Study guide

The Tragedy of Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

Overview

Author: William Shakespeare (1564–1616), actor, sharer and principal playwright of the King's Men
Written: Probably 1606, in the months after the Gunpowder Plot; the earliest recorded performance is Simon Forman's account of a visit to the Globe in April 1611
First printed: The First Folio of 1623, the only early text; there is no quarto
Genre: Tragedy: the shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies, about 2,100 lines in modern editions
Setting: Scotland in the eleventh century, with one scene in England at the court of Edward the Confessor
Main source: The Scottish history in the second edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), itself derived from Hector Boece's Latin history of Scotland
Form: Mostly blank verse; the witches speak in rhyming four-beat lines, and the Porter, the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth and a few others speak prose
Structure: Five acts; the Folio divides the play into scenes, and modern editions such as the Folger, followed here, count 28
Collaboration: The Hecate scenes (3.5 and part of 4.1) and two songs are widely thought to be later additions, probably by Thomas Middleton
Central images: Blood, sleep, darkness, ill-fitting clothes, babes and children, and a nature thrown into disorder by murder

Context

Macbeth was probably written in 1606, three years after James VI of Scotland had become James I of England and taken Shakespeare's company under his patronage as the King's Men. The play pays court to its royal patron in several ways. James claimed descent from Banquo, whom the play makes an honourable man and the ancestor of a line of kings; James had written a treatise on witchcraft, Daemonologie (1597), and had taken part in the North Berwick witch trials of 1590–91, in which witches were accused of raising storms against his ship; and the scene at the English court praises the royal power of healing by touch, a ceremony James inherited. Henry N. Paul argued that the play was written for performance before James, perhaps during the visit of his brother-in-law Christian IV of Denmark in the summer of 1606; that occasion is plausible but not proved (Paul 1950) (Muir 1951).

The only early text is the one printed in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is unusually short, and it shows signs of later theatrical revision. The scene in which Hecate rebukes the witches (3.5), and Hecate's lines and the dance in the cauldron scene (4.1), are written in a different, lighter style, and the Folio's stage directions call for two songs, 'Come away, come away' and 'Black spirits', whose full texts survive in Thomas Middleton's play The Witch. Most editors now believe that Middleton adapted the play for a revival, probably in the 1610s; the Oxford edition of Middleton's works prints it as a 'genetic text' marking his likely contributions. How much else he changed, and whether anything was cut, is disputed (Wells 1987) (Taylor 2007) (Brooke 1990) (Braunmuller 1997).

Shakespeare found the story in Holinshed's Chronicles, which tell how Makbeth and Banquho met three women 'in strange and wild apparell', how Makbeth killed King Duncane with the help of trusted friends, Banquho chief among them, and how he ruled justly for ten years before turning tyrant. Shakespeare compressed this history, made Banquo innocent, and took details of the murder itself, the drugged grooms and the wife who urges the deed, from Holinshed's account of the killing of an earlier king, Duff, by his captain Donwald. The historical Macbeth was a quite different figure: he defeated and killed Duncan I in 1040, reigned for seventeen years, made a pilgrimage to Rome, and was killed by Duncan's son Malcolm in 1057. Banquo and Fleance are inventions of the sixteenth-century chroniclers (Bullough 1973) (Holinshed 1587).

The play is steeped in the anxieties of 1605–06. On 5 November 1605 the Gunpowder Plot to blow up King and Parliament was discovered, and in March 1606 the Jesuit Henry Garnet was tried for his knowledge of it. Garnet admitted that he had defended equivocation, the doctrine that a person under interrogation might give a misleading answer while holding a true meaning in mind, and the word became notorious. The Porter's equivocator 'that could swear in both the scales against either scale' is almost certainly a topical joke, and the witches' prophecies, which 'keep the word of promise to our ear, / And break it to our hope', make equivocation the principle of the whole tragedy (Wills 1995) (Mullaney 1980) (Kinney 2001).

Macbeth has been one of the most performed and adapted of Shakespeare's plays. After the Restoration it was staged in Sir William Davenant's operatic version, with flying witches and expanded songs, which held the stage for decades; David Garrick restored much of Shakespeare's text in the eighteenth century, and Sarah Siddons made the sleepwalking scene famous. In the twentieth century it became a film classic, in Orson Welles's Macbeth (1948), Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957) and Roman Polanski's version (1971). The theatrical superstition that it is unlucky to name the play backstage, hence 'the Scottish play', is a modern tradition with no early evidence behind it.

Plot overview

Returning from victory over rebels and a Norwegian invasion, the Scottish generals Macbeth and Banquo meet three witches on a heath. They hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and king hereafter, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings. Almost at once messengers announce that King Duncan has made Macbeth Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth writes to his wife, and when Duncan announces that he will stay the night at Macbeth's castle at Inverness, Lady Macbeth resolves that he will never leave it. Macbeth hesitates; she shames him into the deed; he stabs Duncan in his sleep and she smears the drugged grooms with blood.

The murder is discovered in the morning. Macbeth kills the grooms, Duncan's sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee to England and Ireland, and Macbeth is crowned. Fearing Banquo and the prophecy about his heirs, he has Banquo murdered, but Fleance escapes. At a state banquet Banquo's ghost sits in Macbeth's place, and Macbeth's terror in front of his lords exposes him. He goes to the witches, who show him apparitions: an armed head warns him against Macduff, a bloody child tells him that 'none of woman born' shall harm him, and a crowned child promises that he will not be defeated until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. A procession of eight kings descended from Banquo follows.

Macduff has gone to England to join Malcolm, and Macbeth has his wife and children slaughtered. In England Malcolm tests Macduff's loyalty by pretending to be worse than Macbeth, then reveals his true character and the army that the English king has lent him. Ross brings news of the massacre, and Macduff's grief turns to resolve.

In Scotland Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep, trying to wash imaginary blood from her hands, while the thanes desert Macbeth. Malcolm's soldiers cut boughs from Birnam Wood to hide their numbers, so that the wood appears to move. Macbeth hears that his wife is dead, reflects that life is 'a tale / Told by an idiot', and goes out to fight. He kills Young Siward, but Macduff reveals that he was 'from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd'. Macbeth fights on and is killed. Macduff brings in his head, and Malcolm is hailed as King of Scotland.

Scene by scene

Scene 1: Act I, Scene 1: The witches agree to meet Macbeth

1.1 (the whole scene)

Summary

In thunder and lightning three witches agree to meet again 'when the battle's lost and won', on the heath, before sunset, to encounter Macbeth. Their familiar spirits, a grey cat and a toad, call them away, and they leave chanting a riddling couplet.

Analysis

The play opens before its hero appears, with beings who already know his name. In a dozen short lines Shakespeare establishes the witches' strange trochaic rhythm, quite unlike the blank verse of the human characters, and the paradox that will govern the play: values are reversed, and a battle can be both lost and won. The scene raises at once the question of whether the witches cause what follows or merely foresee it.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Macbeth 1.1

The play's motto of inversion. The chiasmus makes moral judgement itself unstable, and Macbeth will unknowingly echo it in his first line.

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Scene 2: Act I, Scene 2: Reports of Macbeth's victory

1.2 (the whole scene)

Summary

At his camp near Forres, King Duncan hears a wounded captain describe the battle against the rebel Macdonwald: brave Macbeth carved his way through the enemy and split the rebel open 'from the nave to the chops'. Then the Norwegian king attacked, and Macbeth and Banquo redoubled their blows. Ross arrives from Fife with news of a further victory over Norway, aided by the traitorous Thane of Cawdor. Duncan orders Cawdor's execution and gives his title to Macbeth.

Analysis

We hear of Macbeth before we see him, and what we hear is both glorious and disturbing. His heroism consists in spectacular killing, and the captain's language, 'bathe in reeking wounds', 'another Golgotha', already associates him with blood and with the place of the Crucifixion. Duncan's response is innocent: 'So well thy words become thee as thy wounds'. The transfer of Cawdor's title is the first of the play's ironies, since the new Cawdor will be a far greater traitor than the old.

Some editors have suspected that the scene was abridged or revised, pointing to its irregular, broken verse lines and to small inconsistencies, such as the wounded man who is a 'Captain' in the Folio's stage direction but whom Malcolm calls a 'sergeant' (Brooke 1990).

