Shakespeare, Year 10: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Macbeth option)

name

HintThe missing word means a title or reputation.

The whyMacbeth starts the play as a celebrated soldier, loyal to Duncan. Shakespeare builds him up first so that the fall is a real fall.

ambition

HintThe quality usually named as his fatal flaw.

The whyHe pictures himself as a rider with nothing to drive the horse on except the urge to leap too high, which “o'erleaps itself / And falls”. He knows the danger before he acts.

He hires murderers to do it for him

HintHe no longer needs to hold the dagger.

The whyBy Act 4 he has Macduff's wife and children killed the same way, for no gain at all. One reading: each killing costs him less, which is how the play shows him hardening.

He now plans murder without telling her

HintThink about who was in charge of the plan to kill Duncan.

The whyIn Act 1 she drove the plot. Now he keeps Banquo's murder from her. The partnership has turned round, and she fades from the action after the banquet.

nothing

HintBy now he believes that all his effort has had no meaning at all.

The whyThis is the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech. He has the crown and finds it empty: the play's bleakest moment.

butcher; fiend-like

HintOne word is a trade that deals in slaughter; the other compares her to a devil.

The whyIt is Malcolm's verdict, not necessarily the play's. A good essay can ask whether the man who agonised before and after the first murder is fairly summed up by one word.

flower; serpent

HintSomething pretty in a garden hiding something poisonous beneath.

The whyShe is telling him to hide his intentions when Duncan arrives. The snake recalls the tempter in the Garden of Eden, an echo an audience of the time would have caught.

The gentleness and pity then expected of a woman, so that she can be cruel enough for murder

HintShe thinks her own nature might get in the way of the plan.

The whyShe asks to be filled “from the crown to the toe, top-full / Of direst cruelty”. The fact that she has to ask suggests cruelty does not come naturally to her.

He looked like her father as he slept

HintA family likeness.

The why“Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done't.” It is an early crack in her hardness, long before the sleepwalking.

The sleepwalking scene (Act 5 Scene 1)

HintShe is watched by a doctor and a gentlewoman.

The whyThere she rubs at her hands and says “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” Setting the two lines side by side is a quick way to show how she changes.

spot

HintA small stain.

The whyShe is reliving the night of Duncan's murder. She speaks here in broken prose rather than the controlled verse of Act 1, which many readers take as a sign of a mind coming apart.