Macbeth Flashcards
‘If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well It were done quickly’
Macbeth says if he was to murder the king, he would want it done quickly.
‘Bloody instructions, which being taught, return To plague th’inventor’
Macbeth understands that he will pay for his actions and this also foreshadows mental illness.
‘Vaulting ambition which overleaps itself And falls on th’other’
Macbeth’s ambition will make him fall and overstretch him.
‘We will proceed no further in this business. He hath honour’d me for late’
Macbeth is seen as weak here because he refuses to kill the king, and he also tries to take control of the situation in not doing as Lady Macbeth says.
‘Prithee, peace. I dare do all that may become a man’
Macbeth is asking Lady Macbeth to stop and he is also being emasculated.
‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand?’
The thought of regicide drives Macbeth to insanity. Also, this is another link to his mental suffering, and he is hallucinating.
‘A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?’
Macbeth’s mind is deteriorating and overheating.
‘Mind eyes are made the fools o’th’other senses’
He knows he is not all there. Macbeth’s eyes are being tricked by his brain (hallucinating).
‘Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives, Words to the heat of deeds to cold breath gives’
Influences the supernatural, also rhyming couplets on the end.
‘This is a sorry sight’
Macbeth is overcome by guilt and remorse as he is looking at his hands.
‘I could not say ‘Amen’ When they did say ‘God bless us’
He has betrayed God, and has betrayed the ‘Right Divine Of Kings’.
‘Macbeth does murder sleep; the innocent sleep’
Motif of sleep - can’t sleep can no longer heal his mind.
‘Shall sleep no more: Macbeth shall sleep no more’
Macbeth has been overcome with guilt.
‘Well all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand?’
Macbeth suggests that a whole entire ocean couldn’t wash his guilt away.
Soliloquy - ‘But to be safely thus. Our fears in Banquo Stick deep, and in his royalty of nature’
Paranoia and the 3rd prophecy had come true.
