Macbeth — chapter by chapter
All 28 scenes, by act and beat — from the witches on the heath to the head on a pole.
Macbeth is structured as five acts of unequal weight. Act 1 is the prophecy and the persuasion. Act 2 is the murder of Duncan. Act 3 is the killing of Banquo and the banquet that nearly exposes the killer. Act 4 is the witches again, and the slaughter of Macduff's family. Act 5 is the collapse — Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking, the news of her death, the "tomorrow" speech, and the duel that ends it. Twenty-eight scenes, no detours.
Act 1 · The prophecy
Witches, a battle, a letter home, a king arriving.
Scene 1
Thunder, lightning, an open desolate place. Three witches meet to plan their next encounter. They will meet again on the heath, when the battle is done, and there they will meet Macbeth. Their familiars — Graymalkin the cat, Paddock the toad — call them away. Before they go they speak the line that sets the play's entire moral key: "fair is foul, and foul is fair." They vanish into the fog. The whole scene is twelve lines, and yet the world Macbeth will walk into has already been named.
Appears: The Witches
Scene 2
Duncan and his lords at a camp near Forres receive reports from the battle. A wounded captain describes how Macbeth carved his way through the rebel Macdonwald and split him from navel to jaw. Ross arrives with the rest of the news: the Thane of Cawdor has turned traitor, the Norwegians are paying ten thousand dollars for peace, the war is won. Duncan orders Cawdor executed and the title transferred to Macbeth — the first of the three witches' prophecies, fulfilled before Macbeth has even heard them spoken.
Appears: Duncan · Malcolm · Donalbain · Ross
Scene 3
Macbeth and Banquo, riding home from the battle, meet the witches on the heath. The witches hail Macbeth three times: Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, future king. They tell Banquo his sons will be kings though he himself will not. The witches vanish into the fog. Moments later Ross arrives with the news that Macbeth has been named Thane of Cawdor — the second prophecy fulfilled in real time. Macbeth, in his first soliloquy, is already imagining murder. The witches have suggested nothing; the murder is his own.
Appears: Macbeth · Banquo · The Witches · Ross
Scene 4
At Forres. Duncan asks whether Cawdor has been executed; Malcolm reports the old traitor "very frankly" begged the king's pardon. Macbeth and Banquo enter; Duncan praises them both warmly. Then, with no warning, Duncan names his elder son Malcolm Prince of Cumberland — heir to the throne. Macbeth registers the obstacle in an aside: "stars, hide your fires; let not light see my black and deep desires." Duncan announces he will visit Macbeth's castle that night. The cue Macbeth's mind has been waiting for has just arrived.
Appears: Duncan · Malcolm · Donalbain · Macbeth · Banquo
Scene 5
Inverness. Lady Macbeth, alone, reads Macbeth's letter recounting the prophecy. She fears he is too "full o' the milk of human kindness" to seize the crown. A messenger announces Duncan's arrival that night — the timing she could not have planned. She calls on spirits to unsex her and fill her, top to toe, with direst cruelty. Macbeth arrives; she greets him already as king and takes charge of the plan: "leave all the rest to me." The murder, in her mind, is already half done.
Appears: Lady Macbeth · Macbeth
Scene 6
Outside Inverness. Duncan and his retinue arrive at the castle. Duncan, looking up at the walls, says "this castle hath a pleasant seat" — the air is sweet, the martlets are nesting in the eaves, the place must be blessed. Banquo agrees. Lady Macbeth comes out to meet them in the perfectly tuned voice of a model hostess. Duncan takes her hand and goes inside. The dramatic irony, after the spirits-of-cruelty soliloquy of the previous scene, is total. He has walked, in twenty lines of immaculate manners, into the place where he will be murdered in his sleep.
