*What follows is a mixture of what I said in class (or will say in class) and additional material that I either left out for lack of time or thought of later. For complete citations and endnotes, visit the full commentary for this play.
Brief Note on transition from the previous play we studied to the present one. Whatever we think of Duke Vincentio’s “experiments” in Measure for Measure, to a considerable extent those experiments were conducted with the welfare of his people in mind. Measure for Measure is a social play.
Macbeth has a different emphasis: it’s about the nature of one Scottish power couple’s boundless ambition to gain a royal crown. Macbeth and his Queen show no interest in the commonfolk, or even in the nobility. This doesn’t mean that Macbeth the play shows no interest in how a society falls apart, or in how ordinary people suffer for the mistakes of their governors—these are consistent interests in Shakespeare’s tragedies, and even in some of his comedies.
In Shakespeare’s plays, there’s usually serious interest in a social and political dimension. Still, in Macbeth the dramatic focus is on Macbeth and his wife, not Scotland as a political entity: the focus is on the spiritual errors they make and on how those errors first diminish and finally, inexorably, destroy their souls.
ACT 1
Act 1, Scene 1 (917-18, witches establish place and time for first meeting with Macbeth.)
Macbeth begins by introducing three witches who will tempt the loyal Macbeth. Their sense of expectation is palpable. Their concluding chant is “Fair is foul, and foul is fair, / Hover through the fog and filthy air” (918, 1.1.11-12). They pray for a world turned upside down, and in place of groundedness and certainty, a “hovering.” As Hecate later says, human life is about ambition but also about security, the sure thing. These baits will hook Macbeth and reel him in.
In his Lectures on Shakespeare, Coleridge says supernaturalism sets an excited tone to prepare us for Macbeth’s killing of Duncan in Act 2. But the witches’ insight is authentic, not just a metaphor for states of mind or tendencies. Evil is a Shakespearean power, and King James I wrote about daemonology. Norton editor Stephen Greenblatt reminds us that the witches are never punished, and he refers to the play’s “nebulous infection, a bleeding of the demonic into the secular and the secular into the demonic.”
Act 1, Scene 2 (918-19, a messenger reports to Duncan the details of a battle against rebels; Macbeth and Banquo figure prominently; Duncan sentences Cawdor to death, and dispatches messengers to inform Macbeth that the title is now his.)
Macbeth is a hero early on. Scene 2 bespeaks his bravery against Macdonald, Cawdor, and Norway: “Disdaining fortune with his brandished steel, / Which smoked with bloody execution, / Like valor’s minion carved out his passage / Till he faced the slave [Macdonald] …” (918, 2.17-20), killed the rebel, and, with symbolic aplomb, fixed his head atop the battlements.
Act 1, Scene 3 (919-23, witches hail Macbeth as “Glamis,” “Cawdor,” and “king hereafter”; Banquo will sire kings, but never be one; Ross and Angus report to Macbeth that he is now Cawdor; Macbeth recoils at the thoughts swirling within him, and references chance.)
The Fates were Clotho the spinner, Atropos the “unturning” cutter, Lachesis the “allotter” or measurer, daughters of Zeus and Themis. The Moirai possessed a power over events independent of the gods. This conception of an externally imposed fate is impersonal and irrational; there’s no ultimate meaning to it.
The witches don’t hold deterministic power. The witches claim to know things, but they don’t claim they can change events. Of a sailor, one says, “Though his barque cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-tossed” (828, 3.23-24).
The witches do not set a person’s fate. They suggest, lead on, and generate or take advantage of circumstances, but no more. Macbeth seems hypnotized, but hypnotism only works when people want to do things. The witches provide a vision, they can’t diminish free will.
Perhaps what the witches know is Macbeth’s character. They know his ambition outweighs his conscience. He does not know that—not yet.
Banquo says to the witches that he will neither “beg nor fear / Your favors nor your hate” (921, 1.3.61-62). But if he doesn’t care about the future, why is he asking about it? He’s curious?
Macbeth’s mind turns to provenance: from whence, he demands, does this information come? And just like that, the sisters vanish.
Banquo says, “oftentimes to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s / In deepest consequence” (922, 1.3.125-28). Banquo’s Medieval Christian mind puts moral considerations first.
Macbeth’s reflection: “This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill, cannot be good” (922, 1.3.132-33). The witches’ promises set up a moral antinomy: how can their predictions be good and ill?
The prophecies unsettle Macbeth, even though his violent thoughts be “yet … but fantastical” (922, 1.3.141) or imaginary. How can that be good? Still, how can being Cawdor and king be bad? This experience “Shakes so my single state of man / That function is smothered in surmise, / And nothing is but what is not” (922, 1.3.142-44). As Norton footnote 1 for 922 suggests, here Macbeth’s integrity splits: he is an honorable man and a likely traitor. Murderous thoughts coexist with “chance may crown me …” (923, 1.3.146).
