Act 5 — Macbeth — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Act 5
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking and death, 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow', the battle and Macbeth's death, and Malcolm's restoration.
Key quotations: 'Out, damned spot!', 'Here's the smell of the blood still', 'Hell is murky', 'Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief', 'my way of life / Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf', 'Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased', 'She should have died hereafter', 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow', 'Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing', 'Macduff was from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd', 'Lay on, Macduff', 'this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen'.
Form: Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking in prose, and the equivocations that come true.
Edexcel's Shakespeare question has two parts: part (a) on the printed extract marks only language, form and structure (AO2), so context earns nothing there; part (b) on the play elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1, 15 marks) and context (AO3, 5 marks), not language analysis. Say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
