Act II Summaries

Scene 1
Banquo and Fleance have a conversation about how grateful Duncan seemed for the Macbeth’s hospitality. Banquo also mentions the fact that he has dreamt about the witches. Macbeth replies with a lie, saying that he doesn’t think about them anymore.
Macbeth gives his famous dagger soliloquy. He sees a floating dagger and says things like: “Mine eye’s are made the fools o’th’other senses” and “ on thy blade and dundgeon gouts of blood/ Which was not so before.” A bell rings and he leaves to murder Duncan.

Scene 2
This scene starts with Lady Macbeth and Macbeth reunited after the murder of Duncan. She tells Macbeth that even though she got everything prepared for him to kill Duncan, she couldn’t have done it herself because Duncan looked too much like her father. Macbeth enters the scene with two bloody daggers. She gets really upset shouting “why did you bring these daggers from the place?/ they must lie there”. She tries to get him to go smear blood over the guards and leave the daggers, but in the end he won’t because he is afraid of seeing Duncan’s body again.
Lady Macbeth takes the daggers, leaves them with the guards and returns to Macbeth. Upon her return, Macduff starts knocking at the door. At this point, they are both covered in blood. She suggests that they just need to wash their hands. She comments that: “A little water cleans us of this deed./ How easy is it then!”

Scene 3
In this scene, the porter comments several times on how the castle is like hell. He says things like : “I’th’name of Beelzebub?” and “but this place is too cold for hell”.

Macduff enters and asks for the king. At this point Macbeth enters and they all have a discussion about how the King is doing.
Lennox describes how the evening was so unruly and totally chaotic. This is a great example of disorder in the play. He talks about how the “chimneys were blown down” and there were “strange screams of death”.

Eventually Macduff finds Duncan dead and rejoins the group. He laments Duncan’s death and Lady Macbeth becomes very emotional. Again there is a great example of disorder when Macbeth says that “the fountain of your blood is stopped, the very source of it is stopped”.

Macbeth kills the guards and admits this to the group when he says, “ O, yet I do repent me of my fury/ That I did kill them”.

At the end of this scene, Malcom and Donaldbain decide that they are too afraid to stick around and decide they are going to flee. This makes them look suspicious, and frees up the crown for Macbeth.

Scene 4
This entire scene focuses on the disorder that has occurred because of the fact that Macbeth has killed the King. There is a great line where Ross describes how two horses have broken out of their stalls and eaten each other.