Macbeth: the morning after Duncan, the king, has been murdered Lennox and Macduff arrive at Macbeth's home to collect t

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Macbeth coursework

Macbeth: the morning after Duncan, the king, has been murdered Lennox and Macduff arrive at Macbeth’s home to collect the king. When Macbeth is speaking to Lennox and Macduff, Macbeth isn’t saying enough to make them feel welcomed at his home. Macduff is polite and asks whether the king is awake yet and Macbeth answers with “not yet” suggesting that he is not in the mood for talking. He is probably extremely nervous at the moment in time and is pale and sweating a lot. He is also not talking much because he is thinking of what will happen when they find the king. “Will they blame him? What is he going to do if it is him?” In Shakespeare’s writings he uses ten syllables in every line but in the case of Macbeth, he uses stichomythias, which are short broken lines. When Macbeth is transporting them to the king’s room he says “the labour we delight in physics” which is an old proverb. He uses this because he is so nervous and he can’t think of anything to say, so he says a proverb which isn’t his own words.

        Once they reach the king’s room Lennox asks Macbeth if the king is leaving on that day, and Macbeth says “he does – he did appoint so”. In some ways many people think that Macbeth is giving the whole murder away by saying this because he could mean two things. The first meaning is, that when he says “he did appoint so” he means that he did appoint to go but he’s dead so he’s not really going anywhere. The second meaning is that, he is just agreeing with Lennox’s question about if the king is leaving.

        Macduff is sent to awaken the king, and while that is going on, Lennox is trying to obtain a conversation out of Macbeth, so he talks about how bad the weather was that night. All Macbeth can answer with is “’twas a rough night” because he is too concerned about what will happen when Macduff finds the kings dead body, and he is also agreeing with Lennox because is was a rough night, well for him at least.

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        Once the king was found dead there is confusion everywhere in the air, except for Macbeth who isn’t acting very well and Lady Macbeth who is pretending to wake up. Everybody’s speech is both short and precise or just tangled up so it makes no sense but Macbeth’s parts are all poetic and sounds prepared, unnatural and a bit complex because he is not as shocked. Macbeth says “Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had lived a blessed time” in this quotation Macbeth is saying that, if he had died then he wouldn’t feel guilty anymore. ...

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