For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name), Disdaining Fortune, with his brandish’d steel, Which smok’d with bloody execution,

Macbeth 1.2

The hero introduced as a man of the sword; 'execution' anticipates the deaths he will deal outside the battlefield.

What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won.

Macbeth 1.2

The scene ends with an echo of the witches' 'lost and won'. Macbeth inherits a traitor's title before he becomes a traitor.

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Scene 3: Act I, Scene 3: The prophecies on the heath

1.3 (the whole scene)

Summary

The witches gather. One describes her revenge on a sailor whose wife refused her chestnuts: she will drain him 'dry as hay' and keep him from sleep. Macbeth and Banquo enter, and Macbeth's first words echo the witches. The three hail him as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and 'king hereafter'. Banquo, who notices that Macbeth starts as if afraid, asks for his own fortune and is told he will 'get kings, though thou be none'. The witches vanish.

Ross and Angus arrive and tell Macbeth that he is now Thane of Cawdor. Banquo warns that 'the instruments of darkness tell us truths' in small things to betray us in great ones. Macbeth, in a long aside, finds himself already imagining murder, and is shaken by the thought; he decides, for the moment, to leave things to chance.

Analysis

The scene shows the prophecy working on two different minds. Banquo is curious and sceptical; Macbeth is 'rapt'. The important fact is that the witches never mention murder: Macbeth supplies that thought himself, and the speed with which he does so suggests that the idea was not new to him. His aside gives the first example of the play's characteristic movement inward, into a mind in which 'nothing is but what is not' and imagined horrors are more real than present facts.

The sailor whom the witches torment, kept from sleep and dwindling for 'sev'n-nights nine times nine', is a small picture of what will happen to Macbeth. The witches' powers are limited: they cannot sink the ship, only toss it. Whether they can control Macbeth, or only tempt him, the play leaves open (Stallybrass 1982) (Clark 1997).

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

Macbeth 1.3

Macbeth's first line repeats, without his knowing it, the witches' words in 1.1.

The instruments of darkness tell us truths; Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s In deepest consequence.

Macbeth 1.3

Banquo describes exactly how the prophecies will work: true in small things, treacherous in the outcome.

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man That function is smother’d in surmise, And nothing is but what is not.

Macbeth 1.3

The first appearance of the murder in Macbeth's mind. The imagined deed paralyses action and overwhelms the real present.

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Scene 4: Act I, Scene 4: Duncan names Malcolm his heir

1.4 (the whole scene)

Summary

Malcolm reports that the old Thane of Cawdor died well, confessing his treason. Duncan reflects that there is no way to read a man's mind in his face, and at that moment Macbeth enters. The king thanks him and Banquo warmly, then names his elder son Malcolm Prince of Cumberland, heir to the throne, and announces that he will visit Macbeth at Inverness. Macbeth, in an aside, recognises that Malcolm now stands in his way, and asks the stars to hide his 'black and deep desires'.

Analysis

Duncan's remark about the 'mind's construction in the face', spoken as Macbeth enters, is one of Shakespeare's sharpest ironies: the king repeats his mistake as he speaks of it. The scene also explains why Macbeth cannot simply wait for 'chance' to crown him. In medieval Scotland the crown did not pass automatically to the eldest son, and Duncan's naming of Malcolm closes the route by which Macbeth might have been chosen. Duncan's speech is full of images of planting and growth, and the king who speaks of making a man 'full of growing' is the life-giving centre of the play's natural order.

There’s no art To find the mind’s construction in the face: He was a gentleman on whom I built An absolute trust.

Macbeth 1.4

Said of the old Cawdor, just before the new one enters.

Nothing in his life Became him like the leaving it;

Macbeth 1.4

Malcolm on Cawdor's repentant death, a dignified end that Macbeth's own will not resemble.

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Scene 5: Act I, Scene 5: Lady Macbeth reads the letter

1.5 (the whole scene)

Summary

At Inverness Lady Macbeth reads her husband's letter describing the prophecies. She fears that his nature is 'too full o' th' milk of human kindness' to take the quickest way to the crown. A messenger announces that Duncan is coming that night. Alone, she calls on the spirits that serve murderous thoughts to 'unsex' her and fill her with cruelty, and on night to hide the deed. Macbeth arrives; she tells him that Duncan will never see tomorrow and that he must look innocent and leave the business to her.

Analysis

Lady Macbeth's first soliloquy shows that she understands her husband better than he does himself: he wants greatness but would like to win it 'holily'. Her invocation is a deliberate act of self-transformation. She asks to be emptied of everything associated with women, pity and 'compunctious visitings of nature', and to have her milk turned to gall, and the language of thickened blood and stopped passages is physical as well as moral. Whether she is calling on real demons or only steeling herself has been debated; Jacobean audiences, for whom a spirit might answer such a call, would have found the speech more dangerous than modern ones (Adelman 1987) (Clark 1997).

The scene introduces the play's concern with gender. Lady Macbeth assumes that cruelty is masculine and tenderness feminine, and the play will test those assumptions to destruction.

It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way.

Macbeth 1.5

'Kindness' means both gentleness and the natural feeling proper to humankind. The milk image will return in her own invocation.

Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty!

Macbeth 1.5

The invocation. 'Mortal' means deadly; 'crown' is both head and the royal crown she seeks.

look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under’t.

Macbeth 1.5

Her advice to Macbeth, recalling the serpent in Eden and, perhaps, a medal struck after the Gunpowder Plot that is said to have shown a serpent among flowers (Muir 1951).

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Scene 6: Act I, Scene 6: Duncan arrives at Inverness

1.6 (the whole scene)

Summary

Duncan and Banquo arrive at the castle and admire its pleasant air. Banquo notes that martlets, birds that nest only where the air is sweet, have built their nests all over its walls. Lady Macbeth welcomes the king with elaborate courtesy, and he takes her hand to lead him to her husband.

Analysis

This brief, calm scene is a moment of dramatic irony. The king and his companion praise as a place of health and natural fertility the castle in which he will be killed. Banquo's 'procreant cradle' introduces a thread of images of breeding and children which will become central. Lady Macbeth's speech is all formal politeness, the 'innocent flower' she told her husband to imitate.

This castle hath a pleasant seat. The air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses.

Macbeth 1.6

Duncan's last words of trust. In the theatre the line is often spoken against the audience's knowledge of what waits inside.

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Scene 7: Act I, Scene 7: 'If it were done'

1.7 (the whole scene)

Summary

During the feast Macbeth leaves the table and weighs the murder in a soliloquy. If the deed could end everything with itself, he would risk the life to come; but such crimes teach others to do the same, and Duncan is his king, his kinsman and his guest, a ruler so virtuous that pity itself will proclaim the deed. He has nothing to drive him on but ambition. When Lady Macbeth enters he tells her they will go no further. She attacks his manhood, says she would have dashed out the brains of her own nursing child rather than break such an oath, and explains her plan: she will drug the grooms, and the blame will fall on them. Macbeth is won over.

Analysis

The soliloquy is one of the great examples of Shakespeare's mature verse, its syntax driven by a mind that cannot hold its images still. Macbeth begins with practical calculation and ends in apocalyptic vision: pity as a 'naked new-born babe' riding the storm, cherubs on horseback, tears drowning the wind. Cleanth Brooks took this image as the key to the play's imagery, a babe that is both helpless and irresistibly powerful, and linked it to the many children of the play, from the murdered sons of Macduff to the crowned child of the apparitions (Brooks 1947).

Lady Macbeth wins the argument by redefining manhood as the willingness to do anything. Macbeth's answer, 'I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none', is the play's moral centre, and he abandons it within minutes. Her image of the nursing child is the most shocking in Shakespeare, and it raises the question, famously mocked by L. C. Knights, of what became of her child (Knights 1933) (Adelman 1987).

And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

Macbeth 1.7

The image at the centre of Brooks's reading: weakness that is also overwhelming power.

I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself

Macbeth 1.7

Ambition is a rider who jumps too far and falls; Macbeth breaks off as his wife enters.

I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.

Macbeth 1.7

Macbeth's definition of manhood as a limit, which Lady Macbeth at once overturns.

But screw your courage to the sticking-place, And we’ll not fail.

Macbeth 1.7

The image is probably of a crossbow string wound tight to its notch.

