Macbeth MCQs: 50 High-Yield Questions with Answers & In-Depth Explanations for RPSC & UGC NET

Correct Answer: (B) Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587)

Textual Analysis & Reference: Shakespeare drew almost the entirety of his historical plot from the second edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587). While he consulted Plutarch for his Roman tragedies (such as Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra), Holinshed was the authoritative source for Scottish history.

Correct Answer: (B) Banquo was an accomplice in Duncan’s murder; Shakespeare made him innocent and virtuous to flatter King James I, who claimed descent from Banquo.

Textual Analysis & Reference: In Holinshed’s Chronicles, Banquo is explicitly an accomplice who aids Macbeth in the regicide of King Duncan. Shakespeare radically transformed Banquo into an innocent, morally upright figure who resists the temptation of the Weird Sisters because King James I of England traced his royal lineage directly to Banquo through the Stuart dynasty.

Correct Answer: (C) The Gunpowder Plot

Textual Analysis & Reference: The Porter’s speech famously refers to ‘an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.’ This directly references Father Henry Garnet, a Jesuit superior tried and executed in early 1606 for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot (5 November 1605), who defended the doctrine of equivocation at his trial.

Correct Answer: (C) Daemonologie

Textual Analysis & Reference: King James I published Daemonologie in Edinburgh in 1597, defending the theological belief in witchcraft and detailing witch rituals, storms, and familiars. Shakespeare incorporated specific elements from the North Berwick Witch Trials (which James personally oversaw), including witches sailing in sieves and boiling uncanny ingredients in cauldrons.

Correct Answer: (B) In the First Folio of 1623

Textual Analysis & Reference: Unlike many other Shakespearean plays, no contemporary Quarto edition of Macbeth was ever published during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The play was published for the first time in the First Folio of 1623 (prepared by John Heminges and Henry Condell), where it was entered as The Tragedie of Macbeth.

Correct Answer: (A) Thomas Middleton

Textual Analysis & Reference: The Hecate passages in Act III, Scene 5 and Act IV, Scene 1 feature two songs (‘Come away, come away’ and ‘Black spirits’) taken verbatim from Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch (c. 1613-1616). Most textual editors agree that Middleton revised the King’s Men’s promptbook version of Macbeth around 1616 to add musical spectacles.

Correct Answer: (B) In Holinshed, Duncan was young, weak, indolent, and an ineffective ruler whose reign provoked rebellions.

Textual Analysis & Reference: Historically in Holinshed, Duncan is described as a young and feeble king whose soft nature and negligence fostered lawlessness and insurrection, whereas Macbeth was actually an able administrator who ruled Scotland successfully for ten peaceful years before turning tyrannical. Shakespeare elevated Duncan into an aged, saintly patriarch to magnify the heinous moral sacrilege of regicide.

Correct Answer: (B) King James I; The King’s Men

Textual Analysis & Reference: When Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, King James I granted royal patronage to Shakespeare’s company, renaming the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to ‘The King’s Men’. Macbeth was explicitly written and performed under this royal patronage for King James I.

Correct Answer: (B) At Bothgofnane (Pitgaveny) near Elgin in open conflict or ambush

Textual Analysis & Reference: In Holinshed, Macbeth slew Duncan at Bothgofnane near Elgin. The dramatic details of murdering an unsuspecting, sleeping guest in a castle were borrowed by Shakespeare from Holinshed’s earlier account of the murder of King Duffe by his treacherous host Donwald and his ambitious wife.

Correct Answer: (C) It is by far the shortest in word count, running approximately 2,100 lines.

Textual Analysis & Reference: Running barely 2,100 lines (roughly half the length of Hamlet at over 4,000 lines), Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies. This conciseness produces its relentless, breakneck dramatic tempo where action rapidly cascades without subplots.

Correct Answer: (B) Macdonwald, the rebel from the Western Isles

Textual Analysis & Reference: The Captain reports to King Duncan that brave Macbeth, ‘disdaining Fortune’, carved through the rebel ranks until he faced the treacherous Macdonwald and ‘unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps, / And fix’d his head upon our battlements’ (Act I, Scene 2).

Correct Answer: (B) Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, King hereafter

Textual Analysis & Reference: The Weird Sisters greet him in ascending sequence: ‘All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!’ (his current title), ‘All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!’ (an unannounced honor), and ‘All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!’

Correct Answer: (B) Duncan names his eldest son, Malcolm, as the Prince of Cumberland and lawful heir.

Textual Analysis & Reference: Duncan proclaims his eldest son, Malcolm, the Prince of Cumberland, establishing primogeniture. Macbeth immediately recognizes this obstacle in an aside: ‘The Prince of Cumberland! that is a step / On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap, / For in my way it lies.’ (Act I, Scene 4).

