Macbeth: Questions 2

1. How does Banquo’s speech at the beginning of act 3 reflect his complex position, suspecting Macbeth but knowing he will likely profit from it? But why does he not fear Macbeth will do something to him as well.

2. Why on the other hand Macbeth as soon as he becomes king also becomes obsessed with Banquo, as if in 3.1: 51-70 his entire deed is useless without doing something also about Banquo? How does this become a problematic way of thinking about time?

3. 3.2 is a great scene because it asks to understand how Lady Mac and Mac are both changed by their deed. Lady Mac seems disappointed by her lack of ease and tries to come to terms with dissatisfaction? How does Mac differ from that—3.2: 39-56? Does is help to make an analogy with Jean Paul Sartre’s Saint-Genet where he stresses that for Genet the only way to respond to charges in his youth that he was a thief was to choose to become a thief.

4. Does Mac see Banquo’s ghost because he feels guilty. What possible other explanations could there be, based perhaps on 3.4: 22-26 and 79-83. How can the decision to revisit the witches and 135-41 be seen as repudiations of the whole domain where guilt might be a factor? Can there be a heroism of refusing human constraints against doing evil? Is 4.1 144-56 a plausible conclusion to a path that begins with an initial effort to murder and not to be a murderer at the same time, or to murder for the future while having one’s present be one of normal fears and reverences?

5. Why stage Lady Macduff’s situation as Shakes does in 4.2? Why have her abandoned by her husband? How much are we invited to judge him, and how do we judge him since he will eventually restore order to Scotland?

6. Why then have Malcolm pretend to be even more vicious than Macbeth? Can he even understand the actual viciousness of Mac? Or does it matter that the future king can understand how evil Mac is so that he will not be surprised by temptation, as 4. 3: 113 ff suggests?

7. Is there a strange parallel to Mac in the advice Malcolm gives to Macduff: “blunt not the heart; enrage it.”

8. Why end Lady Mac’s story with her sleepwalking in guilt and then her death? Is the main point of that to confirm traditional moral beliefs about guilt, as perhaps 5.1: 75-880 suggests? How is her position different, perhaps sadder, than Ophelia’s madness? How might you characterize the roles women seem forced to play in Shakesperean tragedy? Are there roles the results of tragic decisions or perhaps retroactively important causes of the tragedies?

9. What does 5.3: 22-7 show about Mac? Why is this crucial to what follows when he hears the doctor’s report? What emotions dominate Mac’s response to the doctor?

10. Why do we not learn what Lady Mac died from until the end? Is it strange to have Mac be so general in responding to her death—5.5: 18-28? Might that level of generalization help when he is confronted with the woods moving? Why does it matter that at this point he knows he is going to die? Does that knowledge change his behavior at all? What about his two speeches in 5.8: 17-34 What happens to Mac’s sense of time by these speeches?