Macbeth

On a battlefield in medieval Scotland, two generals — Macbeth and Banquo — have just won a hard-fought victory for King Duncan against rebels and a Norwegian invasion. Returning across a heath, they are met by three witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis (his current title), Thane of Cawdor (the next title down the line), and king hereafter. To Banquo, they prophesy that he will be the father of kings, though never king himself. Within minutes, royal messengers arrive to confirm that Duncan has indeed made Macbeth Thane of Cawdor — the first prophecy come true.

Macbeth writes home about the encounter. His wife, reading the letter, immediately sees what her husband cannot bring himself to: that the prophecy will not fulfil itself, that Duncan must be killed, that her husband’s nature is “too full o’ the milk of human kindness” for what is needed. When word arrives that Duncan will spend the night under their roof, she calls on the spirits to “unsex” her so she can see the killing through. Macbeth wavers; she does not. The same night, while Duncan sleeps, Macbeth murders him and frames the sleeping grooms with their own daggers.

Duncan’s sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, flee — Malcolm to England, Donalbain to Ireland. Suspicion of the murder, conveniently, falls on them. Macbeth is crowned king. But Banquo, who heard the witches’ prophecy, suspects what has happened; and the witches’ prediction that Banquo’s sons will inherit the throne now begins to torment Macbeth. He hires murderers to kill Banquo and his son Fleance. Banquo is killed; Fleance escapes. At the coronation banquet that night, Banquo’s ghost appears at the table — visible only to Macbeth — and Macbeth’s public collapse is the first sign to the assembled thanes that something is wrong with the new king.

Macbeth seeks out the witches a second time. They show him three apparitions: beware Macduff; no man born of woman shall harm him; he will not be vanquished until Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane hill. Reassured by the second and third (which sound impossible), he ignores the warning of the first only to learn that Macduff has fled to England to join Malcolm. In retaliation, Macbeth has Macduff’s wife and children butchered in their own house.

In England, Macduff and Malcolm raise an army. Lady Macbeth, who in the early acts seemed the colder-blooded of the two, is now sleepwalking through the castle, washing imaginary blood from her hands; she dies offstage, by her own report. Malcolm’s army marches on Dunsinane carrying boughs cut from Birnam wood as camouflage — and the third apparition is suddenly literal. In the final battle, Macduff confronts Macbeth and reveals that he was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d” — born by Caesarean — and so not, in the witches’ sense, born of woman. Macduff kills Macbeth. Malcolm is hailed king of Scotland.

Written around 1606, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s late tragedies and the shortest of the four major ones — about 2,100 lines, against the 4,000 of Hamlet. It was almost certainly written for the new king. James VI of Scotland had become James I of England in 1603 on Elizabeth’s death, and Shakespeare’s company was now the King’s Men, performing under royal patronage. James was Scottish; James was, by his own claim, descended from Banquo; James had written a treatise on demonology and witchcraft (Daemonologie, 1597); James had survived the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament in November 1605. Macbeth is, among other things, the play Shakespeare wrote for that king at that moment: a Scottish history, a meditation on regicide, and a dramatic working-out of how the Stuart line came to be on the throne — Banquo’s descendants, the witches promise, will be kings.

The plot comes from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577, expanded 1587), Shakespeare’s standard source for the English and Scottish history plays. Holinshed’s Macbeth was a real eleventh-century king of Scotland (reigned 1040–1057) who came to the throne by killing his predecessor — but Holinshed’s historical Duncan was a weak ruler and Macbeth’s first decade as king was relatively well-regarded. Shakespeare flattens both portraits: Duncan becomes a saintly old king, Macbeth a usurper from the moment he strikes. Shakespeare also imports the prophesying weird sisters from a marginal episode in Holinshed and gives them centre stage.

The play’s preoccupation with witches, equivocation, and treason is deeply of its moment. The Gunpowder Plot trials had begun in early 1606; one of the most prominent defendants, the Jesuit Henry Garnet, defended himself partly by appealing to the doctrine of equivocation — saying one true thing while meaning another, a way of telling the truth that lies. The Porter scene in Act 2 names this directly (“an equivocator”), and the witches’ prophecies are the play’s most sustained study of how a true statement can destroy you.

