How Shakespeare explores guilt and conscience, in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?', 'Macbeth does murder sleep', 'A little water clears us of this deed', 'O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!', 'never shake / Thy gory locks at me', 'Out, damned spot!', 'Here's the smell of the blood still', 'Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased'.
The motifs of blood, sleep and washing, and how guilt changes places between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.
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.
