Model answers

The question

The paper prints an extract from Act 2, Scene 2, from Macbeth's "I’ll go no more:" to the end of the scene ("Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!").

At this point in the play, Macbeth has just murdered King Duncan and has brought the daggers away with him. Lady Macbeth tells him to take them back to Duncan's chamber.

Starting with this extract, explore how Shakespeare presents guilt in Macbeth.

Write about:

• how Shakespeare presents guilt in this extract
• how Shakespeare presents guilt in the play as a whole.

(30 marks, plus 4 marks for AO4)

A grade 9 answer

Guilt in Macbeth is not something the characters can choose to refuse. Shakespeare presents it as conscience forcing its way out through the body: through sight, sound, sleep and, above all, blood. What makes the play tragic is that the two murderers meet guilt in opposite orders. Macbeth feels it at once and spends the rest of the play killing to silence it; Lady Macbeth denies it at once and is destroyed when it returns. This extract, moments after the murder, is where their paths cross, and it points to Shakespeare's argument: conscience can be buried but not destroyed.

In the extract, Macbeth's guilt is immediate and floods his senses. His question "How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?" (Act 2, Scene 2) shows a soldier who once "unseam’d" a rebel without pause (Act 1, Scene 2) now startled by a knock, so the offstage knocking becomes the sound of conscience itself. His hands seem to belong to someone else: "What hands are here? Ha, they pluck out mine eyes!" (Act 2, Scene 2). Disowning his hands disowns the deed, yet the image also punishes him: the hands blind the eyes that would have to look at it. The hyperbole of "Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?" (Act 2, Scene 2) swells one crime to a global scale, and his answer does the same in sound: the long Latinate "multitudinous seas incarnadine" collapses into the short, plain words of "Making the green one red" (Act 2, Scene 2), as if eloquence fails him. To an audience who believed kings were appointed by God, killing Duncan was a sin as well as a crime, and Macbeth already senses damnation: earlier in the scene he could not bring himself to say amen. His last reflection, "To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself" (Act 2, Scene 2), predicts his future: the only way to live with guilt is to stop being the man who feels it.

Lady Macbeth, by contrast, treats guilt as a matter of surfaces. The curt exclamation "Infirm of purpose!" and the imperative "Give me the daggers" (Act 2, Scene 2) restore the control she showed in Act 1. Her pun is chilling: "I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt" (Act 2, Scene 2). The near-homophone makes guilt a kind of paint, to be smeared on someone else. She answers Macbeth's ocean with "A little water clears us of this deed" (Act 2, Scene 2), a plain line whose calm undercuts his hyperbole, and her antithesis in "My hands are of your colour, but I shame / To wear a heart so white" (Act 2, Scene 2) turns red blood into a badge of courage and a white heart into cowardice, reversing what both colours should mean. Yet Shakespeare invites the audience to distrust her composure. Earlier in the scene she admits she could not kill Duncan herself, "Had he not resembled / My father as he slept" (Act 2, Scene 2), a crack the play will widen; the "little water" is dramatic irony that the sleepwalking scene answers.

Across the play, Macbeth follows the logic of that last line and tries to kill his conscience by giving it more to bear. By Act 3 his mind is "full of scorpions" (Act 3, Scene 2), a metaphor that makes guilt a living, stinging thing inside him. At the banquet it takes visible form in Banquo's Ghost, seen by him alone: "Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake / Thy gory locks at me" (Act 3, Scene 4). His denial is a confession, since no one has accused him. The critic A. C. Bradley argued that Macbeth's conscience speaks through terrifying images rather than moral argument, and the dagger, the voice and the Ghost all fit that reading. Instead of repenting, he reasons that "blood will have blood" (Act 3, Scene 4) and that he is "in blood / Stepp’d in so far" (Act 3, Scene 4) that turning back is as hard as going on. The blood that could not be washed from his hand has become a river he wades through. By Act 5 he has "almost forgot the taste of fears" (Act 5, Scene 5): Shakespeare shows that suppressing guilt brings not peace but numbness.