Act 1, Scene 4 (923-24, sentence has been passed on Cawdor; when Macbeth and Banquo arrive, Duncan thanks them; the King promises blessings to Macbeth and Banquo, but declares Malcolm heir, and says he means to visit Inverness; now Macbeth will need to act.)
Duncan is shocked by Cawdor’s treachery, saying, “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face. / He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust” (923, 1.4.11-14). Duncan doesn’t know the Machiavellian dictum that people are seldom as they appear.
The King makes Malcolm Cumberland and heir, which galls Macbeth, who thought the crown might come to him decently: Malcolm’s preeminence is “a step / On which I must fall down or else o’erleap, / For in my way it lies” (924, 4.48-50), and it reinforces the division within him: “Stars, hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires …” (924, 1.4.50-51).
Act 1, Scene 5 (924-26, Lady Macbeth reads Macbeth’s letter about his encounter with the witches; she fears that her husband is too kind-hearted to kill for a crown; she prays to demonic spirits, asking them to “unsex” her; Lady Macbeth tells her husband to play the innocent host—she will take charge.)
Lady Macbeth reads Macbeth’s letter. More even than the witches, she knows her husband’s latent ambitiousness, and what’s more, the fissures in his character: he would accept ill-got gains, but not get them by dishonorable actions. Macbeth is a walking contradiction, ”too full o’th’ milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way” (925, 1.5.15-16).
But Lady Macbeth is confident. Like a succubus, she will work intimately and transform him: “Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear / And chastise with the valor of my tongue / All that impedes thee from the golden round …” (925, 1.5.23-26). She will make sure he’s “man enough” to take what “fate and metaphysical aid” (925, 1.5.27) have told him is his.
Lady Macbeth calls upon infernal powers to strip her of feminine softness: “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!” (925, 1.5.38-41) Macbeth’s “partner of greatness” (925, 1.5.9-10), prays to be transformed into a steely warrior. (925, 1.5.36-52) Her role is that of the cunning woman, the plotter and seducer.
Lady Macbeth cannot have turned overnight into a devotee of deception and ruthless action: this is who she already is. Does that change how we view Macbeth?
Going forward, Lady Macbeth’s prospects for a felicitous ending are not good. As in classical tragedy (example: The Oresteia), when a woman arrogates to herself the attributes of a male hero, she will be destroyed. As the play proceeds, she will lose her “unsexed” qualities. The fifth scene ends with Lady Macbeth taking charge. When Macbeth arrives, she gives him sage advice: “Look like th’innocent flower, / But be the serpent under’t” (926, 1.5.63-64).
Act 1, Scene 6 (926-27, nearing Inverness, Duncan and Banquo share their appreciation of the place; Lady Macbeth welcomes the royal party with feigned graciousness.)
Duncan arrives at Macbeth’s castle, praising it as “a pleasant seat” (926, 1.6.1), and Banquo adds that “The air is delicate” (926, 1.6.10). Truly, Macbeth is “the man in the high castle.” (Philip. K. Dick’s sci-fi title.) The King and Lady Macbeth exchange greetings, and he is conducted to the castle. She is playing the role of “innocent flower,” as she had recommended to her husband.
Act 1, Scene 7 (927-29, Macbeth ponders the self-destructive nature of the killing he contemplates, and admits Duncan’s murder would be a betrayal; still, when he tells Lady Macbeth that the plot is off, she quickly brings him round.)
Ruminating on the deed to come, Macbeth recognizes his dilemma: “If th’assassination / Could trammel up the consequence and catch / With his surcease success—that but this blow / Might be the be-all and the end-all!” (927, 1.7.2-5) If only, that is, killing Duncan could be like catching a prized fish in a net without dredging up other, unwanted things. But when ambition drives a person to wicked acts, they lead to more and more bad acts to protect what’s been won.
Throughout this conversation with conscience, Macbeth admits that evil is self-destructive (see Augustine’s Enchiridion) and that whoever commits an evil deed becomes its slave. As Lavache says in All’s Well That Ends Well, “he must needs go that the devil drives.”
Macbeth now sounds like a Stage Villain 2.0. He freely admits to being in the wrong. But he still doesn’t feel certain that he should act. His thoughts tend away from action: Duncan is his feudal lord, his guest, and a good man. His murder would generate great pity. (927, 7.12-20)
Macbeth knows the wickedness of self-destructive ambition: as he says, “we but teach / Bloody instructions which, being taught, return / To plague th’inventor” (927 7.8-10) and “I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition…” (836, 7.25-27). As Robert Bridges asks, how could someone so horrified by the prospective crime actually commit it?
