| ACT 5 SCENE 8; OUTSIDE DUNSINANE CASTLE | On another part of the battlefield, Macbeth and Macduff finally come face to face. Words, then sword thrusts are exchanged, and Macbeth, the bloody and tyrannical usurper of the throne of Scotland, meets his predestined end. |
| Act 5 Scene 8MACBETH: Why should I play the Roman fool and die On mine own sword? Whiles I see lives, the gashes do better upon them. | rhetorically questions why he should commit suicide whilst he can still see people in which he wishes to lay ‘gashes…upon…’ Gothic Violence and Tyranny |
| Act 5 Scene 8MACDUFF: Turn, hell-hound, turn. | Macduff’s choice of the epithet “Hell-hound,” recalling his earlier description of Macbeth as a “Hell-kite” (Act IV, Scene 3), confirms the true nature of the tyrant king. |
| Act 5 Scene 8 MACBETH: Of all men else I have avoided thee, but get thee back, my soul is too much charged with blood of thine already. | avoids him cos of what witches say in apparitionsbigging himself up – ironic because Macduff is of no woman born |
| Act 5 Scene 8MACDUFF: I have no words; my voice is in my sword, thou bloodier villain than terms can give thee out. [Fight. Alarum.] | He is through talking to him and wasting time, he’ll let the sword hold AND finish the conversation between the two of them. shows how desperately Macduff wants to murder him. |
| Act 5 Scene 8MACBETH:….Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests; I bear a charmed life which must not yield to one of woman born. | Boasting about his charmed life – luck – which is about to run out he mistakenly imagines that the words of the apparitions are a protective charm, which can keep him from physical injury. |
| Act 5 Scene 8 MACDUFF: Despair thy charm, and let the angel whom thou still hast served tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped. | The true voice of revenge lies in action, not language. Macduff now reveals to Macbeth that he entered the world by being “untimely ripp’d” from his mother’s womb: He was not, therefore, in the strict sense, “born” of woman. With the short but powerful sentence “Despair thy charm,” Macbeth must know that his struggle for survival is over. The penultimate prophecy has come true. |
| Act 5 Scene 8MACBETH: Accursed be that tongue that tells me so, For it hath cowed my better part of man; And be these juggling fiends no more believed That palter with us in a double sense, that keep the word of promise to our ear and break it to our hope. | Throughout play, Macbeth wonders about veracity of Witches’ words: In Act I Sne 3, he calls em “imperfect speakers” because they had not told him all he desired to know; now he realizes that they spoke to him of his own imperfection. In same scene, he admits their supernatural prophecy “Cannot be ill; cannot be good”; now he knows which was which. In Act IV, Sne 1, his opinion was men were “damned . . . that trust them”; now he is damned by his own words. And in Act V, Scene 5, Macbeth speaks of his doubt concerning predictions of “the Fiend / that lies like truth.” Now he has no such doubt: “Be these juggling fiends no more believed / That palter with us in a double sense.”His better part of man was the one before he delved in their powers |
| Act 5 Scene 8 MACDUFF: Then yield thee coward, and live to be the show and gaze o’th’time. We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are, Painted upon a pole and underwrit, ‘Here you may see the tyrant’. | Similar to what happens to the old Thane of Cawdor in Act 1 scene 2 and 4 – memorising another Golgotha as Macduff will Fix Macbeth’s head upon his battlements, like a worthy gentleman. yet, like as mentioned by malcolm about the old thane of cawdor, nothing in Macbeth’s life becomes him like the leaving it. |
| Act 5 Scene 8 MACBETH: I will not yield to Kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet and to be baited with the rabble’s curse.Through Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane and thou opposed being of no woman born, Yet I will try the last.Before my body, i throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, and dammned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’. [FIGHTING. ALARUM.]{ENTER [MACBETH AND MACDUFF,] FIGHTING, AND MACBETH SLAIN.} {Exit Macduff, with Macbeth’s body} | Macbeth won’t go down without a fight for old times sake |
Macbeth
July 21, 2019