AO2 technique practice

Write an AO2-level analysis of this quotation from Macbeth: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?" (8 marks equivalent)

Answer guidance:

• Technique: rhetorical question; classical allusion (Neptune); blood imagery.
• Neptune: god of the sea — the largest body of water imaginable invoked and found insufficient. Scale = the measure of guilt.
• "Wash… clean" — the cleansing/ablution imagery; guilt as physical contamination that cannot be removed.
• Rhetorical question: Macbeth answers his own question implicitly — no, it cannot. The form enacts his recognition.
• "My hand" — singular, specific, bodily. The abstract crime (regicide, cosmic disorder) reduced to one specific hand.
• Effect: Shakespeare externalises Macbeth's guilt into an image of scale (the ocean) against the particular (the hand) — making the impossible gap between the crime and any redemption viscerally felt.