The Norton editors point out that Macbeth may be Shakespeare’s most self-aware villain. How unlike Richard III, whom we can hardly imagine doing other than what he does! Macbeth has the capacity to do good or ill; his choice is sincerely meditated, deeply felt.
Still, Lady Macbeth brings him round to his warrior code: masculine honor calls for him to take the crown. She taunts him: “When you durst do it, then you were a man …” (928, 1.7.49).
Though Lady Macbeth has had a child and suckled it, she tells Macbeth, “I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you / Have done to this” (928, 1.7.56-59). It is hard to imagine a more misguided or pitiless conception of what it means to be a man. Still, Macbeth is brought round, and soon he and his wife get down to the brass tacks of planning.
The conflict between Christian sentiment and pagan heroism we find in Hamlet also obtains in Macbeth: Macbeth’s bloody ambition can only be satisfied by violating Christian principle. Competing codes mean that he must make a moral choice. He has made division within himself, and must manage the yawning divide between what is and what seems to be: “Away, and mock the time with fairest show; / False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (929, 1.7.81-82). Macbeth has by now made Lady Macbeth’s earlier advice his own.
ACT 2
Act 2, Scene 1 (929-31, as a guest at Inverness, Banquo is unsettled since, in his dreams, he has felt the pull of the witches’ promises; Macbeth agrees that they should speak soon; by himself, Macbeth envisions—or actually sees—a blood-smeared dagger that points him toward Duncan’s room; he prepares by reflecting on the fitness of midnight for killing an unsuspecting king; when Lady Macbeth rings the bell, Macbeth stalks toward the scene.)
Sleep-deprived Banquo admits to Macbeth that he “dreamt last night of the three weird sisters” (930, 2.1.20-21). Macbeth asks for Banquo’s support, but Banquo remains aloof.
Macbeth is alone with his thoughts: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still” (930, 2.1.33-35). He questions the dagger’s existence: might it be “A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain”? (930, 2.1.38-39) How much does that matter?
The dagger might be a supernatural but real visitation. It works. As Macbeth says, “Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going” (930, 2.1.42). The bloody knife concentrates Macbeth’s spiritual and bodily forces. Its power may put on the cast of fate, but it’s better to say that it manifests the weirdness of the world through which Macbeth now walks: even as he goes to commit a murder, objects torment him with animistic pranks: nature or his mind plays tricks.
What we are witnessing is not Macbeth still tormenting himself with doubts, but reaffirmation, a plucking-up of sufficient audacity and steadiness. By the scene’s end, Macbeth is stalking with “Tarquin’s ravishing strides” (930, 2.1.55) to the chamber where the king lies.
He prays for an easy, quiet kill that accords with the silence and deadness of nature itself: “Thou sure and firm-set earth, / Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear / Thy very stones prate of my whereabout …” (930, 2.1.56-58). But we know that such ease when a man is dealing out violent death cannot be. Cassius and Brutus in Julius Caesar could tell us that.
Act 2, Scene 2 (931-32, Lady Macbeth waits for Macbeth to finish his work; Macbeth soon returns, overwhelmed with horror; he still clutches the knives that he used to kill Duncan, which he was supposed to place next to the servants; since Macbeth is immobilized with guilt, Lady Macbeth sets the daggers beside the grooms; she returns to her “unmanned” husband and tells him to get dressed and wash his blood-soaked hands.)
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth show weakness right after the murder. Lady Macbeth is anxiety-ridden while enduring the minutes the killing takes. The owl’s cry startles her, and then she fears that the grooms have regained consciousness and stopped the murder.
Most telling is her admission, “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t” (931, 2.2.11-13). She couldn’t shake thoughts of filial affection and respect for her own family patriarch. Lady Macbeth is not as thoroughly “unsexed” as she desires to be.
Macbeth’s initial reaction is horror and disbelief: why didn’t anyone hear anything? (931, 2.2.14) He is shaken by his inability to say amen in response to the grooms’ sleepy “God bless us” (931, 2.2.29-31, 34-35), and reports to Lady Macbeth that after stabbing Duncan, “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep’…” (932, 2.2.38-39).
Macbeth suffers from “Lady Macbeth’s disease,” as that condition later manifests. (Contamination OCD.) He asks, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” (932, 2.2.63-64) Hand-washing is both practical, since the evidence must be eliminated, and ritually significant as an act of forgetting, if not attaining forgiveness. But it gives no relief. So much for “A little water clears us of this deed” (932, 2.2.70).
