Scene 1
Three witches on the heath
An open, desolate place; thunder and lightning. Three witches meet to plan their next encounter. The battle is still being fought; when it is over, when the hurlyburly is done, when one side has lost and the other won, they will meet again on the heath. There they will meet Macbeth. Their familiars — Graymalkin the cat, Paddock the toad — call them away. Before they go they speak, in unison, the line that will set the play's whole tone: "fair is foul, and foul is fair." They vanish into the fog. Twelve lines, no plot yet, and the moral universe of the play has already been inverted.
Scene 2
Reports from the battle
Duncan, his sons Malcolm and Donalbain, and the lords of Scotland are at a camp near Forres awaiting news of the battle. A wounded captain arrives and gives an extended account: the rebel Macdonwald had nearly turned the tide until Macbeth, "valour's minion," carved his way through the enemy lines and split him from navel to jaw. The Norwegian king pressed a fresh attack; Macbeth and Banquo doubled their blows and held. Ross arrives next with the conclusion: the Thane of Cawdor has been revealed as a traitor, the battle is won, the Norwegians are paying ten thousand dollars for peace. Duncan orders Cawdor executed and his title transferred to Macbeth.
Scene 3
The prophecy
Macbeth and Banquo, riding home from the battle, encounter the witches on the heath. The witches greet Macbeth three times: by his current title (Thane of Glamis), by a title he does not yet know is his (Thane of Cawdor), and by a title he should never have ("that shalt be king hereafter"). Banquo, ignored, asks what they have for him. They tell him he will be lesser than Macbeth and greater, not so happy yet much happier — and that his sons will be kings though he himself will not. The witches vanish. Ross arrives moments later with news of the Cawdor title. The first prophecy is already true. Macbeth, in his first soliloquy, is already imagining the murder.
Scene 4
Malcolm named heir
At Duncan's palace at Forres. Duncan asks whether the old Cawdor has been executed; Malcolm reports that Cawdor died well — "nothing in his life became him like the leaving it." Macbeth and Banquo enter. Duncan praises them both warmly and embraces Macbeth as his "valiant cousin." Then, with no warning, he names his son Malcolm Prince of Cumberland — heir to the throne. Macbeth, in an aside, registers what has just happened: "the Prince of Cumberland! That is a step on which I must fall down or else o'erleap." Duncan announces he will visit Macbeth's castle that night. The visit, friendly in intent, is the cue Macbeth's mind has been waiting for.
Scene 5
The letter and the unsexing
Inverness. Lady Macbeth, alone, reads a letter from her husband recounting the witches' prophecy. She finishes it without pausing. She fears Macbeth is too "full o' the milk of human kindness" to take the shortest road to the crown. A messenger arrives: the king will be at the castle that night — the timing she could not have planned. She delivers the play's most chilling soliloquy. "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 arrives. She greets him already as king. "Leave all the rest to me." The murder is, in her mind, half done.
Scene 6
The king arrives
Outside Inverness in the early evening. Duncan, his sons, Banquo, and the Scottish lords arrive at the castle. Duncan, looking up at the walls, remarks that "this castle hath a pleasant seat" — the air is sweet, the martlets nesting in the eaves a sign the air is blessed. Banquo agrees in elaborate verse. Lady Macbeth comes out and greets Duncan with the language of a perfect hostess: every honour they have already received is too small a thing for the love they bear him. Duncan takes her hand and goes in. The dramatic irony is total — he has walked into the place where he will be killed.
Scene 7
If it were done
Inside the castle, during the banquet for Duncan. Macbeth steps out alone and delivers the soliloquy that is the play's clearest argument against the act it is about to commit. "If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly." He lists Duncan's virtues, his duties as host and kinsman, his lack of any spur but ambition. "We will proceed no further in this business." Lady Macbeth enters. She demolishes him in thirty lines — attacking his manhood, recalling a child she has nursed whose brains she would have dashed out had she sworn as he had — and lays out the plan: drug the grooms, plant the daggers. "I am settled," he says.
