TOIL and TROUble' — the stress falling first, often with the final weak syllable dropped ('FAIR is FOUL and FOUL is FAIR'). Against the court's iambic pentameter (unstressed–stressed, ten syllables), their verse is inverted and truncated: rhythm itself marks them as nature reversed. When Macbeth's first line — 'So foul and fair a day I have not seen' — echoes their 'Fair is foul', the infection is verbal before it is moral: he is echoing words he has never heard, even though his metre stays iambic and human.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.” — The Witches, Act 1 Scene 1

Chiasmus collapses the play's moral vocabulary in its opening seconds: if fair and foul are interchangeable, every later judgement ('worthy Cawdor', 'honest trifles') is booby-trapped. The couplet's rhyme ('fair'/'air') seals the inversion like a spell, and the fricative alliteration (foul/fog/filthy) thickens the air the whole play breathes. Twelve lines into the tragedy, its epistemology is already broken — that is why scene 1 exists.

Methods: Chiasmus · Paradox · Incantatory rhyme · Alliteration

Their power is grammatical restraint: the 1.3 prophecies contain no imperatives — 'shalt be king hereafter' commands nothing (by 4.1 the apparitions do give orders: 'Be bloody, bold, and resolute'). They state futures and let Macbeth supply the verbs ('If it were done…'). Structurally they frame the play (scenes 1.1, 1.3, 3.5, 4.1) but never enter a human dwelling: the evil visits the threshold, and is invited in.

Grade 9 upgrade. Instead of: The Witches control Macbeth's fate and represent the Jacobean fear of witchcraft.

Write: The play is constructed so that causation is undecidable: every prophecy could be supernatural knowledge or lucky malice; every crime requires Macbeth's own 'vaulting ambition' as the engine. Shakespeare stages the period's live controversy — Daemonologie's real witches versus Reginald Scot's sceptical Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) — as a structural ambiguity: the tragedy works identically whether the Witches are agents or mirrors, which is the most frightening design available.

Context in depth: the worlds behind the Witches

James I, Daemonologie and North Berwick. James I published Daemonologie (1597) after personally examining the North Berwick witches (1590–91), accused of raising storms against his bride's fleet — which is why the First Witch's revenge on a sailor ('Though his bark cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-tost') is court flattery in miniature: storm-raising against ships was the king's own case file. The 1604 Witchcraft Act made spirit-invocation capital. On stage in 1606, the Witches were not folklore; they were current affairs.

The sceptical countercurrent. Belief was not monolithic: Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) argued 'witches' were the deluded, the defamed and the poor — and James ordered it answered. Shakespeare's design accommodates both audiences: believers see Satan's instruments; sceptics see three old women exploiting a soldier's vanity. The play's refusal to arbitrate is the period's own argument, dramatised.

Fate's classical ancestry. The 'weird sisters' descend from wyrd — Old English fate — and behind them stand the three Parcae/Moirai who spin, measure and cut life's thread, and the prophetic riddles of Greek tragedy: like the Delphic oracle that destroyed Oedipus, they tell truths shaped to be misread. One clause on the oracle tradition lets you argue Macbeth belongs to a two-thousand-year genre of men destroyed by accurate prophecy — the tragedy of interpretation, not information.

Relationships

• Macbeth — They greet him with his desires and are never needed again — he seeks THEM in Act 4. The relationship's direction of travel is the moral diagnosis.
• Banquo — Same stage, same offer, no purchase: 'Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear'. They tell him the truth too — the play's fairness is exact.
• Hecate (if played) — The Hecate scenes (likely later additions by Middleton — say 'widely considered') reframe the sisters as employees of a goddess; most productions cut them, restoring the sisters' unexplained autonomy.

What The Witches stands for

• Ambiguity incarnate — 'imperfect speakers' whose gender ('you should be women, / And yet your beards…'), reality and motives are all left undecidable.
• The storm: they enter with thunder; disorder in nature announcing disorder in the state.
• Doubling — 'Double, double toil and trouble': duplication, duplicity and the play's twinned structures (two feasts, two kings, two prophecy scenes) in one chant.

