Shakespeare for Seeker of Striking Rhetoric

So our discussion in class this week motivated me to go back and finish a bunch of posts that I started but never finished, starting with this one. So when I was reading Macbeth, in addition to being super disturbed by Lady Macbeth, I made note of passages that stood out to me from a rhetorical standpoint, and here they are!

I read this just after our discussion regarding rhetorical devices and it caught my eye:

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?

The employment of alliteration here in the phrase supernatural soliciting draws attention to the strangeness of the circumstance with which Macbeth was informed of his destiny. To simply say soliciting, or supernatural message has less power than the phrase Shakespeare choose.

The following phrases also have rhetorical power—the anaphoric feel of the parallel statements he sets up with “cannot be ill; cannot be good” and the subsequent explanation of either case draws attention to the dilemma he is working through here. The witches approached him; surely he should/could act on the information which he received from their visit?

I suppose it’s not surprise to anyone that I am partial to alliteration; it seems to me the easiest of all rhetorical devices both to write and to recognize, and it lends a catchy feel to whatever phrase it graces. Consonance, the repetition of consonant sounds, not necessarily at the beginning of a word, has the same effect. The quote that follows, from Macduff, trying to convince Malcom that even though he is greedy, he has other good qualities, and other kings have been greedy, has plenty of alliteration. What is Shakespeare trying to accomplish here? What power does consonance lend this passage?

This avarice
Sticks deeper; grows with more pernicious root
Than summer-seeming lust; and it hath been
The sword of our slain kings: yet do not fear…

Maybe this is a stretch…but the thought I had was that the dominant sound in the word which is up for discussion (avarice) has an ‘s’ sound. The continual use of that same sound links the follow phrases back to that word and keeps the focus on avarice.

Ok, I admit, I mostly just like this quote because it struck my funny bone. But it’s a rhetorical device too…irony...paralipsis, anyone?

I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name:

Now, get ready for this next one. It’ll break your heart , once you realize the background. And the personification Ross uses here as he prepares Macduff for the news that his castle has been ransacked and his wife and sons killed struck me as quite poignant.

Let not your ears despise my tongue for ever,
Which shall possess them with the heaviest sound
That ever yet they heard.