Macbeth – Act Two, Scene One

Macbeth gives a soliloquy right before he kills King Duncan, Shakespeare has used personification to give extra meaning to the dagger. Using the information from the other scenes we know that Macbeth is battling the moral issue about killing Duncan, the pressure about being a man from his wife and his given fate from the witches. All this stress is causing Macbeth to go a little insane and is now hallucinating a dagger to give him guidance. When he first acknowledges the dagger he is questioning if it’s actually there “Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?” calling the dagger a “fatal vision” gives a new level of danger to the scene. In Macbeth’s soliloquy, he refers to the dagger as “thee” as you would say to a living thing, but by Shakespeare doing this, he was giving the dagger a purpose. I think the dagger symbolises the point of no return, he has to fully commit to the plan to reach his goal, if he doesn’t he will most likely be killed by his actions.