Why Shakespeare made The Witches

• To externalise temptation without abolishing responsibility — the theological tightrope the whole tragedy walks.
• To speak to the moment: James I wrote Daemonologie (1597) and presided over witch trials; the Gunpowder Plot made equivocation the word of the hour. The witches are 1606 talking to itself.
• To give the play its sound: their metre, rhyme and paradox infect Macbeth's language — evil as a contagious style.

The strongest quotations

“By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes.” — Second Witch, Act 4 Scene 1

The play's darkest joke: the WITCHES call Macbeth 'something wicked' — not 'someone'. By Act 4 the kingdom's hero has become, to the agents of darkness themselves, a wicked thing. The couplet's nursery-rhyme lilt makes the judgement more chilling, not less.

Methods: dehumanising pronoun · rhyme · role reversal

“Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” — The Witches, Act 4 Scene 1

The refrain that names the play's method: DOUBLE — duplication and duplicity at once. The play is built of doubles (two feasts, two prophecy scenes, two Cawdors, the doubling couple), and its language of doubles ('double sense', 'double trust'); the chant is the structure singing about itself. Metrically it is the witches' signature trochaic tetrameter — the inverted heartbeat against the play's iambic norm.

Methods: refrain · trochaic tetrameter · the 'double' motif

“Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. / Not so happy, yet much happier. / Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.” — The Witches (to Banquo), Act 1 Scene 3

Three riddling antitheses that are all, in the event, precisely true — the play's fairness in miniature: the witches never lie, they compress. Each paradox forces interpretation, and interpretation is where the hearer's soul shows: Banquo files them as riddles; Macbeth begins converting his own set into a plan within the scene.

Methods: paradox/antithesis · prophetic compression · the hearer's test

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

Other readings

• Agents of fate, projections of desire, or social scapegoats? The text sustains a supernatural reading (they know the future), a psychological one (they say only what Macbeth wants said), and a historical one (three marginal old women blamed for a state's crimes — the anatomy of a witch panic). Offer at least two; the play was built not to settle it.

Essay arguments

• The witches' power is grammatical, not physical: they alter nothing on stage except language — and language proves sufficient, which is Shakespeare's point about temptation.
• Equivocation structures the whole play: prophecies, the Porter's jokes, 'lies like truth' — an essay tracing the word from 1606 politics through the plot writes itself.
• Their two scenes measure Macbeth's fall by direction of travel: visited, then visiting; warned, then demanding — the tempted man becomes temptation's customer.

In theme essays

• Supernatural: obviously central — but the top-band move is pairing them with Banquo's refusal and the dagger's ambiguity.
• Appearance vs reality: 'fair is foul' is the theme's masthead quotation.
• Ambition: they supply the object ('King hereafter') but nothing shows them creating the desire. The evidence that it may predate them is in 1.3 — Banquo sees him 'start' and 'seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair', and within moments Macbeth is imagining murder ('my thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical'). 'Black and deep desires' comes AFTER the witches, in 1.4, once Malcolm is named heir: use it for the desire hardening, not for where it began.

Questions that get asked

• How does Shakespeare present the witches and their influence?
• 'The witches, not Macbeth, are responsible for the tragedy.' How far do you agree?
• How does Shakespeare create a sense of evil in the play?

Think you understand The Witches? Teach it, then defend it against William Shakespeare →

Macduff

The avenger who feels — masculinity corrected

Macduff is the play's answer to its own worst equation. Where Macbeth and his wife define manhood as daring and doing ('When you durst do it, then you were a man'), Macduff — told of his family's slaughter — is commanded to 'dispute it like a man' and answers with the play's moral centre: 'I shall do so; / But I must also feel it as a man.' Grief first, vengeance second, and vengeance as justice rather than ambition: he is what the warrior virtues look like when conscience keeps them. Born 'from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd', he is also the equivocation's solution — the man 'not of woman born' by a technicality, nature's loophole against the unnatural king.

His arc in brief

Act 2: the discoverer — his horror at Duncan's body ('O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart / Cannot conceive nor name thee') is the play's authentic voice of sacrilege; and he immediately distrusts the new order, skipping Macbeth's coronation. Act 4: the exile — testing scene in England, where Malcolm's false self-accusations probe his integrity ('Bleed, bleed, poor country!' is patriotism passing the test); then the news, and the play's most painful pause: 'He has no children.' Act 5: the instrument — 'Turn, hell-hound, turn!'; he fights not for a crown but 'my wife and children's ghosts'.

