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MACBETH - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Macbeth’s soliloquy in Act I, Scene 3 shows him trying to puzzle out the implications of the Witches’ prophecy. He reasons that since what the Witches predicted turned out to be correct, it cannot be evil (he’s wrong). But Macbeth also admits that because of their prediction, he’s already begun to fantasize about killing King Duncan and taking the throne.
      - The soliloquy in Act 1, Scene 7 - Macbeth struggles with whether he should murder Duncan. Macbeth also acknowledges that his role as Duncan’s host and subject is to protect his king, not murder him in his sleep. Macbeth senses that the murder will change his life, by making him king, but also by unleashing his dark ambition on the world. By the end of the speech, he seems to have decided against the murder, but his wife will soon talk him back into it.
      - Act 2, Scene marks the first time he hallucinates. Macbeth is aware that the floating knife he sees is not really there. The fact that he is troubled enough to hallucinate, yet still sane enough to understand that he is hallucinating, can be contrasted with his later mental state, when he fully believes he sees Banquo’s ghost, even though Lady Macbeth tells him no one is there.
      - Lady Macbeth
        
        QUOTES
        
        Lady Macbeth gives a soliloquy in Act 1, scene 5, while waiting for King Duncan to arrive at her castle. She’s determined that Duncan must be murdered and asks for help from the spirits to give her the courage she needs to kill him. The references she makes to being female reveal that she feels her natural womanhood may keep her from acting cruelly, so she demands that they be removed.
        
        “I laid their daggers ready: he could not miss ‘em. Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done’t” - This speech in Act 2, scene 2 reveals that Lady Macbeth has not helped kill Duncan and that Duncan’s resemblance to her father prevented her from killing him.
        
        GENDER
        
        Her husband implies that she is a masculine soul inhabiting a female body, which seems to link masculinity to ambition and violence.
        
        Shakespeare seems to use her, and the witches, to undercut Macbeth’s idea that “undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males” (1.7.73–74).
        
        Women, the play implies, can be as ambitious and cruel as men, yet social constraints deny them the means to pursue these ambitions on their own.
        
        GUILT
        
        It takes Lady Macbeth’s steely sense of purpose to push Macbeth to kill Duncan.
        
        After the murder, however, her powerful personality begins to disintegrate, leaving Macbeth increasingly alone.
        
        Lady Macbeth begins a slow slide into madness—just as ambition affects her more strongly than Macbeth before the crime, so does guilt plague her more strongly afterward
      - His ending
        
        With the English army at his gates, he can finally return to life as a warrior, and he displays a kind of reckless bravado as his enemies surround him and drag him down.
        
        This stems from his fatal confidence in the witches’ prophecies, but it also seems to derive from the fact that he has returned to the arena where he has been most successful.
        
        It begins with Macbeth winning on the battlefield and ends with him dying in combat.
      - Guilt
        
        He fluctuates between fits of fevered action, in which he plots a series of murders to secure his throne, and moments of terrible guilt (as when Banquo’s ghost appears) and absolute pessimism (after his wife’s death, when he seems to succumb to despair).
        
        These fluctuations reflect the tragic tension within Macbeth: he is at once too ambitious to allow his conscience to stop him from murdering his way to the top and too conscientious to be happy with himself as a murderer
        
        Ambition
        
        We may classify Macbeth as irrevocably evil.
        
        These three attributes—bravery, ambition, and self-doubt—struggle for mastery of Macbeth throughout the play
        
        Our initial impression is of a brave and capable warrior.
        
        His physical courage is joined by a consuming ambition and a tendency to self-doubt—the prediction that he will be king brings him joy, but it also creates inner turmoil.
  - - - Duncan acknowledges Banquo as “no less deserved” of praise than Macbeth, but from the beginning of the play Banquo is overshadowed by Macbeth’s accomplishments and ambition.
      - Banquo asks for a prophecy from the Witches, too, and is pleased to learn that his children will rule Scotland.
      - Banquo seems unable to understand the cost of the Witches’ prophecy will be his life. In Act III, murderers kill Banquo at Macbeth’s command, and try to kill Fleance.
      - Soon after his death, Banquo appears in the form of a ghost at the banquet.
      - At play’s end, Banquo’s greatest import remains offstage: his son, Fleance, who could come back to revenge his father’s death and take the throne of Scotland, fulfilling the Witches’ prophecy.
  - - - SUPERNATURAL
        
        The audience is left to ask whether the witches are independent agents toying with human lives, or agents of fate, whose prophecies are only reports of the inevitable.
        
        The witches bear a striking and obviously intentional resemblance to the Fates, female characters in both Norse and Greek mythology who weave the fabric of human lives and then cut the threads to end them.
        
        Some of their prophecies seem self-fulfilling. For example, it is doubtful that Macbeth would have murdered his king without the push given by the witches’ predictions. In other cases, though, their prophecies are just remarkably accurate readings of the future—it is hard to see Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane as being self-fulfilling in any way.
      - QUOTES
        
        The play opens with the Witches greeting each other in Act I, scene 1. From the opening, the dark and disturbing tone of the play is clear. The Witches speak easily of warfare as something to watch avidly until it’s time to meet with their newest victim: Macbeth
        
        “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”. This foreshadows that the all is not what it seems as the play is plagued with deception from many characters, including the prophecies given by the witches.
        
