Key quotations — Macbeth — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Key quotations
Key quotations
What you need to know
The essential quotations from Macbeth, grouped by character and by theme, each with what it means and how to analyse it.
A table of 30 to 40 key quotations by character and theme, each with its speaker, place and a one-line note, for testing yourself.
Including Duncan ('There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face', 'An absolute trust'), 'This supernatural soliciting', 'screw your courage to the sticking-place', 'Is this a dagger which I see before me', 'Macbeth does murder sleep', 'Infirm of purpose!', 'Had he not resembled / My father as he slept', 'The multitudinous seas incarnadine', 'Nought's had, all's spent', 'Thou shalt get kings', 'Double, double toil and trouble', 'Untimely ripp'd', 'She should have died hereafter', 'Out, out, brief candle', 'Lay on, Macduff' and 'this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen'.
Form: verse and prose, the witches' chanting rhythm, and the shared lines of Act 2 Scene 2 ('When?', 'Now.', 'As I descended?') and what they show about the couple.
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.
