Macbeth — Acts 1–2 Lady Macbeth and the Murder of Duncan — AQA GCSE English Literature

SPEC 3.1.1 • MACBETH

Lady Macbeth & the Murder of Duncan

Acts 1–2. Lady Macbeth enters already plotting, weaponises gender against her husband, and steers the play to its central crime. Shakespeare gives us the architect of regicide — and begins, immediately, to dismantle her.

Lady Macbeth — Architect of the Crime

Lady Macbeth is one of the most dramatically charged figures in Shakespeare. She enters the play already plotting; she ends Act 2 having steered her husband to regicide; and the methods Shakespeare gives her — soliloquies, imperatives, gendered transgression — are among the play's analytically richest.

The Arc Begins Here

Acts 1–2 are not just background to her Act 5 collapse. They build the strength that Acts 3–5 will dismantle. A strong response on Lady Macbeth tracks the arc — rhetorical mastery in 1.5, manipulation in 1.7, pragmatic command in 2.2 — and uses these as evidence for why her sleepwalking in 5.1 lands so hard.

Avoid the Classic Error

Don't write "Lady Macbeth makes Macbeth kill Duncan." She doesn't make him; she catalyses an ambition Macbeth already harbours. Her manipulation succeeds because his desire is already there. Removing his agency removes the tragedy.

Key Terms For This Lesson

Definitions

Apostrophe — a figure of speech that directly addresses an absent person, abstract concept, or supernatural force. Lady Macbeth's "Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts" is a textbook example — she addresses spirits who are not on stage.

Hallucination — a perception experienced in the absence of external stimulus. Macbeth's dagger (2.1) is the play's first; Lady Macbeth's phantom blood (5.1) the last.

Personification — the attribution of human qualities to non-human things. Sleep is personified across the play — "the innocent sleep, / Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care."

Dramatic irony — a situation in which the audience knows something a character does not. The hospitality scenes (1.6) and the immediate aftermath of the murder are saturated with it.

Caesura — a deliberate pause in a line of verse, usually marked by punctuation. Disrupts rhythm to mimic psychological disturbance — listen for caesurae in Macbeth's post-murder speech.

Imperative — a verb in the command form. Lady Macbeth's "unsex me here" uses imperative after imperative to construct her invocation.

1.5 — Lady Macbeth Reads the Letter

Lady Macbeth enters mid-letter — the letter Macbeth has sent her about the witches' prophecy. She finishes reading and, before Macbeth has even returned home, has decided what must happen. Her first analytical move is about him:

"Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o' th' milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way." Lady Macbeth · Act 1 Scene 5

The Diagnostic Move

"Too full o' th' milk of human kindness" — the metaphor is maternal-nutritional. Macbeth has too much of the substance of moral feeling. The verb "catch" reduces regicide to mere expedience: "the nearest way". Lady Macbeth is diagnosing what stands between Macbeth and the throne — and the answer is his conscience.

Why This Matters

Shakespeare establishes Lady Macbeth's rhetorical power before she ever speaks to her husband. By the time Macbeth arrives, she has already analysed him, decided on the murder, and chosen her strategy. Her authority in 1.7 is built here, in private — that is what AO2 picks up.

"Unsex Me Here" — Strength By Invocation

"Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty… Come to my woman's breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers… Come, thick night." Lady Macbeth · Act 1 Scene 5

"Unsex" — A Shakespeare-Coined Verb

The verb "unsex" is almost certainly Shakespeare's invention. It tells us exactly what Lady Macbeth thinks strength requires: the abandonment of her female identity. Gender is framed as an obstacle, not an asset. Her power is to be constructed by subtraction, not by anything innate.

Apostrophe + Imperatives

The whole speech is an apostrophe to spirits not on stage. The imperative verbs stack up — come, unsex, fill, take, come — making the speech a series of commands. But the commands are addressed to powers outside herself. Her strength is requested, not innate. This matters when she collapses in Act 5 — the strength she summoned is the strength that leaves her.

