Act 2 Key Quotes

“the innocent sleep, / Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care / The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, / Balm of hurt minds "

• One of the key introductions for the motif of sleep as innocence and peace of mind in the play

• A series of metaphors each of which convey the same key idea in slightly different ways, all of which you could analyse (e.g. without sleep, our minds will unravel, like a sleeve that is not knitted up at the end of each day)

• The semantic field of mortality (life and death) that Macbeth uses - foreboding, conveys the mortal consequences of what has happened

“Will all great Neptune's oceans wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine”

• Develops the other key motif in the play: blood as symbolic of both violence and its consequences, especially guilt and remorse

• metaphor - the idea that all the water in the ocean cannot clean the blood (the guilt) from his hands; death and killing happen in an instant, but blood remains and stains

• Quantifier “all” and adjective “great” used for emphasis - it’s not enough just to say the oceans, Macbeth needs to show their significance even more clearly

• Use of Neptune, the god of the sea - a supernatural reference to further emphasise the power of the ocean in order to reinforce the greatness of his guilt

• The blood will turn the ocean red - the remorse will metaphorically grow and spread until it has stained, tainted, spoiled every aspect of Macbeth’s life; he will be haunted by it forever

• Cognates of the word ‘blood’ (‘blood’ and ‘bloody’) are used more than any other lexical word in the play

• The symbolic use of water as cleansing people of sin

“A little water clears us of this deed”

• The juxtaposition of this line with Macbeth’s line conveys the early difference between the two when it comes to guilt and remorse

• The adjective “little” used to further diminish the significance of the regicide - it doesn’t even need much water

• The irony that this line later evokes given how much guilt and remorse Lady Macbeth goes on to feel, evidence in Act 5 Scene 1

• The symbolic use of water as cleansing people of sin - linking to Christian ideas of baptism

“Is this a dagger which I see before me… Come, let me clutch thee”

• rhetorical question

• hallucination → product of a disturbed and distressed mind

• imperitive

• Begging foreshadows his future paranoia and mentalk state post murder

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

• Macbeth is going to do something unnatural

• subverting will of God due to divine right

• act of regicide disrupts natural order

“Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell.”

• rhyming couplet

• bell symbolises death → shows movement of Dunvan’s death and the impact he has as king

• reaffirms his decision to commit regicide → signals Macbeth’s decent into madness