Macbeth GCSE Edquas Extract Questions: Analyses and Notes.
Remember the recurring question and ensure you answer all the parts of the question.
Q) Look at how the characters speak and behave here. How do you think an audience might respond to this part of the play? Refer closely to details from the extract to support your answer.
Act One Scene Two.
Speak/behave: King in waiting,( Malcolm) relieved to testify to his own survival due to the heroism of the sergeant who in turn is in awe of the violent capabilities of the throne saving warrior, Macbeth. Thus testimony doubly validates the bravery of ‘valour’s minion,’ Macbeth. A powerful announcement of Macbeth’s character after his contamination by the witches in the preceding scene. Language is visceral and disturbingly exuberant. Underlines the relationship between violence, physical masculinity and power. Manliness is a degraded version of humanity, yet accepted, even praised. Macbeth is like an angel of death. His brutality continues, seems unnecessarily sadistic, even ecstatic in its frenzy. A near-mythic figure. The irony that rebels/traitors are prevalent in Scotland suggesting the fragility of Duncan and his reliance on Macbeth who will betray him too.
Audience: Aware of the predilection for violence and the supernatural. associated with Macbeth. Anxiety possibly over his usefulness to the King? The ambivalence of their relationship when ‘merciless Macdonwald’ is symptomatic of the uneasy state of divided, violated Scotland? The fragility of Kingship and the dramatic irony of the audience knowing about Macbeth’s impending ‘fated’ rendezvous with the malign witches. Violent foreshowing of the play’s dramatic action.
MALCOLM
This is the sergeant
Who like a good and hardy soldier fought
‘Gainst my captivity. Hail, brave friend!
Say to the king the knowledge of the broil
As thou didst leave it.
Doubtful it stood;
As two spent swimmers, that do cling together
And choke their art. The merciless Macdonwald–
Worthy to be a rebel, for to that
The multiplying villanies of nature
Do swarm upon him–from the western isles
Of kerns and gallowglasses is supplied;
And fortune, on his damned quarrel smiling,
Show’d like a rebel’s whore: but all’s too weak:
For brave Macbeth–well he deserves that name–
Disdaining fortune, with his brandish’d steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valour’s minion carved out his passage
Till he faced the slave;
Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps,
And fix’d his head upon our battlements.
Act One Scene four.
Speak and behaves/Audience entwined: King Duncan is naive and susceptible to mistaken judgement. Irony evident. Seems trusting. Even desperate. Wilfully naïve perhaps? In order to inspire loyalty?
Yet ironically leaps to favour Macbeth, even after disclosing his lack of judgement with Cawdor. A poisoned chalice surely? Does he learn anything? Maybe elderly? Senile? Foreshadowing of inevitable doom, emanates from the recklessness of Duncan. He is enthusiastically impetuous in his affection for Macbeth. Perhaps attempting a form of control via the ecstatic promotion? Perhaps aware of his dependence upon Macbeth’s violence as a soldier and desperately attempting to keep him close through flattering promotion. Hyperbole confirms King’s flattery which is reflected by the studiedly, ironically dutiful, Macbeth whose fawning jars after the brutality of his soldiering and his secret longing for power, fuelled by the witches. And made evident to the audience. The word ‘duties’ sits uneasily in the mouth of the individualist, Macbeth.
DUNCAN
There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face:
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust.
Enter MACBETH, BANQUO, ROSS, and ANGUS
O worthiest cousin!
The sin of my ingratitude even now
Was heavy on me: thou art so far before
That swiftest wing of recompense is slow
To overtake thee. Would thou hadst less deserved,
That the proportion both of thanks and payment
Might have been mine! only I have left to say,
More is thy due than more than all can pay.
The service and the loyalty I owe,
In doing it, pays itself. Your highness’ part
Is to receive our duties; and our duties
Are to your throne and state children and servants,
Which do but what they should, by doing every thing
Safe toward your love and honour.
Act One Scene Four.
Speech and behaves: Strong sense of community shown through the device of the list. Duncan is beloved, despite the rebellions and invasions. No sense of his own personal danger and public folly in talking about his son’s ascendancy to the throne. Not strategic. Unlike his heir. The flattery of Macbeth sounds forced and hollow. He is shocked and incensed. Hurries home to gain his wife’s support and powers of persuasion. Reveals his reliance on Lady Macbeth surely? Incites him to confirm his secret desire to kill the King. The use of the aside confirms the duplicity of Macbeth and his capacity for hypocrisy. Chooses evil ambition over loyalty. Divided self. Appearance versus reality. Banquo is almost an afterthought that shows the centrality of Macbeth and the depth of his betrayal.
Macbeth’s aside is couched in the contrast between light and dark revealing his own willingness to embrace evil. Objectification of others allows for dehumanisation and murder. Mere obstacles to his power. Knowingly immoral and shares his duplicitous nature with the audience who are placed in a difficult position and we can see his depravity and allegiance to the witches. The audience are privileged to learn of the hypocrisy and mental machinations of the protagonist, yet are powerless to intervene. The jacobean audience would clearly link the depravity of the witches to the fallen morality of the once ‘noble’ Macbeth.
DUNCAN
Sons, kinsmen, thanes,
And you whose places are the nearest, know
We will establish our estate upon
Our eldest, Malcolm, whom we name hereafter
The Prince of Cumberland; which honour must
Not unaccompanied invest him only,
But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine
On all deservers. From hence to Inverness,
And bind us further to you.
The rest is labour, which is not used for you:
I’ll be myself the harbinger and make joyful
The hearing of my wife with your approach;
So humbly take my leave.
[Aside] The Prince of Cumberland! that is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap,
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires:
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be,
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
Exit
True, worthy Banquo; he is full so valiant,
And in his commendations I am fed;
It is a banquet to me. Let’s after him,
Whose care is gone before to bid us welcome:
It is a peerless kinsman.
Act Two Scene One.
Speak and behaves: Heavily ironic declaration of the supposedly impervious Banquo yet he has been thinking of the witches so do we believe he is confirming something to his suspicious friend? As if ‘All’s well’ is a form of code? Who is testing whom? Yet timing crucial as Macbeth about to murder King and Banquo supposedly guarding the King, and naively assuming ‘all is well’ ( such irony!) yet this short and ironically concealing, duplicitous conversation. On both sides perhaps, as Macbeth evasive and determined to deflect Banquo through falsity, yet still to maintain their intimacy and trust too. Banquo is testing out his haunting or preoccupation with the witches, which may even be planted by the witches, thus condemning him to death as he knows too much as Macbeth is made aware here. Or is Banquo a little tarnished too in his fascination with the witches’ malign and cryptic promises?
The audience can see how Banquo could have stopped the murder if more aware. Does his response seem to maintain his nobility through his repeated loyalty yet a little unease there too? He reminds the audience of the supernatural allegiances of the ‘weird sisters’ which would appal yet fascinate too. Yet Macbeth’s duplicity is now too entrenched as we know and he lies and fawns for his own reasons. The division between them uneasily affects the audience. Witches have succeeded in weakening the once strong intimacy and have divided the friendship with catastrophic consequences. Anarchy and chaos beckon.
BANQUO
All’s well.
I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters:
To you they have show’d some truth.
MACBETH
I think not of them:
Yet, when we can entreat an hour to serve,
We would spend it in some words upon that business,
If you would grant the time.
BANQUO
At your kind’st leisure.
If you shall cleave to my consent, when ’tis,
It shall make honour for you.
So I lose none
In seeking to augment it, but still keep
My bosom franchised and allegiance clear,
I shall be counsell’d.
