In this video I'll be teaching you what a motif is and how to analyse four of the biggest motifs in Shakespeare's Macbeth: sleep, hands, light & dark and blood. This is one of the best technique's you can analyse in your Macbeth essays to help you get the highest marks. And yet, so many students haven't even heard of it.
This is a tough topic to make 'clickbaity' in the title and try to convince a student it is worth watching, but, trust me, by the end of this video you'll realise that you have something to analyse which is really important, useful and helps you push towards higher levels of insight.
Timestamp
0.00 What is a motif?
2.07 Sleep
6.00 Light & Dark
12.22 Hands
16.12 Blood
This video is on my YouTube channel. However, there are a few benefits to watching it here instead:
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There are also multiple resources to help you in the Study Materials section:
Unlocking Shakespeare Study Guide
This is the perfect accompaniment to my video on how to read Shakespeare's language. It goes back over the strategies with more examples and - most importantly - more opportunities for you to practice putting those strategies to use.
Macbeth Wide Margin Textbook
If you don't have a copy of the play to annotate, then this is a must, must, MUST have. If you do have a copy of the play, but it's one of those editions where they have filled every inch of the page with only slightly useful information and have left practically no space for your notes, then my version is also going to be ideal. The wide margins of this version mean that there is plenty of space for your notes. I have still provided translations for lots of the archaic language, and I've provided a list of characters at the start too. It is basically everything I always wished was in the copies of Macbeth I had to use to teach! If you are from a school and would like to order physical copies of the textbook, you can find it on Amazon too.
Macbeth Hexagons Game
If you are studying Macbeth for the purposes of an exam, then this is a fantastic, quick and easy revision game (dare I call it 'fun'?). The basic idea is that every hexagon has a character, theme or some sort of important technique on it. You have to join the hexagons up by connecting the things that link. It's a great way to practice making links and also revise what you know about every important aspect of this play.
If there are any videos or resources you'd like to help you with the study of this play, then please do leave a comment and let me know. I know that my videos only scratch the surface at the moment and you can rest assured that I fully intend to release videos on all the other characters, themes and key techniques. I'm also planning to release model essays so that you can spot the patterns of approach across top grade essays.
Lesson Transcript:
The technique I'm going to be talking to you about today is one that you have possibly never heard of, or maybe have heard of but don't really know much about. Regardless of the position you're coming from, it is an amazing technique for analyzing Shakespeare. And it is motif.
Okay, I've just pointed in completely the wrong direction, haven't I?
A motif is a repeated image that has symbolic significance. So there's two reasons why this is an amazing technique to analyze. The first is the fact that it's an image with symbolic significance. Symbolism is a really brilliant technique to analyze in text because it's entirely implicit, and you have to show you understand a text on a deep level to understand symbolism. That's then magnified by the fact that a motif is a repeated symbol. And at the very top levels of English analysis is patterns: spotting patterns and analyzing patterns. It's everything at the top end of English analysis. So motif is just top-grade food being handed to you on a plate.
So what I'm going to be doing in this video is I'm going to be talking to you about the four biggest motifs that we see in Shakespeare's Macbeth. I'm going to be telling you some key quotes that help to illustrate what it is you can say about these motifs, but it's important for you to remember that I am not looking at every single quote that uses these symbols. It would take way too long. There's literally hundreds of references in the play to these different images, so I can't possibly go through them all. That's why an important step here is that in your revision, you keep these motifs in mind; you keep in mind what they can represent so that whenever you see the words come up in something that I didn't talk about, you can still apply the knowledge and apply the analysis to that quote, and it could help you come up with something really interesting to say in your essays. So, let's do this.
Sleep. Sleep is the first motif we're going to talk about. And this quote—I'm pointing in the wrong direction again, aren't I?—this quote is a really great one for just being super obvious on the symbolic significance of sleep. We're in Act 2, Scene 2. So, Macbeth has just killed King Duncan, and he says:
"Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep'—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast—"
Wow, that's a lot of metaphors and a list there. "Balm of hurt minds"—that metaphor is basically highlighting the power of sleep to act as like a mental health support. When we're feeling really conflicted, when we're feeling really troubled—that's again reinforced by the metaphor of "sore labor’s bath"—when you're going through a difficult time, sleep gives you peace from that mental struggle, from everything you've been going through physically and mentally in a day. And so it's this idea of like things coming to an end, "the death of each day's life," but the positive of that coming to an end is the rest and relaxation that you get from it.
