Macbeth Revision Guide

Act 1, Scene 5
'I do fear thy nature, / It is too full o'th'milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way'
~ Lady Macbeth is worried that Macbeth is too good and soft-hearted to take action to get the crown. She acknowledges that Macbeth has ambition, but that he needs to be ruthless (show no pity) to get the things that he wants.

Act 1, Scene 5
'Thou wouldst be great, / Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it'
~ This quote suggests that Lady Macbeth sees kindness and goodness as bad traits - she doesn't really think these are good parts of Macbeth's character.
~ She doubts that her husband can kill the King.
~ She says that he could be more powerful and that he is ambitious, but he doesn't have the evil inside him to help him do what is needed.

Act 1, Scene 5
'Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear / And chatise thee with the valour of my tongue'
~ This is part of Lady Macbeth's speech, in which she summarises her plan to manipulate Macbeth into going after the crown. When the audience first sees Lady Macbeth on stage, she is reading the letter from her husband. Even though Macbeth never mentions the idea of trying to take the crown in his letter, Lady Macbeth immediately wants to do this.
~ She wants her husband to be more powerful so that she, in turn, shares the power.

Act 1, Scene 5
'Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here'
'fill me from the crown to the toe topfull / Of direst cruelty'
~ When she asks to be 'unsex[ed]', she is asking the spirits to remove the feminine aspects of her character.
~ Women were supposed to be gentle and kind. she wants to be cruel and not feel regret over any of her actions.
~ She wants to be able to force her husband to murder the king.

Act 1, Scene 5
'Come' , 'fill', 'stop', 'take'
~ These are some of the imperative verbs used by Shakespeare to fill Lady Macbeth's speech in Act 1, Scene 5 to show that she is taking control.
~ She wants to be harder so that she can commit these crimes. These characteristics were definitely seen as masculine, but not honourable.

Act 1, Scene 5
'Come to my woman's breasts / And take my milk for gall'
~ This quote is the clearest demand to have her femininity removed.
~ She no longer wants to be able to nurture children with her breastmilk. she wants her breastmilk to be filled with bitter poison instead - this is a clear indication that she doesn't want to nurture anyone; she wants to cause pain and death.

Act 1, Scene 5
'O never / Shall sun that morrow see'
~ This is when Lady Macbeth decides the plan - King Duncan will not live to see the dawn of the next day under their roof.
~ When Macbeth arrives home, Lady Macbeth dominates (has power over) the conversation, whereas Macbeth hardly speaks.

Act 1, Scene 5
'Look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under 't'
~ This is a simile used by Lady Macbeth when she tells her husband to think about the facial expression that he is pulling. He should think about it to hide his true intentions, he needs to come across as innocent, even though he has violent intentions.
~ Lady Macbeth thinks that Macbeth is not cunning or devious enough, she thinks that he struggles to trick people. This links back to the witch's line: 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' - Lady Macbeth wants her husband to practise this, to be able to encourage people to trust him, and then to betray them without warning.
~ Links to the key theme of manipulation.

Act 1, Scene 6
'Fair and noble hostess'
'By your leave, hostess'
'honoured hostess'
~ This is how King Duncan refers to Lady Macbeth.
~ This proves that she is very good at hiding her true thoughts.
~ Shakespeare is using dramatic irony here: the audience knows that she plans to kill hem, but she meets him with kind words and welcome.
~ Her manipulative and secretive nature highlights her as a villain in the story. She wants her husband to murder the King purely so they can become more powerful.

Act 1, Scene 7
'live a coward in thine own esteem'
~ Lady Macbeth attacks Macbeth's courage, asking him if he plans to live in fear.
~ This is done by Lady Macbeth to change her husband's mind and convince him to kill King Duncan. She then tells him that he has broken a promise to her. She says she would rather murder her own child than go back on her word to him.

Act 1, Scene 7
'Bring forth men-children only'
~ Said by Macbeth to Lady Macbeth
~ This suggests that she has masculine qualities. She is so masculine that her husband thinks that she should only give birth to male children (traditionally seen as the stronger sex).

Act 2, Scene 2
'Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done 't'
~ This quote shows Lady Macbeth thinking about killing the King herself.
~ This is interesting because it shows that she has some softer emotion - a love for her father.
~ She drugs the guards outside the King's chamber and puts their daggers ready for the murder. In this way, she manipulates the murder scene to ensure Macbeth will not be blamed.

Act 5, Scene 1
'Out damned spot! Out, I say!'
~ Here, Lady Macbeth seems haunted by the blood on her hands - the same blood she said did not bother her in Act 2, Scene 2.
~ She is trying to order the blood to leave her hands. This makes it seem like she is permanently marked by it. The blood isn't real - it is a symbol of the guilt that she feels over the murder.

Act 5, Scene 1
'Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand'
~ By speaking like this in her sleep, Lady Macbeth seems to regret her crimes, even though she says she does not.
~ Shakespeare could be suggesting that we cannot escape from the consequences of our actions. Sometimes, we have to admit to our faults and deal with them - otherwise they will haunt us.
~ Even though Lady Macbeth comes across as a somewhat evil, cruel character, she does have a human side that struggles to deal with what she has done.
~ The structure of her speech moves into prose (ordinary language without a metre), rather than the usual iambic pentameter that Shakespeare writes in.
~ Shakespeare could be doing this to show how her speech is fluid (free) and doesn't have structure. This would suggest that it is more natural and honest.
~ When she is sleeping, Lady Macbeth loses the mask of innocence that she normally wears when she is awake.

Act 5, Scene 3
'Not so sick, my Lord, / As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies / That keep her from her rest'
~ This is what the doctor tells Macbeth about Lady Macbeth. It implies that sleepwalking is also the sign of a distressed mind.
~ Sleepwalking was seen as a sign that someone was possessed by a demon. So a Jacobean (during the reign of James 1 of England) audience might have thought that this was because Lady Macbeth invited the spirits into her at the start of the play.

Act 5, Scene 5
'A cry of women within' [stage direction]
~ This indicates the death of Lady Macbeth, even though the audience never sees it.

Act 5, Scene 9
'by self and violent hands / Took off her own life'
~ This is what Malcolm reports at the end, suggesting that Lady Macbeth killed herself.
~ Suicide was seen as a sin, but by this stage, Lady Macbeth has already damned (condemned) her immortal soul by being involved in the plot to kill the King.
~ When she was sleepwalking, she said 'Hell is murky'. This may suggest that she is already existing in a sort of hell.
~ The human side of Lady Macbeth comes through with her apparent suicide - she cannot live with the guilt of what she has done, and so only sees one solution: suicide.

~Taken from SenecaLearning and CGP GCSE English Macbeth The Text Guide.