The knocking at the gate “appalls” Macbeth (932, 2.2.61). His sensibilities are now heightened and deranged. Macbeth’s final words here are, “To know my deed ‘twere best not know myself“ (932, 2.2.76). Now he must deaden his consciousness, and certainly his conscience.
But for the moment, Lady Macbeth must grab the daggers from her husband and take care of insinuating the grooms’ guilt for Duncan’s murder. (932, 2.2.55-56)
Act 2, Scene 3 (933-36, a drunken porter, hearing knocking, takes on the persona of a porter guarding hell’s gates; he allows Macduff and Lennox in, who are tasked with waking Duncan; Macbeth welcomes them; Macduff goes to rouse Duncan, but returns screaming “murder”; Lennox believes the servants are guilty, but Macbeth confesses that he has just slain them; Macduff is incredulous, but Lady Macbeth faints and requires attention; Malcolm and Donalbain realize that they are in danger, and decide to flee Scotland.)
The porter hears knocking at the castle’s gates, and rehearses the role of a porter at Hell’s gates, generating “knock, knock” jokes. This scene (933, 2.3.1-35) points us toward the true nature of Macbeth’s crimes, and the reason why he is bound to be disappointed in what they bring.
First are the porter’s five references to “equivocation,” which the Norton editors explain were topical when the play was written. (Henry Garnet.) To equivocate is verbal deception: to speak in an ambiguous, slippery way so as to deceive others, etc. (Wiktionary.)
The porter uses the term first for the imaginary entrants to hell, and secondly for anyone who drinks. Strong drink “provokes the desire / but it takes away the performance” (933, 2.3.24-25).
The witches’ prophecies function similarly. Like an intoxicating brew, those promises arouse Macbeth’s latent ambition for advancement. But what is the “performance” that this same intoxication “takes away”? What are the witches promising that will not be delivered?
It can’t be simply Macbeth’s taking of the crown by murdering Duncan. The “consummation” must be security of outcome. Macbeth wants to enjoy the crown and kingly power in perpetuity, and he wants to be able to pass them along: generational immortality. “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus,” says Macbeth (938, 3.1.48).
The witches, however, did not include any “clause” in their prophecy that indicated whether Macbeth would be king for three decades or three minutes—they offered no security. Macbeth acts without getting the full story about what the prophecied path entails for his and Lady Macbeth’s ultimate well-being. In the end, Macbeth acts only in reaction to bitter necessities of his own making. That hardly amounts to freedom.
Unrestrained ambition leads to madness, making its indulgers lose free will and self-respect. Macbeth becomes as impotent as the Porter’s drunken lecher, even as he hacks his way through his stolen kingship.
There is yet another function of the porter scene, recognized by Thomas De Quincey. In “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” this author writes that the porter scene captures the moment when a murderous act beyond civilized existence necessarily gives way to everyday life. One can’t, after all, live in a perpetual state of monstrous depravity.
Macbeth’s reality entails covering up what he and his wife have done. He seems to pass the “genuine emotion” test when Macduff returns from the murder scene, but when Macbeth kills the grooms allegedly out of righteous fury, he falls down. “I do repent me of my fury / That I did kill them” (935, 2.3.103-04), he says, but only Lady Macbeth’s fainting spell covers him.
Finally, the porter’s brief scene widens the frame beyond the selfish circle of Macbeth and his wife. The porter couldn’t care less about the castle goings-on. He has his own life to live. Plus, his play-acting as Satan’s gatekeeper cuts Macbeth’s role as a grand criminal down to size, so that we may, for a time, see in it a common act of betrayal, fueled by vile ambition and justified by knavish equivocation. We are not to identify with Macbeth or his wife.
Finally, Malcolm is a good enough Machiavellian to see that it’s time to head for England. He and his brother Donalbain are under suspicion.
Act 2, Scene 4 (936-37, Ross and an elder discuss the weird things that have been happening since Duncan’s murder; Macduff informs them that Duncan’s sons have been accused of bribing the grooms to kill him; he also says Macbeth has been appointed king; Ross departs to attend Macbeth’s coronation at Scone, but Macduff will go home to his castle at Fife.)
A solar eclipse occurs, and an old man says the eclipse is “unnatural, / Even like the deed that’s done” (946, 2.4.10-11). The natural world will signify: it will turn weird, and have its revenge for the unnatural acts, the wicked artifice, enacted by Macbeth and his wife. The man will struggle with conscience, and for a time he will seem to have killed it (along with fear), but he will be destroyed. But that is still to come. Macbeth is currently a success.