Around the play has accumulated a long theatrical superstition — actors traditionally refer to it only as “the Scottish play” — said to date from troubles attending early productions. The superstition is itself a tribute to the play’s reputation as the most violent, fastest, and most unsettling of the major tragedies.

Ambition and its cost. Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition” (1.7) is the play’s named engine — not greed for the crown itself but the willingness to kill for it, and the recognition, even at the moment of acting, that the ambition exceeds the reasoning. Lady Macbeth has the same ambition more cleanly; what destroys her is not the wanting but the doing.

Fate and free will. The witches’ prophecies are the play’s great test case for whether Macbeth is fated or chooses. Banquo hears the same prophecy and does nothing; Macbeth hears it and acts. The later prophecies (no man born of woman; Birnam wood) are technically true but designed to mislead — fate, in this play, is less a force than a trap baited with words you want to believe.

Manhood, gender, and unsexing. The play is unusually preoccupied with what makes a man. Lady Macbeth taunts Macbeth into the murder by accusing him of unmanliness; she calls on spirits to “unsex” her so she can do what (in the play’s logic) only a man could; the witches confound Banquo by being female with beards. Macduff’s “not of woman born” closes the loop: the man who can kill Macbeth is, in a technical sense, not of woman.

Blood and guilt. Blood is the play’s most insistent image — the sergeant’s wounds, Duncan’s body, the daggers, Banquo’s ghost “with twenty trenched gashes,” Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking hands. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” (2.2): the answer the play returns is no.

Sleep, sickness, and disorder. The night Macbeth kills Duncan he is told he “hath murder’d sleep”; he never sleeps easily again, and Lady Macbeth’s eventual breakdown comes through her sleep. The natural order is everywhere disturbed — horses eat each other, falcons are killed by owls, the night refuses to give way to day. Scotland under Macbeth is sick, and the play’s images of disease (“rooted sorrow,” “perilous stuff,” the country’s “sickly weal”) are the same images applied to its king.

Equivocation and the failure of language. The witches speak in paradoxes (“fair is foul, and foul is fair”); the prophecies are technically true and practically lethal; the Porter calls Hell’s gate the workplace of an equivocator; Lady Macbeth tells her husband to “look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under’t.” The play is, among other things, a sustained study of the gap between what a sentence says and what it does.

Macbeth is the most concentrated of Shakespeare’s tragedies — the action moves at a pace closer to a thriller than to Hamlet or Lear — and it has given English more quotable phrases per minute than any other play in the canon. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”; “something wicked this way comes”; “screw your courage to the sticking-place”; “the milk of human kindness”; “double, double, toil and trouble”; “out, damned spot” — all of these have left the play and become part of ordinary English.

It is also Shakespeare’s deepest portrait of a marriage. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are not in love in the modern sense, but they think together — the early scenes between them are some of the most intimate writing in Shakespeare, and the great tragedy of the play is that the act they commit together pulls them apart. By the middle of the play they no longer share scenes; by the end she is sleepwalking alone and he is grimly calculating the next prophecy alone.

The play’s political imagination is unusually sharp. It takes seriously the question of how a tyrant feels from the inside, and it gives Macbeth some of the most psychologically exact soliloquies Shakespeare ever wrote — the “If it were done” speech (1.7), the dagger speech (2.1), the “Tomorrow” speech (5.5). These are not the words of a monster but of a man who can see what he is becoming and continues anyway. That is the play’s most difficult and most lasting achievement.

Critically, Macbeth has been read as a study of conscience, as a meditation on the corrupting effects of power, as an early modern thriller about the supernatural, as a feminist text (Lady Macbeth’s arc is one of the most demanding female roles in the canon), and as a political tract about kingship. Modern productions have set it in fascist Italy, in corporate boardrooms, in war zones, on the moon. The play’s machinery — ambition, complicity, the unbearable weight of an act once done — keeps recognising itself in new contexts.