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Scene 8: Act II, Scene 1: The dagger

2.1 (the whole scene)

Summary

Late at night Banquo and his son Fleance cross the castle courtyard. Banquo cannot sleep and has been dreaming of the witches. Macbeth enters and pretends he has not thought of them; he asks Banquo to support him when the time comes, and Banquo replies that he will do so only if his honour remains clear. Alone, Macbeth sees a dagger hanging in the air before him, its handle towards his hand, then streaked with blood. He describes the night of witchcraft and murder, hears the bell that Lady Macbeth rings as a signal, and goes to kill Duncan.

Analysis

Banquo's restless night shows that he too has been tempted, but he resists, praying to be spared 'cursed thoughts'. The contrast with Macbeth is the point of the scene's first half. The dagger soliloquy, the second half, is a study in hallucination. Macbeth cannot tell whether the dagger is supernatural or 'a dagger of the mind', and the uncertainty is the play's own. His description of night, with its Hecate, its wolf, and the rapist Tarquin, turns the murder into an act of ritual and sexual violation, and the speech ends with his decision to stop talking and act.

Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee:— I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Macbeth 2.1

The opening of the dagger soliloquy. In performance the dagger is almost always left invisible to the audience.

Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

Macbeth 2.1

The rhyming couplet that ends the scene and sends Macbeth to the murder.

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Scene 9: Act II, Scene 2: After the murder

2.2 (the whole scene)

Summary

Lady Macbeth waits, emboldened by drink. She says she would have killed Duncan herself had he not resembled her father as he slept. Macbeth returns with bloody hands, carrying the daggers he should have left with the grooms. He is horrified that he could not say 'Amen' when one of the sleepers prayed, and says he heard a voice cry that Macbeth had murdered sleep. Lady Macbeth takes the daggers back and smears the grooms with blood. A knocking begins at the gate. Macbeth stares at his hands and imagines them turning the whole ocean red; she returns, her hands bloody too, and tells him a little water will clear them.

Analysis

The murder happens offstage; we see only its effect on the murderers. The scene is built of broken lines, whispers and noises: the owl, the crickets, the voice, the knocking. Macbeth's guilt shows itself not as reasoning but as hallucination and a wild, rich poetry, while Lady Macbeth speaks practically and briefly. The roles will later be reversed. Her confidence that 'a little water clears us of this deed' will return in the sleepwalking scene as the hand that all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten.

The scene is the heart of the play's imagery of sleep and blood, which Caroline Spurgeon and others traced through the whole text (Spurgeon 1935). Sleep is the natural restorative that Macbeth has destroyed; blood is the mark of guilt that cannot be washed away.

Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep,”—the innocent sleep; Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,

Macbeth 2.2

Sleep as a healer that mends the tangled thread ('sleave') of anxiety. Macbeth will never sleep peacefully again.

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.

Macbeth 2.2

The Latinate grandeur of 'multitudinous seas incarnadine' gives way to plain English in the last line.

A little water clears us of this deed: How easy is it then!

Macbeth 2.2

Lady Macbeth's confidence, which the sleepwalking scene will answer.

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Scene 10: Act II, Scene 3: The Porter and the discovery

2.3 (the whole scene)

Summary

The knocking continues. A drunken Porter, slow to open the gate, imagines himself the porter of hell, admitting a farmer who hanged himself, an equivocator and a tailor. He lets in Macduff and Lennox, and jokes about the effects of drink. Macbeth enters and Macduff goes to wake the king, while Lennox describes the unnatural storms of the night. Macduff returns crying 'horror'. Amid the alarm Macbeth announces that he has killed the grooms in a fury of grief, and Lady Macbeth faints, or seems to. Banquo calls for an inquiry. Malcolm and Donalbain decide to flee, to England and Ireland.

Analysis

The Porter's comic interlude has been the most argued-over passage in the play. Coleridge thought it an actors' interpolation; Thomas De Quincey, in a famous essay, argued that the knocking marks the return of the ordinary human world after the suspension of nature during the murder (De Quincey 1823). The Porter's fantasy also has a serious religious source. In the medieval mystery plays, Christ knocks at the gate of hell to release the souls of the righteous, and a comic porter keeps the gate; Macbeth's castle has become that hell (Wickham 1966). The equivocator who 'could not equivocate to heaven' is very probably Garnet, and the farmer may glance at his alias 'Farmer' (Muir 1951) (Wills 1995).

In the discovery Macbeth's elaborate speech over Duncan's body, 'His silver skin lac'd with his golden blood', is too ornate, and his killing of the grooms is suspicious. Whether Lady Macbeth's faint is real or a diversion is left to the actor. Donalbain's remark that 'There's daggers in men's smiles' sums up the new Scotland.

Faith, here’s an equivocator

Macbeth 2.3

The Porter's equivocator, who could swear on both sides and commit treason in God's name: almost certainly a reference to the Jesuit defence of equivocation at the Gunpowder trials.

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece! Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence The life o’ th’ building.

Macbeth 2.3

Macduff describes the murder as sacrilege: the king's body is a consecrated temple.

There’s daggers in men’s smiles: the near in blood, The nearer bloody.

Macbeth 2.3

Donalbain's reason for flight. 'Near in blood' means close kin.

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Scene 11: Act II, Scene 4: Unnatural portents

2.4 (the whole scene)

Summary

Outside the castle, Ross and an Old Man discuss the night's portents: the day is dark, a falcon was killed by a mousing owl, and Duncan's horses broke loose and ate each other. Macduff tells them that suspicion has fallen on the king's sons, who have fled, and that Macbeth has gone to Scone to be crowned. Macduff will not attend the coronation but will go home to Fife.

Analysis

The chorus-like scene sets the murder in a cosmic frame. In the Elizabethan picture of an ordered universe, regicide disturbs nature itself, and the inversions reported here, owl over falcon, horses against their masters, night in daytime, are emblems of the subject who has killed his king. Macduff's quiet refusal to go to Scone is the first sign of resistance.

by the clock ’tis day, And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.

Macbeth 2.4

The sun ('the travelling lamp') is strangled as Duncan was killed, a figure of murdered light.

A falcon, towering in her pride of place, Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d.

Macbeth 2.4

The royal bird killed by a lesser one: a natural emblem of regicide.

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Scene 12: Act III, Scene 1: Macbeth turns against Banquo

3.1 (the whole scene)

Summary

At the palace in Forres, Banquo, alone, suspects that Macbeth 'play'dst most foully' for the crown, and wonders whether the prophecy about his own heirs may come true. Macbeth enters as king, invites him to the evening's feast, and asks casually whether he rides that afternoon and whether Fleance goes with him. Alone, Macbeth broods: to be king is nothing unless he is safely king, and the witches have given him a 'fruitless crown' while promising Banquo's children the throne. He has damned himself for Banquo's heirs. He then persuades two men with grievances that Banquo is the cause of their misfortunes and hires them to kill Banquo and Fleance.

Analysis

Banquo's silence is morally ambiguous. He suspects murder but says nothing, perhaps because the prophecy has given him hopes of his own. In Holinshed he was Macbeth's accomplice; Shakespeare makes him innocent but not entirely active in his innocence (Bullough 1973) (Norbrook 1987).

Macbeth's soliloquy reveals the logic of the tyrant. Having killed for the crown, he finds that its value depends on the future, on succession, and the future belongs to Banquo. 'Mine eternal jewel', his soul, has been given to 'the common enemy of man', the devil, for another man's sons. His scene with the murderers mirrors Lady Macbeth's persuasion of him in 1.7: he too challenges men to prove their manhood, comparing them to breeds of dog.

To be thus is nothing, But to be safely thus.

Macbeth 3.1

The tyrant's insecurity in two lines.

Upon my head they plac’d a fruitless crown, And put a barren sceptre in my gripe, Thence to be wrench’d with an unlineal hand, No son of mine succeeding.

Macbeth 3.1

Childlessness becomes Macbeth's torment. The images of barrenness answer Banquo's 'procreant cradle' and the play's many babes.

Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;

Macbeth 3.1

Macbeth taunts the murderers about manhood, as his wife taunted him.

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Scene 13: Act III, Scene 2: 'O, full of scorpions is my mind'

3.2 (the whole scene)

Summary

Lady Macbeth, alone, admits that nothing has been gained, since their desire is satisfied without contentment. Macbeth enters, tormented by dreams; he envies the dead Duncan, who now sleeps well. She urges him to be cheerful at the feast. He tells her that Banquo and Fleance still live and that a 'deed of dreadful note' will be done before nightfall, but refuses to tell her what it is. He calls on night to blind the day.

