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.
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.
