Hooray! Not Piers Plowman! Act Macbeth Analysis.

Rereading Macbeth was a real treat for me. I was able to pick up on a lot more stuff that I didn't notice back in my sophomore year in high school. For instance, I'm sure we're all familiar with the lines, "Fair is foul and foul is fair/ hover through the fog and the frosty air," (1.1.11-12) spoken by the witches in the first act of the play. This of course references the moral ambiguity of the main character, Macbeth, who by the end of act one seems set on killing the king in order to seize power. What I did not realize was that the first lines spoken by Macbeth was "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" (1.3.38). Since these are his first lines, an astute reader could easily pick up that the witches are about to meddle in his affairs. There are more of these clever little word plays a little later on in the act. For instance, in scene four, Duncan reminisces about the old Thane of Cawdor, whose position he has just assigned to Macbeth. The king says that he was "an a gentlemen whom I had built an absolute trust" (1.4.13-14). At that moment, Macbeth enters and the king begins praising him on his kindness and loyalty. If one has foreknowledge of what happens later on in the first act, the pacing and timing of the scene feels like a set up to a joke, in which the King has said that he is fed up with people betraying him, only to appoint the most conniving person to this position. 

Lastly, I cannot help but to bring up Lady Macbeth, whose speech always gives me chills. One line that stuck out to me in my second reading in the monologue was, "The raven himself is hoarse/ that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan/ under my battlements" (1.5.37-39). First off, what is the raven representing here? I though it was death, as ravens usually foreshadow it, and the word "fatal" later do certainly clarify her intentions. The word that really caught my eye was the word "battlements." Macbeth had just came back from fighting a traitor, and he now holds the position of said traitor. Now, he begins along a similar path, as the battlements of war begin to fester in his own house.