Macbeth - Big Ideas to learn for the exam (with examples)

Macbeth (1606) Improving your grade 

The examiners want you to grapple with the “big ideas”. When you are analysing language, structure and context, try to add on some reference to these big ideas in some extra sentences at the end of your paragraphs.  
What is the point of Macbeth? Why does it still appeal to audiences around the world?  
Some critics would say Macbeth’s lasting appeal lies in the way it explores: 
  • The human experience 
The soliloquies allow the audience to connect more deeply with Macbeth and understand his motivations and very human struggles. The soliloquies stress that Macbeth could have not succumbed to his hamartia – that he has potential for virtue and potential for horrific evil, just like all of us.  They also emphasise how LONELY Macbeth is.  
  • Soliloquy 1: Act 1, scene 3 “Why do I yield to that suggestion...”  
  • Soliloquy 2: Act 1, scene 7 “He’s here in double trust” 
  • Soliloquy 3:  Act 2, scene 1 “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” 
  • Soliloquy 4:  Act 3, scene 1 “To be thus is nothing but to be safely thus“ 
  • Soliloquy 5:  Act 4, scene 1 “From this moment the very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand” 
  • Soliloquy 6:  Act 5, scene 3 “That which should accompany old age as honour love obedience troops of friends I must not look to have” 
  • Soliloquy 7:  Act 5, scene 5 “Out out brief candle. Life’s but a walking shadow…” 

  • Despair 
Macbeth’s final despairing soliloquies in Act 5 ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ ‘Out, out brief candle’.  
‘It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing’ 

  • The meaning of life/the nature of good and evil 
“Macbeth puts us through an actual experience of the insufficiency of our finite minds to the infinite universe.” Stephen Booth  
  • Death 
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both seem troubled and haunted by their childlessness, and the way that their grip on the crown is fragile because they do not have children to pass it onto. 
Children and babies are often referred to – ‘Pity, like a naked newborn babe/Striding the blast’ (Soliloquy Act 1, Scene 7). ‘Fruitless crown’ Lady Macbeth ‘have plucked my nipple from its boneless gums/and dashed the brains out’.  
  • Loneliness 
Macbeth is a play full of ‘lonely talking’ (the soliloquies). Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s crimes serve to isolate both of them from the other characters and from each other.  
As a play, Macbeth suggests that we are all alone. Ultimately, no matter how successful we are, we die alone.  (Lady Macbeth dies alone (friendless) as does Macbeth. ‘She should have died hereafter’.  

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