Macbeth Act II

Something that particularly drew my attention in the first two scenes of  Act II was the story's path around Duncan's death. Instead of confronting the murder head on, the narrative switches characters and stays out of Duncan's room. While the murder of Duncan is already a sinister event, the fact that it happens off stage makes it even more ominous. We are left to image a horrific act, made even worse in the audience's imagination. It serves to heighten the suspense of the scene and gives us insight into both Macbeth's and Lady Macbeth's thoughts. The knocking on the door and the floating on the dagger are the last elements of a very dark scene. I think the mood of Duncan's murder permeates the events themselves and foreshadows grave consequences for the perpetrators.
Questions- How will Macbeth deal with his guilt after his coronation?
What is happening to Lady Macbeth?

Macbeth Act II

While reading Act II I noticed several things but the one thing that stood out the most was nature. After Macbeth kills the king it seems to me that nature starts spiraling out of control. Okay maybe not spiraling, but things are definitely strange. For example, in Act II, scene 4, line 6, Ross tells the Old Man, “By th’ clock ‘tis day, And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp.” So it’s the middle of the day but there is some kind of darkness in the world that, as Ross puts it, “strangles the traveling lamp.” A few lines down something else is off when it comes to nature. The Old Man mentions to Ross how an owl somehow managed to kill a falcon. I’m not an owl expert but I do know that owls usually kill and eat smaller animals like mice, not birds that are bigger than them. Something else strange about the owl is that owls are nocturnal beings which means they hunt at night right? But we’ve already established that it’s somewhere in the middle of the day. So because Macbeth went against nature by committing murder against the king, it seems that nature has been thrown off balance.

My questions for Act II are:

Lady Macbeth has always been the one to push and convince Macbeth that killing the king is right thing. She craves power and wants the king dead probably more than Macbeth himself. So then why was she not able to kill Duncan just because he resembled her father? Is there a backstory between Lady Macbeth and her father? It just seems strange that this power hungry woman who wants nothing more than the king dead would be unable to accomplish her mission just because the king bared a resemblance to her father. Based on what I’ve been able to gather on Lady Macbeth so far, it doesn’t seem like family values would be very high on her list.

Why is Macbeth unable to take the daggers back to frame the others for the death of Duncan? Obviously I realize that he is feeling remorse and guilt for the crime he has just committed but Macbeth seems like the type of person who would always be trying to save his own skin and getting caught with the two bloody daggers isn’t the best way to go about that.

Macbeth Act 2 analysis

Something that I thought was particularly interesting in Act 2 were all the references to evil. First of all the porter spoke of the castle as being hell, he described it as a place where sinners go, ie the farmer who committed suicide and the tailor that ripped his customers off. I wonder if this is some sort of foreshadowing about what's going on inside Macbeth's castle. Also, Lennox in lines 50-56 describes that there were strange screams in the night air that seem to be references to evil doing and something being amiss that night. He also says "Some say the earth was feverous and did shake" which suggests that whatever happened that night caused great disturbances in the surrounding area. In scene 2.4 Ross and an old man speak about how Duncan's horses, which were normally well behaved and the best of their race, acted very wild and ended up eating each other which is completely strange. My conclusion is that the act of witchcraft which Lady Macbeth did with the potion she gave to Duncan's guards and all the other sort of incantations she did earlier in the play caused these reactions around her. I came up with this mainly because of our discussion in class about witches.

My questions are:

What meanings lie behind Macduff's treatment of Lady Macbeth when they discover Duncan has been killed? He treats her like a fragile creature and she takes full advantage of that. I wonder if this was Shakespeare's way of conveying that women are fully capable of evil and that they should not be underestimated.

Also I wonder why it was assumed that Malcolm and Donaldbain were somehow guilty of Duncan's murder just because they ran away? I feel like what they did was reasonable, after all their father had just been murdered and they're next in line for the throne so why wouldn't they be afraid for their lives?