        In Act 1, Scene 3, the first Witch calls him “thane of Glamis,” (already his title) but then the Witches call him “thane of Cawdor” and “king hereafter”. This prophesises that he will be promoted to thane of Cawdor and then king.
        
        in Act 1 scene 3, Banquo asks what his future holds. The witches tell him he’ll be lesser than Macbeth but grater, less happy than Macbeth but far happier, and predict that Banquo will never be king, but his descendants will be.
  - - - At the beginning of the play, Macduff is a loyal and brave noble fighting on Duncan’s side. He immediately distrusts Macbeth’s claim that Duncan was killed by his servants and refuses to go to Macbeth’s coronation.
      - Macbeth arranges for murderers to kill Macduff’s wife and children, after Macduff has already fled to England
      - Macduff’s decision to abandon his family is never fully explained, and seems hard to justify, given their brutal murders. But Macduff is deeply motivated by his wife and sons’ deaths, and he speaks several times in the play about how he must revenge them.
      - His mission to place Malcolm on the throne of Scotland reflects his desire to have the true monarch ruling.
  - - - The king of Scotland should be a figurehead of order and orderliness, and Duncan is the epitome, or supreme example, of this.
      - His language is formal and his speeches full of grace and graciousness, and concerns matters of honor.
      - When greeting his kind hostess Lady Macbeth in Act I, Scene 6. Duncan also expresses humility when he admits his failure in spotting the previous Thane of Cawdor's treachery: "There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face" (I: 4,11).
      - Most importantly, Duncan is the representative of God on earth, ruling by divine right, a feature of kingship strongly endorsed by King James I, for whom the play was performed in 1606.
      - This "divinity" of the king is made clear on several occasions in the play, most notably when Macbeth talks of the murdered Duncan as having "silver skin lac'd with . . . golden blood" (Act II, Scene 3).
      - The importance of royal blood, that is, the inheritance of the divine right to rule, is emphasised when, in the final scene, Duncan's son Malcolm takes the title of king, with the words "by the grace of Grace / We will perform.“
      - However, Duncan’s fatal flaw is his trust in his subjects. As he believes strongly in loyalty and trust, it makes it possible for Macbeth to murder him.
  - - - With his brother Donalbain, Malcolm quickly ascertains the danger of remaining in Scotland and flees the country (Act II, Scene 3).
      - By the time he reappears, in Act IV, Scene 3, he has won the support of Edward the Confessor (king of England), he has mobilized troops under Northumberland and Siward.
      - If Macduff is the stereotypical revenger, Malcolm is the embodiment of all that is good in kingship, and this is seen particularly in Act IV, Scene 3, in which he tests the allegiance of Macduff.
      - His testing of Macduff, although dramatically longwinded, is psychologically accurate. By pretending to be what he is not, he hopes to coax from Macduff a confession of his loyalty. This feature of his character — playing a part in order to strengthen the prospect of good — is in stark contrast to Macbeth, who plays a part in order to advance his own evil.
      - In the final scene of the play, Malcolm is presented as the future king. His use of the phrase "by the grace of Grace" indicates the importance that he attaches to the service of good and reminds the audience of his direct descent from one who ruled by divine right, as opposed to Macbeth, who usurped the throne. Like his father Duncan, Malcolm is the representative of order.
- - - - “We still have judgement here… This even-handed justice commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice to our own lips.”
        (Macbeth)
        Explanation:
        demonstrates that there are consequences (even-handed justice) and implications for his actions (poisoned chalice)
        Device:
        Metaphor -poisoned chalice is a metaphor for ambition, with even-handed justice commending his consequences.
      - ‘I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent but only vaulting ambition which overleaps itself’
        (Macbeth)
        Explanation:
        this storngly foreshadows the tragic heros own demise in the play. fails to take caution and istead becomes excessively proud and complacement through the witches second prophecies suggesting the fact that ambition leads to failure
        Device:
        Metaphor - Macbeth llikens his intent to a horse and his ambition to the spur
        compares his ambition to a rider juming into the addle of a horse. high leaps (tries to seize the crown of scotland) misses his seat and falls (meets with disaster)
        Metaphor – Macbeth describes being unable to motivate himself to act by likening himself to a rider who cannot use his spurs to motivate his horse to go faster. The one thing he does have is ambition, which he compares to a horse and rider who overestimate their ability to leap over an obstacle and end up falling down.
      - “The instruments of darkness tell us truths, to betray us in deepest consequence.”
        (Banquo)
        Explanation:
        Banquo resists the temptation given by Macbeth. Shakespeare uses the characts to show supernatural presence.
        Device:
        Foreshadowing – what will eventually happen to Macbeth, shows Macbeths true character – consumed by his ambition
      - “All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee thane of Cawdor! All hail, Macbeth! that shall be king hereafter.”
        (The Witches)
        Explanation:
        the witches are playing on Macbeths ambition and planting the idea of murder
        this scene is improtant for the whole play that it works as foreshadowing. the prophacy is the major cause for macbeths tragedy
      - “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me without my stir.”
        (Macbeth)
        Explanation:
        He is thinking about his future as a king. He believes in destiny and prophecy will create a situation for him to be the king without him trying
        Device:
        juxtaposition - Contrasts the person Macbeth was before and after the murder. This is in complete juxtaposition to his prior thoughts of “whose murder yet is but fantastical”.
      - “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus”
        (Macbeth)
        Explanation:
        Macbeth says this after he becomes king but continues to feel restless and insecure
      - “Thou wouldst be great art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it” – Lady Macbeth. Lady Macbeth speaks these lines as she reflects on her husband’s character. She knows that Macbeth is capable of ambitious dreams, but she thinks that he is unwilling to display the ruthless behaviour necessary to achieve those dreams. These lines reflect Lady Macbeth’s own philosophy of power, in which only individuals who are willing to set their morality aside will rise to greatness.