Analysis

The scene marks the turning point in the marriage. In Act I Lady Macbeth planned and Macbeth hesitated; now he plans alone and keeps her 'innocent of the knowledge', calling her 'dearest chuck', a tender word that sounds hollow. Their speech has drawn apart: she speaks in a few sad couplets, he in visionary verse full of bats, beetles and crows. His invocation of 'seeling night', in which night is a falconer sewing up the eyes of a hawk, echoes her invocation of 'thick night' in 1.5, and shows that he has taken over her role.

Naught’s had, all’s spent, Where our desire is got without content:

Macbeth 3.2

Lady Macbeth's first admission of failure, spoken alone.

O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!

Macbeth 3.2

Macbeth's guilt as physical torment.

Light thickens; and the crow Makes wing to th’ rooky wood. Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

Macbeth 3.2

Nightfall as the hour of predators; 'Light thickens' is one of the most admired phrases in the play.

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Scene 14: Act III, Scene 3: The murder of Banquo

3.3 (the whole scene)

Summary

The two murderers are joined by a third, sent by Macbeth. In the dusk they attack Banquo and Fleance as they walk towards the palace. Banquo is killed, crying to his son to fly and revenge him; the torch is put out and Fleance escapes.

Analysis

The short scene is notable for the mysterious Third Murderer, whose identity has fascinated readers; suggestions have included Macbeth himself, Ross and Seyton. More likely he shows only that Macbeth now trusts no one, not even his own agents. Fleance's escape, in the darkness after the light is struck out, preserves the line of kings that the witches promised and that James I claimed as his own (Braunmuller 1997).

The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day. Now spurs the lated traveller apace, To gain the timely inn;

Macbeth 3.3

Even a hired killer speaks poetry in this play; the image of the traveller hurrying to shelter makes Banquo's coming death more poignant.

O, treachery! Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly!

Macbeth 3.3

Banquo's last words save the line of future kings.

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Scene 15: Act III, Scene 4: The banquet and the ghost

3.4 (the whole scene)

Summary

Macbeth welcomes his lords to a state banquet. One of the murderers appears at the door with blood on his face and reports that Banquo is dead but Fleance has escaped. Macbeth turns back to the table and finds his own place filled by the ghost of Banquo, which only he can see. He addresses it in terror. Lady Macbeth explains to the guests that he has suffered such fits since youth, and privately scorns him. The ghost vanishes and returns as Macbeth proposes a toast to the absent Banquo. She dismisses the guests. Alone with her, Macbeth reflects that 'blood will have blood', notes that Macduff refused to attend, and resolves to visit the witches, since he is so far steeped in blood that going back would be as hard as going on.

Analysis

The banquet is the play's great public scene, the one moment when Macbeth tries to act as king among his nobles, and it falls apart. A feast is an image of social harmony and of the kingly 'good digestion' that Macbeth cannot have. The ghost, unlike the dagger, is usually visible to the audience, though some productions have kept it invisible. Either way, the scene stages the return of the murdered, the dead who 'rise again' and 'push us from our stools'.

After the guests leave, the scene becomes intimate and desolate. Lady Macbeth's last line in the scene, 'You lack the season of all natures, sleep', is the last time she speaks to her husband in the play. Macbeth's image of wading in a river of blood marks his new resolve: crime will now be swift and unreflecting.

Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake Thy gory locks at me.

Macbeth 3.4

Macbeth to the ghost, in front of the court. He denies a guilt nobody has yet named.

It will have blood, they say, blood will have blood.

Macbeth 3.4

The proverbial law of revenge, which the play fulfils.

I am in blood Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

Macbeth 3.4

The river of blood: going back is no easier than going on. 'Tedious' means wearisome.

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Scene 16: Act III, Scene 5: Hecate rebukes the witches

3.5 (the whole scene)

Summary

Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, meets the three witches on the heath and scolds them for dealing with Macbeth without her and for serving a man who loves only his own ends. She orders them to meet her at 'the pit of Acheron' in the morning, where Macbeth will come to learn his destiny. She will make spirits whose illusions will lead him to destruction by giving him a false sense of security. A song calls her away.

Analysis

This scene is almost certainly not by Shakespeare. Hecate speaks in smooth iambic tetrameter couplets, unlike the witches' rougher trochaic chants; the scene adds little to the action; and the song cued in the stage direction, 'Come away, come away', is found complete in Middleton's The Witch. Most editors now attribute 3.5 to Middleton's revision of the play, probably for a revival with more music and spectacle (Wells 1987) (Taylor 2007) (Brooke 1990).

The scene nevertheless contributes one important idea, the danger of overconfidence, which the apparitions of 4.1 will put into practice. In early modern English 'security' often meant carelessness, a false confidence in one's safety.

And you all know, security Is mortals’ chiefest enemy.

Macbeth 3.5

The moral of the apparition scene, stated in advance. 'Security' means complacency.

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Scene 17: Act III, Scene 6: Lennox and a Lord

3.6 (the whole scene)

Summary

Lennox and another lord talk in guarded, ironic language about the deaths of Duncan and Banquo. Lennox pretends to accept the official accounts while making clear that he does not believe them. The lord reports that Malcolm is at the court of the English king Edward, that Macduff has gone there to seek help from Northumberland and Siward, and that Macbeth is preparing for war. Both pray for Scotland's deliverance.

Analysis

The scene shows what speech becomes under tyranny: everything must be said by implication. Lennox's sarcasm ('Men must not walk too late') lets the audience know that Scotland's nobles see the truth. The lord's description of England, where a 'most pious' king rules, introduces the contrast between the two kingdoms that 4.3 will develop. Some editors think this scene was originally placed after 4.1, since the lord knows of Macduff's flight while Macbeth learns of it only at the end of the cauldron scene (Brooke 1990).

Give to our tables meat, sleep to our nights; Free from our feasts and banquets bloody knives,

Macbeth 3.6

The lord's hope for restored order picks up the broken banquet and the murdered sleep.

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Scene 18: Act IV, Scene 1: The cauldron and the apparitions

4.1 (the whole scene)

Summary

In a cave the witches circle their boiling cauldron, throwing in a grotesque catalogue of ingredients, from 'eye of newt' to the finger of a strangled baby. Hecate commends them and departs after a song. Macbeth arrives and demands answers. The witches summon three apparitions. An armed head warns him to beware Macduff; a bloody child tells him that 'none of woman born' shall harm him; a crowned child with a tree in its hand promises that he will never be vanquished until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. Reassured, Macbeth asks one more question: will Banquo's issue ever reign? A procession of eight kings passes, the last holding a mirror that shows many more, with Banquo smiling and pointing at them as his. The witches dance and vanish. Lennox brings word that Macduff has fled to England, and Macbeth decides to seize Macduff's castle and kill his wife and children.

Analysis

The apparitions are riddles in images. The armed head may be Macbeth's own, soon to be cut off; the bloody child is Macduff, 'untimely ripp'd' from his mother's womb; the crowned child holding a tree is Malcolm, whose soldiers will carry Birnam's boughs. Each is literally true and deeply misleading, and Macbeth hears only what he wants to hear. The procession of kings is a compliment to James: the eight are usually identified with the Stuart kings of Scotland, and the mirror held by the last suggests the line continuing into the audience's present. The 'twofold balls and treble sceptres' are usually read as an allusion to James's union of the crowns of England and Scotland and his rule over three kingdoms (Paul 1950) (Muir 1951).

Hecate's brief appearance and the dance with the song 'Black spirits' are probably Middleton's additions; the rest of the witches' scene is generally accepted as Shakespeare's (Taylor 2007). Macbeth's resolution at the end, that the 'firstlings' of his heart will be the firstlings of his hand, is the end of the reflective Macbeth: thought and deed are now the same thing.

Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire, burn; and cauldron, bubble.

Macbeth 4.1

The witches' refrain, in their characteristic trochaic rhythm.

Be bloody, bold, and resolute. Laugh to scorn The power of man, for none of woman born Shall harm Macbeth.

Macbeth 4.1

The second apparition, the bloody child. The prophecy is true, but not in the sense Macbeth assumes.