ACT 3
Act 3, Scene 1 (937-41, Banquo, invited by Macbeth to a feast, suspects the worst, but says he will attend; Macbeth, anxious about the witches’ prophecy of Banquo’s fathering of kings, hires two disgruntled men to kill Banquo and his son Fleance as they return in darkness to Inverness; Macbeth says that his goal is security: “to be safely thus.”)
Banquo’s ambition appears only as distrustful speculation about Macbeth: “Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all / As the weird women promised, and I fear / Thou play’dst most foully for’t. Yet it was said / It should not stand in thy posterity …” (937, 1.1-4). Immediately after these reflections, Banquo finds himself warmly invited to dinner.
The new king sums up his goal to himself, “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus” (938, 3.1.48). Banquo’s continued existence is unbearable: if the witches are correct, it’s all for naught: “For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind …” (939, 3.1.65).
Though but briefly on his throne, Macbeth is already confronting the hollow ruin of himself that he will soon become: the witches promised him only “a barren scepter” (939, 3.1.62). As he is ruminating in this unhappy way, in come the hired assassins.
The play deals with the relationship between spiritual error and its material and psychological consequences, and we can register a change from an initially pensive Macbeth to “Macbeth 2.0.” 2.0 is hardened, resolute, ruthless: the flip side of acedia or apathy, a state he will enter later.
Act 3, Scene 2 (941-42, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth express their anxieties—both have been shaken by terrible dreams; Macbeth is obsessed with Banquo’s existence; the King mentions obliquely that something will happen tonight.
An intimate conversation between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth brings home both the psychological disturbance caused by what they have done and their determination to quell such effects and govern in security. Lady Macbeth issues the despairing reflection that “’Tis safer to be that which we destroy / Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy” (941, 3.2.6-7).
Still, she tries to buck up Macbeth’s spirits: “Things without all remedy / Should be without regard. What’s done is done” (941, 3.2.11-12).
Macbeth’s thoughts betray a similar mixture of self-defeating melancholia and earnest resolutions for better times: the King says, “But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, / Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep / In the affliction of these terrible dreams / That shake us nightly” (941, 3.2.16-19).
Until Banquo is dealt with, says the King, “we / Must lave our honors in these flattering streams / And make our faces vizards to our hearts, / Disguising what they are” (941, 3.2.31-34). But the need to keep up this division between being and seeming will never diminish: it will tear Lady Macbeth apart, and alienate Macbeth from her and from his life.
“What’s to be done?” asks Lady Macbeth. (942, 3.2.43) She seems to suspect that Macbeth will have Banquo killed, but he keeps this partly to himself. “Why?” we might ask, since she is already complicit in the worst that Macbeth has done.
Still, the king keeps his plans to himself, plans that entail the murder of Banquo and Fleance: “Come, seeling night, / Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, / And with thy bloody and invisible hand / Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond / Which keeps me pale!” (942, 3.2.45-49). The rational, humane eye of daytime must be kept shut to open up the terror-laced opportunities of night. One bad deed calls for another—it’s the only way forward now. As yet, Macbeth doesn’t realize that no security will ever emerge.
Act 3, Scene 3 (942-43, an extra man joins Macbeth’s two hired assassins; together, they cut down Banquo and leave his corpse in a ditch with many gashes; Fleance, however, escapes, and the killers go to inform Macbeth of the outcome.)
Three assassins kill Banquo, but Fleance escapes. Ironically, his escape is facilitated by one of the murderers’ decision to put out the torch as he fights with Banquo. The night-spirit that Macbeth invoked as his benefactor has instead allowed Fleance to get away.
Act 3, Scene 4 (943-46, the banquet begins, and one of the assassins fills Macbeth in on the outcome of their efforts; when Macbeth joins the dinner guests, Banquo’s ghost is sitting in his place, nodding his “gory locks”; Macbeth and Lady Macbeth make excuses, but the ghost returns. Macbeth makes a spectacle of himself; finally, Lady Macbeth hustles the guests out; Macbeth will again question the witches, and he resolves to win security by any means.)
The banquet scene is the play’s climax. Banquo’s gore-spattered ghost appears during the feast that Macbeth and his queen are hosting to normalize their reign. He takes his seat in Macbeth’s place of honor after the First Murderer privately delivers to Macbeth the bad news that while Banquo is dead, Fleance escaped.
Graciousness reigns at the table until Macbeth declares that there’s no place for him to sit, and moments later he blurts out, “Thou canst not say I did it. / Never shake thy gory locks at me!” (944, 3.3.50-51) Lady Macbeth is shocked, but privately contemptuous of her husband’s outburst: “When all’s done, / You look but on a stool” (944, 3.3.68-69). But there sits Banquo.
