How Shakespeare presents Macduff, and how the character develops across the text: loyalty, grief and his role in defeating Macbeth.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'O horror, horror, horror!', 'Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord's anointed temple', 'He loves us not', 'Bleed, bleed, poor country!', 'All my pretty ones?', 'But I must also feel it as a man', 'Macduff was from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd', 'The usurper's cursed head'.
Different readings of his leaving his family, and his manhood set against Macbeth's.
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.