So let's now then look at what he says at the top, which is "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep." Interesting. So obviously Macbeth has actually just murdered King Duncan, not sleep. So why have this personification of sleep with saying Macbeth has murdered it? Well, what it's essentially showing is that Macbeth is aware that his actions have ruined his own mental health. He's aware of how he is not going to be able to relax anymore; he's always going to be emotionally troubled by what he has done. And the reason he's going to be so emotionally troubled you can see in the language that the metaphor uses: he's murdered it. He's very aware of him causing his own problems through the violent act that he has committed. So if sleep symbolizes calm, relaxation, peace, and Macbeth has murdered that, he is never again going to be at peace.
And he really hammers that message home in this scene when he says:
"Still it cried 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:
'Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more.'"
It's interesting how he runs through his different titles. It's like he starts with who he used to be, which was Thane of Glamis, and then who he is now, Thane of Cawdor, and then it becomes much more personal with his first name: "Macbeth shall sleep no more." Wait, that's not even his first name, is it? That's still just his surname. Scottish nobility are weird. What do you reckon Macbeth's first name is? Dave?
Point is, what Macbeth is really aware of immediately after killing King Duncan is the fact that he is so troubled and racked with guilt over what he has done that he's not able to sleep.
Another brilliant example of this for Lady Macbeth is the fact that the way her guilt manifests is via sleepwalking. So even though technically she's asleep, she's not asleep. She can't sleep anymore; she has lost the ability to sleep. And of course, when she's sleepwalking, what she's doing is trying to clean the blood off her hands. She's yelling, "Out, damned spot!" She's essentially reliving that night over and over and over and over again. So again, the motif is: sleep equals peace of mind. Lady Macbeth also doesn't have any peace of mind. So sleep really represents the mental conflict that our characters go through.
Light and dark. The symbolic significance of light and dark is pretty classic: light equals good, dark equals bad. And we see that in this quote from Act 1, Scene 3. Banquo and Macbeth have just met the witches for the first time, and they've just given Macbeth the initial prophecies saying that he's going to be Thane of Cawdor and he's going to be king. And Banquo warns him:
"...The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s
In deepest consequence."
In other words: witches will tell us what we want to hear, give us some good things so that they can later down the line betray us in a really bad way. It's interesting, though, that Banquo refers to the witches as "the instruments of darkness." Now, part of that is linked to the origin that the people at the time believed witches had, which is that they worked for the devil; they were like the devil's minions. And so in that sense, "the instruments of darkness," he's referring to them as working for the devil. So darkness is essentially being associated with evil and the devil there.
And we can see that again in Act 3, Scene 2. We've got this quote from Macbeth. This time, he's killed King Duncan now, and now he's talking about killing Banquo, and he says:
"Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale!"
Macbeth is calling on night to cover day. So with our light and dark symbolic meaning—of light being goodness, rightness, morality; dark being evil, the supernatural, the devil—the fact that Macbeth is calling on night deliberately to get rid of day is really significant, because it shows the loss of his moral compass now. Especially this late into the play, after the fact that he's killed King Duncan and the fact that he's about to go murder Banquo, it really shows that loss of moral compass from Macbeth, and that he is now calling on the supernatural, calling on evil through that imperative of "come" to come and help him.
We've also got the really violent way he's asking it to be done: "with thy bloody and invisible hand cancel and tear to pieces that great bond which keeps me pale." Now, "that great bond which keeps me pale"—there's two ways of interpreting this, okay? And if you've watched my videos before, you know that we like the fact that there's multiple ways of interpreting it, because that means we get to talk about multiple things in our essays and show off how clever we are.