Correct Answer: (C) ‘Amen’

Textual Analysis & Reference: Macbeth relates to Lady Macbeth: ‘One cried “God bless us!” and “Amen” the other… I could not say “Amen,” when they did say “God bless us!” … I had most need of blessing, and “Amen” / Stuck in my throat.’ (Act II, Scene 2). This signifies total theological alienation.

Correct Answer: (B) Malcolm flees to England, and Donalbain flees to Ireland.

Textual Analysis & Reference: Recognizing that ‘There’s daggers in men’s smiles: the near in blood, / The nearer bloody’, the princes separate for safety: Malcolm flees to England (to seek refuge with King Edward the Confessor), while Donalbain flees to Ireland.

Correct Answer: (B) The escape of Banquo’s young son, Fleance, in the darkness

Textual Analysis & Reference: While the murderers succeed in assassinating Banquo, one murderer accidentally strikes out the torch light, allowing Fleance to flee into the night. Fleance’s escape guarantees the fulfillment of the Witches’ prophecy that Banquo’s descendants will inherit the crown, rendering all of Macbeth’s bloodletting futile.

Correct Answer: (C) Banquo’s ghost; seen exclusively by Macbeth, remaining entirely invisible to Lady Macbeth and the lords.

Textual Analysis & Reference: Banquo’s ghost enters and sits in Macbeth’s place. Crucially, the ghost is an objective hallucinatory projection seen only by Macbeth. Lady Macbeth and the Scottish nobles see an empty chair, forcing Lady Macbeth to dismiss the assembly hurriedly.

Correct Answer: (B) 1-Armed Head (Beware Macduff); 2-Bloody Child (None of woman born shall harm Macbeth); 3-Crowned Child with tree (Birnam Wood to Dunsinane)

Textual Analysis & Reference: The first apparition is an Armed Head (‘Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth! beware Macduff; / Beware the Thane of Fife’). The second is a Bloody Child (‘none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth’). The third is a Crowned Child with a tree in his hand (‘Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until / Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him’).

Correct Answer: (B) By falsely claiming that he himself possesses boundless lust, avarice, and vices far worse than Macbeth’s tyranny.

Textual Analysis & Reference: Malcolm suspects Macduff might be an agent sent by Macbeth. To test his sincere love for Scotland, Malcolm slanders his own nature, claiming he is insatiably voluptuous, greedy, and devoid of kingly virtues. When Macduff cries out in despair (‘O Scotland, Scotland!… Fit to govern! / No, not to live’), Malcolm realizes Macduff is truly devoted to his country and retracts his false confessions.

Correct Answer: (C) Macduff was ‘from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d’ by Caesarean section.

Textual Analysis & Reference: Macduff reveals: ‘Despair thy charm; / And let the angel whom thou still hast served / Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d’ (Act V, Scene 8). In Elizabethan/Jacobean linguistic understanding, a child delivered via Caesarean section was technically not ‘born of woman’ through natural parturition.

Correct Answer: (B) The Three Witches in unison (Act I, Scene 1)

Textual Analysis & Reference: All three Witches chant this foundational chiasmus together at the conclusion of Act I, Scene 1. It establishes the central moral theme: boundaries between good and evil, truth and deception, heroism and damnation will be systematically overturned.

Correct Answer: (B) He is ‘too full o’ the milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way’

Textual Analysis & Reference: Lady Macbeth assesses her husband’s divided psyche: ‘Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great; / Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it’ (Act I, Scene 5).

Correct Answer: (C) Lady Macbeth invoking demonic forces to shed feminine remorse (Act I, Scene 5)

Textual Analysis & Reference: Lady Macbeth speaks this soliloquy upon hearing that King Duncan is arriving at Inverness. She calls upon dark spirits to strip away her maternal compassion (‘unsex me here’) and replace her breast milk with gall, preparing her psychological resolve for regicide.

Correct Answer: (B) ‘Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on the other’

Textual Analysis & Reference: Reviewing the reasons against regicide (Duncan is his kinsman, king, and houseguest, and has been blameless in office), Macbeth concludes: ‘I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on the other’ (Act I, Scene 7).

Correct Answer: (B) A visionary dagger with ‘gouts of blood’ upon the blade and dudgeon

Textual Analysis & Reference: Macbeth utters the iconic lines: ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still… And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, / Which was not so before’ (Act II, Scene 1).

Correct Answer: (B) Macbeth immediately after murdering Duncan (Act II, Scene 2)

Textual Analysis & Reference: Macbeth speaks this in utter shock to Lady Macbeth in Act II, Scene 2. The hyperbolic classical allusion to Neptune illustrates the irreversible, cosmic stain of his crime. ‘Incarnadine’ means to dye deep crimson/red.

