Decisions in Macbeth - On the way to kill King Ducan

Quote: Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going; Explanation: Here Macbeth refers to the dagger that he has mentally conjured up. It is leading him towards Duncan’s room and he sees this as an omen that he should kill the king. The key word here is “marshall’st” which means to lead, the dagger is drawing Macbeth to murder. As an audience we feel that Macbeth’s mental state is…. Quote: A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? Explanation: Macbeth is very aware that the dagger is an unusual, perhaps supernatural event. He describes it as a ‘false creation,’ so something that’s not real. We see how confused Macbeth is as he creates a compound word ‘heat-oppressed’ to describe his head. He is not literally hot but metaphorically he is struggling with this decision. Shakespeare present the decision to murder as a very difficult one, it’s not a choice that Macbeth takes lightly, despite his wife suggesting that it’s an easy task. By using a rhetorical question, Shakespeare is asking us as an audience at which lengths we would go to murder.