So the first way of interpreting it is: the great bond is his friendship with Banquo. That's what he wants: he wants the night to come and essentially get rid of the friendship he has with Banquo, the connection, the care he feels for Banquo which makes him afraid to go ahead with killing Banquo—"which keeps me pale."
Another way of viewing it is that the great bond is not Macbeth and Banquo; it's Banquo and his children one day becoming king. That's the bond he wants broken, and that is the bond that Macbeth is afraid of: the fact that the witches' prophecy said Banquo's sons would be king.
Now, of course, when you have those really different interpretations, there's then really different ways that we can analyze this light and dark imagery. Because if the great bond is his friendship with Banquo, then what we can analyze there is essentially that Macbeth isn't like a naturally evil person. There's goodness in him; he cares about Banquo, and he has to actively ask for help to have that goodness in him essentially removed and gotten rid of. On the other hand, if what he sees is that great bond being Banquo's right to the throne via his descendants, via his children, then actually what Macbeth is doing is showing it's not about love, it's not about friendship, it's not about goodness—it's about ambition, it's about power. And therefore, that's what is driving and pushing Macbeth in all things. That's all he cares about; losing power is what he's afraid of, and all he wants is the gaining of power. So there's two really different ways of looking at that.
Either way, the light and dark imagery are important in conveying that he knows that this ambition, this desire to get rid of his friendship with Banquo, needs evil in order to do it, and that therefore requires getting rid of the good light. But again, just that violent way in which he wants it to be done speaks to—obviously Macbeth has been violent since the very start of the play, but just how much that violence is interweaving into just everything he feels and thinks now. Violence is just a first gut instinct to him.
This next one is said by Malcolm in Act 4, Scene 3. That's when he's playing the psychological war games with Macduff and trying to pretend he's a terrible king to see how Macduff will respond. But then he does the big reveal of: actually, he's this like perfect virgin who's never done a bad thing in his entire life. And he gives this quote to Macduff—oh my god, there's too many M's in this play! Could Shakespeare not have called at least one person Dave and done us all a favor? Seriously.
Anyway, he gives this quote as a means of making a point of how even good people can become bad by saying:
"Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell..."
That's a reference to the devil's origin story, if you will. The devil, Lucifer, was originally one of God's favorite angels, one of the best angels. And I'm not going to pretend I can remember exactly what Lucifer did—I'm pretty sure it had something to do with him wanting more power than he's supposed to have in his position, but don't quote me on that—but he did something that led to him falling from grace and then becoming the devil. So what we can take from that is again that idea of lightness and darkness, with lightness representing good, darkness representing bad.
Hands. Hands are a really important symbol in Macbeth in representing action and responsibility. And we can see that in this quote—I keep pointing in the wrong direction—from Act 2, Scene 2, where Macbeth has just killed King Duncan and he's feeling really guilty, and he says:
"Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red."
In other words: will all Neptune's ocean wash the blood from my hand? No, my hands will turn the entire sea red. This is showing his guilt because essentially the blood is representing guilt—which I'm going to talk more about in a minute, because blood is one of the motifs of Macbeth—but also his hands represent the personal actions he has taken. It's like his responsibility. So he feels like he will never be able to stop feeling guilty for what he has done—what he has done with his own two hands.
And we can contrast that image with what he then says in Act 4, Scene 1:
"The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand."
This is when he's been to see the witches a second time and he's demanded that they give him more prophecies. And they both make him feel incredible and awful within seconds of each other. So they make him feel invincible by telling him that no man born of woman can kill him, and also that he will not be defeated until a wood moves towards a castle—which, of course, to any sane human being basically sounds like he can't be defeated, because a wood is never going to move of its own volition, and everybody is born from a woman. So there you go.
However, they then scare the bejeezus out of him by telling him that Banquo's descendants are going to be king for time infinitum. And the reason that this scares him so badly he references in a soliloquy by talking about the fruitless crown that's been put on his head and the barren scepter, and this feeling that this was all for nothing. If he can't keep it going, if he can't pass the power on, it was all pointless.
