Macbeth — themes & analysis

The witches predict three things and all three come true. Macbeth will be Thane of Glamis (he already is), Thane of Cawdor (he becomes one within minutes), and king. The first two are reports. The third is a possibility. The play is interested in what Macbeth does with the third.

What he does with it, almost instantly, is plan. His first soliloquy, just after Ross confirms the Cawdor title, is already about murder: "why do I yield to that suggestion / whose horrid image doth unfix my hair?" The witches have not suggested anything. They have said he will be king. The leap from "will be" to "must kill the man in the way" is Macbeth's, performed in front of the audience inside fifty lines of meeting them. Lady Macbeth, reading his letter from afar, makes the same leap independently. Whatever the witches have done, the planning is the Macbeths' own.

And yet the play does not let the witches off. They appear when Macbeth is alone on a heath with Banquo. They name him with a precision no human source could have known — Cawdor's treason has not been announced. They vanish into the air. Banquo sees them too. They are real enough to require an explanation, and unreal enough that the play refuses to give one. When Macbeth returns to them in Act 4, demanding more, they hand him three apparitions designed to make him overconfident and lead him to his death. They are not neutral observers. They are working on him.

What the play settles on, as far as it settles anything, is that a person becomes responsible for a thing the moment they hear it spoken in a voice they were ready to obey. The witches name an ambition Macbeth carries onto the heath with him; he carries it off again, now with words attached. Modern flatterers and conspiracy theorists, anything that hands a person back the version of themselves they were already looking for, work the same territory. Shakespeare does not blame the mirror. He does not absolve it either.

Where to follow it: Scene 3 (the prophecy), Scene 5 (the letter), Scene 7 (Lady Macbeth pushes), Scene 18 (the cauldron).

The most quoted line of the play is one Lady Macbeth speaks while sleepwalking in Act 5: "out, damned spot." She is rubbing at a hand that has been clean for years. The image holds the whole play. Blood does not stay on the surface; it sinks into the person who spilled it and stays there.

Macbeth understands this immediately. He returns from Duncan's chamber in Scene 9 with bloody hands and cannot put the daggers back where they belong; Lady Macbeth has to do it for him. She tells him "a little water clears us of this deed" and he does not believe her. "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." The gesture is theatrical and the meaning is not. He has stained the water of the world; he has not cleaned the hand.

The play stages this argument in physical detail. Banquo's ghost in Act 3 sits at the table in the king's seat with twenty mortal wounds in him; only Macbeth sees the body, but the body is the play's verdict on whether the killing has been forgotten. The witches' cauldron in Act 4 is mostly blood — finger of strangled babe, blood of bat. Macduff, told his wife and children have been butchered, does not so much weep as simply count: "all my pretty ones? did you say all? what, all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop?"

By the time Lady Macbeth, who told her husband water would clear them, is rubbing a clean hand at three in the morning, the play's argument is over. The deed cannot be undone. Conscience is not a thought you have but a thing your body does — Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov and a long line of guilty figures in modern fiction are working out the consequences of what Shakespeare staged here in 1606.

Where to follow it: Scene 9 (Neptune's ocean), Scene 15 (Banquo's ghost), Scene 19 (Lady Macduff), Scene 21 (out, damned spot).

As Macbeth comes out of Duncan's chamber, he hears a voice — or thinks he hears one — cry out: "Sleep no more! Macbeth doth murder sleep." The voice names what the killing has cost. Sleep, the play says in some of its most beautiful lines, is "the innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, the death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast." Macbeth has cut himself off from it. So has the woman holding the daggers a few feet away.

What this means in practice is that the rest of the play happens to people who cannot rest. Macbeth is haunted by the dagger before the murder and by the ghost after; he stops sleeping in any deep way; by Act 5 he is pacing his castle in armor day and night. Lady Macbeth, the harder of the two at the start, suffers the cost more visibly. She sleepwalks. She speaks to herself in the voice of the night the murder was done. She rubs her hands. The doctor, watching, concludes she needs a divine more than a physician.

