After finishing Act I, scene 3 of Macbeth, the students wrote a response to the following:
Macbeth thinks about what the witches have told him.
• How is he responding emotionally to what he has learned?
• Do you think he will leave it to “chance”? Why or why not?
Use the passage to provide support for your responses
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill, cannot be good: if ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor:
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir.