So, when he's saying this—"the firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand"—he's essentially showing his determination to not let the third of the witches' prophecies come true, while also firmly believing in the first two. Do you see the flaw in his thinking here, wanting to pick and choose how fate works? And so what that line translates to is: the first thing I feel shall be the first thing I do. Because the heart symbolizes emotions, and the hands symbolize his actions.
That, of course, is a huge change in his character from the start of the play. Just think for a second about before he killed King Duncan, how much thinking he did about that. I can think of at least two really long soliloquies plus a couple more asides just to have been him being like: "Shall I do this? Shall I not do this? No, I'm not going to do this. Okay, I will do this." He was constantly thinking and feeling, and he was so conflicted. Now he's just like, "I'm not going to think. I'm not going to feel. I'm just going to do."
So it's a signal of a really big change in his character, a big developmental step in his character. So what you're able to analyze here is not just the fact that we've got a pattern of hands being referred to, but how that pattern of hands—that motif—helps signal the change in his character, which is again at that top level of things to do in an English essay. You've got to be comparing and contrasting and exploring how characters develop as a play goes on.
Blood. Before I start going through this, I have to make a confession: there are over a hundred different occasions where the word "blood" or "bloody" appears in Macbeth. And so when I was searching for the best quotes to go through in this video, I read that word a lot, and it means nothing to me now. Specifically, my brain has suddenly decided that blood is not a word. I've just been saying it wrong all this time, and actually, clearly, just look at it—that is blude. That right there, that's blude.
So I have to make two apologies: number one, if I do accidentally say "blude" or "bludy" at some point in this explanation; and also number two, there were multiple occasions where I doubted myself on the spelling of blood and bloody. At one point I did B-L-U-D-E, because I was like, "Yeah, bloody, right?" And I doubted myself, and I went into a dark, bloody place because of how many times I had to read that word. So if you do see any mistakes like that, I'm not a complete fool. I know these words; my brain has just had to read them way too many times.
So, the first thing that blood symbolizes, nice and simple, is violence. And you can see that in these two quotations—did I point the right way?—from Act 1, Scene 2 and Act 2, Scene 1.
In Act 1, Scene 2, that's the very first time we're getting an insight into Macbeth's character from the captain, and he's telling us all about the battle against Macdonwald. And he describes how Macbeth enters the battle with brandished steel—which just means he's holding his sword out—and his sword is "smoking with bloody execution." So that's referring to the fact that his sword is so covered in blood because of the number of people that he's killed that—and obviously we're in Scotland, so it's bleeding cold—it's like the steam rising off of the sword because of all of the hot blood in the cold air that's on it. I don't know the scientific terms; someone in the comments can tell me the scientific terms.
And then the second thing, from Act 2, Scene 1: that's when Macbeth is having his hallucinations of the dagger right before he goes to kill King Duncan. And he's trying to decide if the dagger is real or if it's a hallucination, and he concludes it is a hallucination, and it is the "bloody business which informs thus to mine eyes." So it's: "the violent act I'm about to go commit that is making me hallucinate a dagger."
So that violence of blood is important in showing how violence is a natural part of Macbeth's character from the very beginning. And that's really important because the amount of violence he's going to engage in is not going to increase, arguably—because, you know, battle compared to essentially getting somebody else to kill Banquo and Macduff's family. But what does change about the violence is his moral compass around it.
When it's described as being an "execution," that's like you're punishing somebody who's done wrong things. So at the beginning of the play, Macbeth was killing people who had wronged King Duncan; he was killing rebels against King Duncan. He was on the right side of history, if you will; he was killing people who had done bad things. Later on in the play, with killing King Duncan, killing Banquo and trying to kill Banquo's son, killing Macduff's family—which is women and children—that's seven levels of wrong in terms of a moral compass. And so what changes is not his violence, but the acceptability of his violence.
It's also important to note that Macbeth is very aware of the violence of what he's doing: "the bloody business which informs thus to mine eyes." He's aware of the role violence plays, and that's important because he's under no illusions of how he's gaining his power. He knows it's a part of who he is, and he knows that he's using it basically to his advantage.