“All my pretty ones? / Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? / What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?” — Macduff, Act 4 Scene 3

Grief rendered as broken interrogatives — the repeated 'all' circling what cannot be taken in. The homely metaphor (chickens, the kite that kills them) does what heroic language could not: it makes the loss domestic and total. Shakespeare gives the play's most powerful warrior its most vulnerable speech; that inversion IS the argument about manhood.

Methods: repetition · domestic metaphor · interrogatives of shock

Another reading. The question the play plants and never answers: why did Macduff leave his family unprotected? His wife calls it madness and lack of love ('He wants the natural touch'); the play lets the accusation stand, then kills her. A top-band essay names this deliberate stain — Shakespeare refuses even his moral counterweight a clean sheet.

Language & structure: how Shakespeare builds Macduff

Macduff's grief scene (4.3) is built on monosyllables and questions: 'All my pretty ones? / Did you say all?' — repetition circling what cannot be processed, against Malcolm's fluent consolations. Shakespeare gives the play's plainest language to its truest feeling; after three acts of equivocation, semantic honesty arrives as short words. 'He has no children' — two possible referents (Malcolm? Macbeth?), four words — is the play's densest line of grief precisely because it refuses ornament.

“But I must also feel it as a man.” — Macduff, Act 4 Scene 3

The play's counter-definition of manhood, placed with surgical symmetry: Malcolm's 'Dispute it like a man' receives 'feel it as a man' — the same noun, re-lexicalised to include grief. Every previous definition (Lady Macbeth's 'When you durst do it', Macbeth's 'I dare do all that may become a man') equated manhood with daring; Macduff's adversative 'But' corrects the entire play's gender lexicon in one clause.

Methods: Antithesis · Re-definition · Adversative syntax

Structurally, Macduff is the prophecy's loophole embodied: 'from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd' resolves 'none of woman born' as equivocation, not impossibility. Shakespeare holds him offstage at every corrupting moment — absent from the coronation at Scone, absent from the feast — so the hand that kills Macbeth is the only significant one the play has kept clean. His flight leaving 'wife and child' is the single stain, and the play makes him pay it in full before licensing him as executioner.

Grade 9 upgrade. Instead of: Macduff is the avenging hero who defeats Macbeth and restores order.

Write: Shakespeare prices the restoration: order returns through a man whose family was slaughtered because he chose Scotland over them — 'Why in that rawness left you wife and child?' is never answered, only outlived. The ending's justice is real and stained; 'the time is free' is spoken over Fife's graves. Grade 9 essays can argue the play refuses a clean restoration on purpose: tyranny's cost is written into the credentials of its remover.

Context in depth: the worlds behind Macduff

Tyrannicide: the forbidden question. Divine-right orthodoxy — James's own True Law of Free Monarchies — held that even tyrants must be endured, never resisted: rebellion was sacrilege. Yet the play ends in an applauded tyrannicide. Shakespeare threads the needle with legitimacy: Macbeth is usurper, so Macduff kills no lawful king; Malcolm, the anointed heir, is restored. The Grade 9 nuance: the play stages the era's most dangerous political question — when may a king be killed? — and answers it only in the safe case, leaving the hard one (a lawful tyrant) untouched. That evasion is itself historical evidence.

Caesarean birth and the era's body-lore. In 1606, caesarean delivery meant the mother's death or near-certain sacrifice — a birth outside nature's course, 'untimely ripp'd'. Folklore credited such the 'unborn' with uncanny immunity. Shakespeare converts obstetric horror into structural irony: the man not 'of woman born' is the one man born entirely of loss — mother, then wife, then children — making him grief's instrument against ambition's.

England as the counter-Scotland. Act 4's English scenes stage the healing king: Edward the Confessor cures scrofula ('the king's touch'), a rite James I himself revived reluctantly. The play builds a diptych — Edward's supernatural healing against Macbeth's supernatural harm; a court that cures against a court that kills. Macduff's testing in England is the play's political seminar: Malcolm's fake vices catalogue what a king must not be, with the real specimen reigning at Dunsinane.