Appears: Duncan · Banquo · Lady Macbeth · Macduff · Lennox
Scene 7
During the banquet for Duncan. Macbeth steps out alone and delivers the play's clearest argument against the act he is about to commit. "If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly." He lists Duncan's virtues, his own duties, his lack of any spur but vaulting ambition; he concludes "we will proceed no further in this business." Lady Macbeth enters and demolishes him in thirty lines — questioning his manhood, recalling a nursing child whose brains she would have dashed out had she sworn as he had sworn. He yields. "I am settled."
Appears: Macbeth · Lady Macbeth
Act 2 · The murder
A dagger in the air. Sleep murdered. A porter at the gate.
Scene 8
Past midnight in the courtyard at Inverness. Banquo and Fleance walk through with a torch — Banquo cannot sleep, troubled by the witches' prophecy. They meet Macbeth and exchange wary lines about the weird sisters; Macbeth lies and says he has not thought of them. Banquo goes in to bed. Alone, Macbeth sees a dagger floating in the air, its handle toward his hand, its blade smeared with blood — and pointing him toward Duncan's chamber. The bell rings, Lady Macbeth's signal that the grooms are drugged. He goes.
Appears: Banquo · Fleance · Macbeth
Scene 9
Lady Macbeth waits in the antechamber, slightly drunk on the wine she has used to drug the grooms. Macbeth returns from Duncan's chamber, hands bloody, both grooms' daggers still in his grip. "I have done the deed." He heard one groom cry "murder!" in his sleep; he heard a voice cry "sleep no more, Macbeth doth murder sleep." Lady Macbeth, exasperated, takes the daggers back herself. A slow knocking begins at the south gate. Macbeth, alone, stares at his hands and asks whether all great Neptune's ocean would wash them clean. They retreat.
Appears: Lady Macbeth · Macbeth
Scene 10
The knocking continues. The porter, hung over, drags himself to the gate while pretending to be hell's gatekeeper, admitting an imaginary farmer who hanged himself, an equivocator, and a thieving tailor. He opens the gate to Macduff and Lennox. Macduff goes to wake the king and returns shouting "O horror, horror, horror!" Macbeth performs shock and kills the two grooms in apparent fury — too quickly, Macduff notices. Lady Macbeth faints. Malcolm and Donalbain, sensing what has happened, flee — to England and to Ireland. "There's daggers in men's smiles."
Appears: The Porter · Macduff · Lennox · Macbeth · Lady Macbeth
Scene 11
Outside the castle the next morning. An old man tells Ross what the night was like — the sun has not risen, a falcon was killed by a mousing owl, Duncan's horses ate each other. The cosmos is registering, in three different ways, that something irreparable has happened. Macduff arrives with the political news. Macbeth has been named king; the murdered grooms are being blamed; Malcolm and Donalbain are suspected of having paid them. Ross will go to the coronation at Scone; Macduff will not. He is going home to Fife.
Appears: Ross · The Old Man · Macduff
Act 3 · The crown that doesn't hold
Banquo killed. A ghost at the banquet. Hecate scolds the witches.
Scene 12
Forres. Macbeth is now king. Banquo, alone, speaks the suspicion the audience has been waiting for — Macbeth has played most foully for the crown. Macbeth invites Banquo to that evening's feast; Banquo says he and Fleance will ride out until then. Alone, Macbeth delivers his second great soliloquy: the witches gave the throne to him but the future to Banquo's line. He has killed Duncan only to make Banquo's sons kings. He summons two embittered men and turns them into murderers. Banquo and Fleance must die before the banquet.
Appears: Banquo · Macbeth · Lady Macbeth
Scene 13
Lady Macbeth, alone, finds the crown empty: "naught's had, all's spent, where our desire is got without content." It is the play's first signal that what they have paid so much for is not what they wanted. Macbeth enters, restless, envying Duncan in his grave. They have "scotched the snake," he tells her, not killed it. He hints at a coming "deed of dreadful note" but refuses to say what — "be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, till thou applaud the deed." The marriage that opened the play has shifted underneath them.
