Macbeth Quote Analysis

One of Macbeth's hired murderers addresses Macduff's young son with this insult immediately before stabbing him. The child has just called the murderer a liar for claiming his father is a traitor.

The murderer's epithet "egg" reduces the child to something unformed and fragile, but the violence of the image lies in what it implies: eggs are made to be cracked. By choosing a word associated with potential life, the murderer darkly acknowledges he is destroying a beginning, not an enemy—the casual cruelty of the phrasing ("What, you egg!") makes the infanticide seem almost reflexive.

Use this to argue that Shakespeare's language choices expose the dehumanizing logic of political violence—the murderer's reduction of the boy to an "egg" shows how tyranny requires its agents to see victims as objects rather than people in order to kill without hesitation.