What, will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?

Macbeth 4.1

The line of Banquo's descendants seems endless; the 'crack of doom' is the Last Judgement.

The very firstlings of my heart shall be The firstlings of my hand.

Macbeth 4.1

From now on Macbeth will act on his first impulses.

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Scene 19: Act IV, Scene 2: The murder of Lady Macduff and her son

4.2 (the whole scene)

Summary

At Fife, Lady Macduff complains bitterly to Ross that her husband has abandoned his family by fleeing; even the wren will fight the owl to protect its young. Ross defends Macduff and leaves. She tells her young son that his father is dead and a traitor, and the boy answers with sharp, innocent wit. A messenger warns her to flee, but too late: Macbeth's murderers burst in, call Macduff a traitor, and stab the boy, who dies telling his mother to run. She flees, pursued, crying murder.

Analysis

This is the only scene of domestic life in the play, and its tenderness makes the massacre all the more terrible. The dialogue between mother and son is half comic, and the boy's question 'What is a traitor?' opens the play's political theme in a child's voice. Macbeth's crime is no longer against a rival but against the innocent, and the slaughter of the children is the logical end of his war with the future. Lady Macduff's last speech makes the point that in this world 'to do harm / Is often laudable; to do good sometime / Accounted dangerous folly'.

He loves us not: He wants the natural touch; for the poor wren, The most diminutive of birds, will fight,

Macbeth 4.2

Lady Macduff's charge against her husband: he lacks natural feeling. The play never fully answers it.

What is a traitor?

Macbeth 4.2

The child's question, central to a play written soon after the Gunpowder treason.

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Scene 20: Act IV, Scene 3: Malcolm and Macduff in England

4.3 (the whole scene)

Summary

At the English court, Macduff urges Malcolm to return and fight Macbeth. Malcolm, suspicious that Macduff is Macbeth's agent, tests him by claiming to be a worse tyrant than Macbeth: lustful, greedy, and lacking every 'king-becoming grace'. When Macduff despairs of Scotland, Malcolm reveals that his confession was false and that old Siward is ready with ten thousand men. A doctor describes how the English king, Edward, cures the 'evil', scrofula, by his touch. Ross arrives and, after hesitating, tells Macduff that his wife and children have been slaughtered. Macduff is stunned; Malcolm urges him to turn grief into revenge, and Macduff vows to meet Macbeth face to face.

Analysis

The long testing of Macduff, adapted closely from Holinshed, is a dialogue about kingship. Malcolm's list of royal virtues defines the ideal king that Macbeth is not, and his caution shows that he has learnt the lesson of his father's trust. The description of Edward the Confessor's healing touch sets a sacred English monarchy against the diseased Scotland, and alludes flatteringly to James, who continued the ceremony (Bullough 1973) (Sinfield 1986).

The scene's emotional climax is Macduff's response to the news. 'He has no children' may refer to Malcolm, who cannot understand, or to Macbeth, on whom no equal revenge is possible. When Malcolm tells him to 'Dispute it like a man', Macduff answers that he must 'also feel it as a man', a definition of manhood that includes grief and that corrects the one Lady Macbeth imposed in 1.7 (Adelman 1987).

Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell, Uproar the universal peace, confound All unity on earth.

Macbeth 4.3

Malcolm's false self-portrait as anti-king. The 'milk' recalls the 'milk of human kindness'.

What, all my pretty chickens and their dam At one fell swoop?

Macbeth 4.3

Macduff imagines Macbeth as a kite, a bird of prey; 'fell' means cruel.

I shall do so; But I must also feel it as a man:

Macbeth 4.3

Manhood redefined to include feeling.

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Scene 21: Act V, Scene 1: The sleepwalking scene

5.1 (the whole scene)

Summary

At Dunsinane a doctor and a gentlewoman watch Lady Macbeth walk in her sleep. She carries a candle, which she keeps by her always, and rubs her hands as if washing them. In broken prose she relives the murders: the spot of blood, the bell, the old man's blood, Lady Macduff, Banquo's burial, the knocking at the gate. The doctor says the disease is beyond his practice and that she needs a priest more than a physician.

Analysis

Lady Macbeth's last scene reverses her first. The woman who called on night to hide her deeds now cannot bear darkness; the woman who said a little water would clear them washes her hands endlessly. Her prose, a jumble of fragments from earlier scenes, shows a mind that can no longer impose order on memory. She has had no scene since 3.4, and her collapse has happened offstage, which makes its revelation all the more shocking. The doctor and gentlewoman are the audience's surrogates, horrified spectators of a guilt they are not meant to know.

Critics have read the scene in very different ways: as conscience breaking through, as the return of the feminine nature she tried to suppress, or as the isolation of a woman whom her husband no longer needs (Adelman 1987) (Belsey 1985).

Out, damned spot! out, I say!

Macbeth 5.1

Lady Macbeth sees the blood that her husband saw in 2.2.

Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard?

Macbeth 5.1

Fragments of 2.2 and of her taunts in 1.7, now mixed with a terror of hell that she never admitted awake.

What’s done cannot be undone.

Macbeth 5.1

An echo of her 'what's done is done' in 3.2, now in the tone of despair.

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Scene 22: Act V, Scene 2: The Scottish lords march

5.2 (the whole scene)

Summary

Near Dunsinane, the Scottish thanes Menteith, Angus, Caithness and Lennox march to join Malcolm's English army near Birnam Wood. They report that Macbeth is fortifying Dunsinane, that some call him mad, and that his followers obey from fear rather than love.

Analysis

The brief scene shows the kingdom turning against its tyrant. Angus's image of Macbeth's title hanging 'loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief' is a key instance of the clothing imagery traced by Spurgeon and Brooks: from the 'borrow'd robes' of 1.3 Macbeth has worn honours that do not fit (Spurgeon 1935) (Brooks 1947). The rebels speak of Malcolm as medicine for a sick country, a theme that links this scene to the doctor's helplessness in 5.1.

He cannot buckle his distemper’d cause Within the belt of rule.

Macbeth 5.2

Caithness's image of Macbeth's cause as a swollen, diseased body that cannot be contained.

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Scene 23: Act V, Scene 3: Macbeth at Dunsinane

5.3 (the whole scene)

Summary

Macbeth, defiant, trusts the prophecies and dismisses reports of desertion. He abuses a terrified servant who brings news of the English army of ten thousand. In a quieter moment he reflects that his life has fallen into 'the sere, the yellow leaf' and that, instead of the honour and love that should go with old age, he has only curses. He asks the doctor to cure his wife's mind, and when told that the patient must minister to herself, says 'Throw physic to the dogs'. He arms himself and orders his armour taken off again, restless and divided.

Analysis

The scene alternates between bluster and melancholy. Macbeth's insults to the servant ('cream-fac'd loon') are almost comic, but the reflection on old age is one of his most moving speeches, a recognition of everything he has lost. His question to the doctor, 'Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd', is about his wife but also about himself. The armour he puts on and takes off is another ill-fitting garment.

I have liv’d long enough: my way of life Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf;

Macbeth 5.3

Macbeth sees his life as an autumn without the comforts of age.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

Macbeth 5.3

The question about Lady Macbeth that reveals his own sickness.

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Scene 24: Act V, Scene 4: Birnam Wood

5.4 (the whole scene)

Summary

At Birnam Wood the Scottish rebels join Malcolm, Siward and the English army. Malcolm orders every soldier to cut down a bough and carry it before him, so as to hide their numbers from Macbeth's scouts.

Analysis

In a few lines the second prophecy begins to come true, by a simple military stratagem. The comedy of the trick, a wood that moves because soldiers carry branches, exposes the witches' prophecy as an equivocation. The green boughs also suggest spring and renewal advancing on the barren castle.

Let every soldier hew him down a bough, And bear’t before him.

Macbeth 5.4

The fulfilment of the crowned child's prophecy, with the tree in his hand.

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Scene 25: Act V, Scene 5: 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow'

5.5 (the whole scene)

Summary

Macbeth orders banners hung on the castle walls, confident that the siege will fail. A cry of women is heard; he reflects that he has almost forgotten the taste of fear. Seyton tells him that the queen is dead. Macbeth responds with a meditation on time and the meaninglessness of life. A messenger reports that Birnam Wood appears to be moving. Macbeth begins to doubt 'th' equivocation of the fiend' and resolves to go out and fight, wishing the world itself would end.

