Act 4 — Macbeth — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Act 4
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
The apparitions, the murder of Macduff's family, and Malcolm testing Macduff in England.
Key quotations: 'Double, double toil and trouble', 'By the pricking of my thumbs', 'beware Macduff', 'none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth', 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill', 'The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand', 'He loves us not', 'Bleed, bleed, poor country!', 'the king-becoming graces', 'All my pretty ones?', 'But I must also feel it as a man'.
Equivocation in the apparitions' promises, and Malcolm's test of Macduff as a lesson in kingship.
Eduqas's Shakespeare questions don't mark context: the extract question (15 marks) and the whole-play essay (20 marks, plus 5 for spelling, punctuation, vocabulary and sentence structures) both mark response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2). Use context only in a phrase that supports an interpretation, and say which question each worked paragraph practises.
