

I think he regrets killing the king and has a sub-conscious guilt, also he says, “I am afraid to think what I have done” which also proves he feels guilty. Macbeth: as I descended? Lady Macbeth: ay.” They are very simple one-word answers and make the atmosphere tense.I think it is an important part of the scene when Macbeth can’t say the word “amen”. I think that it gets pretty tense when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have this conversation, “Lady Macbeth: did not you speak. Lady Macbeth says she would’ve committed the murder if the king hadn’t have resembled her father in his sleep, I think this is a cowardly excuse to make Macbeth look like the coward in front of the audience. We Will Write a Custom Essay Specifically Also it says “The surfeited grooms do mock their charge with snores”, this implies that the grooms are almost mocking the king as they are asleep and snoring whilst the king is about to be murdered. In one of the first lines it says “It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman”, It is believed that death is imminent when the owls shriek is heard and gives the audience an idea that the murder will be committed soon.

There is no going back for Macbeth and everyone is against him.I will now breakdown the seen and talk about different sections of it. Everything that happens in the rest of the play is a result of the murder of Duncan. But Macbeth is now seen as the evil one as he commits treason. Lady Macbeth seems to be the “boss” of Macbeth and she clearly organises the murder. Therefore, the audience wonder whether he will kill Duncan or not, this builds tension.Īct 2, Scene 2 is an important scene because it reinforces the relationship between Macbeth and lady Macbeth. She also doubts Macbeth’s courageous to carry out the murder. Also they have met lady Macbeth and know that she is evil. In the lead up to this scene, the audience are waiting for Macbeth to kill Duncan, they have been since the beginning of the play, when Macbeth first thought about killing Duncan. He is co-author of The Routledge History of Literature in English with Ron Carter, and also wrote The Language of Poetry, Literature with a Small 'l' and the first critical edition of Teleny by Oscar Wilde and others.In this piece of coursework I am going to respond to the questions asked.

John McRae is Special Professor of Language in Literature Studies and Teaching Associate in the School of English at Nottingham University, and holds Visiting Professorships in China, Malaysia, Spain and the USA. Students using a different version of the play may encounter slight differences in both the text and line numbers. Note: We use the Arden edition of the play. After that, we go through the play scene by scene, providing close reading and detailed analysis, with commentary on character, plot, themes and motifs, language, symbolism – and more. We begin with a broad introduction to historical, political, and intellectual context of early 17th-century England. In this nineteen-part course, Professor John McRae (University of Nottingham) explores Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In this module, we provide a commentary on Act 2, Scene 2, focusing in particular on the contrasting behaviour of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the immediate aftermath of the murder.