Scene 8
The dagger
Past midnight in the courtyard. Banquo and his son Fleance walk through carrying a torch — Banquo cannot sleep, troubled by "cursed thoughts." They meet Macbeth. Banquo mentions the witches; Macbeth says he has not thought of them, a transparent lie, and they part. Macbeth, now alone, sees a dagger floating in the air, its handle toward his hand. He reaches for it; it will not be grasped. "Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight?" The dagger turns and points him toward Duncan's chamber, its blade now smeared with blood. The bell rings — Lady Macbeth's signal. He goes. "Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell."
Scene 9
The murder
Lady Macbeth waits in the antechamber. Macbeth returns, shaken, hands red, two daggers in his grip. "I have done the deed." He cannot say more. He heard one of the grooms cry "murder!" in his sleep; he could not say "amen" when they prayed. He heard a voice cry "sleep no more! Macbeth doth murder sleep." He has carried the daggers out with him. Lady Macbeth, exasperated, takes them back herself: "the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures." She returns with bloody hands of her own. A knocking begins at the south gate. Macbeth, staring at his hands, asks whether all great Neptune's ocean would wash them clean. They retreat.
Scene 10
The porter and the discovery
The knocking continues. The porter, hung over, lurches to the gate, talking to himself as if he were the porter of hell — admitting an imaginary farmer who hanged himself, an equivocator, an English tailor. He opens the gate to Macduff and Lennox, jokes about drink and lechery, and lets them in. Macduff goes to wake the king. Off-stage, he discovers the body. He returns shouting: "O horror, horror, horror!" The castle is roused. Macbeth, performing shock, runs to the chamber and kills the two grooms — too quickly — claiming his fury could not be controlled. Lady Macbeth faints, real or feigned. Malcolm and Donalbain, realising the danger, flee — Malcolm to England, Donalbain to Ireland. "There's daggers in men's smiles."
Scene 11
The unnatural night
Outside the castle the next morning. An old man, seventy years deep in memory, talks with Ross about the unnatural night. The sun has not risen. A falcon, "tow'ring in her pride of place," was killed by a mousing owl. Duncan's horses — "the minions of their race" — broke their stalls and, against all custom, ate each other. The natural order, the play tells us through these reports, has been ruptured by the murder. Macduff arrives with the political news. Macbeth has been named king and gone to Scone for the coronation. Duncan's sons are being blamed. Macduff, already suspicious, will not go; he is going home to Fife.
Scene 12
Macbeth fears Banquo
The palace at Forres. Macbeth is king. Banquo, alone, speaks the suspicion the audience has been waiting for: "thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, as the weird women promised, and I fear thou played'st most foully for it." Macbeth and Lady Macbeth enter as host and queen and invite Banquo to that evening's banquet. Banquo agrees; he and Fleance are riding out for the afternoon and will be back in time. Alone, Macbeth delivers his second great soliloquy: the witches gave him the throne but the future to Banquo's line; he has killed Duncan only to make Banquo's sons kings. He summons two embittered men and dispatches them to ambush Banquo and Fleance on the road back.
Scene 13
"We have scotched the snake"
Lady Macbeth, alone, speaks the line that captures everything the play is about to demonstrate: "naught's had, all's spent, where our desire is got without content." The crown brings no peace. Macbeth enters, restless and pale; she tries to soothe him. He tells her they have only "scotched the snake, not killed it" — the work is not done. He hints at "a deed of dreadful note" coming that night but will not tell her what. "Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, till thou applaud the deed." The marriage — once a partnership of equals — has begun to come apart. He needs her not to know.
Scene 14
Banquo killed
A park near the palace, near sunset. Three murderers — Macbeth has sent a third the others did not know about, suggesting he does not even trust the men he hired — wait by the road. Banquo and Fleance arrive on horseback, Banquo carrying a torch. The murderers attack. Banquo, fighting, shouts: "O, treachery! Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly! Thou mayst revenge." He is killed. Fleance escapes into the dark. The torch is put out. The murderers leave to report the half-success. The witches' second prophecy — Banquo's sons will be kings — is now structurally guaranteed: Fleance is alive, Banquo's line is intact, and Macbeth's effort to extinguish it has failed at its first attempt.