Relationships

• Macbeth — Mirror-warriors: the play's final duel is its thesis fight — feeling armed against numbness, justice against tyranny, the caesarean child against the childless king.
• Lady Macduff — Her one scene (worldly, bitter, tender with her son) exists to price his flight and Macbeth's atrocity in full domestic currency.
• Malcolm — The testing scene forges the new order: Malcolm's suspicion plus Macduff's grief equals a kingship that has learned what Duncan's trustfulness cost.

What Macduff stands for

• Righteous vengeance — violence with a warrant, defined against Macbeth's.
• The 'not of woman born' loophole: nature's own equivocation, turned against equivocation's students.
• Scotland's grief personified — 'Bleed, bleed, poor country' makes the nation a wounded body and him its voice.

Why Shakespeare made Macduff

• To redefine manhood mid-play: 'I must also feel it as a man' answers 'when you durst do it' across three acts.
• To keep the ending morally legible: the tyrant must fall to wronged justice, not rival ambition.
• To carry the audience's grief: someone on stage must feel the Macduff murders as we do.

The strongest quotations

“I shall do so; / But I must also feel it as a man.” — Macduff, Act 4 Scene 3

The play's ethical fulcrum in thirteen words: action and feeling reunited after four acts of their divorce. Use it as the closing paragraph of any gender or masculinity essay — it is the standard by which every other definition of 'man' in the play is marked.

Methods: antithesis resolved · thematic keystone

“He has no children.” — Macduff, Act 4 Scene 3

Four plain words carrying the play's whole children-motif. The referent is genuinely ambiguous — Macbeth (so he could do this / so I cannot repay him in kind) or Malcolm (whose comfort only a childless man could offer)? Both readings are canonical; offering the ambiguity AS the analysis is the mature move. Either way the line convicts the play's world: its wars are waged on other people's futures.

Methods: monosyllabic weight · designed ambiguity · children motif

“Turn, hell-hound, turn!” — Macduff, Act 5 Scene 8

The avenger's challenge compresses the play's animal-imagery system to its terminus: the man the Captain called an eagle and a lion is now a 'hell-hound' — dehumanisation complete, and pronounced by the play's moral voice. The tripled monosyllables and imperative frame the final duel as execution, not contest.

Methods: animal imagery · imperative · monosyllables

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

Other readings

• Hero or instrument? He gets no soliloquy, no interiority — some critics read him as a function (Nemesis) rather than a character. The grief scene is the counter-evidence; weigh them.

Essay arguments

• Macduff resolves the play's masculinity debate: Shakespeare stages three definitions of 'man' (Lady Macbeth's, Macbeth's, Macduff's) and lets the third one win the duel.
• His flight to England is the play's most productive flaw: it costs his family, stains his virtue, and proves that in tyranny even right action kills — tragedy's logic applied to the good.
• Structurally he is the return stroke: discoverer of the first murder, avenger of the last — the play's moral frame in one character.

In theme essays

• Gender/masculinity: the keystone — see above.
• Kingship: his testing of Malcolm defines the good king by interrogation.
• Violence: his vengeance lets you distinguish kinds of violence — the play is not pacifist, and saying so precisely reads well.

Questions that get asked

• How does Shakespeare present Macduff?
• How does Shakespeare explore ideas about masculinity through Macduff and others?
• What is the importance of the scene in England (Act 4 Scene 3)?

Think you understand Macduff? Teach it, then defend it against William Shakespeare →

Duncan & Malcolm

The king killed and the king restored — the play's political frame

Duncan and Malcolm bracket the tragedy: the saintly king whose murder breaks nature, and the tested son whose accession repairs it. Duncan is goodness without guile — generous ('Signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine / On all deservers'), trusting, and twice deceived by trusted thanes ('There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face' — spoken of the first Cawdor as the second walks in). Malcolm is goodness WITH guile: his self-slandering test of Macduff in Act 4 shows a prince who has learned suspicion, and his final speech — naming thanes earls, recalling exiles, invoking 'the grace of Grace' — restores order in the play's last lines. Whether that restoration is complete, or shadowed (Fleance lives; the witches' kings were Banquo's, not Malcolm's), is a genuine open question.