Appears: Lady Macbeth · Macbeth
Scene 14
A park near the palace, near sunset. Three murderers — Macbeth has sent a third the others did not know about — wait by the road. Banquo and Fleance arrive on foot with a torch. The murderers attack. Banquo, fighting, shouts: "fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly! Thou mayst revenge." He is killed. Fleance escapes into the dark; the torch goes out. The witches' prophecy that Banquo's descendants will reign survives. Macbeth has failed at his first attempt to extinguish the future the witches gave him.
Appears: Banquo · Fleance
Scene 15
The royal banquet. The first murderer appears at a side door with blood on his face: Banquo is dead, Fleance has escaped. Macbeth, shaken, returns to the table and toasts the absent Banquo. The ghost of Banquo enters and takes the king's chair — silent, bloody, visible only to Macbeth. He shouts at the chair, very nearly gives himself away. Lady Macbeth covers as best she can and dismisses the guests. Alone, Macbeth notes Macduff's absence and resolves to consult the witches: "I am in blood stepped in so far."
Appears: Macbeth · Lady Macbeth · Banquo · Lennox · Ross
Scene 16
A short scene on the heath. Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft and queen of the witches, meets the three Weird Sisters and scolds them for trafficking with Macbeth without her involvement. She instructs them to prepare more potent illusions for his next visit — apparitions designed to "spurn fate, scorn death, and bear his hopes 'bove wisdom, grace, and fear." Security, she says, is mortals' chiefest enemy. The next encounter, the play tells the audience in advance, is being designed as a trap. Macbeth's confidence is itself being prepared as a weapon against him.
Appears: The Witches · Hecate
Scene 17
A private room in the palace. Lennox and another lord, alone, talk politics in a way no one would dare in front of the king. Lennox is bitterly sarcastic about the official explanations for recent deaths. The other lord brings news from abroad. Macduff has fled to England, where Malcolm is at the court of Edward the Confessor; an army is being raised under Siward of Northumberland. Macbeth has heard about it and is preparing for war. They pray that "some holy angel" will fly to the English court and bring blessing back to a suffering country.
Appears: Lennox
Act 4 · The cauldron and the slaughter
Three apparitions. Macduff's family murdered. Malcolm tested in England.
Scene 18
A dark cave. The witches at their cauldron — "double, double, toil and trouble" — conjure three apparitions for Macbeth: beware Macduff; none of woman born can harm him; he is safe until Birnam Wood marches on Dunsinane. The last two seem impossible; Macbeth is exultant. He demands one more answer: will Banquo's descendants ever reign? A procession of eight kings appears, all in Banquo's likeness — the future of the Stuart line shown to the man trying to extinguish it. Lennox arrives: Macduff has fled to England. Macbeth orders Macduff's wife and children put to the sword.
Appears: The Witches · Hecate · Macbeth · Lennox
Scene 19
Macduff's castle in Fife. Lady Macduff is angry that her husband has fled to England, leaving her and the children unprotected. Ross fails to console her. She has a tender, almost playful exchange with her young son about whether his father is a traitor. A nameless messenger bursts in: flee, immediately. Before she can, Macbeth's murderers arrive, kill the boy in front of her — "he has killed me, mother, run away, I pray you" — and pursue her offstage. The killing is staged where the audience sees it. It is the play's clearest demonstration of what Macbeth has become.
Appears: Lady Macduff · Ross
Scene 20
England. Macduff has come to ask Malcolm to lead an army into Scotland. Malcolm, cautious, tests him with a long speech pretending to be unfit to rule — lustful, avaricious, monstrous. Macduff breaks; Malcolm reveals the test was a test. Edward has promised aid; ten thousand English troops are ready under Siward. Ross arrives from Scotland with the news from Fife. Macduff hears that his wife and children have been slaughtered. "All my pretty ones? Did you say all?" He converts the grief into resolve: "front to front bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself."
Appears: Malcolm · Macduff · Ross
Act 5 · The end
Sleepwalking. Tomorrow. Birnam Wood. The duel.