Scene 15
The banquet and the ghost
The royal banquet. Macbeth welcomes the lords; Lady Macbeth presides. The first murderer appears at a side door, blood on his face. Macbeth confers with him: Banquo is dead, Fleance has escaped. Macbeth, shaken, rejoins the table and proposes a toast to the absent Banquo. The ghost of Banquo enters and takes Macbeth's chair — silent, bloody, visible only to Macbeth. Macbeth shouts at the chair, very nearly gives himself away. Lady Macbeth covers: a fit, an old affliction; ignore him. The ghost vanishes and returns. She dismisses the guests. Alone, Macbeth notes Macduff's absence and resolves to consult the witches again. "I am in blood stepped in so far."
Scene 16
Hecate scolds the witches
On the heath. The three witches meet Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft and their superior. She is angry. They have been "trafficking with Macbeth in riddles and affairs of death" without consulting her. She instructs them to prepare more potent illusions for his next visit — apparitions designed to lull him with overconfidence, "spurn fate, scorn death, and bear his hopes 'bove wisdom, grace, and fear." The scene is short, almost choric, and is widely thought to be a later addition (possibly by Thomas Middleton) but it has remained in the standard text. It establishes that the witches have been escalating, that the next encounter will be deliberately deceptive, and that Macbeth's confidence is itself being prepared as a weapon against him.
Scene 17
Lennox and the Lord
Lennox and another lord, alone in a private room, talk politics in a way no one would dare in front of the king. The conversation is bitter and bitterly ironic. Lennox runs through the recent deaths — Duncan, Banquo — and the official explanations, his sarcasm rising line by line. Of course Macbeth was sorry. Of course he killed the grooms in righteous fury. Of course Malcolm and Donalbain paid the grooms. The other lord brings the political news. Macduff has fled to England, where Malcolm is being received by the saintly Edward the Confessor; Macduff has gone to ask Siward and the English king for support. Macbeth has heard about it and is preparing for war. They pray for Scotland.
Scene 18
The cauldron and the apparitions
A dark cave. The witches circle their cauldron, chanting "double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble," dropping in finger of strangled babe, tooth of wolf, eye of newt. Macbeth arrives demanding answers. They give him three apparitions. An armed head: "beware Macduff." A bloody child: "none of woman born shall harm Macbeth." A crowned child holding a tree: "Macbeth shall never vanquished be until great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him." Macbeth, hearing the last two, is exultant. He demands one more: will Banquo's line reign? A procession of eight kings appears in Banquo's likeness. The witches vanish. Lennox enters with the news that Macduff has fled. Macbeth orders Macduff's family killed.
Scene 19
Lady Macduff and her son
Fife. Lady Macduff is angry. Her husband has fled to England without explanation, leaving her and the children unprotected. Ross tries to comfort her: Macduff is wise; he knows what he is doing. He leaves. Lady Macduff has a tender exchange with her young son — the boy asks how she will live now; he is the play's perfect child voice. A messenger bursts in warning her to flee. He goes. Before she can move, Macbeth's murderers arrive. They demand her husband. They kill the son in front of her — "he has killed me, mother, run away, I pray you" — and pursue her offstage as she runs.
Scene 20
Malcolm tests Macduff; the news
England, before Edward the Confessor's palace. Macduff has come to ask Malcolm to lead an army into Scotland. Malcolm, cautious, tests him with a long, strange speech in which he claims to be more vicious than Macbeth — lustful, avaricious, without a single kingly virtue. Macduff, breaking, agrees Malcolm is unfit. Malcolm reveals the test, the lies, and the news: Edward has promised aid; ten thousand English troops under Siward will march. Ross arrives from Scotland. Slowly, he tells Macduff what has happened in Fife. The wife, the children, the household — all slaughtered. "He has no children," Macduff says of Macbeth. He swears to kill Macbeth himself.