Analysis

The response to his wife's death is one of the most famous speeches in English. 'She should have died hereafter' can mean that she would have died some time anyway, or that she should have died at a better time, when there would have been room for grief. The speech then widens from one death to the whole of human time, imagined as an endless, trivial sequence of days leading to death. Life becomes a candle, a shadow, a bad actor, a tale told by an idiot. The theatrical images are especially bitter in a play: Macbeth sees himself as an actor whose part has meant nothing.

Bradley saw in the speech Macbeth's final despair, and many readers have heard in it the deadness of a man who has lost the capacity to feel. Others stress its grandeur, the power of a mind that still sees clearly what it has destroyed (Bradley 1904) (Booth 1983).

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time;

Macbeth 5.5

Time as a slow, trivial crawl to the end of history.

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more:

Macbeth 5.5

The theatrical image: life as a bad actor in a brief part.

I pull in resolution; and begin To doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend, That lies like truth.

Macbeth 5.5

Macbeth names the witches' method at last.

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Scene 26: Act V, Scene 6: The army before Dunsinane

5.6 (the whole scene)

Summary

Before the castle, Malcolm orders the soldiers to throw down their 'leafy screens'. Old Siward and his son will lead the first battle; Macduff calls for the trumpets to sound.

Analysis

The disguise is dropped and the battle begins. The trumpets, 'clamorous harbingers of blood and death', recall Macbeth's promise in 1.4 to ride ahead as 'the harbinger' of Duncan's visit to Inverness.

Now near enough. Your leafy screens throw down,

Macbeth 5.6

The moving wood becomes an army again.

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Scene 27: Act V, Scene 7: Young Siward is killed

5.7 (the whole scene)

Summary

Macbeth, trapped, compares himself to a bear tied to a stake for baiting. Young Siward challenges him and is killed. Macduff searches the field for Macbeth, refusing to fight the hired soldiers. Malcolm and Siward enter the castle, which has surrendered almost without a fight.

Analysis

The image of the baited bear shows Macbeth reduced to a beast fighting for survival, yet he fights with courage. His killing of Young Siward seems to confirm the prophecy that no man born of woman can harm him, and builds the tension before the final duel.

They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly, But, bear-like I must fight the course.

Macbeth 5.7

Macbeth as a baited bear, a familiar sight on the Bankside near the Globe.

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Scene 28: Act V, Scene 8: The death of Macbeth

5.8 (the whole scene)

Summary

Macbeth refuses to 'play the Roman fool' and kill himself. Macduff finds him. Macbeth tells him to go back, since he already has too much of Macduff's blood on him, and boasts of his charmed life. Macduff reveals that he was 'from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd', born by Caesarean section. Macbeth loses heart and refuses to fight, but when Macduff threatens to exhibit him as a captive monster, he fights on and is killed; the Folio's stage directions leave it unclear whether he dies in sight of the audience. Siward learns that his son died with his wounds in front and is content. Macduff brings in Macbeth's head and hails Malcolm as king. Malcolm makes his thanes earls, promises to call home the exiles and punish the 'cruel ministers' of the 'dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen', and invites all to his coronation at Scone.

Analysis

The final prophecy is fulfilled by another equivocation, and Macbeth curses the 'juggling fiends' that 'palter with us in a double sense'. His last stand, though, has a grandeur that the ending does not entirely acknowledge. He refuses suicide and surrender, and dies fighting.

The ending restores legitimate rule, and Macduff's 'the time is free' announces a new age. Yet critics have noticed how much is left unresolved. Malcolm's verdict, 'this dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen', is a political judgement that does not match the complexity we have seen. The severed head on a pole echoes the head of Macdonwald fixed on the battlements in 1.2, so that the play ends where it began, with a rebel killed by the king's champion. Fleance's line, promised the throne, is absent. Some readers see the close as a confident restoration, others as the beginning of a new cycle of violence (Sinfield 1986) (Norbrook 1987) (Booth 1983).

Despair thy charm; And let the angel whom thou still hast serv’d Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb Untimely ripp’d.

Macbeth 5.8

The revelation that undoes the bloody child's prophecy. 'Angel' here means evil angel.

That palter with us in a double sense; That keep the word of promise to our ear, And break it to our hope!

Macbeth 5.8

Macbeth's final judgement on the witches: equivocation as the essence of their prophecy.

I throw my warlike shield: lay on, Macduff; And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

Macbeth 5.8

Macbeth's last words, defiant to the end.

Of this dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen,

Macbeth 5.8

Malcolm's epitaph for the Macbeths, simpler than the play.

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Characters

Protagonist

Macbeth: Thane of Glamis, later Thane of Cawdor and King of Scotland; a great soldier and Duncan's kinsman. The witches' prophecy awakens a desire for the crown that he already seems to have entertained. He has an extraordinary imagination, which shows him the horror of what he does before and after he does it, yet he goes on. After the murder of Duncan he becomes increasingly isolated, killing Banquo and then Macduff's family to secure a future that he cannot possess. At the end he is a tyrant deserted by all, numbed by crime, but still courageous. The paradox of the role is that the audience shares the mind of a murderer and is never allowed to stop understanding him.

Macbeth's household

Lady Macbeth: Macbeth's wife, who seizes on the prophecy, calls on spirits to unsex her, and drives her husband to the murder by attacking his manhood. She plans the crime and coolly returns the daggers. After the coronation she is gradually excluded from his plans, and when we next see her after the banquet she is walking in her sleep, haunted by the blood she claimed a little water would wash away. Her death, reported offstage, is thought, by Malcolm at least, to be suicide. She has been played as a demonic temptress, a loving wife who destroys herself for her husband, and a woman whose only route to power is through him.
The Porter: The drunken gatekeeper at Inverness who, on the morning after the murder, imagines himself porter of hell gate. His comic speech connects the castle with hell, and his 'equivocator' points to the Gunpowder trials.
Seyton: Macbeth's officer at Dunsinane, the last man who serves him and the one who tells him of the queen's death.
The Doctor and the Gentlewoman: The witnesses of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking. The Doctor recognises that her disease is spiritual, not physical. A second, English doctor appears in 4.3 to describe King Edward's healing touch.
The Murderers: Men hired by Macbeth to kill Banquo and Fleance, and later Macduff's family. A mysterious Third Murderer joins the first two in 3.3.

Duncan's party

Banquo: A Scottish general and Macbeth's fellow soldier, promised that his descendants will be kings. He is wary of the witches and resists the 'cursed thoughts' they provoke, but he keeps silent about his suspicions of Macbeth. Murdered on Macbeth's orders, he returns as a ghost at the banquet and smiles at the line of kings in 4.1. Shakespeare made him blameless, unlike the accomplice of Holinshed, partly because James I claimed descent from him.
Duncan: King of Scotland, generous, trusting and old. He rewards Macbeth lavishly and names Malcolm his heir. His goodness and his position as king, kinsman and guest make his murder especially monstrous, and his body is described as a 'temple' and a 'building' whose life has been stolen. His one flaw as a ruler is that he cannot read faces.
Malcolm: Duncan's elder son and named heir, who flees to England after the murder. In 4.3 he tests Macduff with a false confession of vice, showing a political caution his father lacked. He leads the English army and becomes king at the end. Readers disagree whether he is the ideal king the play promises or a colder, more calculating politician.
Donalbain: Duncan's younger son, who flees to Ireland and does not return.
Fleance: Banquo's son, who escapes the murderers and disappears from the play. He carries the line of kings that the witches promised, and from which the Stuarts claimed descent.

Supernatural

The Weird Sisters (the witches): Three bearded women who hail Macbeth and Banquo on the heath, and later show Macbeth the apparitions. The Folio calls them the 'weyward' or 'weyard' sisters, usually modernised as 'weird', from Old English wyrd, fate; they have something of the Fates or Norns, something of the village witches of Jacobean pamphlets, and something of demons. Their exact nature is never explained, and their prophecies are true but deceptive. They do not tell Macbeth to murder; they show him a future and let him make it.
Hecate: The classical goddess of witchcraft and the underworld, who appears in 3.5 and briefly in 4.1 to command the witches. Her scenes are generally thought to be additions, probably by Thomas Middleton.