The AO3 Move

To a Jacobean audience, a woman openly calling on spirits to remove her femininity would have registered as witchcraft-adjacent — exactly the transgression the Witchcraft Act 1604 made a capital crime. Lady Macbeth's strength is constructed through inversion of natural order, and Acts 3–5 will exact the cost.

"Innocent Flower / Serpent" — The Play's Compressed Thesis

When Macbeth arrives, Lady Macbeth's first instruction to him is the play's appearance-vs-reality argument in a single line:

"Look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't." Lady Macbeth · Act 1 Scene 5

A Simile And A Metaphor

The flower — open, beautiful, harmless — is the simile, marked by "look like". The serpent — hidden, lethal — is the metaphor, marked by direct identity: "be the serpent". The grammatical structure is the trap: appearance ("look like") versus reality ("be"). The instruction is to inhabit both: visible innocence; concealed lethality. This is equivocation, applied as policy.

Biblical Allusion — Genesis

The serpent is the figure of deception in Eden — the source of original sin. For a Jacobean audience, Lady Macbeth's instruction would not have read merely as cunning. It would have read as the recurrence of the play's most theologically loaded image. She is, by analogy, the Eve figure tempting her husband into the fall — which is exactly the role Shakespeare's audience would have recognised.

The witches' "fair is foul, foul is fair" gave us inversion at the level of language. This line gives us inversion as instruction. Lady Macbeth is teaching Macbeth how to inhabit the witches' world.

1.7 — Manhood Weaponised

Macbeth has decided not to proceed. Lady Macbeth's response is the play's most famous piece of moral pressure:

"When you durst do it, then you were a man; / And to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the man." Lady Macbeth · Act 1 Scene 7

The Conditional Trap

"When you durst do it, then you were a man." The conditional construction — "when you durst… then you were" — makes manhood retroactively dependent on the act. Not "you will be a man if you do it"; "you were a man then" — the implication being that you are no longer one now.

The Image That Lands the Argument

Lady Macbeth then offers the most disturbing image in the play:

"I have given suck, and know / How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, / And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn / As you have done to this."

She does not say she would kill a baby. She says she would do so if she had sworn to it — making the issue not the deed but the keeping of a vow. Macbeth, who has sworn (privately) to murder Duncan, is being told that vow-breaking is the worst of all crimes.

The Gender Inversion

Lady Macbeth's 1.5 soliloquy unsexed herself. By 1.7 she weaponises sexed expectations against her husband. Shakespeare's argument: her power depends on using gender norms she has herself rejected. The contradiction is part of what the play will punish.

"I Am Settled" — Macbeth's Yielding

"I am settled, and bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat. / Away, and mock the time with fairest show: / False face must hide what the false heart doth know." Macbeth · Act 1 Scene 7

"Bend Up" — A Martial Verb

"Bend up" is the language of drawing a bow — preparing a weapon for release. Macbeth is not euphoric; he is tensed, like a string about to be released. The verb registers his deliberate physical preparation rather than emotional surrender.

"Terrible Feat" — He Knows

The adjective "terrible" is crucial. Macbeth has not been deceived into thinking the murder is good. He calls it terrible as he agrees to do it. Shakespeare's tragic argument: Macbeth was not deceived. He was persuaded. He understands what he has agreed to.

"False Face / False Heart"

The closing couplet directly enacts Lady Macbeth's "innocent flower / serpent" instruction. The doubling of "false" — face and heart — registers the disguise as already complete. The moral corruption precedes the deed. Macbeth is, by the end of 1.7, already inside the inverted world the witches opened the play with.

2.1 — The Dagger Soliloquy

Alone, on the way to Duncan's chamber, Macbeth sees a vision:

"Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. / Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?" Macbeth · Act 2 Scene 1

The Handle's Orientation

The dagger appears with "the handle toward my hand". The orientation is invitational. The dagger is offering itself to be used. Macbeth reaches — and cannot grasp it. The vision precedes him; he follows.

Don't Resolve The Ambiguity

Many students confidently argue the dagger is either "the witches' magic" or "Macbeth's hallucination". The play deliberately keeps both possibilities live. Macbeth himself asks both questions: "fatal vision" (supernatural) or "dagger of the mind" (psychological). Shakespeare refuses to answer. A Level 5/6 reading names the ambiguity rather than dissolving it.