Scene 21
"Out, damned spot"
Dunsinane Castle, late at night. A doctor has been called in by Lady Macbeth's gentlewoman; for several nights now the queen has been walking in her sleep. She arrives, holding a candle she has insisted on having always, and rubs her hands compulsively as if washing them. She speaks fragments. "Out, damned spot. Out, I say." "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" "The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?" "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." The doctor concludes she needs the divine, not him. "More needs she the divine than the physician." The play's most chilling scene of guilt as physical fact.
Scene 22
The Scottish lords march
Open country near Dunsinane. The Scottish lords — Menteith, Caithness, Angus, Lennox — are on the move with their forces to meet Malcolm and Siward and the English army at Birnam Wood. They speak of Macbeth in the past tense already. He has fortified Dunsinane; "some say he's mad, others, that lesser hate him, do call it valiant fury." His title hangs on him "like a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief." Most of his men, Caithness says, are obeying out of fear, not love. The country has turned against the king; he is alone in his castle with mercenaries; the walls of Dunsinane are the only thing he can stand on.
Scene 23
Macbeth defiant
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 both prophecies to himself like incantations. A servant — "the devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!" — brings news that ten thousand English soldiers are at the gate. Macbeth calls for his armour. The doctor reports that Lady Macbeth is "not so sick as troubled with thick-coming fancies." Macbeth, listening only with half an ear, demands medicine for the country instead: "find her disease and purge it to a sound and pristine health." He buckles on his armour and goes to meet the army.
Scene 24
Birnam Wood
Open country near Birnam Wood. The combined English and Scottish army arrives. Malcolm asks Siward how far it is to the castle. Siward replies. Malcolm gives an order with a strategic and a symbolic purpose. Every soldier is to cut down a bough from the wood and carry it before him as he marches. The shadow of the army will be hidden; Macbeth's scouts will report fewer men than there really are. The order is short and businesslike. The audience, who knows the witches told Macbeth he was safe until Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane, recognises what has just happened. The tree-prophecy, which Macbeth thought impossible, is being made true by an entirely ordinary tactical decision in the field.
Scene 25
Tomorrow
Inside Dunsinane. Macbeth, in armour, paces. A cry of women is heard from somewhere in the castle. He notes that he has almost forgotten the taste of fears — "I have supped full with horrors." Seyton brings the news. "The queen, my lord, is dead." Macbeth's response is 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, he concludes, is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." A messenger arrives: he has seen Birnam Wood begin to move toward the castle. Macbeth, finally afraid, calls for the alarm bell.
Scene 26
The army arrives
A plain in front of Dunsinane Castle. The army has arrived. Malcolm gives the order: "now, near enough; your leavy screens throw down, and show like those you are." The boughs come down. The full size of the army is revealed. Siward marshals the order of battle. Malcolm assigns commands — Siward and his son to lead the first battle, Macduff and himself to follow. They march on the castle. The trumpets sound. The scene is short and almost businesslike. The witches' prophecy has been performed on the field; the next thing the audience will see is Macbeth fighting men who appeared at his walls behind moving trees.
Scene 27
Young Siward
Another part of the plain, in the heat of the battle. Macbeth, in armour, still believes the witches' second prophecy: no man of woman born can harm him. Young Siward, Siward's son, finds him and challenges him by name. "My name's Macbeth." They fight. Young Siward, born of woman in the ordinary way, is killed within seconds. Macbeth notes that the prophecy is holding. Macduff is heard offstage looking for him: "tyrant, show thy face! If thou be'st slain and with no stroke of mine, my wife and children's ghosts will haunt me still." Malcolm and old Siward enter the castle, which has surrendered without resistance once the gate was opened.
Scene 28
The duel
Macduff finds Macbeth at last. Macbeth, still trusting the second prophecy, refuses to fight him. "Of all men else I have avoided thee. But get thee back; 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 unbeatable advantage: "I bear a charmed life, which must not yield to one of woman born." Macduff replies: "despair thy charm. And let the angel whom thou still hast served tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped." Macbeth refuses, briefly, to fight; then charges anyway. Macduff returns shortly with Macbeth's head. "Hail, King of Scotland!"