so I've chosen these quotations because they're going to be the most useful ones to you they will fit the most themes the most exam questions and the most characters Macbeth says I have no spur to prick the size of my intent save vaulting ambition which leaps itself and falls on the other now here he's saying that he has got his intentions his intent and they're not going to be enough his intent is like a horse that's going to Vault but when it lands it's going to fall it's overreaching itself the jump is just too great and the only thing that's helping him control that jump are Spurs these spurs are just his ambition that's not enough what do you need to wear the Spurs you need a rider and so what Matt Beth is saying is he's not in control of this ambition the rider is of course Lady Macbeth so what does this tell us about the supernatural it tells us that Macbeth has met the witches and that is still not enough to make him kill Duncan he's already thinking it's going to fail they make him think about killing Duncan but that's not enough to make his intent come to life his ambition is therefore not enough that the other major theme of the play most teachers tell you that his fatal flaw is ambition not so his ambition is not enough he tells us in his own words and we know he's been he's because it is a soliloquy and the convention is that you always tell the truth in a soliloquy so ambition is not his hamartia yes it's his impulse but that isn't what makes him carry through the murder it is however Lady Macbeth so we have an acknowledgment that Lady Macbeth is at least an equal partner in the marriage this will allow us to say that his hamartia could perhaps be his love for his wife fair is foul and foul is fair hover through the fog and filthy air a lovely easily remembered quotation which we can use in lots of ways let's think about the supernatural here the witches just describe the weather they hint at their own power which may be to fly through the fog on there but that's not made clear it introduces the perspective active of Duality or appearance and reality where what seems fair is actually foul and what seems foul is actually Fair it's a world a universe you can't trust that links to the whole idea that Duncan introduces us to that you can't read the man's intentions from their face so he keeps appointing traitors the first thing of corridor and then he gets executed and Duncan replaces him with another traitor who's actually going to kill him Macbeth who becomes a Thane of cordle this of course links to the idea of Fate suggesting that Duncan's murder is inevitable or we can flip that the other way and say gnome Beth could have avoided his fate now the reason this is contentious is that in Greek tragedy the hero tries like anything to avoid their fate and they can't do it whatever they do to avoid the fate brings them closer to that face in Macbeth the opposite is happening he can wait to be crowned King to which his prophecies are correct he's going to become king anyway but because he doesn't wait he rushes towards his fate and Embraces it and that is his tragedy it's actually the opposite of a Greek tragedy something that few people know but is a Grade 9 idea you can also pick out the fricatives the repetition of the F sound we use that in our most popular swear word because to make a fricative you bear your teeth that is a sign of aggression and that is why that word is so aggressive in sound it's not a coincidence it's an evolutionary thing where we threaten the person listening to us by bearing our teeth as though we're literally going to bite them and the so this conveys the violence of the witch's desires you can argue that the witches are therefore much more sinister or you can flip that on its head and argue that the portrayal of the witches is much more childlike they speak in trochaic tetrameter fair is foul and foul is fair hover through the thought can't filthy air something not Sinister at all very childlike so if you want to you can say that Shakespeare is walking a tightrope on the one hand portraying The Witches as supernaturally Sinister and on the other hand undermining that belief by suggesting that they are just a childish fantasy who don't have any real power to control Macbeth go back to our earlier quotation about his ambition remember the witches have worked on his mind but that is not enough to make him kill Duncan and that brings us to another interpretation of this quotation and the witches in general they never actually tell Macbeth to do anything evil they only prophesize the future or they lie to him by telling him not to worry because you know the forest's not going to March up the hill and no man born of a woman is going to kill you but they never actually tell him to do anything again another way that Shakespeare signals that Macbeth is the person who is 100 responsible for his choice to start killing the King the regicide and for all the future murders we can't blame the supernatural we can't blame the witches next we have Lady Macbeth out down spot out I say one two white is time to do it hell is murky what need we fear who knows it when none can call our power to account so there's a lot to unpack in that quotation out damn spot reveals how she now realizes her soul is going to go to hell and she wants to get rid of it obviously the spot of blood that she imagines in her hand represents her guilt and it is a Christian guilt that she's now going to go to hell she comes back to this idea with hell is murky this links us back to the filthy Air at the beginning that the witches mentioned that's why she carries a light around with her a taper that symbolizes Christianity she is also the brains behind the operation she says look why should we be afraid of anyone finding out because we're the ultimate power in the land no one can do anything about it if they do find out therefore we will get away with the regicide now what's interesting about that of course is that she is wrong as soon as the Nobles find out that Macbeth killed Duncan they start to turn on him when do they find that out you ask well when the