Blood can also represent family lines, like bloodlines, and we see that in these two quotes. The first one, Act 2, Scene 3: King Duncan is now dead. Macbeth is around the other lords, like Macduff, Donalbain, and Malcolm, and he is pretending to be devastated that King Duncan is dead, because obviously he's not telling anybody that he did it. And he says:
"Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood..."
So in this case, the image of blood is about this idea of, first of all, his goodness, his purity, his morality, his high value and significance in society, as exemplified with the metaphor of "golden blood." But also blood representing this idea of who you are innately: King Duncan was just a good person right inside of him as well as what he looked like from the outside.
And then in that same scene, a little bit later on, Donalbain is talking to his brother Malcolm, and he's basically explaining why they need to leave and escape here after their father's death:
"...There’s daggers in men’s smiles: the near in blood,
The nearer bloody."
In other words: you can't trust people that you think you can. The nearer you are in blood relation, the more likely you are to have committed violence against them. So everyone is going to suspect Donalbain and Malcolm to have been the ones to kill King Duncan because they are his sons. So we can see how blood is all about symbolizing who you are inside as a person, and also your relationships with others as well with the bloodline too.
The final symbolic significance of blood is guilt. Now, I've already referenced this a bit when we saw the quote with Macbeth and his bloody hands and not being able to wash the blood off of his hands, because of course, as well as being the violence he's committed, it's like the inability to get rid of that violence, to undo the violent act that he has done.
And another great quote which shows this idea is from Act 3, Scene 4, which is when Macbeth is being haunted by Banquo's ghost, and Macbeth says:
"...It will have blood, they say:
Blood will have blood."
So here's this idea again of violence, but also of revenge: "Blood will have blood. I will get my own back on you."
And the reason I'm saying that line shows the guilt that Macbeth feels also tracks back to whether Banquo's ghost is real or not. There's two ways of interpreting it. If we start off by saying Banquo's ghost is real—Banquo's ghost is there and is speaking to Macbeth—then in that case, it's linking to the theme of the natural versus unnatural, and the idea that what Macbeth has done by becoming king is so unnatural that it has essentially turned the world upside down and things that shouldn't be able to happen are now happening, like ghosts being around.
On the other hand, another way to interpret Banquo's ghost is the fact that he is a hallucination, and a hallucination that is happening as a consequence of Macbeth's guilt. Now, the reason we could argue hallucination is because of the fact that back in Act 2, Macbeth hallucinated a dagger. And at that point, as we've already discussed, he himself thought that the dagger was a hallucination as a result of his conflicted feelings about the murder of King Duncan. So essentially, it's already been established for us as an audience that Macbeth can hallucinate things when he feels really conflicted, when he feels really guilty. So in that sense, this line is Macbeth's own guilt—Macbeth almost projecting onto himself that he feels like there should be revenge against him, that he feels there should be violence against him, and that's why he's hallucinating Banquo's ghost saying that to him.
Another important motif of the blood that I haven't included here, but again links to Lady Macbeth—I really haven't given her enough love in this video, have I, considering she's like my favorite character in this play?—is the fact that Lady Macbeth, when she's sleepwalking and when she has gone insane, is constantly trying to wash blood off of her hands. The classic line of "Out, damned spot!"—she's trying to get the blood off her hands. She also says stuff like "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?", referring to King Duncan and how much blood he had in him. So again, it's like the blood is what is haunting Lady Macbeth. The violence of what they did is what is haunting Lady Macbeth.
So I've gone through quite a few different symbolic significances of blood in this play. And that's why you're really going to have to look at the specific example you find in whatever quote you're looking at and ask yourself which applies: Are we looking at bloodlines? Are we looking at guilt? Are we looking at violence? Is it a combo of two or more of those? Because as I've already mentioned, there are over a hundred references to blood, so it's going to have lots of different situations.
It's also worth noting that especially towards the end, when the other Scottish lords have turned against Macbeth, "blood" and "bloody" get used a lot to describe Scotland itself. So if we think about Macbeth being a violent character, suddenly it's like his violence is spreading throughout Scotland, and it's influencing and corrupting Scotland. So all of Scotland is dealing with this level of violence because of who is now king.