This scene undoes Macbeth’s attempt to play the Machiavel: his behavior unsettles everyone, including Lady Macbeth. His strange words pay tribute to the time’s weirdness: “The times has been / That, when the brains were out, the man would die, / And there an end. But now they rise again …” (945, 3.4.80-82). Macbeth is a haunted man.
How to deal with this? Lady Macbeth orders the guests to exit. Macbeth determines to find out the worst and thereby discover how to maintain his power. He declares, “I will . . . to the weird sisters. / More they shall speak, for now I am bent to know / By the worst means the worst” (946, 3.4.135-37). There’s no point turning back now: “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (946, 3.4.138-40).
That’s similar to Richard III’s summation, “I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin. / Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye” (4.2.64–67).
He must now act so quickly that there’s no time left to analyze his actions beforehand. As quickly as the mind can conceive, the hand will act (946, 3.4.141-42).
Act 3, Scene 5 (946-47, in this scene probably by Middleton, Hecate, Queen of the Night, scolds the three witches for neglecting to bring her into their “Macbeth” project.)
In this scene that many textual scholars believe was written not by Shakespeare but by a collaborator, Thomas Middleton, Hecate upbraids the witches for not apprising her of their work with Macbeth. Macbeth she categorizes as no more than “a wayward son, / Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do, / Loves for his own ends, not for you” (947, 3.5.11-13). Macbeth does not do evil for its own sake—he’s just selfish and looking for shortcuts.
Hecate mocks human pretensions to permanence and safety, saying, “you all know security / Is mortals’ chiefest enemy (947, 6.5.32-33). As the Norton gloss points out, “security” in Hecate’s context means “overconfidence.” It may also mean “being sure of what you’ve gained.”
Act 3, Scene 6 (947-48, Lennox mocks Macbeth’s “fake news” interpretations of the violence in Scotland; a lord tells him that Macduff has gone to England to get military help.)
Lennox repeats ironically the “official, state-sponsored versions” of events that Macbeth’s regime has been pumping out, and we hear that Malcolm has found refuge with Edward the Confessor. Macduff has followed Malcolm there to seek military help against Macbeth.
ACT 4
Act 4, Scene 1 (948-52, as the witches finish a potion, Macbeth demands that they help him achieve security; they call up an armed head, a bloody child, and a crowned child holding a tree; Macbeth is told to “beware Macduff,” that “none of woman born” can harm him, and that his kingdom will last until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane; Macbeth is relieved until he is shown a line of eight kings, with Banquo holding a mirror to infinity; Lennox tells him Macduff has gone to England, so Macbeth will send agents to slaughter Macduff’s family.
Like Act 3, Scene 5, this scene seems to have been partly written by Middleton. Macbeth meets again with the witches. Three apparitions come.
The first is “an armed head” that tells Macbeth to “beware Macduff.”
The second is “a bloody child” that says “none of woman born” will harm him
The third, a crowned child holding a tree in his hand, proclaims that only when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill will he be defeated (950-51, 4.1.70-93).
Certitude? You bet! Still, Macbeth demands information about Banquo’s line, and a series of eight kings appears, Banquo holding a mirror showing his issue reigning forever. “What, will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?” (951, 4.1.116)
Macbeth will do anything to secure his throne: “From this moment / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand … / The castle of Macduff I will surprise …” (952, 4.2.143-147, 149). Macduff’s family? To be slaughtered. No time for reflection.
Act 4, Scene 2 (952-54, Ross travels to Macduff’s estate, but Macduff’s family is helpless; a messenger tells Lady Macduff she must flee, but it’s too late.)
Ross comes to the castle at Fife. This friend tries to justify Macduff’s decision to go and seek military assistance. Lady Macduff’s words to her son suggest that she fears her husband is already dead. Ross departs.
Before their murder, Lady Macduff and her son give us their perspective on the great events that overtake them: the innocent boy says in response to Lady Macduff’s insistence that traitors be hanged, “the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and / swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them” (953, 4.2.54-55).
A messenger arrives and begs Lady Macduff to leave. Too late.
In this scene, we see the private consequences of public disorder. We also see an emphasis on the natural affective ties that bind people and reinforce charity and social order. This is a dimension of humanity that Macbeth and his queen have scorned.
Why did Macduff leave the family unprotected? Macduff probably couldn’t imagine the depths of depravity to which Macbeth could sink. Wickedness tends to outpace goodness, and what some people can scarcely imagine, others readily do.
Act 4, Scene 3 (954-60, Macduff meets with Malcolm in England and encourages him to strike at Macbeth; fearing that Macduff may be acting on Macbeth’s behalf, Malcolm tests him by talking about his own alleged wickedness; Macduff passes the test, so Malcolm informs him that Edward has supplied 10,000 troops….
