Macbeth quotations for the essay question. At the beginning of the play Macbeth writes to his wife as 'my dear

Question

At the beginning of the play Macbeth writes to his wife as 'my dearest partner of greatness'. How does their relationship change during the play and how is the balance of power affected?

Can you help me find quotations or a place to get quotations for this essay and reasons for the quotations.

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Answer 1

Lady Macbeth [who has no name of her own in this play, but who historically had the "uneuphonious" name of ... brace yourself ... Gruoch (Asimov 167; cf. Ogburn and Ogburn 789)] reads her husband's letter to her regarding the witches. Macbeth calls her his "dearest partner in greatness" (I.v.11), so it's an odd marriage. They may leave a lot unsaid -- it's difficult to tell (or to read). Lady Macbeth considers that her husband is too kind and insufficiently ambitious -- "too full o' th' milk of human kindness" (I.v.17) -- so she plans to "pour [her] spirits in [his] ear" (I.v.26). (There's an echo from Hamlet and Othello.) When she hears that Duncan will be spending the night at the Macbeths' castle, she delivers a dramatic apostrophe:

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe topful

Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,

Stop up th' access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

Th' effect and it! Come to my woman's b*****s,

And take my milk for gall, you murth'ring ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,

And pall thee in dunnest smoke of h**l,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

To cry, "Hold, hold!"

(I.v.40-54)

"This is her vivid way of asking to be stripped of feminine weakness and invested with masculine resolve" (Macrone 175). It also focuses attention on what is becoming another theme: bodily openings, hereafter mostly a matter of wounds.

Macbeth arrives and she announces, "Thy letters have transported me beyond / This ignorant present, and I feel now / The future in the instant" (I.v.56-58). The enjambement is effective for conveying this time warp. Macbeth says Duncan is coming tonight and Lady Macbeth asks when he's leaving. "To-morrow," replies Macbeth, "as he purposes" (I.v.60) -- adding a troubling note of ambiguity. Lady Macbeth coaches her husband to be more poker-faced, worrying that his visage can be read like a "book" (I.v.62-63). "To beguile the time, / Look like the time... / look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under 't" (I.v.63-66). [Catherine de Medici was called "Madame la Serpente" (Ogburn and Ogburn 794).] As he promised with Banquo, he tells his wife, "We will speak further" (I.v.71).