Lady Macbeth's guilt, pushed down in the extract, surfaces first as disappointment ("Naught’s had, all’s spent", Act 3, Scene 2) and finally in the sleepwalking scene, where it escapes her control. Her commanding blank verse has broken into fragmented prose, so the form itself enacts a mind that can no longer order its thoughts. "Out, damned spot! out, I say!" (Act 5, Scene 1) keeps the imperative voice she once used on her husband, but now she commands a stain that will not obey. She even takes over his hyperbole: "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand" (Act 5, Scene 1) echoes his "Neptune’s ocean", while "little" recalls the "little water" she thought would be enough. "What’s done cannot be undone" (Act 5, Scene 1) reverses her own dismissive "what’s done is done" (Act 3, Scene 2). The Doctor's verdict, "Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles" (Act 5, Scene 1), places her suffering inside a God-given natural order: a crime against that order breeds a sickness no medicine can reach.

Malcolm's final verdict on "this dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen" (Act 5, Scene 8) suits a new king who needs a clear story, but it is not the play the audience has watched. A fiend would not sleepwalk, and a butcher would not hear a voice cry out against him. Shakespeare shows two people who knew exactly what they had done: one silenced his conscience and was left with a life "Signifying nothing" (Act 5, Scene 5); the other buried hers and was destroyed by it. In both, guilt is the moral order taking its revenge from inside the mind.

Grade 5 and grade 9 side by side

Same question, same point: Lady Macbeth's calm in Act 2, Scene 2 against her guilt in Act 5, Scene 1.

Grade 5

Lady Macbeth does not seem to feel guilty in this extract. She says "A little water clears us of this deed" (Act 2, Scene 2), which shows that she thinks it is easy to get rid of the evidence of the murder. The word "little" suggests that she does not think the murder is a big deal. This is different to Macbeth, who thinks that not even the ocean could wash the blood off his hands. However, later in the play Lady Macbeth does feel guilty when she sleepwalks and says "Out, damned spot! out, I say!" (Act 5, Scene 1). This shows that she has changed and that the guilt has made her go mad. In Jacobean times people believed in God and in heaven and hell, so the audience would think she deserved to be punished for her sins.

Grade 9

Lady Macbeth's "A little water clears us of this deed" (Act 2, Scene 2) is built to sound final: its plain, even line and calm statement answer Macbeth's hyperbolic "Neptune’s ocean" by shrinking the murder to a household chore. Yet the confidence is dramatic irony, and Shakespeare makes her pay for every word. In the sleepwalking scene the "little water" returns as "this little hand" that "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten" (Act 5, Scene 1): the same small word now measures her helplessness, and the ocean-sized exaggeration she dismissed has become her own. Even the form turns against her, as the commanding verse of Act 2 breaks into disordered prose. For an audience who believed that killing a king was a sin against God, her collapse is not madness but conscience, the proof of the Doctor's warning that "Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles" (Act 5, Scene 1). Shakespeare suggests that guilt denied is not guilt escaped: it simply waits.

What made the difference

• A claim, not a description. The grade 5 starts with what she feels. The grade 9 starts by arguing why the line is written that way, and ends with a verdict on guilt in the whole play.
• One word, followed. Both spot "little". Only the grade 9 tracks it from "little water" to "this little hand", which turns a comment on one line into proof of change.
• Methods that do something. The grade 9 shows what the hyperbole, the dramatic irony and the switch to prose each achieve. The grade 5 leans on "shows that" and "suggests".
• Context that explains. The grade 5's "Jacobean times" sentence could end any paragraph. The grade 9 uses the belief that killing a king was a sin to explain the Doctor's "Unnatural deeds".
• Exact words. "Not a big deal" and "go mad" blur the point and echo the loose labels examiners criticise. "Conscience", "helplessness" and "disordered prose" are precise, and precision earns AO4.