Correct Answer: (C) Macbeth upon receiving news of Lady Macbeth’s death (Act V, Scene 5)

Textual Analysis & Reference: In Act V, Scene 5, Seyton informs Macbeth that ‘The Queen, my lord, is dead.’ Macbeth delivers the immortal ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ soliloquy, concluding that life is ‘a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.’

Correct Answer: (B) ‘Out, damned spot! out, I say!… The Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?’

Textual Analysis & Reference: In Act V, Scene 1, watched by the Doctor and the Gentlewoman, Lady Macbeth obsessively rubs her hands to wash away imaginary blood, crying: ‘Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t… The Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?—What, will these hands ne’er be clean?’

Correct Answer: (B) scorpions

Textual Analysis & Reference: Macbeth exclaims: ‘O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! / Thou know’st that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives’ (Act III, Scene 2). The metaphor of stinging scorpions encapsulates his paranoid agony and psychological disintegration.

Correct Answer: (B) Malcolm, counseling Macduff to convert his grief into anger

Textual Analysis & Reference: When Ross arrives in England and informs Macduff that his castle was surprised and his wife and babes ‘savagely slaughter’d’, Macduff pulls his hat over his brows in silent shock. Malcolm urges him: ‘Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak / Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break’ (Act IV, Scene 3).

Correct Answer: (B) The motif of ill-fitting, borrowed, or dwarfish clothing

Textual Analysis & Reference: Caroline Spurgeon in Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935) proved that the dominant metaphorical motif in Macbeth is ill-fitting clothing. Macbeth is repeatedly likened to a small, petty man wearing garments that are far too large for him, culminating in Act V: ‘Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief.’

Correct Answer: (B) Hamartia

Textual Analysis & Reference: In Aristotle’s Poetics, the tragic flaw or error of judgment that brings about the downfall of an otherwise noble protagonist is called Hamartia. In Macbeth, his hamartia is explicitly self-acknowledged as ‘vaulting ambition’. Hubris denotes excessive pride/arrogance (often against gods), while Hamartia encompasses the broader moral error.

Correct Answer: (B) Tragic irony (Dramatic irony)

Textual Analysis & Reference: This is supreme dramatic irony: King Duncan perceives Inverness Castle as sweet, welcoming, and peaceful, whereas the audience is acutely aware that inside those very walls, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are plotting his imminent murder that very night.

Correct Answer: (B) As the innocent balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, and chief nourisher in life’s feast

Textual Analysis & Reference: Macbeth recites: ‘Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, / The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, / Chief nourisher in life’s feast.’ By murdering Duncan in his sleep, Macbeth has murdered his own capacity for peace, condemning both himself and his wife to perpetual insomnia and sleepwalking.

Correct Answer: (B) An owl hawked at and killed a towering falcon, and Duncan’s beautiful horses turned wild and ate each other.

Textual Analysis & Reference: The murder of God’s anointed monarch violates the divine order (the Great Chain of Being). Ross and the Old Man note that daylight is strangled by darkness, an ordinary mousing owl killed a noble falcon (inversion of status), and Duncan’s well-bred horses broke their stalls and cannibalized one another (‘Tis said they eat each other’).

Correct Answer: (B) It provides comic relief while reinforcing moral themes by metaphorically framing Inverness as the gate of hell.

Textual Analysis & Reference: Thomas De Quincey in his celebrated 1823 essay On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth pointed out that the Porter scene provides brief comic relief, but far more crucially, the heavy knocking signals the re-establishment of normal human reality following the nightmare of murder. Furthermore, the Porter pretends to be the porter of hell-gate (‘If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key’), showing that Inverness has indeed become hell.

Correct Answer: (A) Equivocation

Textual Analysis & Reference: Equivocation is the central linguistic mode of the Witches. Their prophecies (such as ‘none of woman born shall harm Macbeth’ and ‘until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him’) are technically true in a literal sense but fundamentally misleading in their intent and interpretation.

Correct Answer: (A) Metaphor and Simile combined with Biblical allusion to the Genesis Fall

Textual Analysis & Reference: The line utilizes simile (‘look like the innocent flower’) and metaphor (‘be the serpent under’t’). It also carries a direct allusion to the Gunpowder Plot commemorative medal struck by King James I in 1605, which featured a serpent concealed beneath flowers and strawberries.

Correct Answer: (A) Lennox

Textual Analysis & Reference: In Act III, Scene 6, Lennox speaks to an unnamed Lord with devastating dramatic irony: ‘Men must not walk too late. Who cannot want the thought how monstrous / It was for Malcolm and for Donalbain / To kill their gracious father? damned fact! How it did grieve Macbeth!… Did he not straight / In pious rage the two delinquents tear / That were the slaves of drink and thralls of sleep?’

