Macbeth Act 1 Scene 7 Summary

This scene is the one between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth where Lady Macbeths true evil really comes alive. Macbeth first enters and speaks. This scene makes us realise that he knows about the plan to kill Duncan, at first, I thought he was just oblivious to Lady Macbeths plan. Macbeth speaks for a long time at first, but a short summary of what he says is that he does not want to kill Duncan. He says that Duncan trusts him, and has given him honour and how they are too close. Macbeth speaks about how if he did kill Duncan, the consequences would affect him most of all. He finally talks about the idea of ambition, with the quote ‘I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on th’ other’. In this he is saying he lacks the motivation but has too much ambition which isn’t a good thing.

Lady Macbeth then enters. At the start, she and Macbeth talk about the king wanting Macbeth. But then Lady Macbeth turns angry after Macbeth basically tells her that he can not go ahead with killing Duncan, after the amount of honour Duncan has given him and made people give him. Lady Macbeth asks if he was drunk when he was hopeful about the plan (Basically saying where has your ambition gone), and tells Macbeth that if he wants the crown he has to do this. Macbeth asks her to stop, but that is only the beginning. In the last paragraph of this scene, Lady Macbeth says that Macbeth was only truely a man when he was hopeful about the plan. She speaks about if she ever had a child with the same lack of ambition as him then she would ‘Have plucked the nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this’. This scene is important because we finally see how much more ambition Lady Macbeth has for her husband, and how evil her intentions truely are.

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