Macduff's castle — Lady Macduff and her son

Macduff's castle in Fife. Lady Macduff is angry and afraid. Her husband has fled to England without telling her. Ross tries to argue for him: "the fits o' the season" make every man behave strangely. He cannot stay; he leaves. Lady Macduff, alone with her young son, tells the boy his father is dead. The boy questions her as a child does — "how wilt thou do for a father?" She, half-smiling: "I'll buy me twenty at any market." He: "then you'll buy 'em to sell again." One of Shakespeare's tenderest exchanges, partly because the audience knows what is about to happen.

She presses on. Why is your father a traitor? The boy answers with a child's logic: a traitor is one that swears and lies. There are enough of those, he observes, "to beat the honest men and hang up them." The mother laughs almost despite herself. A messenger bursts in: "if you will take a homely man's advice, be not found here; hence with your little ones." He leaves. Lady Macduff has nowhere to go. "Whither should I fly? I have done no harm. But I remember now: I am in this earthly world, where to do harm is often laudable, to do good sometime accounted dangerous folly."

The murderers enter. They demand to know where Macduff is. Lady Macduff replies that she hopes he is in no place so unsanctified as theirs. The first murderer calls Macduff a traitor; the boy, his father's son, replies "thou liest, thou shag-haired villain!" The murderer stabs him. The boy's last line is what should not be possible to write: "he has killed me, mother. Run away, I pray you." She runs offstage shouting "murder!" — and the murderers pursue her. The killing is staged where the audience sees it: the play's clearest demonstration of what Macbeth has become.