Shakespeare locates conscience here, in the body's refusal to let the mind rest. The play does not give Macbeth or his wife a long internal soliloquy of remorse — neither of them, after the act, ever directly says they regret it. What the play gives instead is the stained mind dramatized as physical symptom. Hallucination. Insomnia. Sleepwalking. The interior life is staged as the body refusing to do what bodies normally do.

Lady Macbeth dies offstage in Act 5; the report says it was probably suicide. Macbeth, hearing it, delivers the "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech — the most desolate moment in the play, and one written by a man who has stopped being able to feel anything. He has long stopped sleeping. He has run, by the end, out of the body's last protections, and out of feeling along with them.

Where to follow it: Scene 9 (sleep no more), Scene 15 (the ghost), Scene 21 (sleepwalking), Scene 25 (tomorrow).

Duncan is the play's image of legitimate kingship: gracious, trusting, generous, and almost too credulous to live. Macbeth himself catalogs his virtues in soliloquy before deciding to kill him — "his virtues will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against the deep damnation of his taking-off." Shakespeare wants the audience to know exactly what is being killed. Then Duncan is killed.

What the play does with the killing is unusual for a tragedy. It treats the murder as a cosmic fact, not just a political crime. The night Duncan dies, an old man tells Ross, the sun does not rise; a falcon is killed by a mousing owl; Duncan's horses, "the minions of their race," break out of their stalls and eat each other. These reports take a full scene. They are the play registering, at the level of nature, that something irreparable has happened. A legitimate king has been killed by his host in his sleep. The order that holds the kingdom together has been broken, and the world reflects the break.

Macbeth's reign that follows is the play's portrait of bad kingship — paranoid, murderous, choking off speech, killing the families of dissenters. Macduff, told what has happened to Scotland, says "bleed, bleed, poor country!" The political argument is plain. A throne taken by violence requires further violence to keep, and the kingdom under such a king becomes a kingdom of fear in which no one trusts anyone. By Act 5 the Scottish lords are deserting Macbeth; the army that finally arrives at Dunsinane is mostly the men he himself drove away.

The play ends with Malcolm hailed as king — "by the grace of grace, we will perform in measure, time, and place." It is the formal restoration of legitimate rule and the formal end of the unnatural night. Macbeth was written for a king (James I) who took the throne via the very Scottish royal line Banquo's ghost prophesied. The political reading is part of the design. So is the deeper claim: that bad kingship is not a policy failure but a wound in the world.

Where to follow it: Scene 4 (Malcolm named heir), Scene 11 (the unnatural night), Scene 19 (Macduff's family), Scene 28 (Malcolm hailed).

Macbeth begins with a prophecy and ends with a man for whom the future has emptied of meaning. Between those two moments the play does something unusual with time. The witches speak of what will happen as if it has already happened — "all hail Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter." Macbeth, hearing it, leaps forward in his mind to the killing as if it were already done. Lady Macbeth, reading his letter, speaks of him as already king. The future and the present collapse into each other before any of it has occurred.

Macbeth's first soliloquy after the prophecy works the same trick from the other side. He imagines the murder so vividly — the dagger, the bell, the bloody hands — that by the time he commits it in Scene 9 the audience has already lived through it twice. "If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly" runs the famous opening of his Scene 7 soliloquy. The line is grammatically tangled because the act is temporally tangled: he wants the doing to be already over before it has started, and the play's tragedy is that he is going to discover, after the doing, that an act done can never be over.

By Act 5 he has been "supped full with horrors" and has stopped being able to feel anything. The news that his wife is dead arrives. He hears it; he absorbs it; he gives the speech. "She should have died hereafter; there would have been a time for such a word." Then: "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death." Time, the speech says, is a dull procession that signifies nothing. Life is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

It is the most desolate speech in Shakespeare and one of the most accurate. A man who has spent five acts trying to seize a future that the witches said was already his ends with no future left. The prophecy he chased was fulfilled and made him hollow. The tomorrows still come. He has nothing in him to meet them with.

Where to follow it: Scene 7 (if it were done), Scene 8 (the dagger), Scene 25 (tomorrow), Scene 28 (the end).