Macbeth Act 2 Flashcards
‘That which hath made them drunk, hath made me bold:/ What hath quench’d them, hath given me fire’
(2,2)
Ironic- she couldn’t carry it out herself.
Said by LM
‘The sleeping, and the dead,/ Are but as pictures: ‘‘tis they eye of childhood/ That fears a painted devil’
(2,2)
After calling Macbeth a coward before the murder, she accuses him of acting like a child after it.
suggests that Lady Macbeth thinks Macbeth a scared child. This is because he won’t go back to the scene of his crime and frame the sleeping guards for Duncan’s murder. In modern English, Lady Macbeth is saying that only children are afraid of scary pictures. This is her stinging rebuke to Macbeth, who tells his wife that he’s afraid even to think about what he’s done.
She’s telling her husband that he shouldn’t fear those who sleep or those who are dead because they are like “pictures,” static images who cannot harm him. She calls him childish for giving in to fear because only a child’s eye would fear a “devil” in a picture.
This is another one of Lady Macbeth’s insults, which she often relies on to convince her husband to do as she wishes.
Macbeth: ‘Will all great Neptune’s Ocean wash this blood./ Clean from my hand’
Lady Macbeth; ‘A little water clears is of this deed’
(2,2)
meaning he doesn’t think anything will ever wash the metaphorical blood from his hands. Guilt
He has just murdered Duncan, and the crime was accompanied by supernatural portents. Now he hears a mysterious knocking on his gate, which seems to promise doom. (In fact, the person knocking is Macduff, who will indeed eventually destroy Macbeth.) The enormity of Macbeth’s crime has awakened in him a powerful sense of guilt that will hound him throughout the play. Blood, specifically Duncan’s blood, serves as the symbol of that guilt, and Macbeth’s sense that “all great Neptune’s ocean” cannot cleanse him—that there is enough blood on his hands to turn the entire sea red—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” (2.2.65). By the end of the play, however, she will share Macbeth’s sense that Duncan’s murder has irreparably stained them with blood
‘Lamentings heard I’ th air;/ Strange screams of death’
(2,3)
By Lennox
reminds the audience of the sounds that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth heard in the immediate aftermath of the murder bringing back the tension from that earlier scene which had been dispelled by the porter and his bawdy humour.
The discovery of Duncan’s murder in Act 2, Scene 3 is an extended moment of dramatic irony. The audience is aware that Duncan is dead, but Macduff and Lennox are oblivious, an ignorance that Macbeth maintains by making comments that imply the king is still alive.
