Key quotations — Macbeth — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
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.
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.
