appearance vs reality

• " Sleek o'er your rugged looks. Be bright and jovial among your guests tonight"

  • Links to hypocrisy
  • hiding their true self
  • Macbeth must look the part to become king
  • suggesting his behaviour is jovial Lady Macbeth wants him to be presentable
• "fair is foul and foul is fair"

  • The witches suggest that things are not as they seem
  • developed over the course of the play
• "Wither are they vanished?"

  • Macbeth and Banquo keep asking questions to show their confusion they cannot believe what they have seen
• "There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face he was a gentleman on whom I built an absolute trust"

  • Duncan says that people may seem good and trustworthy but they might not be
  • Ironic because he misjudges Macbeth
• "Look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under't"

  • Lady Macbeth encourages Macbeth to deceive Duncan by pretending to be something he is not
• "mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, I see still"

  • Macbeth is not sure whether the dagger he sees is real or not
  • it is not clear to the audience if the witches created the hallucination
• "Help me hence-ho"

  • Pretends to faint to distract everyone from Macbeth's suspicious actions
  • everyone is tending to her forgetting about Macbeth
• "Angels are bright still though the brightest fell"

  • Malcolm says its hard to tell who is good and who is evil