Why is banquo troubled about the dream

Download it to get the same great text as on this site, or purchase a full copy to get the text, plus explanatory notes, illustrations, and more. Contents Characters in the Play. Entire Play Macbeth, set primarily in Scotland, mixes witchcraft, prophecy, and murder.

Act 1, scene 1 Three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Act 1, scene 2 Duncan, king of Scotland, hears an account of the success in battle of his noblemen Macbeth and Banquo. Act 1, scene 4 Duncan demands and receives assurances that the former thane of Cawdor has been executed.

Act 1, scene 6 Duncan and his attendants arrive at Inverness. Lady Macbeth welcomes them. Act 1, scene 7 Macbeth contemplates the reasons why it is a terrible thing to kill Duncan.

Act 2, scene 2 Lady Macbeth waits anxiously for Macbeth to return from killing Duncan. Act 2, scene 3 A drunken porter, answering the knocking at the gate, plays the role of a devil-porter at the gates of hell…. Act 2, scene 4 An old man and Ross exchange accounts of recent unnatural happenings.

Act 3, scene 1 Banquo suspects that Macbeth killed Duncan in order to become king. Act 3, scene 2 Both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth express their unhappiness. Act 3, scene 3 A third man joins the two whom Macbeth has already sent to kill Banquo and Fleance. Act 3, scene 5 The presentation of the witches in this scene as in 4.

Act 3, scene 6 Lennox and an unnamed lord discuss politics in Scotland. Act 4, scene 1 Macbeth approaches the witches to learn how to make his kingship secure. Act 4, scene 3 Macduff finds Malcolm at the English court and urges him to attack Macbeth at once.

Macbeth emerges, his hands covered in blood, and says that the deed is done. Badly shaken, he remarks that he heard the chamberlains awake and say their prayers before going back to sleep.

He refuses to go back into the room, so she takes the daggers into the room herself, saying that she would be ashamed to be as cowardly as Macbeth. As she leaves, Macbeth hears a mysterious knocking. As Lady Macbeth reenters the hall, the knocking comes again, and then a third time.

She leads her husband back to the bedchamber, where he can wash off the blood. We realize that if Macbeth succeeds in the murder of Duncan, he will be driven to still more violence before his crown is secure, and Fleance will be in immediate and mortal danger.

Act 2 is singularly concerned with the murder of Duncan. We see the scenes leading up to the murder and the scenes immediately following it, but the deed itself does not appear onstage. This technique of not allowing us to see the actual murder, which persists throughout Macbeth, may have been borrowed from the classical Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

In these plays, violent acts abound but are kept offstage, made to seem more terrible by the power of suggestion. She claims that she would have killed Duncan herself except that he resembled her father sleeping.

This is the first time Lady Macbeth shows herself to be at all vulnerable. Her comparison of Duncan to her father suggests that despite her desire for power and her harsh chastisement of Macbeth, she sees her king as an authority figure to whom she must be loyal. The dagger is the first in a series of guilt-inspired hallucinations that Macbeth and his wife experience.

The murder is also marked by the ringing of the bell and the knocking at the gate, both of which have fascinated audiences. The knocking occurs four times with a sort of ritualistic regularity. Later in the play, the Witches appear with their Queen, Hecate, in a scene without any human characters. If Macbeth had been hallucinating the Witches, he would need to be onstage for them to be seen.

He is not, which is more proof that in the world of this play, they are real. In the play, both Macbeth and his wife have hallucinations which they alone see, but the Witches are clearly visible to more than just Macbeth. The audience sees Macbeth for the first time just moments before he and Banquo encounter the Witches. Similarly, when Lady Macbeth reads a letter from Macbeth telling of the prophecies for his future, she immediately begins to plot to kill Duncan and take the throne, suggesting that Lady Macbeth has also always dreamed of being queen.

Everything the Witches predict does come true, but everything that happens ends up hurting Macbeth as well. He does become Thane of Cawdor, but that feeds his ambition so he kills Duncan. He becomes the king, but as a result kills many people, including his best friend. He is very wrong. When Macbeth is told that his wife has died, no details are given and he does not ask for them.

Instead, he talks about how futile and pointless life is. Suicide is considered a mortal sin by the Roman Catholic Church, and thus frowned upon throughout England. According to church law, if Lady Macbeth killed herself, she would be eternally damned.

Yet the question is never fully answered. Malcolm orders the soldiers to break off boughs from a tree in the Wood and hold the boughs in front of them as they march toward Macbeth. He says that doing so will conceal their true numbers from those watching for Macbeth, who will not be able to report an accurate count to the king. When the three Witches first approach Macbeth, they acknowledge Macbeth as Thane of Glamis his current title as well as Thane of Cawdor.