How Shakespeare explores the witches, visions and the supernatural, and fate against free will 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: 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair', 'This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill, cannot be good', 'The instruments of darkness tell us truths', 'Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts', 'Is this a dagger which I see before me', 'never shake / Thy gory locks at me', 'Double, double toil and trouble', 'none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth'.
Fate and free will, and whether the witches cause Macbeth's crimes or reveal his ambition; Daemonologie and equivocation.
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.