The frame in brief

Duncan's two errors (trusting two Cawdors) and one irony ('This castle hath a pleasant seat' — of Inverness, his abattoir) make him tragedy's precondition rather than its fool: Jacobean kingship theory held the king's person sacred, and the play stages his murder as cosmic sacrilege — 'most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord's anointed temple'. The unnatural night that follows (day strangled, horses eating each other, a falcon killed by an owl) is the Chain of Being registering the wound. Malcolm's arc runs flight (suspicion falls on the fleeing sons) → testing (the England scene's catalogue of feigned vices) → command (each soldier a walking bough of Birnam) → restoration.

Grade 9 insight. Use Duncan for the play's definition of legitimacy and Malcolm for its price: the son must LEARN distrust, theatricality (the camouflage is literal appearance-management) and political speech. The play's cure for tyranny is not innocence restored but innocence educated — an ending more ambivalent than it looks, and saying so is a top-band move.

Language & structure: how Shakespeare builds the two kings

Duncan speaks the play's language of increase: 'I have begun to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of growing'; 'signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine'. His lexicon — planting, harvest, stars, feasting — is the vocabulary of sacramental kingship, which is why his murder is announced in the same system inverted: night strangles the travelling lamp, horses eat each other, 'the wine of life is drawn'. Kill the planter and the imagery itself sickens.

“There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face: / He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust.” — Duncan, Act 1 Scene 4

Spoken of the first Cawdor as the second walks in — the play's cruellest entrance cue. The architectural metaphor ('construction', 'built') makes trust a building, and the play immediately quarries it: Macbeth becomes 'a gentleman on whom I built' — and Inverness the building he dies in. Duncan's epistemological confession (faces are unreadable) is the tragedy's enabling condition; Lady Macbeth's 'look like th' innocent flower' is its weaponisation.

Methods: Dramatic irony · Entrance timing · Architectural metaphor

Malcolm's Act 4 self-slander — the false confession of lust and avarice — is the play's strangest rhetorical set piece: the rightful heir learning Machiavellian technique (seeming vicious to test loyalty) and then unsaying it ('my first false speaking / Was this upon myself'). His final speech, distributing earldoms 'in measure, time and place', restores administrative prose-order to the verse-world — deliberately smaller music than the play's poetry, which some read as peace and some as diminishment: after Macbeth's imagination, legitimacy sounds beige. Argue either; note both.

Grade 9 upgrade. Instead of: Duncan represents the good king whose murder destroys the natural order.

Write: Shakespeare quietly audits Duncan too: a king whose reign hosts two rebellions, who twice mis-trusts (both Cawdors), whose meekness Macbeth cites as fact ('hath borne his faculties so meek') — sainthood with a competence question. The play needs him sacred for the murder's horror and slightly failing for its plausibility; holding both makes 'kingship' the play's open problem, not its answered one — which is why Act 4 must audition Malcolm at such length.

Context in depth: the worlds behind the kings

The Divine Right and the Great Chain. In the Great Chain of Being, the king occupies earth's summit as God's deputy; regicide therefore tears the cosmos, not just the state — hence the night of Duncan's death produces falcon killed by owl, horses turned cannibal, darkness at noon (2.4). This is macrocosm answering microcosm, the period's standard physics of order. James I's True Law made the doctrine policy. Quote the omens as the Chain's seismograph and you convert 'pathetic fallacy' into political theology.

Election, tanistry and the Prince of Cumberland. Historical Scotland chose kings by tanistry — election from the royal kin — not primogeniture. Duncan's naming of Malcolm as 'Prince of Cumberland' is thus a political act, converting elective kingship toward inheritance, and Macbeth's 'that is a step / On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap' registers it as the closing of a legitimate route: under tanistry, the victorious general had a claim. One clause of this history complicates 'ambition' usefully — Shakespeare erased a system in which Macbeth's hope was not absurd.

1606 performance: the king watching kings. Performed for a court where James sat as the play's foretold descendant, the two-kings structure is a mirror held to the patron: Duncan the sanctity James claimed, Malcolm the tested legitimacy he modelled, Edward the healing touch he practised, Macbeth the regicide he had survived twice (Gowrie, Gunpowder). The play is, among its other identities, a mirror for princes — the Renaissance genre teaching kings by exempla — staged for the genre's most invested reader.

Relationships

• Macbeth — Duncan loads him with honours and metaphors of planting ('I have begun to plant thee'); the gardener-king is cut down by his best tree. Malcolm inherits the duel he never fights — his war is managerial, and that is the point.

