MACBETH QUOTATIONS- (btw already done every soliloquy)

Witches

 “Fair is foul and foul is fair,/ Hover through the fog and filthy air.”- typical couplet Shakespeare
uses to voice the witches- sense of chanting= supernatural. Paradoxes, recurring motif
throughout the play, complexity of human nature.
 “like a rat without a tail, / I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do.”- is going to rape some sailor because his wife
didn’t give her chestnuts, simile, comparison to animal, repetition of do.
 “I’ll drain him dry as hay”- simile, emphasizes her intention of rape.
 Banquo says they are “So wither’d and so wild”. They have beards.

Macbeth- Noble Warrior

 “But all’s too weak, / For brave Macbeth.”

 “Disdaining Fortune, with his brandish’d steel, / Which smoked with bloody execution, / Like
Valour’s minion carv’d out his passage”- simile, comparing him to a slave of the virtue valour=
brave warrior. Fearless, he disdains fortune.
 Duncan refers to him as “O valiant cousin! Worthy gentleman!”
 “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”- successful fighting but terrible weather.
 “If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me / Without my stir.”- ultimately a man
who lives by his conscience/ morals. Decides not to pursue the prochecies, adopts a fatalistic
attitude.
 Lady Mac about Mac: “Your face, my thane, is as a book where men / May read strange
matters.” – too honest/ honourable.
 He SHOULD be: “Your hand, your tongue; look like th’innocent flower, / But be the serpent
under’t.”- be deceptive and sly minxy.
 Consciously decides not to kill Dunc: “We will proceed no further in this business.”- firm
language as opposed to the soliloquy from just before.

Macbeth- becoming a dodge/ deceiver +guilt

 “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.” – learning to deceive.
 “I think not of them [witches]”- bull, he does all the time.
 “I could not say ‘Amen’”- horrible image for Elizabethan Christian audience, spiritually damned.
 “every noise appals me”
 “We have scotch’d the snake not kill’d it”
 “we will eat our meal in fear and sleep / In the affliction of these terrible dreams”
 “better be with the dead.”
 “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!” scorpions- poison, evil.
Macbeth as a Tyrant

 2nd Apparition says: “Be bloody, bold and resolute; laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none
of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.”
 Decides to kill Macduff anyway, like wth for the lols I’ll just kill dat biatch cos I’m cool lyk dat:
“what need I fear of thee [Macduff] But yet I’ll make assurance double sure… thou shalt not
live.”
 Unnecessary killing, becomes rash and gance, He will kill: “His [Macduff’s] wife, his babies, and
all unfortunate souls / That trace him in his line.”

Macbeth as a reflector

 “And that which should accompany old age, / As honour, love, obedience. Troops of friends, / I
must not look to have” instead he will have: “Curses”- realizes he has forgone a normal life,
sacrificed too much to reach his goal.
 “I have almost forgot the taste of fears”
 “I have supp’d full with horrors; / Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts”- he is
desensitized to all bad things, he has experienced things that are that terrible.

Macbeth as a Warrior, Tragic Hero

 “I will not yield:

 “Yet I will try the last. Before my body/ I throw my warlike shield.”- willing to go to the last.
 “I have no words; / My voice is in my sword.”- warrior.
 “But bear-like I must fight the course.”- willing to challenge fate, animalistic, use of simile.

Banquo

 “The instruments of Darkness tell us truths / Win us with honest trifles to betray’s / In deepest
consequence”- prudently dismisses the witches, understands they are not to be meddled with,
unlike Mac.
 Banquo says: “Good sir, why do you start; and seem to fear / Things that do sound fair?”-
observes Mac’s reaction.
 He says: “Look how our partner’s rapt.” Saying how Mac is entranced by prophecies.
 Dunc says: “he is full so valiant.”
 Fatalistic, doesn’t act on prophecies unlike Mac: “May they [the prophecies] not be my oracles
as well, / And set me up in hope? But hush! No more.”

Lady Macbeth

 Is tight with Mac, he calls her “my dearest partner of greatness.”

