guilt Flashcards
Macbeth - Act 3, Scene 2
“O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!”
These scorpions represent the evil because Macbeth’s mind is tainted by poisonous thoughts.
Mabeth - Act 3, Scene 2
“ere the bat hath flown”
A bat is a blind creature striking only at night for its preys. This reflects Macbeth’s actions: following his wife and the prophecies blindly and striking for murder only at night.
PROPOSED SUGGESTION: Bats are creatures often associated with the supernatural and therefore, its presence here brings an ominous atmosphere.
Macbeth - Act 2, Scene 2
“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?”
Blood, specifically Duncan’s blood, serves as the symbol of Macbeth’s guilt. Panicking after the murder, he imagines that all great Neptune’s ocean cannot cleanse him–that there is enough blood on his hands to turn the green sea red. (Neptune is the Roman god of the sea.) In other words, he imagines the guilt will stay with him until his death.
Lady Macbeth’s response to this speech will be her prosaic remark:
A little water clears us of this deed…
By the end of the play, however, she will share Macbeth’s sense that Duncan’s murder has irreparably stained them with blood.
Lady Macbeth - Act 2, Scene 2
“I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal;
For it must seem their guilt.”
Gilding is to adorn somthing with precious metals (often gold). This quote, therefore, shows us that L. Macbeth sees the blood and murder of Duncan in a positive light ; she’s enthralled by the blood and promise of power.
Lady Macbeth - Act 2, Scene 2
“To wear a heart so white.”
Connotations of the colour white are purity, innocence &c, unlike Macbeth, she feels no guilt in her heart.
Lady Macbeth - Act 5, Scene 1
“Out damned spot!”
Earlier in the play, Lady Macbeth possessed a stronger resolve and sense of purpose than her husband and was the driving force behind their plot to kill Duncan. When Macbeth believed his hand was irreversibly bloodstained earlier in the play, Lady Macbeth had told him:
A little water clears us of this deed…”
Now, however, she too hallucinates blood. Her recall falters: her memory obsessively returns to the murder, but she doesn’t seem to know whether it’s happened yet or not. She is completely undone by guilt and descends into madness.
It may be a reflection of her mental and emotional state that she is not speaking in verse; this is one of the few moments in the play when a major character—save for the witches, who speak in four-foot couplets—strays from iambic pentameter. In fact critic A. C. Bradley has said she is “denied the dignity of verse”–uniquely among major Shakespearean characters making their final appearance.
Compare “Out, damned spot! out” with Macbeth’s later “Out, out, brief candle!” in Act 5, Scene 5. Guilt can stain a whole life, but life itself is fleeting.
Macbeth - Act 5, Scene 5
“Out out damned candle.”
The candle represents human life. Macbeth calls it a brief candle, meaning a short candle that only burns briefly. It burns down and the flame goes out. And then it is completely dark. Life is really very short and in the context of that great darkness around it, it is inconsequential. The burning ambition to become king is meaningless in the context of that vast stretch of black night beyond human life.
Lady Macbeth - Act 2, Scene 2
“It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman,”
The owl here represents a hunter of the night, a killer working in the darkness, much like Macbeth, who kills Duncan in the middle of he night.
In Greek mythology, the screeching owl was one of Hades’ sacred animals, hence the owl here “that shriek’d” may be a screeching owl.
An owl’s shriek was supposed to be an omen of death. The bellman’s job was to ring a bell while walking in front of a coffin that was being carried through the streets. From 1605 onwards, a bellman also rang a handbell at midnight outside the cell of condemned people due to be executed the following day, and called on them to remember their sins. The owl’s shriek is therefore understood by Lady Macbeth to be a sign that Duncan’s death is imminent.