What Duncan & Malcolm stands for

• Duncan: the sacred body of kingship; his blood 'golden' on 'silver skin' — even his corpse is described in coronation metals.
• Malcolm: order's return with experience's scar tissue; 'the grace of Grace' — legitimacy re-tied to heaven.

Why Shakespeare made Duncan & Malcolm

• To stage the doctrine of divine kingship for its royal audience — and the full horror of its violation.
• To close the tragedy politically as well as morally: Scotland, not just Macbeth, must be resolved.

The strongest quotations

“There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face: / He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust.” — Duncan (of the first Thane of Cawdor), Act 1 Scene 4

Spoken seconds before Macbeth — the new Cawdor, the next betrayer — enters to receive that same absolute trust. The dramatic irony is a trap Shakespeare springs twice in one scene; quote it for appearance-vs-reality and for Duncan's characterisation at once.

Methods: dramatic irony · structural repetition

“This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air / Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses.” — Duncan (arriving at Inverness), Act 1 Scene 6

The play's most quietly horrifying dramatic irony: the victim praising the air of his slaughterhouse, in the play's gentlest verse ('nimbly and sweetly'). Banquo's reply about the 'temple-haunting martlet' compounds it — nature's own misreading of the house. Two innocents read Inverness by its appearance moments after its mistress has asked 'thick night' to fill it: the appearance-reality theme staged as a change in the weather of the verse.

Methods: dramatic irony · tonal contrast · symbolic setting

“Macbeth / Is ripe for shaking, and the powers above / Put on their instruments.” — Malcolm, Act 4 Scene 3

Malcolm's harvest metaphor ('ripe') makes the tyrant's fall a season, not merely a battle — time and nature reclaiming Scotland — while 'the powers above / Put on their instruments' claims heaven's commission for the invasion. This is the restored order's official theology: quote it beside Macbeth's 'juggling fiends' to show each side naming its supernatural sponsor in its final act.

Methods: harvest metaphor · providential framing

Duncan & Malcolm: all 8 quotations in the Macbeth quote bank, analysed →

Other readings

• Is the ending secure? Malcolm's order is real, but the audience holds two loose threads: Fleance (the prophecy's unpaid instalment) and Donalbain (absent, in Ireland). Some productions end on the witches or on Fleance; the text permits the unease.

Essay arguments

• Duncan's murder is staged as sacrilege, not politics: the imagery (anointed temple, unnatural night) frames regicide as a wound in creation — context (divine right, the Gunpowder Plot) explains the framing.
• Malcolm's England scene is the play's theory of good kingship: legitimacy must add cunning to virtue — Duncan's fate is the syllabus, Malcolm the graduate.

In theme essays

• Kingship/order: this pair IS the theme's evidence set.
• Appearance vs reality: Duncan's 'no art' line anchors it.
• The supernatural: the unnatural omens after the murder show nature as moral participant.

Questions that get asked

• How does Shakespeare present kingship in Macbeth?
• What is the significance of Duncan's murder and its aftermath?
• 'The play ends with order fully restored.' How far do you agree?

Think you understand Duncan & Malcolm? Teach it, then defend it against William Shakespeare →

Ambition

The play's named engine — 'vaulting ambition' — examined not as desire for achievement but as the willingness to break the world to place yourself higher in it.

The central idea, in plain words: in Macbeth, ambition destroys the very things it wins. Shakespeare builds this as a chain, step by step. (1) The desire. When the witches hail him 'King hereafter' (1.3), Macbeth starts as if guilty and within moments imagines murder — so the text suggests, though it never states, that the wish was already there; by 1.4, once Malcolm is named heir, he is hiding 'black and deep desires'. (2) The choice, made knowingly. In the 'If it were done' soliloquy (1.7) he lists every reason not to kill Duncan and admits his only motive is 'vaulting ambition' — he sees the cost before he pays it. (3) Gain becomes fear. Once king, he finds 'To be thus is nothing, / But to be safely thus' (3.1): the crown brings no peace, only the need to kill again. (4) Fear becomes slaughter — Banquo, then Macduff's family. (5) The final account. In the 'Tomorrow' speech (5.5) he finds that life signifies 'nothing'. The Grade 9 argument: each thing ambition wins takes away his ability to enjoy it — first sleep, then the feast, then his marriage, and finally any sense that life means something.

