Macbeth Act 1 Flashcards
- Stage direction
- Motif?
- Symbol for evil
Pathetic fallacy
“Thunder and lightning.”
- Power of 3
- Rhyming couplet, language of witches
- Characterization
- Shakespeare’s comment on witchcraft
Hook for King James - supernatural
“When shall we three meet again?/In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”
- Rhyming couplet - creates sense of witches power
- Binaries
- Foreshadowing
Unsettling feeling…casting a spell? incantation
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair/hover through fog and filthy air.”
- Characterization of Macbeth at beginning of play
- Elizabethan values - good soldiers
- Good man turned bad
- Foreshadowing
Dramatic irony
“brave Macbeth - well he deserves that name”
- blood Imagery
- Strong soldier
- Courageous
“Which smoked with bloody execution”
- Blood imagery - gruesome
This behaviour is rewarded
“unseamed him from the nave to th’chaps”
- Foreshadowing
- Blood imagery
“Fixed his head upon our battlements”
- Simile
- Strong soldiers
“They were as cannons over-charged with double cracks”
- Macbeth and Banquo are strong together
- Best friends
- Use of double - witches influence?
“So they doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe”
- Macbeth and Banquo are celebrated
- Contrast to later in the play
- Builds dramatic tension
Characterisation
“They smack of honour both”
- Shakespeare’s commentary on God’s power (God could not save the King)
- Dramatic irony
- Fate and destiny
“God save the King”
- Macbeth may be tainted by his title like the previous Thane of Cawdor
- Characterisation of Macbeth
- Rewarded for being brutal
“What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won.”
- Honourable soldier
- Foreshadowing
- clothing imagery
“Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?”
- Foreshadowing
- Already captured by witches power
- Foul and fair repetition
“so foul and fair a day I have not seen.”
- Referring to witches
- Binaries, honest vs. betrayal
“Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s in deepest consequence.”
- Unsettled by witches
- Nature imagery
“Make my seated heart knock at my ribs/Against the use of nature?”
- Foul vs fair
- Repetition, rhythm
“Cannot be ill, cannot be good”
- Unsettled by witches
- Uncomfortable
“Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair”
- Nothing is as it seems
- Building dramatic tension
“And nothing is,/but what is not”
- Will not act
- LM spurs him to act
- Leave it to fate
“Why chance may crown me without my stir”
- Dramatic irony
- No secrets between friends
“Let us speak/our free hearts to each other”
“there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”
“He was a gentleman on whom I built an absolute trust”
- Thane of Cawdor’s betrayal
- Foreshadowing, tragic irony
- King feeling betrayed - naïve, kind
- Light vs dark imagery
- Change in character
- Ambition - Macbeth really wants to be King
- Wrong to show ambition
“stars, hide your fires,/let not light see my black and deep desires”
- Metaphor, symbolism
- Gender roles
“full o’th’milk of human kindness”
