Thinking about 'Macbeth'

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Here are 12 exercises on quotations in Macbeth. They are designed for 15-minute pair-work sessions in class, but work perfectly well for individuals. You need to know the play well, so these are for revision at a late stage. The purpose is to make your mind work hard: retrieving factual details, certainly, about the sequence of the play, individual quotations and so on, but more importantly making you think and create connections, and have a debate with a partner.

You don’t need to write on the original sheet itself: just take a piece of paper and jot down your responses. When finished find the quotation in context from the text itself, and then fill in any gaps. [Line numbers are from the Complete Works edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, 2nd edition, 2022].

Here is a series of 15 exercises on Hamlet in the same format, here King Lear, here Othello.

  1. Witches: ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair / Hover through the fog and filthy air.’ I i 12-13.

  2. Macbeth: ‘What seemed corporal / Melted as breath into the wind. Would they had stayed.’ I iii 83-4.

  3. Lady Macbeth: ‘Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty.’ I vi 37-40.

  4. Macbeth: ‘His virtues / Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against / The deep damnation of his taking off.’ I vii 18-20.

  5. Macbeth: ‘Whiles I threat, he lives: / Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives. / I go, and it is done: the bell invites me.’ II i 67-9.

  6. Macduff: ‘Most sacriligeous murder hath broke ope / The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence / The life o’th’building.’ II iii 60-62.

  7. Macbeth: ‘Our fears in Banquo stick deep, / And in his royalty of nature reigns that / Which would be feared.’ III i 52-54.

  8. Macbeth: ‘I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.’ III iv 157-159.

  9. Macbeth: ‘From this moment / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand.’ IV i 159-161.

  10. Macduff: ‘Boundless intemperance / In nature is a tyranny.’ IV iii 76-77.

  11. Doctor: ‘Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles.’ V i 50-51.

  12. Macbeth: ‘It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.’ V v 26-28.