Correct Answer: (B) Malcolm orders every soldier to hew down a bough from Birnam Wood and carry it before him to conceal their numbers.

Textual Analysis & Reference: Malcolm instructs: ‘Let every soldier hew him down a bough / And bear’t before him: thereby shall we shadow / The numbers of our host and make discovery / Err in report of us’ (Act V, Scene 4). When the messenger informs Macbeth that ‘the wood began to move’, the supernatural prophecy dissolves into military stratagem.

Correct Answer: (B) L.C. Knights

Textual Analysis & Reference: L.C. Knights wrote How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism (1933). Knights launched a famous attack against A.C. Bradley’s nineteenth-century approach of treating Shakespeare’s characters as real human beings with independent biographies outside the dramatic text, arguing that Shakespeare’s plays should be read primarily as dramatic poems.

Correct Answer: (B) An atmosphere dominated by darkness, black night, blood, and the uncanny presence of supernatural evil

Textual Analysis & Reference: A.C. Bradley observes that almost all pivotal scenes in Macbeth take place in pitch darkness or murky gloom (the midnight murder of Duncan, the evening assassination of Banquo, the sleepwalking scene by candlelight). Bradley emphasized that Shakespeare drenches the Scottish landscape in blood and supernatural horror to externalize Macbeth’s moral damnation.

Correct Answer: (A) Cleanth Brooks

Textual Analysis & Reference: Cleanth Brooks devotes an entire chapter of The Well Wrought Urn to Macbeth, analyzing Macbeth’s lines: ‘And pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air’ (Act I, Scene 7). Brooks argues that the paradox of the fragile, naked infant represents the unyielding power of the natural human bonds and moral law that Macbeth violates.

Correct Answer: (A) G. Wilson Knight

Textual Analysis & Reference: G. Wilson Knight, in The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy, pioneered spatial and spatial-symbolic interpretation. He analyzed Macbeth as a visionary poetic universe depicting a man descending into nightmare, isolation, and spiritual death as a consequence of choosing absolute evil.

Correct Answer: (B) The Grand Mechanism (a relentless staircase of power, murder, and inevitable downfall)

Textual Analysis & Reference: Jan Kott famously formulated the concept of the ‘Grand Mechanism’—a terrifying, impersonal, mechanized staircase of power where every step to the throne must be bought with blood, and whoever reaches the summit must be pushed down by the next murderer climbing from below. Kott’s bleak, mid-20th-century interpretation influenced Peter Brook’s productions.

Correct Answer: (B) They are two parts of a single undivided personality, where Lady Macbeth enacts the guilt and mental collapse that Macbeth represses.

Textual Analysis & Reference: Freud suggested that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth can be interpreted as two halves of a single psychological entity. As Macbeth grows progressively hardened, remorseless, and incapable of feeling remorse, Lady Macbeth internalizes all the conscience, guilt, and psychic collapse that her husband sheds, culminating in her somnambulism and suicide.

Correct Answer: (B) A patriarchal anxiety over female power, maternal contamination, and reproductive lineage

Textual Analysis & Reference: Feminist critics such as Janet Adelman argue that Macbeth dramatizes intense male anxieties regarding female generation and maternal power. The Weird Sisters are barren, bearded females; Lady Macbeth demands to be ‘unsexed’ and fantasies about dashing her baby’s brains out; and Macbeth is ultimately vanquished only by a man who was ‘untimely ripp’d’ without normal birth through a woman’s body.

Correct Answer: (B) The perpetual Stuart royal succession stretching into eternity, flattering King James I in the audience

Textual Analysis & Reference: The procession displays the descendants of Banquo who will rule Scotland and England. The eighth king holds a two-fold ball and treble scepter (symbolizing the union of the crowns of Scotland, England, and Ireland under James I in 1603). The mirror held by the king famously reflected King James I himself sitting in the royal gallery, symbolically validating his perpetual royal dynasty.

Correct Answer: (B) ‘This dead butcher and his fiend-like queen’

Textual Analysis & Reference: Malcolm delivers the final judgment: ‘Producing forth the cruel ministers / Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen, / Who, as ’tis thought, by self and violent hands / Took off her life’ (Act V, Scene 8).

Correct Answer: (B) He creates them the first ‘Earls’ that Scotland ever had.

Textual Analysis & Reference: Malcolm announces: ‘My thanes and kinsmen, / Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland / In such an honour named’ (Act V, Scene 8). This Anglicization of Scottish titles symbolizes the institutional alignment of Scotland with England under civilized, lawful Christian monarchy.