When Macduff arrives in England, Malcolm laments Scotland’s downfall and voices his skepticism about Macduff’s intentions. Malcolm tests him, boasting about his own corruption. Macduff’s final expression of disgust convinces Malcolm: “These evils thou repeat’st upon thyself / Hath banished me from Scotland….” (957, 4.3.112-13).
Malcolm’s ploy underscores the crime Macbeth committed in moving from thought to act. His play-acting with Macduff reassures us: human nature is corrupt, but the corruption’s effects can be kept in check. Macbeth’s “throne of blood” need not become the universal, irresistible pattern of royal conduct. We saw in the previous scene what happens when nobility fails to resist: derangement and denaturation of the very landscape, destruction of life and property. Ross says, “good men’s lives / Expire before the flowers in their caps, / Dying or ere they sicken” (958, 4.3.171-73).
Ten thousand troops are King Edward’s contribution to the Scottish effort.
The end of the third scene concentrates on Macduff’s grief over Ross’s news. Finally, Ross informs him that his wife and children have all been cruelly slain by Macbeth’s agents. Macduff is stunned, and Malcolm’s rhetorical inexperience shows.
As Macduff says of Malcolm, “He has no children” (959, 4.2.216); i.e., he can’t feel the loss of children like a grown man. Macduff, unlike Macbeth, does not subscribe to the “hardness” doctrine of masculinity. Nature’s bonds of affection still work within him.
Malcolm need not have worried: Macduff the warrior soon comes round to revenge.
ACT 5
Act 5, Scene 1 (960-61, Lady Macbeth has been walking, talking, and writing in her sleep; a gentlewoman and a doctor watch her; she rubs her hands as if trying to wash them clean, and exclaims with horror that the rubbing doesn’t work; the doctor’s diagnosis is that the Queen needs the help of a priest, not a medical practitioner.)
Lady Macbeth has been driven mad by guilt, and has Contamination OCD. As an assistant and a doctor listen in, the queen asks nobody, “who would have / thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (960, 5.1.34-35) Her hand-washing reveals a psychic derangement: she can’t expunge her guilt.
The Lady’s final utterance of the night is, “I tell you yet again Banquo’s buried; he / cannot come out on’s grave” (961, 5.1.56-57). The doctor admits his frustration: “More needs she the divine than the physician” (961, 5.1.67). But he must stay silent.
What is the point of showing Lady Macbeth’s insanity, a psychological problem, when the supernatural agents who set the stage for disaster seem real enough? Macbeth is not a pure psychodrama, but the witches are not causes of human evil; they only assist.
What affects Lady Macbeth in the private, psychological sphere plays out for Macbeth in the broader public sphere of kingship. Action, battles and machinations constitute his attempt to scrub his hands and conscience clean. Vain repetition rules the day: grasping at power, Macbeth will repeat the same pattern to the bitter end.
Act 5, Scene 2 (961-62, Macbeth’s Scottish opponents go toward Birnam Wood to combine with Malcolm, Siward and 10,000 English fighters; Menteith and Caithness discuss what Macbeth is doing and feeling now.)
Menteith, Caithness, Lennox and Angus head for Birnam Wood, where they will combine with the English forces led by Malcolm, Siward, and Macduff. Macbeth is fortifying Dunsinane. Angus offers a memorable image: “Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief” (962, 5.2.20-22).
Act 5, Scene 3 (962-64, Macbeth has received dispatches about the forces coming to destroy him, but still trusts the promises made by the apparitions; he abuses Seyton for confirming bad news, and reflects on the sad life he now lives; Macbeth questions Lady Macbeth’s physician, but he knows what really ails her.)
Macbeth’s opponents are coming to Birnam, but the deluded king thinks he leads a charmed life thanks to the apparitions’ promises, so he scorns those who abandon him: “Then fly, false thanes, / and mingle with the English epicures!” (962, 5.3.7-8) “Till Birnam Wood remove to Dunsinane / I cannot taint with fear” (962, 5.3.2-3).
But Macbeth’s claims ring hollow: “I have lived long enough. / My way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf, / And that which should accompany old age, / As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have…” (963, 5.3.22-26). The words are beautiful, but hollow and not directly related to action: this man is tired of living. The crown he stole is no longer worth the trouble it takes to maintain.
Still, Macbeth resolves to steel himself in violence, saying, “I’ll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked” (963, 5.3.33). This is determination that stems from despair, one almost wants to say apathy, though acedia, spiritual sloth, is more accurate.
Macbeth remains distant from his wife’s sufferings. “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?” Can’t the doctor “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow” and “Raze out the written troubles of the brain …” (963, 5.3.40-42)? No, he can’t. Macbeth rejects “physic”: what good is doctoring that only heals physical maladies?
