Macbeth Act 2 Flashcards
- Change in character - lying to his best friend
- Breaking promise
“I think not of them”
- M soliloquy
- Blood imagery
“And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood”
- Foreshadowing
- Innate trait, curtain between life and death is sleep
“Wicked dreams abuse/the curtained sleep”
- Psychological decline, soliloquy
- Hallucination - knows he is hallucinating
a what of the mind
“A dagger of the mind, a false creation”
Nature’s influence - higher power, alliteration
LM hearing of regicide
“I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry”
- Sinned, going to hell?
- Could not pronounce Amen
“But wherefore could I not pronounce Amen?”
- Sleep is a metaphor for innocence
- Psychological decline
“Sleep no more:/Macbeth does murder sleep”
- Colloquial language
- Simple task, irony as they will not be cleared of deed so easily
- Foreshadowing LM’s decline, dramatic irony
“Go get some water/and wash this filthy witness from your hand.”
“A little water clears us of this deed.”
- Gender roles, LM still has power over M
- Coward
“My hands are of your colour, but I shame to wear a heart so white.”
- Shift in character
- Accepting himself as a murderer
- characterisation
“To know my deed, ‘twere best not know my self.”
- Dramatic irony
- Building dramatic tension
- Macbeth’s have been good hosts
“Is the king stirring, worthy thane?”
- Nature is disturbed by Duncan’s death
- Shakespeare does not endorse regicide
“The night has been unruly”
“The earth/was feverous and did shake.”
- Horrified at what M has just seen
- Hiding the fact that M committed regicide
“Tongue nor heart cannot conceive, nor name thee.”
- Wake up from sleep and look on the real thing
- Sleep imagery
- Sleep = innocence, protection from reality
“Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit/and look on death itself”
- Rhetoric
- LM’s selfishness, our house, not our King (not concerned about Duncan)
“What, in our house?”
