Macbeth — Key Quotes and Context
Quotations only earn marks when you can do something with them. A shorter list you can analyse closely will always beat a longer list you can only reproduce, so learn these in groups — by theme or by character — and practise writing two sentences of analysis on each.
Essential Quotes
| Quote | Significance |
|---|---|
| "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" | Witches establish the theme of appearance vs reality from the very start |
| "Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires" | Macbeth's first aside showing hidden ambition |
| "Come, you spirits… unsex me here" | Lady Macbeth calls on supernatural forces to make her ruthless |
| "Is this a dagger which I see before me?" | Hallucination — guilt manifests before the murder even happens |
| "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?" | Macbeth's guilt is permanent and overwhelming |
| "Out, damned spot!" | Lady Macbeth's descent into madness; guilt has consumed her |
| "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" | Macbeth's nihilistic speech; life has become meaningless |
How to analyse three of these properly
"Fair is foul, and foul is fair" — the paradox inverts moral categories before a single human character has spoken, so the audience enters the play already unable to trust appearances. The chiasmus (the mirrored structure) makes the line feel like an incantation rather than a statement, and the alliteration on f gives it the rhythm of a spell. Note that Macbeth's own first line — "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" — echoes it, linking him to the witches before he has met them.
"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?" — the scale is the point. Macbeth reaches for an entire ocean and a classical god, and the answer is still no. Compare it directly with Lady Macbeth's "A little water clears us of this deed" from the same scene: the same image, opposite conclusions, and by Act 5 they have exchanged positions. That comparison is worth more than either quotation alone.
"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" — the repetition creates a flat, trudging rhythm that enacts the meaninglessness it describes. The metaphors that follow reduce life to a "brief candle" and a "poor player", and the speech ends by calling it a tale "signifying nothing". Macbeth has achieved everything he murdered for and finds it empty.
Grouping quotations by theme
- Ambition — "vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself"; "Stars, hide your fires"
- Guilt — "Neptune's ocean"; "Out, damned spot!"; "Is this a dagger"
- Appearance vs reality — "Fair is foul"; "look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't"
- Gender — "unsex me here"; "When you durst do it, then you were a man"
- Kingship and order — "this most bloody piece of work"; the natural disorder after Duncan's death
Learning them in groups means that whatever theme the question names, you already have two quotations ready and a comparison between them.
Context
- Written c.1606 for King James I, who had a keen interest in witchcraft and wrote Daemonologie
- Divine Right of Kings — killing a king was both a political and religious crime
- The Gunpowder Plot (1605) — recent context of treason and regicide
- Jacobean audiences believed in witchcraft and the supernatural
Using context without derailing the essay
Context belongs inside the analysis, not beside it. Compare:
Weak: "Jacobean audiences believed in witchcraft. Shakespeare uses witches in the play."
Strong: "Because a Jacobean audience took the supernatural literally, the witches' prophecies would have carried genuine menace rather than reading as metaphor — which sharpens the question of whether Macbeth is choosing his crimes or being steered towards them."
The second version uses the same fact but makes it do work.
Common mistakes
- Quoting at length. A quotation longer than a line is usually a sign you are not sure which part matters. Embed a phrase, not a sentence
- Naming a technique and stopping. "This is a metaphor" is not analysis; what the metaphor makes the audience feel is
- Analysing the character's psychology instead of Shakespeare's craft
- Misquoting. An inaccurate quotation undermines the point it is supporting — learn them exactly
Exam tips
- Embed quotations inside your own sentences so they read fluently
- Zoom in on one word where you can — the verb "yield", the adjective "black" — since close reading of a single word scores higher than commentary on a whole line
- Where two quotations speak to each other, use both; comparison is the fastest route to a developed argument
- Keep a handful of very short quotations for the extract question, where time is tight
Key facts to remember
- Eight well-analysed quotations beat twenty memorised ones
- Group them by theme, so any question finds you prepared
- Always move from what it says to how it is written to why Shakespeare wrote it that way
- The Macbeth/Lady Macbeth blood comparison is one of the most useful contrasts in the play
- Context earns marks only when it explains a choice in the text