For Thursday: Macbeth, Acts 4-5

Sorry, I couldn't narrow it down to four questions today, but you still only have to answer two of them. Enjoy! 

Q1: In Act 4, scene 3, Malcolm tells Macduff that "black Macbeth/will seem as pure as snow, and the poor state/Esteem him as a lamb, being compared/With my confineless harms...there's no bottom, none/In my voluptousness" (143). Why does he threaten to be an even worse ruler than Macbeth, and vow to debauch women, ruin men, and destroy order?

Q2: In Scene 2, Lady Macduff tells her son that Macduff (who has fled lest he be killed by Macbeth) is "dead" and "a traitor." Why does she say this, especially as her son knows that neither of them are true. Is she joking with him, or being deadly serious? You might also account for her line, "Why, I can buy me twenty [husbands] at any market."

Q1: Is it significant that the witches disappear in Act Five? If they are the moral, supernatural force of the play, shouldn’t they have a concluding chorus (especially since they open the play)? And if they’re simply evil, human creatures, shouldn’t they be brought to justice, or killed off-stage? Why do you think they are entirely banished in Act Five, never to be heard from again?

Q3: Discuss Lady Macbeth’s final words/appearance in 5.1. Considering how much time and power Shakespeare lavished on her throughout the play, is this a fitting end for her? Why does she devolve into a hand-scrubbing madwoman? If she is the mastermind of the plot, why does she go mad and not Macbeth (who if anything, becomes more cruelly lucid as the play continues)?

Q4: In her “Modern Perspective” reading of Macbeth, Susan Synder points out that “Macbeth...is preoccupied less with the protagonist’s initial choice of a relatively unambiguous wrong action than with the mental decline that follows” (206). In many plays and stories, we can argue about what the right action is, and how one person’s ‘right’ is another one’s ‘wrong.’ Why in Macbeth does Shakespeare make this easy for us? What might this say about what interests Shakespeare in storytelling and in the theater?