Every card in Shakespeare, Year 10: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Macbeth option)
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- Before we meet him, a wounded Captain praises Macbeth in Act 1 Scene 2: “For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that ____)”.
name
HintThe missing word means a title or reputation.
WhyMacbeth starts the play as a celebrated soldier, loyal to Duncan. Shakespeare builds him up first so that the fall is a real fall.
- In Act 1 Scene 7 Macbeth admits he has no good reason to kill Duncan: “I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ____”.
ambition
HintThe quality usually named as his fatal flaw.
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.
- Macbeth kills Duncan himself. In Act 3, how does he deal with Banquo instead?
He hires murderers to do it for him
HintHe no longer needs to hold the dagger.
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.
- In Act 3 Scene 2 Macbeth tells his wife “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck”. What has changed between them since Act 1?
He now plans murder without telling her
HintThink about who was in charge of the plan to kill Duncan.
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.
- Told in Act 5 Scene 5 that his wife is dead, Macbeth calls life “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying ____”.
nothing
HintBy now he believes that all his effort has had no meaning at all.
WhyThis is the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech. He has the crown and finds it empty: the play's bleakest moment.
- In the final speech Malcolm sums the couple up as “this dead ____ and his ____ queen”.
butcher; fiend-like
HintOne word is a trade that deals in slaughter; the other compares her to a devil.
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.
- Lady Macbeth's advice to her husband in Act 1 Scene 5: “look like the innocent ____, / But be the ____ under't”.
flower; serpent
HintSomething pretty in a garden hiding something poisonous beneath.
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.
- In Act 1 Scene 5 Lady Macbeth calls on spirits to “unsex me here”. What is she asking them to take from her?
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.
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.
- In Act 2 Scene 2 Lady Macbeth says she would have killed Duncan herself but for one thing. What stopped her?
He looked like her father as he slept
HintA family likeness.
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.
- After the murder, in Act 2 Scene 2, Lady Macbeth says “A little water clears us of this deed.” Which later scene shows how wrong she was?
The sleepwalking scene (Act 5 Scene 1)
HintShe is watched by a doctor and a gentlewoman.
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.
- Sleepwalking in Act 5 Scene 1, Lady Macbeth tries to rub an imagined mark from her hand: “Out, damned ____! out, I say!”
spot
HintA small stain.
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.
1★ GCSE-ENLI-SHA-0013
2★ GCSE-ENLI-SHA-0014
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4★ GCSE-ENLI-SHA-0016
5★ GCSE-ENLI-SHA-0017
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7★ GCSE-ENLI-SHA-0019
8★ GCSE-ENLI-SHA-0020
9★ GCSE-ENLI-SHA-0021
10★ GCSE-ENLI-SHA-0022
11★ GCSE-ENLI-SHA-0023
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