Beth sees the ghost of Banquo and starts ranting on about never shaking like gory locks at me and now cats not say I did it who do they think he's talking about they don't know banquoise dead but they do know that Duncan's dead and they do know that he was very bloody indeed they suspect Macbeth is confessing to killing Duncan the other interpretation of this quotation about not fearing being discovered is it shows how powerful Lady Macbeth is in their marriage and it's the logic of her argument that she now regrets remember in her sleepwalking scene she's going through the things all the things that she regrets earlier what she's telling us is she thinks the most persuasive argument was this one about being able to get away with it her tragedy is that she didn't realize how vulnerable she would be when she had orchestrated this she didn't understand what would happen to her own mind so her ambition has been too great for her that's caused this excessive grief she's asked for Supernatural help and Allied herself to the forces of evil hence the hell references and so you can see how easy it is to link this quotation to numerous themes come spirits that tend on Mortal Thoughts unsets me here fill me from the crown to the toe top full of diarist Cruelty so I love this quotation because it's so famous we all latch on to the idea of being unsexed but what's really going on here is a rejection of the patriarchy what she's saying is in order to succeed in this Society you have to be a man and the qualities of manhood are cruelty Shakespeare is using this to suggest what kind of King King James should be he should be someone who rejects cruelty remember King James has just been through the Gunpowder Plot and he could start executing plotters everywhere James would have a license to start going out finding the Nobles who were catholic killing them taking their lands but Shakespeare doesn't want him to do that he doesn't think that would be a good example of kingship cruelty and kingship do not belong together and that is one message of the whole play Macbeth fails because he is a cruel ruler not because he has killed Duncan in fact he would have got away with killing Duncan it starts to unravel when he killed Banquo if we go into Shakespeare's Source material Holland sheds Chronicles we find out that the real Macbeth got away with killing the real Duncan and that the real Banquo helped him do it to the real Macbeth was able to stay as King of Scotland for quite a long time everybody knew he'd killed Duncan and they were perfectly okay with it so Shakespeare has been quite manipulative with history in order to show King James what being a good King looks like we can also use the quotation to show that women are excluded from power they only get power through their relationships with men either their fathers or their husbands and so that encourages Lady Macbeth to try to manipulate and control her husband so yes she acts evenly but Shakespeare is pointing out that the way Society treats women they have to act in unfeminine ways if they're going to achieve power we can even extend that to the witches who we're told look ugly they've got beards because what sort of woman would gain any status in society in Shakespeare's time looking like that well they wouldn't women were valued for their appearance and their money and that those two things would make them eligible to marry a man of higher status on their own they could achieve nothing and so the witches are women who have been excluded from society and have therefore turned to each other and towards evil the other thing that is uppermost on lady Macbeth's mind is that she has just lost her child not only is she a grieving mother she's also a failed wife because she hasn't provided an heir to Macbeth this is how the patriarchal society works and she's failed in that and therefore failed in her role in society and that's part of the reason she chooses another Avenue to seek power and influence by becoming Queen by encouraging Macbeth to commit regicide we can see that she's totally focused on becoming queen as the solution to her grief and her lack of power because she talks about the crown the crown of the head is this bit but obviously she's fixating on the crown that's going to sit there The Witches tell Banquo that he will be lesser than Macbeth yet greater not so happy yet much happier he shall get Kings though he be none so number one this is flattery of King James it was believed at the time that King James was a descendant Banquo and therefore by portraying bankroll as a noble figure in the play who doesn't participate in the regicide Shakespeare is suggesting that King James comes from this Noble ancestry even more importantly this Noble ancestry is chosen by God all the powers of evil work their way on Macbeth they kill off Duncan and eventually they're going to kill off Malcolm and his line and then freons is going to take over as though he's been appointed by God this plays into the idea of the divine right of kings that God chooses who's going to be the next king and therefore the king is God's representative on Earth this ties into the idea of the play being a warning to the Nobles not to try to overthrow King James because they'll be going against God's divine plan and therefore they'll be punished driven in saying like Macbeth was and then punish with how in the afterlife the other thing this does is it sets up Banquo as the antithesis to Macbeth in simplistic terms bankro becomes the model of good behavior and Macbeth becomes the model of bad behavior for the watching Nobles remember the play was first performed not at the Globe Theater but at St James's Palace for King James and all the Nobles the play reminds them that the Gunpowder Plot was unsuccessful and suggests that any other plotting against the king will also be unsuccessful and also end in tragedy for any Rebels the quotation reminds us of fair is foul and foul is fair this idea of appearance versus reality this equivocation between what looks good and what looks bad again you'll notice the witches don't actually tell bankro that he has