“To be thus is nothing, / But to be safely thus.” — Macbeth, Act 3 Scene 1

The crown achieved and instantly worthless: 'nothing' is the exact word, and the play will keep it (the 'tomorrow' speech ends on 'nothing' too — 'signifying nothing'). Ambition's object dissolves at the moment of grasp; only 'safely' — security, the tyrant's obsession — remains, and security requires endless further crime.

Methods: antithesis · echo of 'nothing'

Use this in an essay. Link ambition to the Jacobean frame: in a divinely ordered hierarchy (the Great Chain of Being), ambition above your station was not a career strategy but a form of rebellion against creation — which is why the play prices it in cosmic disorder, not just personal guilt.

Essay questions to practise

• How does Shakespeare present ambition as dangerous?
• 'Macbeth's ambition is not his own — it is planted in him.' How far do you agree?
• How does Shakespeare present the consequences of ambition?

5 quotations on ambition in the Macbeth quote bank, analysed →

Think you understand ambition in Macbeth? Teach it, then defend it →

Guilt and conscience

The play's special effects — dagger, voice, ghost, spot — are all guilt made sensible: Macbeth is Shakespeare's most sustained staging of conscience as experience.

Guilt in Macbeth escalates through the senses in order: sight (the dagger), hearing (the voice crying 'Sleep no more'), sight again but public (Banquo's ghost), then smell and touch (the spot, the perfumes of Arabia). The couple divide the theme chronologically — his guilt is loudest before and just after the deed, hers arrives late and terminally — and they trade positions: the hand-washing pragmatist becomes the compulsive washer; the man who could not say 'Amen' learns to kill without noticing. The theme's darkest turn: guilt fades. By Act 5 Macbeth has 'almost forgot the taste of fears' and 'supp'd full with horrors' — conscience does not defeat him; it dies in him, and its death is the real damnation.

Grade 9 insight. Top-band structure point: Shakespeare gives guilt a metre. Macbeth's guilt speaks in soaring pentameter ('multitudinous seas incarnadine'); Lady Macbeth's terminal guilt is denied verse altogether — the sleepwalking scene is prose fragments. The form performs the difference between guilt imagined and guilt lived.

The guilt evidence chain

• 'Amen' stuck in his throat (2.2) — grace refused at the threshold.
• 'Sleep no more' (2.2) — sentence pronounced.
• 'A little water clears us' vs 'multitudinous seas' (2.2) — two theologies of stain.
• Banquo's ghost (3.4) — guilt goes public.
• 'Out, damned spot' (5.1) — the water theology refuted.
• 'She should have died hereafter' (5.5) — guilt outlived; vacancy instead.

9 quotations on guilt and conscience in the Macbeth quote bank, analysed →

Think you understand guilt and conscience in Macbeth? Teach it, then defend it →

The supernatural

Witches, prophecies, apparitions, an air-drawn dagger, unnatural night: the play saturates its world with the uncanny while keeping every crime scrupulously human.

The precise claim to make: the supernatural in Macbeth INFORMS but never PERFORMS. The witches predict and vanish; the dagger marshals him the way that he was going; the ghost sits in Macbeth's own place. Every reading of the play turns on this division of labour — and Shakespeare protects it carefully (Banquo hears the same prophecy and kills no one). For the Jacobean audience the supernatural was factual (James I's Daemonologie, the witch trials); for a modern one it is psychological; the play was built to work under both descriptions, and the strongest essays run the two readings in parallel rather than choosing.

“And be these juggling fiends no more believed, / That palter with us in a double sense; / That keep the word of promise to our ear, / And break it to our hope.” — Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 8

Macbeth's own final theory of the witches: 'palter' (deceive by quibbling) and 'double sense' name equivocation exactly. Ear versus hope — the words kept, the meaning broken — is the best two-line definition of the play's method you can quote.

Methods: definition of equivocation · antithesis

Avoid. Do not write 'the witches make Macbeth kill Duncan'. They never mention murder. The idea, the plan and the hand are all Macbeth's (and his wife's) — the play's whole theology depends on it, and examiners flag the error instantly.