The Dagger — Visualising the Rupture

Shakespeare uses the hallucination to dramatise the gap between what Macbeth sees and what is real — the gap "fair is foul" opened, now made physical:

Why The Handle Orientation Matters

Daggers in 17th-century stagecraft were drawn from the side — handle away from the user, blade pointing in. Shakespeare reverses this. The handle facing Macbeth makes the dagger an invitation, not a threat. The metaphor is direct: the means of the crime is being offered, not threatened.

WHW+C — The Dagger Soliloquy

Question: Starting with this soliloquy from Act 2 Scene 1, explore how Shakespeare uses the dagger to dramatise Macbeth's state of mind in the moments before the murder. 30 + 4 marks

Constructed example in AQA's question format — not from a real past paper. The dagger has never been a named focus in the 2020–2024 archive.

Thesis

Shakespeare uses the dagger to dramatise a Macbeth still split between perception and reality — a man whose moral consciousness has not yet failed but whose senses are already being acted upon by the supernatural world he has chosen to enter.

W

What the writer does: Shakespeare gives Macbeth a hallucinated dagger with "the handle toward my hand", then makes him reach for it and fail to grasp it — "I have thee not, and yet I see thee still."

H

How it works: The handle's orientation is invitational — a stage weapon would conventionally face blade-first. Shakespeare reverses the convention, making the dagger an offer. The failure to grasp it stages the perception/reality rupture the witches' "fair is foul" introduced linguistically — now made physical on Macbeth's hand. The rhetorical questions — "fatal vision" or "dagger of the mind" — refuse to resolve which world the dagger is from.

W

Why it matters: Shakespeare keeps the supernatural and psychological readings both live because the play's tragic argument requires both: Macbeth must be acted upon by forces he has invited, and remain morally conscious enough to recognise what he is doing. The dagger marks the last moment Macbeth still questions his own perception. After the murder, the questioning collapses into hallucinated certainty ("Sleep no more!").

+C

Context: To a Jacobean audience reading the supernatural through James I's Daemonologie, the dagger would not have been merely psychological — it would have registered as the genuine intervention of malign spirits acting on a soul that had already opened itself to corruption through Macbeth's "Stars, hide your fires" in 1.4 and Lady Macbeth's invocation of "thick night" in 1.5.

2.2 — "I Have Done The Deed"

The murder is committed offstage. Macbeth returns with bloody daggers. Shakespeare's method here is fragmentation — Macbeth, articulate in his soliloquies, now cannot complete a thought:

"MACBETH: I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?

LADY MACBETH: I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.

Did not you speak?

MACBETH: When?

LADY MACBETH: Now.

MACBETH: As I descended?

LADY MACBETH: Ay." Act 2 Scene 2

Stichomythia & Caesurae

The lines break into stichomythia — single-line exchanges, often shared between two speakers. Caesurae (the punctuation pauses) fragment the verse into nervous half-lines. Shakespeare is staging psychological disturbance through form: the iambic pentameter that defined the noble register in Act 1 is breaking apart under the weight of what they have done.

The Failure To Say "Amen"

Macbeth reports: "I could not say 'Amen'… 'Amen' / Stuck in my throat." The first immediate consequence of the murder is theological — Macbeth has been severed from the language of prayer. He has not yet been physically punished. He has been cut off from God.

"Sleep No More!" — Sleep As Something Murdered

"Methought I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more: / Macbeth does murder sleep' — the innocent sleep, / Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care, / The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, / Chief nourisher in life's feast." Macbeth · Act 2 Scene 2

Personification — Sleep As A Victim

Sleep is personified across six lines. It is "innocent" (it has moral status); it "knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care" (it has a function); it is "the death of each day's life" (it is itself a structuring force); it is the "balm of hurt minds" (it is restorative); it is "great nature's second course" and "chief nourisher" (it is part of the cosmic order). Then Shakespeare names what Macbeth has done to it: murder.

