Act 4 — Macbeth — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
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.
OCR's question on this play is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the play elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the play, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts as the play shows it, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