5 quotations on the supernatural in the Macbeth quote bank, analysed →

Think you understand the supernatural in Macbeth? Teach it, then defend it →

Appearance and reality

'False face must hide what the false heart doth know': a play in which faces, castles, prophecies and even weather systematically mean their opposites.

The theme runs from the witches' founding paradox through every layer: Duncan misreads two Cawdors; Inverness looks 'pleasant' and guest-friendly; Lady Macbeth performs the 'honour'd hostess'; Malcolm feigns vice to find virtue; an army wears a forest. Track the theme's education: Duncan dies of misreading, Malcolm survives by strategic misrepresentation — the play does not condemn appearance-management absolutely; it distinguishes the serpent's use from the survivor's.

Use this in an essay. Sharp paragraph: compare the two 'performances' — Lady Macbeth's hostess act (appearance concealing murder) and Malcolm's vice act (appearance testing loyalty). Same technique, opposite morality: the play judges deception by its object, which is a subtler claim than 'appearances are deceptive'.

Think you understand appearance and reality in Macbeth? Teach it, then defend it →

Kingship, order and tyranny

Written for a king, the play is a study in the difference between a king and a tyrant — and in what regicide does to a world built on divine order.

The play offers a taxonomy: Duncan (sacred, trusting, vulnerable), Macbeth (usurping, sleepless, bloody — 'a tyrant whose sole name blisters our tongues'), Edward the Confessor (offstage in England, healing by royal touch — the anti-Macbeth, curing where Macbeth kills), Malcolm (tested, cunning, restorative). Under it runs the Great Chain of Being: the king as God's deputy, regicide as cosmic rupture — hence the unnatural omens and Scotland itself sickening ('It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds'). The nation is a body; tyranny is its disease; the rightful king is medicine.

1606. James I — patron of Shakespeare's company (the King's Men), author of Daemonologie and treatises on kingship, survivor of the Gunpowder Plot (November 1605), claimed descendant of Banquo. Macbeth touches every one of these: witches, divine right, equivocating traitors, Banquo's royal line shown stretching 'to th' crack of doom'. Deploy this as design context (why these elements exist), not decoration.

11 quotations on kingship, order and tyranny in the Macbeth quote bank, analysed →

Think you understand kingship, order and tyranny in Macbeth? Teach it, then defend it →

Gender and manhood (minor)

'What is a man?' is asked, answered wrongly, and finally answered rightly: the play stages competing definitions of masculinity and prices each one.

The wrong equation — manhood as daring ('When you durst do it, then you were a man') — is Lady Macbeth's weapon, Macbeth's goad to the murderers ('Now, if you have a station in the file, / Not i' th' worst rank of manhood, say't'), and the play's target. Against it: Macduff's 'I must also feel it as a man', and Malcolm's 'Dispute it like a man' corrected in real time. Femininity is likewise interrogated: Lady Macbeth must be 'unsexed' to act, the witches are bearded women, Lady Macduff is femininity destroyed by male politics. The play's answer, delivered by its ending: the complete human being feels AND acts — the divorce of the two is where the tragedy lived.

5 quotations on Gender and manhood in the Macbeth quote bank, analysed →

Think you understand Gender and manhood in Macbeth? Teach it, then defend it →

Time, children and the future (minor)

A less obvious theme that unlocks top-band readings: Macbeth's war is ultimately against time itself — against succession, seed, and tomorrow.

Count the children: Banquo's Fleance (escapes), Macduff's son (murdered on stage), the bloody child and crowned child of the apparitions, Lady Macbeth's remembered babe, the 'naked new-born babe' of pity in Macbeth's own soliloquy. The Macbeths have no living child; the crown they seize cannot descend ('Upon my head they plac'd a fruitless crown, / And put a barren sceptre in my gripe'). Macbeth's late crimes are all aimed at other people's futures — Fleance, Macduff's 'line' — and all fail. Time wins: 'the seeds of time' grow exactly as Banquo asked to be told, and the play ends with the future (Malcolm, and beyond him Banquo's line, and beyond that James in the audience) restored. Fruitless/barren versus seed/harvest is a complete image-system to build an essay on.

2 quotations on time, children and the future in the Macbeth quote bank, analysed →

Think you understand time, children and the future in Macbeth? Teach it, then defend it →