The Triple Murder

Shakespeare's argument: in killing Duncan, Macbeth has murdered three things. The king (politically). Sleep (psychologically — neither Macbeth nor Lady Macbeth will sleep peacefully again). And the natural order itself (cosmically — sleep is "great nature's second course"). One deed; three severances. Acts 3–5 will pay each cost in turn.

The Blood Motif — Structural Arc

Shakespeare does not introduce blood and leave it. He builds a structural arc in which the play's central image is set up in Act 2 and overturned in Act 5. Macbeth's instant recognition is dismissed by Lady Macbeth — and what she dismisses returns to destroy her.

The Level 6 Move

Name the arc, not the individual moments. A Level 3 response analyses "a little water" in isolation. A Level 6 response identifies it as the opening of a three-stage structural argument Shakespeare completes only in Act 5.

Weak vs Strong — "Unsex Me Here"

Weak · Level 2/3

"Lady Macbeth says 'unsex me here' which means she wants to be like a man."

Problem: paraphrase, not analysis. The Shakespeare-coined verb is unremarked. The theological weight is unremarked. The structural function — strength requested, not innate — is unremarked.

Strong · Level 5/6

"Shakespeare's Shakespeare-coined verb 'unsex' tells us Lady Macbeth's strength requires the abandonment of her female identity — a transgression of the natural order Jacobean audiences would have heard alongside Macbeth's transgression of the political order. Her strength is constructed through inversion, and the play will spend Acts 3 to 5 exacting the cost."

Scores because: specific method (the Shakespeare-coinage). Specific effect (strength by subtraction). Specific context (gender transgression + natural order). Forward link to the play's whole arc.

Examiner Alert — Vocabulary You Don't Understand

Examiner Report · Paper 1 · June 2024

"Many candidates labelled Lady Macbeth a 'proto-feminist' or 'femme fatale' without showing they understood the terms. If you use a critical label, demonstrate it works. Better to write specifically about what she does than apply a fashionable category."

"Proto-feminist" and "femme fatale" are both anachronisms — they apply 19th and 20th-century categories to a Jacobean character. They can work as critical terms, but only if the writer shows what the term means in context and what work it does for the argument.

The Safer Move

Describe what Lady Macbeth does — invokes spirits, weaponises gender, gives commands in imperatives, drives the murder pragmatically — and let the reader infer the categories. "Catalyst," "rhetorical master," "transgressive figure" all do useful analytical work without imposing a category the play does not announce.

Practice — Close Analysis Drill

Lady Macbeth to Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 5:

"Look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't."

Write one sentence that names two methods, explains their combined effect, and integrates a relevant context.

Model

"Shakespeare pairs the simile of the 'innocent flower' with the metaphor of being 'the serpent under't' — the grammatical hinge between 'look like' and 'be' is itself the appearance-vs-reality argument — and folds in a biblical allusion to Genesis, where the serpent is the figure of original deception in Eden; a Jacobean audience steeped in scripture would have heard Lady Macbeth's tutoring of her husband as the recurrence of Eve's role in the fall."

Why

Two precisely named methods (simile + metaphor — not both similes). Specific effect (the look like / be hinge enacts the play's whole appearance-vs-reality argument). Integrated context (Genesis / Eden / the fall). One sentence; Level 5/6 in shape.

Checkpoint

You should now be able to do three things:

1

Explain how Shakespeare constructs Lady Macbeth's strength through gendered transgression — the Shakespeare-coined verb "unsex" , the apostrophe to spirits, the imperatives stacking up: strength requested , not innate, and therefore vulnerable to collapse.

2

Analyse the 1.7 "manhood" persuasion as the weaponising of gender norms her own 1.5 soliloquy invoked — the conditional "when you durst do it, then you were a man" making regicide the test of his masculinity.

3

Apply WHW+C to the dagger soliloquy — naming the hallucination, the handle's invitational orientation, the rupture between perception and reality, and Shakespeare's refusal to resolve the supernatural-vs-psychological ambiguity.

Next Lesson

Lesson 1.04 — Acts 2–3: Guilt, Blood and Banquo's Murder. The Porter scene, the discovery of Duncan's body, Macbeth's commissioning of Banquo's murder, and the banquet hallucination.