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.
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.