Opposition

Macduff: Thane of Fife, who discovers Duncan's body, refuses to attend the coronation, and flees to England to join Malcolm, leaving his family to be massacred. His grief, 'I must also feel it as a man', offers a different idea of manhood from Lady Macbeth's. Born by Caesarean section, 'untimely ripp'd', he is the man not 'of woman born' who kills Macbeth.
Old Siward and Young Siward: The Earl of Northumberland, commander of the English army, and his son. Young Siward is killed by Macbeth; his father's stoic response, glad that his son's wounds were in front, shows a simpler heroic code.

Macduff's household

Lady Macduff and her son: Macduff's wife and young son, who appear in a single scene (4.2). She is angry at her husband's flight; the boy is witty and brave. Their murder is Macbeth's most purely evil act and the play's clearest picture of innocence destroyed.

Scottish nobles

Ross: A Scottish thane who brings news throughout the play: the victory, the title of Cawdor, the portents after the murder, and the massacre at Fife. He moves between Macbeth's court and the rebels, and some productions make him a time-server.
Lennox: A Scottish thane, present at the discovery of the murder and at the banquet, whose ironic speech in 3.6 shows that Macbeth's nobles see through him. He later joins the rebels.

Themes

Ambition and its self-defeat

The play is the classic study of 'vaulting ambition', but it does not present ambition as a simple vice. Macbeth wants the crown, yet before the murder he sees with complete clarity what it will cost him, and after it he finds that the crown he has gained gives him nothing: 'To be thus is nothing, / But to be safely thus.' Ambition in Macbeth is a desire for the future, and the play shows that the future cannot be seized. Every crime he commits to secure it pushes it further away.

The play also shows ambition shared in a marriage. Lady Macbeth's desire for her husband's greatness is as strong as his own, and the destruction of their partnership, from 'my dearest partner of greatness' to her solitary death, is one of the play's tragedies (Bradley 1904).

Equivocation, prophecy and fate

The witches tell truths that deceive. Each of their prophecies comes true, but not as Macbeth expects, and his final cry against the 'juggling fiends' that keep 'the word of promise to our ear' sums up the experience. In 1606 the word equivocation had a precise political and religious meaning, and the play links the witches' riddles to the treasonous half-truths of the Gunpowder conspirators (Mullaney 1980) (Wills 1995).

Behind this lies the question of fate. Do the witches know the future, or create it by planting ideas? The play balances the two possibilities. The witches never tell Macbeth to kill, and Banquo hears the same prophecy without killing; yet the future they foretell does arrive. Macbeth is not a puppet, but he lives in a world where evil has real power (Clark 1997) (Stallybrass 1982).

Kingship, tyranny and legitimacy

Macbeth was written for a king who claimed to rule by divine right, and it presents regicide as sacrilege and a crime against nature. Duncan's body is the Lord's anointed temple; the heavens darken when he dies; Edward the Confessor heals by touch. Against these images of sacred kingship the play sets the tyrant, whose rule is maintained by spies and murder and whose title hangs on him like a giant's robe.

The play's politics are not simple. Duncan's kingdom begins with rebellion, and its hero is a man who wins fame by violence; Malcolm defeats Macbeth with an English army; the play ends with a head on a pole. Critics have argued that the play exposes the violence on which legitimate monarchy also rests, and that its distinction between the good king and the tyrant is less secure than it appears (Sinfield 1986) (Norbrook 1987).

Manhood and gender

Again and again characters ask what it means to be a man. Lady Macbeth defines manhood as the will to do anything, and taunts her husband with cowardice; Macbeth uses the same tactic on the murderers; at the banquet she asks 'Are you a man?' Macduff answers that a man must also feel. The play exposes the cost of a masculinity defined by violence.

Women in the play are powerful and terrifying: the witches with their beards, Lady Macbeth asking to be unsexed. Feminist critics have explored the fears of female and maternal power that the play dramatises, and the way its ending seems to restore a world of men, in which the only woman left is dead by her own hand (Adelman 1987) (Belsey 1985) (Stallybrass 1982).

Conscience, guilt and the mind

Macbeth is a play about the inside of a guilty mind. The hero imagines his crimes before he commits them and is tormented by them afterwards; he sees a dagger and a ghost, and hears a voice that cries 'Sleep no more!' Lady Macbeth, who scorned such imaginings, is destroyed by them in the end. Guilt in the play is not only moral judgement but a physical disease of mind and body: sleeplessness, scorpions in the brain, a heart 'sorely charged'.

The play's tragic power depends on this inwardness. We see the murderer from within, so that the horror is not only in the deeds but in the clarity with which Macbeth understands them.

Nature and the unnatural

Murder in Macbeth is a violation of natural order. The play is full of images of planting, breeding and growth associated with Duncan and Banquo, and of barrenness, poison and disease associated with Macbeth. The night of the murder is accompanied by storms, earthquakes, darkness at noon and animals turning against each other. The restoration at the end is figured as healing and as the advance of a green wood.

Motifs

Blood

Blood is everywhere in the play, from the bleeding captain of 1.2 to Macduff's report of the dead tyrant. It marks honour on the battlefield, guilt on the murderers' hands, and the line of descent ('the near in blood'). Macbeth's hands that would turn the sea red, his image of wading in a river of blood, and Lady Macbeth's 'damned spot' trace its progress from deed to memory.

Sleep

Sleep is the natural restorer that Macbeth murders along with Duncan. The witches deny sleep to a sailor; Macbeth hears a voice cry 'Sleep no more!'; he envies the dead Duncan who 'sleeps well'; Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep. The loss of sleep is the loss of peace, innocence and health.

Darkness and night

The crimes are committed at night, and both Macbeths call on darkness to hide them. The play is unusually dark, with daylight 'strangled' after the murder, and its light sources, torches, candles, the 'brief candle' of life, are fragile.

Clothing that does not fit

Caroline Spurgeon noticed how often Macbeth's honours are described as clothes that do not fit him: 'borrow'd robes', 'Golden opinions' to be 'worn now in their newest gloss', a 'giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief'. Brooks connected this to the play's theme of disguise and the cloaking of true nature (Spurgeon 1935) (Brooks 1947).

Babes and children

Children appear throughout: the 'naked new-born babe' of pity, the baby Lady Macbeth would kill, Fleance, the bloody and crowned children of the apparitions, Macduff's 'pretty chickens'. They represent the future and the line of succession that Macbeth cannot control, and the innocence he destroys (Brooks 1947).

Hands and washing

Hands commit the murders, and the attempt to wash them clean runs from 'A little water clears us of this deed' to the sleepwalker who cannot sweeten 'this little hand'.

Symbols

The dagger

The 'dagger of the mind' that Macbeth sees before Duncan's murder symbolises the power of imagination to lead him into the deed, and the uncertain border between the supernatural and the psychological.

Banquo's ghost

The ghost in Macbeth's seat at the banquet embodies the return of the murdered and the impossibility of escaping the past. It sits in the king's place, which it has, in a sense, inherited through Fleance.

The crown and the sceptre

The 'fruitless crown' and 'barren sceptre' symbolise a kingship without a future. In the apparition scene they are answered by the crowned child and the procession of kings bearing balls and sceptres.

Birnam Wood

The moving wood is the fulfilment of an equivocal prophecy, but also an image of natural growth and renewal advancing on the tyrant, as if nature itself were rising against him.

The knocking at the gate

The knocking after Duncan's murder marks the return of the outside world. For De Quincey it signalled the re-establishment of the ordinary human world after the 'awful parenthesis' of the murder; in the Porter's speech it recalls Christ knocking at the gate of hell (De Quincey 1823) (Wickham 1966).

Critical debates

The Folio text and Middleton's revision

Macbeth survives only in the Folio of 1623, and its text is short, sometimes metrically irregular, and contains material that seems not to be Shakespeare's. The Hecate scenes in particular (3.5 and parts of 4.1) differ in style from the rest, and the songs cued in the stage directions belong to Middleton's The Witch. The view that Middleton revised the play for a later revival has been widely accepted since the nineteenth century and was developed in the Oxford Textual Companion and the Oxford Middleton (Wells 1987) (Taylor 2007).

How far the revision extends is disputed. Some scholars think Middleton cut the play as well as adding to it, which would explain its brevity; others see the short text as Shakespeare's own swift design. Most modern editions print the Hecate material but note its doubtful authorship (Brooke 1990) (Braunmuller 1997) (Clark 2015).