to do anything it's just a prophecy about the future but what they suggest thing is he is going to be much happier than Macbeth because he's not going to act on his evil thoughts now that suggests the witches know that Macbeth won't be happy because he will act on those evil thoughts in fact when he goes back to see the witches later on once he's King one of the witches says by the pricking of my thumbs Something Wicked This Way Comes and that is Macbeth not the witches themselves so in their perspective Macbeth is inherently evil and that also explains why he's easily persuaded by his wife remember not the witches to kill Duncan the quotation in which Lady Macbeth talks about looking at her babies smiling face and plucking its lips from her nipples and then dashing its brains out is intentionally horrific on one level it's supposed to show that she has abandoned all sense of femininity she has rejected the patriarchal roles and also her duty to provide children for her husband at a deeper level it shows us how much the death of her baby has affected her it's led to this extreme level of violence which she is describing about the baby but actually she wants Macbeth to inflict on Duncan it's a kind of Revenge killing this is what the world has done to me it's taken my baby away and killed it and I now can no longer put it on my breast I'm still lactating my milk is still there remember she asks her milk to be turned to Gaul so she's clearly a recent grief-stricken mother whose baby has just died well interestingly who is God's representative on Earth in this Society it's the king the king is divinely chosen according to the divine right of kings and so in her attack against God she attacks the king and wants Tonkin killed obviously we can talk about the way she manipulates her husband here by suggesting that his promise to her could never be broken it's even more important than a matter of life and death you can look at the consonants of B's and D's to show how aggressive this imagery is which reflects her own aggression and also suggests him at Beth the agree question that he must use in his actions to kill Duncan as always with Lady Macbeth we can use the quotation to prove that she is a fiend-like queen inherently evil or that Society has made her evil so if our only role or her main role in life is to provide heirs but her children can never survive because they don't have any children and this must have happened therefore quite frequently then we can have a massive amount of sympathy for her obviously that doesn't justify encouraging her husband to go and kill the king but it does throw into Focus the terrible life of a woman there are so few things that you can succeed at and of course the death of children in childbirth or soon after was incredibly common so Shakespeare is legitimately asking what kind of society is it that forces women to Value themselves only on their appearance the person they're married to or their ability to have children or you can flip that the other way around and say no Shakespeare is totally cool with that and lay them at best problem is that she doesn't know her place and she exceeds the role of a woman and therefore she's rightly punished you decide which way you want to go with it if you look at both quotations and weigh them up you're bound to get top grades whichever way you tell the examiner you've decided out out brief candle life's but a walking Shadow a poor player that struts his hour upon the stage and then it's heard no more life is a tale told by an idiot full of Sound and Fury signifying nothing there's so much in this quotation notice out out how he's using lady Macbeth's language of out damn spot echoing her language on the one hand shows that he is similarly evil but on the other hand shows how closely they are attuned to each other it emphasizes his love for her interestingly the image of light in the candle is a Christian image and Macbeth is suggesting that his love for his wife is more powerful than his love for God again we can see that as indicative of his evil State turning away from God deserving Divine punishment but on the other hand it is a true love story when he talks about life being a poor player the player means an actor playing a part and here he's expressing his nihilistic view that life is pointless now let's think about the play as a tragedy that is an exact idea about how tragedy works if Our Fate is already decided by God then it doesn't matter what we do on Earth we don't really have free will we're just going to end up at the point that God has dictate related therefore we are like actors working through a script that someone else has written for us and we believe as we're performing that script that we're in charge but then at some point the veil is lifted we understand that we haven't been in control fate or God has so again we could sympathize quite a lot with Macbeth here or we could argue this is total self-deception he has written his own script he has taken all his own decisions which he didn't have to take and therefore he is refusing to accept responsibility he's blaming God for his own mistakes actually his actions have led to his wife feeling tremendous guilt and then committing suicide he doesn't want to face up to that and therefore he blames the scriptwriter not him not her but God Shakespeare's audience would have seen this as deeply ironic because he's been acting on his own free will and that's what's led to the tragedy of course they would also have enjoyed the dark humor of this moment What's the dark humor well the actor playing Macbeth is actually strutting his hour on the stage he is actually performing someone else's script so underlying that is the idea that maybe God has written our scripts maybe we're not fully in control of what happens to us and it's very easy actually to look at the world and think am I really in charge of my destiny or is something else controlling what happens to me I like to think of Shakespeare as sitting outside of that as a self-invented man he was only supposed to be a glove maker back in Stratford following in his father's