My Essay Flashcards
P1 I1🏇🙏⛓️🤴🤩
At the beginning of the play, Macbeth rejects his ambition. 🏇
He believes that rising to the highest authority of the country would not stand ‘within the prospect of belief’ 🙏
indicating that even pondering upon the fact he might be king is an unnatural desire and is completely beyond him. 🫅
He also uses a parallel comparison with the titles king and Cawdor, and as the audience know is soon to have news of his new title it foreshadows that this ‘fantastical’ idea of becoming king is possible. 🤩✨
P1 I2
However, once Macbeth receives this title, he begins to have a moral battle with himself. 🤺
He believes that stepping out of his place as a ‘valiant cousin’ to Duncan would cause him to ‘jump the life to come’. 🛟
This shows that if Macbeth was to betray Duncan and take his title, he is aware that his soul would be dammed to hell as he had committed the sin of regicide. 🔥
The verb ‘jump’ may be also used as a metaphor to represent the physical act of jumping a rank in society. 🪜
At the time when this play was written, it was believed that going against the chain would be committing a sin and it would be going against God’s plan to try and get a better life.
P1 I3 (inc)
Later on, Macbeth discovers that the heir to the throne is Malcom, the prince of Cumberland. 🥒
We start to see his true thoughts, ‘deep’ desires and the start of his ‘vaulting’ hamartia as he views the new thane as a ‘step’ which he must ‘fall down or else o’erleap’ 🕳️🏇🍁
P2 I1
Lady Macbeth is determined that Macbeth will fulfil his desires and become king. 🤴
As we see Macbeth get more skeptical of the regicide plot, we start to see LM’s perspective on her husband. 🤵
Lady Macbeth recognises that Macbeth does not have the ‘illness’ with his ambition and is ‘too full of the milk of human kindness’. 🥛
This is significant as LM believes that her husband is not worthy or masculine enough to commit to his ambitions and to act upon them with the plot against Duncan. 🗺️
The wording of ‘illness’ also connotes something horrible and dreadful, and foreshadows the pair’s descent into madness as a result of their ambitions later in the play. 🤒
P2 I2
At the start of () we begin to see LM immediate ambition break through when she receives news of the prophecy. 📜
She asks the ‘spirits’ to ‘unsex’ her and fill her with ‘direst cruelty’. ♈️
This shows that LM is prepared to go out of her way and give up her feminine qualities so that she can align herself with cruelty and therefore assist Macbeth in perusing his ‘dark’ desires. 🌚
The ‘spirits’ that are being referred to link to LM with the supernatural and the obscurity of the request as women have been expected to be compassionate and nurturing. ☺️In these times, women were very much oppressed in society and were seen as weak and only capable of having traits such as being nurturing and kind due to Jacobean patriarchy.
This highlights the huge extent of willing to have reach of her ambition ✏️
P3 I1
After the successful murder of Duncan, 🔪Shakespeare presents the negative effects of ambition and what it can do to someone. Shortly after the murder, Macbeth feels the immediate psychological and emotion effects on his mental health. ⛑️
He hears a voice crying ‘sleep no more, Macbeth does murder sleep’ on the night of the murder. 💤
This hallucination foreshadows his future insomnia and lack of sleep, which leads in to more incidents and paranoia. It is also a personification of his thoughts, which shows how mentally unstable and disturbed Macbeth is. ⚛️
As well as this, sleep has connotations of being ‘innocent’, implying that Macbeth has got rid of his innocence, forever. 😇