 Knows Mac, knows he abides by his conscience too much: “yet I do fear thy nature, / It is too full
o’th’milk of human kindess”- metaphor of` milk- imagery of motherhood, affection, nurturing.
  “Art not without ambition, but without / The illness that should attend it.”- hit the nail on the
head- he has ambition but is too honourable to act on it.
 “I may pour my spirits in thine ear; / And chastise with the valour of my tongue.”- poison vs milk,
willing to manipulate hubby despite her love for him, just to achieve his aims.
 “unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty;”
 “Stop up th’access and passage to remorse / That no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake
my fell purpose.”- make me as inhumane and cruel as possible so I can help my husband-
complexity of human nature, admire her cause she is willing to go to these lengths to help her
husband out of love but she is helping him commit regicide- worst crime of the Elizabethan era.
 “take my milk for gall”- milk vs poison; gall Is bile- bitter fluid secreted in liver= acidic and
shitskies.
 Manipulation: “I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have pluck’d my nipple from his
boneless gums / And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn / As you have done to this.”-
manipulation, ruthlessness.
 Mac says: “Bring forth men children only, / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing
but males.”
 Essentially a good person, can’t handle the consequences/ guilt: “That which hath made them
drunk hath made me bold”- drinks to deal with it.
 “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t”- lame excuse, she couldn’t do it,
essentially a good person.
 “Nought’s had all’s spent, / Where our desire is got without content: / ‘Tis safer to be that which
we destroy / Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.”- alliteration, use of couplets,
emphasizes, separates it. Opposites, nought vs all, sense of loss and regret. She says this in
absence of Mac.
 When Mac is present she is different: “what’s done is done.”- trying to keep it cool.
 Her torment, not coping well with guilt: “Yet who would have thought the old man / To have so
much blood in him.”
 “What will these hands ne’er be clean?”
 “Here’s the smell of blood still: all the / perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little / hand.
Oh, oh, oh!”- blood.

Clothes Symbolism

 You may wear clothes that show a certain status e.g. king but they do not change who you are.
You cannot move in the Great Chain of Being.
 Mac says: “Why do you dress me / In borrow’d robes?” – ironic, eventually wears king’s robes.
 “New honours come upon him / Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould / But with
the aid of use.”- new clothes that don’t fit our bodies until we are used to them. Mac must grow
to appreciate these honours.

Duncan/Malcolm
  Is a mad guy, which emphasizes the crime of Mac’s regicide, enlarges its immorality/ horror.
 “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face. / He was a gentleman on whom I
built / An absolute trust.” – irony, Dunc is referring to a traitor who he trusted, but we know
Mac is thinking about regicide and Dunc trusts him too. Dunc’s right- you can’t judge ppl by their
face.
 “O worthiest cousin. / The sin of my ingratitude even now / Was heavy upon me.”- Dunc is a
generous, appreciative, kind man.
 “I have begun to plant thee and will labour / To make thee full of growing.” – imagery of
nurturing, fatherly, further highlights awfulness of regicide.
 “But signs of nobleness like stars shall shine / On all deservers [Macbeth]”- just a nice guy.
 “This castle hath a pleasant seat”- highlights awfulness of regicide- use of dramatic irony, we
know that Mac is planning to kill him and Dunc’s liking of the castle emphasizes the horror of the
crime.
 “Conduct me to mine host: we love him highly”- dramatic irony aye.
 Gives Macbeth a diamond- stage direction, dunc gives Lady Mac a diamond.
 Mac describes him at funeral thing: “His silver skin lac’d with golden blood”- deceptive, is
becoming 2 faced.
 King Edward, contrast with Mac: “How he solicits Heaven”
 “there are a crew of wretched souls / but at his touch… they presently amend.”
 Macduff feels emotion, is grievous when hears of his slaughtered family: “I cannot but
remember such things were, / That were most precious to me.” Contrast to Mac who feels
none, he’s just killed them all.

Sleep

 Powerful image, sleep is innocent, time of vulnerability, peace, relaxation, thing of nature, rest
etc. To destroy it would be horrible, effectively conveys their guilt.
 “Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent
sleep, / Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, / The death of each day’s life, sore
labour’s bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, / Chief nourisher in life’s
feast.”- elaborate description of sleep. Personification, very powerful, seems like Mac has
murdered a person, one that is a fundament of life, extended of metaphor of sleep as a main
course in a feast.
 “Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor / Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep
no more.”- so guilty Mac will not sleep.

Blood

 Reminds them of their guilt, symbol of violence and their road to shitness.
 “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will
rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.” – such is the scale of
 his crime- permanently stained. Incarnadine= stain red, diction- choice of words, effective, its
length and sound give strength to the meaning. Ocean of blood.
 “I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as
go’er.”- river of blood, strong imagery, embarked on an unreturnable path- complexity of
human nature, he’s determined and courageous despite his ‘corruption’. Embraces his evilness,
loss of conscience.
 “Here’s the smell of blood still: all the / perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little / hand.
Oh, oh, oh!”- blood.

Pathetic fallacy

 “Lamentings heard I’th’air; strange screams of death”

 “Confus’d events, / New hatch’d to th’woeful time”
 “A falcon, towering in her pride of place, / Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at, and kill’d.”- the
falcon, king of birds was killed by a lower rank bird. Symbolises Dunc’s murder, shows the
imbalance in the natural order of things.
 Dunc’s horses: “eat each other.”