Act 2, Scene 1 – Macbeth’s soliloquy

Shakespeare uses a wide range of powerful language in his play ‘Macbeth’. One of these is personification in Macbeths soliloquy of Act 2 Scene 1. When Macbeth is imagining the dagger in front of him, he constantly refers to it as ‘thee’. Saying ‘Come, let me clutch thee’, and also ‘I have thee not, and yet I see thee still’. When Macbeth does this, he is giving living qualities to a non living thing. Normally we would call a dagger ‘it’, but Macbeth is referring to it as ‘you’. When he does this, it is showing us that he sees the dagger as a person leading him to do something. This makes us understand that he believes the dagger has more meaning and more power than just a normal knife.