Scene 21
Dunsinane Castle, late at night. A doctor and a gentlewoman watch Lady Macbeth walk through her own castle in her sleep, candle in hand, rubbing her hands as if washing them. She speaks fragments of every murder that has happened in the play — Duncan, Banquo, Lady Macduff. "Out, damned spot. Out, I say." "Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." The doctor stands shaken: "more needs she the divine than the physician." The play's most chilling scene of guilt as physical fact.
Appears: Lady Macbeth
Scene 22
Open country near Dunsinane. The Scottish lords are on the move with their forces, going to meet Malcolm and Siward and the English army at Birnam Wood. They speak of Macbeth in the past tense already. His title hangs on him "like a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief." Most of his troops obey only out of fear. The country has turned against him; the walls of Dunsinane are about to be the only thing he can stand on. The next time we see Macbeth he will be inside those walls, calling for his armour.
Appears: Lennox
Scene 23
Inside Dunsinane. Macbeth refuses to be afraid. The witches told him no man of woman born could harm him; they told him he was safe until Birnam Wood marched. He repeats the prophecies to himself like incantations. A servant arrives with news of ten thousand English soldiers at the gate; Macbeth calls for his armour. The doctor reports that Lady Macbeth is "not so sick as troubled with thick-coming fancies, that keep her from her rest." Macbeth, half-listening, demands the doctor cure the country instead. The siege has begun.
Appears: Macbeth
Scene 24
Open country in front of Birnam Wood. The combined English and Scottish army has arrived. Malcolm gives an order with both a tactical and a symbolic purpose: every soldier is to cut down a bough from the trees and carry it before him as he marches. The shadow of the army will be hidden; Macbeth's scouts will undercount. The decision is purely military, made without any reference to the witches. The audience, who knows the third prophecy, recognises what has just happened. The "Birnam Wood will march on Dunsinane" line is in motion.
Appears: Malcolm · Macduff
Scene 25
Inside Dunsinane. Macbeth, in armour, paces. A cry of women is heard within the castle. Seyton brings the news: "the queen, my lord, is dead." Macbeth delivers the play's most desolate speech — "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time." Life is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." A messenger bursts in: he has seen Birnam Wood begin to move. Macbeth, finally afraid, recognises the equivocation of the fiend and calls for the alarm.
Appears: Macbeth
Scene 26
A plain in front of Dunsinane. The army has arrived at the walls carrying the boughs they cut at Birnam. Malcolm gives the order to drop them: "now, near enough; your leavy screens throw down, and show like those you are." The size of the army becomes visible to the defenders. Siward marshals the battle order. He will lead the first attack with his son; Malcolm and Macduff will follow. Macduff calls for the trumpets — "those clamorous harbingers of blood and death." The trumpets sound. The witches' "marching wood" prophecy has been proven in the open field.
Appears: Malcolm · Macduff · Siward and Young Siward
Scene 27
Another part of the plain, in the heat of the battle. Macbeth, still believing no man of woman born can harm him, is fighting confidently. Young Siward — Siward's son — finds him and challenges him by name. They fight; Young Siward, born of woman in the ordinary way, is killed within seconds. Macbeth, standing over the body, notes the prophecy is holding. Macduff is heard offstage searching for him. Inside the castle, Malcolm and old Siward enter without resistance — the defenders have surrendered. Macbeth's own men have stopped fighting for him.
Appears: Macbeth · Siward and Young Siward · Macduff · Malcolm
Scene 28
Macduff finds Macbeth at last. Macbeth, still trusting the prophecy, would rather not fight him — "my soul is too much charged with blood of thine already." Macduff: "I have no words; my voice is in my sword." They fight. Macbeth presses his charmed life: no man of woman born can harm him. Macduff replies: "despair thy charm. Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped." The equivocation collapses. Macbeth refuses, briefly, then charges anyway. Macduff returns with his head. Malcolm is hailed king of Scotland.
Appears: Macduff · Macbeth · Malcolm · Siward and Young Siward
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