business but instead he's completely reinvented himself as this hugely successful businessman in the theater World he's gone to London and started writing plays something that hasn't been around and for more than 20 years so he's right on the cusp of a new invention a new form of entertainment and a new class the self-made man who doesn't depend on where they were at their birth for their own success before Shakespeare's time and if we went back 60 years the only way to improve your social position was to join the church or to join the Army but your fate was decided by who your parents were Shakespeare totally lived a different life and so we can imagine that he looks on Macbeth as somebody who could have chosen differently could have had success in a different way the problem for Macbeth is that he has tried to write his script in blood this of course is also a rejection of God all the audience would have been Christian and so it turns them if they needed turning entirely against Macbeth they could understand his desire to kill Duncan and become king but what they wouldn't be able to understand is how he then rejects God so to the Nobles at court they could think yeah I could get rid of King James and get away with it who's going to call my power to account once I'm made King but what they couldn't do then is think yeah but I won't have to go to hell and God won't punish me and by introducing the theme of Christianity so fully in the play Shakespeare is also hoping to stop them acting on their own desires choosing their own destinies by rising up against King James look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it this advice from Lady Macbeth comes straight out of Genesis in the Adam and Eve story Eve meets the serpent who persuades her to eat the apple or the fruit of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil that she shouldn't eat God has forbidden it however the serpent tempt her the serpent is Satan the devil and Eve is the one that the devil is able to influence most remember in the play The Witches appear to influence Macbeth but when we get this image Shakespeare is suggesting something different it's Lady Macbeth who inferences Macbeth just like Eve influenced Adam just like the serpent influenced Eve this is quite a misogynistic interpretation of the Bible but it was current at the time and was one that King James really favored in his own writings remember he wrote the book demonology about Witchcraft and He suggests in that that women are much more evil than men and the proof is well look how Eve behaved and we're all descended from Eve aren't we so that original sin shows us how evil women are how open they are Temptation so Lady Macbeth is portrayed as a worse figure than Macbeth the other way of looking at that of course is to suggest that Shakespeare doesn't really believe that he's just giving King James the view that King James wants he's flattering King James just as he did by putting the witches into the play because these are King James's beliefs and King James is the one paying the Moolah he is the one sponsoring Shakespeare he is the number one dude in the land and Shakespeare is sucking up to the number one dude in the land don't use that language in your exam though another way of ingratiating himself with King James that's the technical term for sucking up is this very image King James had a medal produced to commemorate his victory over the Gunpowder Plot and it showed a snake the plotters underneath the flower so this is a cool little reference that would have delighted the king and would also have reminded the Nobles that the Catholic plotters were utterly unsuccessful and therefore any future plots would also be as easy as that to unravel a little known quotation is what Macbeth says after his wife has died I begin to be weary of the Sun and wish the estate of the world were now undone we can use this to show that he utterly understands that he is going to die it means that he doesn't believe in the super natural influence of the witches they give him all these prophecies about how he can never be killed but he knows that the end is coming and his revenge isn't just to kill as many people as he can in battle it's to wish that the whole world is undone he wants to destroy everything this suggests that his nihilism is actually childish it's a childish impulse to want to destroy everything without thinking about the consequences Shakespeare is drawing the parallel with any Nobles in the audience who want to get rid of King James your desire to become king he is telling them is ultimately a childish desire symbolically to reject the sun is to reject God the son often symbolized God in literature and paintings because it sits at the top of the sky just as God sits at the top of the heaven in rejecting God Macbeth automatically rejects the whole world he wants the world to be on and done in other words without your faith in God you are nothing the world is meaningless you will become nihilistic as Macbeth is nihilistic the reason Shakespeare wants to emphasize the Christian faith here is if the Nobles emphasize their own Christian faith they cannot kill the king who they believe or who are told to believe that the king is appointed by God they'll certainly believe that their souls will go to hell and Macbeth has served as an example to show that going against God will lead to punishment on Earth just as Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are punished on Earth as well as Eternal damnation and Punishment in hell you could argue that the extreme nature of this imagery I want to destroy the whole world is a reflection of how guilty Macbeth now feels for what he's done he's not admitting his guilt he's transposing those emotions onto other things his blame mean God is blaming the world but this is a childish refusal to take responsibility for what he himself has done now if you want to understand how to weave your grade 9 understanding of quotations into a Grade 9 essay this is the video to check out now if you've got the stamina you're bound to get a grade nine I know I talk too much damn