Bradley, character and 'How many children?'

A. C. Bradley's lectures of 1904 read Macbeth as a study of two great characters. He described the play's atmosphere of darkness and blood, the imagination that makes Macbeth both poet and murderer, and Lady Macbeth's 'greatness' of will. He also asked questions that treat the characters as real people, such as when the murder was first planned. For many readers his account remains the best introduction to the play (Bradley 1904).

In 1933 L. C. Knights attacked this method in an essay whose title, How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?, mocked speculation about the characters' offstage lives. Knights argued that the play should be read as a 'dramatic poem', in which theme and imagery matter more than psychology. The debate between character and poetic pattern shaped criticism of Shakespeare for decades (Knights 1933).

Imagery: Spurgeon and Brooks's 'naked babe'

Caroline Spurgeon catalogued the recurring images of Shakespeare's plays and found in Macbeth a pattern of ill-fitting clothes, as well as imagery of blood, darkness and sound (Spurgeon 1935).

Cleanth Brooks, in 'The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness', took up Spurgeon's clothing images and joined them to the many babes of the play. The 'naked new-born babe' of pity is weak and yet more powerful than any warrior; the babe is the future that Macbeth cannot control, and the cloak is the disguise that hides his true nature. Brooks's essay became a model of New Critical reading, showing that a single image could unlock the structure of a whole play (Brooks 1947).

The witches: demons, fates or village women?

Who are the witches? They have been read as figures of classical fate, as Norse Norns, as demons, as embodiments of Macbeth's own desire, and as the poor old women accused of witchcraft in Jacobean England. The play draws on all these traditions without committing to one. Stuart Clark has shown how seriously learned contemporaries, including James, took witchcraft as part of a demonic order (Clark 1997).

Peter Stallybrass argued that the witches, together with Lady Macbeth, represent a threat of female power and disorder that the play's patriarchal ending suppresses, and that witchcraft in the play is a political category as well as a supernatural one (Stallybrass 1982).

Lady Macbeth and maternal power

Feminist critics have made Lady Macbeth's invocation and her image of the nursing child central to their reading. Janet Adelman argued that the play is driven by a fantasy of malign maternal power, embodied in the witches and in Lady Macbeth, and by a corresponding fantasy of escape from it: the man 'not of woman born'. The ending, in her reading, creates a world purged of women (Adelman 1987).

Catherine Belsey placed Lady Macbeth in a broader history of the female subject in Renaissance drama, a woman who speaks with power but is finally silenced (Belsey 1985). Other readers stress that the play also offers Lady Macduff, a mother who is neither demonic nor powerful, and Macduff's own capacity to 'feel it as a man'.

The play's politics: royalism or critique?

Macbeth has often been seen as a royal play written to please James, celebrating his ancestry, his interest in witchcraft and his escape from the Gunpowder Plot (Paul 1950) (Wills 1995).

Later critics have complicated this view. Alan Sinfield argued that the play's contrast between legitimate violence (Macbeth killing rebels for Duncan) and illegitimate violence (Macbeth killing Duncan) is ideological and unstable, and placed the play in the context of the debate between royal absolutism and George Buchanan's defence of the right to resist tyrants (Sinfield 1986). David Norbrook showed how Shakespeare reshaped the Scottish chronicles, suppressing material that might have supported a theory of elective kingship (Norbrook 1987). Arthur Kinney read the play as a response to a whole range of Jacobean anxieties (Kinney 2001).

The Porter and the knocking

Coleridge thought the Porter's speech an interpolation by the actors, unworthy of Shakespeare. Thomas De Quincey argued in a famous essay that the knocking which precedes it is a stroke of genius: it marks the moment at which the human world returns after the murder has suspended it (De Quincey 1823).

Glynne Wickham showed that the scene draws on the 'Harrowing of Hell' in the medieval mystery plays, where Christ knocks at hell's gate and a comic devil-porter answers. Macduff, who will eventually defeat Macbeth, enters as the harrower of a hell-castle (Wickham 1966). Most critics now regard the scene as integral, a comic interlude that deepens the horror.

The ending: restoration or repetition?

The play ends with Malcolm's coronation and the 'dead butcher' disposed of. Traditional readings see a restoration of order and grace; Malcolm speaks of 'the grace of Grace' and promises to act 'in measure, time, and place'.

Other critics point to the ironies of the close: Macbeth's head on a pole echoing Macdonwald's at the start; the new king who has learned to lie; the absence of Fleance and the line of Banquo. Stephen Booth argued that Macbeth refuses the neat closure that tragedy usually offers, leaving the audience with an experience it cannot fully define (Booth 1983) (Norbrook 1987).

Key passages

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

The witches · Macbeth 1.1

The witches' chant at the end of the first scene. It announces a world in which moral values are inverted and appearances deceive, and Macbeth's first words in 1.3 echo it.

Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings.

Macbeth · Macbeth 1.3

Macbeth, aside, after the first prophecy has come true. Real dangers frighten him less than what his mind invents; the line defines the imaginative, self-tormenting quality of the hero.

unsex me here,

Lady Macbeth · Macbeth 1.5

Lady Macbeth's invocation of the spirits. She asks to be stripped of the qualities associated with women, especially pity, so that she can act without remorse.

I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.

Macbeth · Macbeth 1.7

Macbeth's answer to his wife's taunts: true manhood has limits, and to go beyond them is to cease to be human. He soon abandons this position.

A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

Macbeth · Macbeth 2.1

Macbeth questions the dagger he sees before him. The play never settles whether such visions are supernatural or psychological.

Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more.

Macbeth · Macbeth 2.2

The voice Macbeth hears after the murder names him by each of his titles. Sleep, the restorer of life, becomes the second victim of the crime.

It will have blood, they say, blood will have blood.

Macbeth · Macbeth 3.4

After the ghost's appearance Macbeth recognises the law of retribution. Murder demands further murder and ends in the murderer's own death.

He has no children.—All my pretty ones?

Macduff · Macbeth 4.3

Macduff's response to the news of the massacre. 'He' may be Malcolm, who cannot understand a father's grief, or Macbeth, on whom no equal revenge is possible.

Here’s the smell of the blood still:

Lady Macbeth · Macbeth 5.1

The sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, still smelling the blood on her hands. The woman who said 'A little water clears us of this deed' now finds that 'all the perfumes of Arabia' cannot sweeten them.

it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Macbeth · Macbeth 5.5

The end of the 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow' speech, spoken after the news of his wife's death. Life has become meaningless noise; the theatrical images make the audience part of the spectacle Macbeth describes.

Questions for study

Do the witches cause Macbeth's crimes, or only reveal a desire that is already there?
Compare Macbeth's and Banquo's reactions in 1.3, and look at what the witches actually say. Do they ever mention murder?
How does Lady Macbeth persuade her husband to murder Duncan in 1.7, and why does her argument work?
Look at how she defines manhood and how she uses his love for her and his promise.
Trace the imagery of sleep through the play. What has Macbeth murdered when he 'murders sleep'?
Look at 1.3 (the sailor), 2.2, 3.2, 3.4 and 5.1.
What is the function of the Porter scene? Is it comic relief, or something more?
Think about De Quincey's essay, the mystery plays' Harrowing of Hell, and the equivocator.
How does the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth change after Duncan's murder?
Compare 1.5–1.7 with 3.2, 3.4 and her last appearance in 5.1.
What does the play say about manhood? Compare the definitions offered by Lady Macbeth, Macbeth and Macduff.
Look at 1.7, 3.1, 3.4 and 4.3.
How do the witches' prophecies 'lie like truth'? Explain each of the three apparitions in 4.1 and how it is fulfilled.
Think about equivocation and the Gunpowder trials; look at 5.4, 5.5 and 5.8.
How does the play present the relation between a good king and a tyrant? Is the contrast between Duncan or Malcolm and Macbeth as clear as it seems?
Look at the battle in 1.2, Malcolm's self-accusation in 4.3, and the ending.
Analyse the 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow' speech. What does it show about Macbeth's state of mind at the end?
Consider its images of time, light and theatre, and how it responds to his wife's death.
Is the ending of Macbeth a restoration of order, or does it hint at continuing violence?
Compare the end of 5.8 with 1.2, and think about Fleance and the line of Banquo.