Macbeth - Quotes Flashcards
“Is this a dagger which I see before me? Come let me clutch thee” - Macbeth
- Embraces his madness and rejects guilt
- Embraces god and the bloody dagger
“Sleep no more! Macbeth doth murder sleep” - Macbeth
- Shakespeare dramatising quick descent into madness
- Becoming king would get rid of all joy in his life
- Great prize of kingship is worthless unless you are the divinely appointed king
“Will all great Neptune’s oceans wash this blood clean from my hand?” - Macbet
- Guilt forces you to reject god - Neptune not a Christian god
- Eternity in hell if you didn’t believe in god
“I shame to wear a heart so white” - Lady Macbeth
- Instructing her husband to reject guilt and innocence
- White symbolises innocence and purity but she is using it to symbolise cowardice
“It will have blood; they say blood will have blood” - Macbeth
- Overcomes guilt and kills more people
- The blood he sheds demands he sheds more blood
- Makes it more easier for him to kill and killing has taken over him
“Out damned spot: Out, I say! … Hell is murky” - Lady Macbeth
- “Damned” signifies she’s going to hell
- Shakespeare’s message that if you go against your conscience, your guilt will destroy you on Earth and permanently destroyed in Hell
“What’s done cannot be undone” - Lady Macbeth
- You can’t get rid of the consequences of what you have done
“She should have died hereafter” - Macbeth
- Proof that Macbeth no longer loves his wife and then abandons her after she serves her purpose
- Macbeth knows he cannot win with everyone turning against him
“Life is a tale told by an idiot” - Macbeth
- Life is scripted out. There is fate
- He blames God for writing the script and is an idiot who wrote Macbeth’s fate
“Teach bloody instruction” - Macbeth
- Killing Duncan taught other people that they can kill him - it is okay to kill a king
- Someone else can kill you if you kill King James
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes” - the witches
- Witches observation about Macbeth’s wickedness signposts his descent into evil
- Rhyming couplet suggests they’re supernatural and they know things
“Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here”
- Commanding evil spirits to take away her feminine traits
- Women that develop men’s traits make them more powerful but also lead to their downfall
- Patriarchal society
“Fair is foul and foul is fair” - witches
“So foul and fair a day I have not seen” - Macbeth
- Paradox - themes of deception in the play (what is good is bad and vice versa)
- Foreshadowing of chaos about to come in the play
- Macbeth is already susceptible and led by them
“Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent underneath it” - Lady Macbeth
- Lady Macbeth is duplicitous
- Suggesting Macbeth to hide his true treasonous self from King Duncan
“The dead butcher and his fiend-like queen” - Malcolm
- Macbeth was evil and had no remorse
- Doesn’t refer to them by their names
- Aligning Lady Macbeth with the witches with “fiend”
