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‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?’ So begins one of the most famous soliloquies in Shakespeare’s Macbeth – indeed, perhaps in all of Shakespeare. Before we offer an analysis of this scene – and summarise the meaning of the soliloquy – here is a reminder of the famous speech.
‘Is This A Dagger Which I See Before Me’ is one of the most famous soliloquies of Shakespeare. Appearing in Act Scene 1 of his celebrated tragedy ‘Macbeth,’ it reveals his intention in killing Duncan to become the King. The soliloquy represents his self taken over by the act that he is about to do.
Read Shakespeare’s ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’ soliloquy from Macbeth below with modern English translation and analysis, plus a video performance.
The focus of the soliloquy, the invisible dagger, is our first glimpse of Macbeth's powerful imagination – imagination that is largely responsible for his mental torment throughout the drama.
Macbeth: "Is this a dagger which I see before me..." Macbeth has made his decision to kill the King and take the crown as his own. Inspired in part by his own ambition,...
Macbeth now has to make sense of this paradox; he plainly sees the dagger, it's right there in front of him, and yet he cannot lay hands upon it. The starkness of the line helps to punctuate the subtle change in Macbeth's tone as he tries to puzzle through this vision in the next few lines.
It begins after midnight on the day of the king's arrival at Inverness, with a scene devoted to the preliminaries of the murder, and closes late in the following day with a scene telling us of the immediate consequences of the deed, the flight of the princes and the election of Macbeth to the sovereignty" [Thomas Marc Parrott].