As for his own situation, Macbeth believes the witches’ charms are best: “I will not be afraid of death and bane / Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane” (964, 5.3.59-60).
Act 5, Scene 4 (964, with the Scottish and English forces now combined at Birnam Wood, Malcolm tells his men each to cut off a branch from the forest’s trees so as to prevent Macbeth from making an accurate assessment of their strength.)
Birnam Wood is coming to Dunsinane, even though we and Macbeth are not witnessing a violation of the laws of nature, as the witches’ phrasing led us to believe.
Act 5, Scene 5 (964-65, Macbeth expresses confidence as the enemy forces come on; Lady Macbeth dies, and Macbeth responds with despairing poetry: life is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing”; Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane; Macbeth decides to fight Malcolm out in the open.)
Macbeth is convinced that he is beyond the reach of massed troops: “Our castle’s strength / Will laugh a siege to scorn” (964, 5.4.2-3). He has “almost forgot the taste of fears” (965, 5.4.9). But the announcement of Lady Macbeth’s death oblivion leads him to a startlingly nihilistic place. “She should have died hereafter” (965, 5.5.17).
Macbeth now speaks haunting lines, culminating in the description of life as “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (965, 5.4.26-28).
A messenger informs Macbeth about a moving forest. The King invites general decreation and destruction: “I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun, / and wish th’estate o’th’ world were now undone” (965, 5.5.49-50). He will fight, but his beautiful words are hollowed-out husks. Language, too, has failed Macbeth—he can still speak with eloquence that moves us, but such eloquence can only deepen his weariness.
Birnam Wood has indeed come to High Dunsinane. Finally, Macbeth admits that he has lost his certitude, his “security” in the sense that Hecate lent that word in Act 4, Scene 1. A final command: “Arm, arm, and out!” (965, 5.5.46) He will leave the now illusory safety of his high castle and go to fight Macduff, Malcolm & Co.
Nature, represented by “Birnam Wood,” must seem bizarre and uncanny to Macbeth because he himself has become unnatural, even monstrous. This apparent weirdness in nature punishes him: he has betrayed his natural lord, Duncan (his “father” in Jacobean political theory) and turned his marriage bond into a criminal partnership.
Shakespeare is working within a Christian framework where sin has deranged the entire Creation, just as it will later in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Eve “pluck’d, she eat, / Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat / Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, / That all was lost.” Nature responds as by sympathetic magic to human error, reflecting that error back to us if we know how to interpret nature’s signs.
The weird, or the uncanny, is in this context a function of Providence, which makes use of whatever is at hand to punish transgressors.
Act 5, Scene 6 (965, Malcolm and Siward arrive in front of Dunsinane castle.)
Malcolm orders the men to cast down their tree boughs hewn from Birnam Wood. It’s time to fight. Siward and his son will lead the first wave of battle, and Malcolm and Macduff will do the rest.
Act 5, Scene 7 (965-69, Macbeth kills the confident young Siward; Macduff enters, looking for his nemesis; Malcolm has accepted the surrender of Dunsinane castle; Macduff tells Macbeth he was not “of woman born” directly; Macbeth is slain….)
Macbeth confidently kills young Siward, and rejects classical honor-suicide, choosing to direct violence at others. To his guilty consternation, the King is confronted by Macduff, who was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” (967, 5.7.45-46).
Macbeth loses his courage, but quickly recovers with curses against the witches: ”be these juggling fiends no more believed, / That palter with us in a double sense, / That keep the word of promise to our ear / And break it to our hope” (967, 5.7.49-52).
Macbeth is duly slain by the antagonist, Macduff. In the end, the terms Macduff and others use to describe him strip him of humanity: a baited bear, and a hell-hound. Lady Macbeth, too, is described by Malcolm as “fiend-like” (968, 5.7.99).
From the time of their first terrible deed onward, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth tried to kill all sentiment within themselves, and it seems fitting that the end of the play isn’t sentimental. Siward rejects mourning over his son in battle, saying only, “Had I as many sons as I have hairs, / I would not wish them to a fairer death” (968, 5.7.78-79).
Malcolm promises to perform all the necessaries in the proper way. The kingdom has been set right, and the emphasis is on order and ceremony, spare and fitting words.
Finally, we might concentrate on Macbeth’s concluding musings and resolutions. Do they constitute a classical recognition scene? Coleridge says the play is “pure tragedy” rather than “reflective” as Hamlet. But surely there is no lack of introspection or understanding coming from Macbeth. His tragedy involves the process of desiring honors and attaining them by unjust means, of buying into the epistemological and moral ambiguity proffered by the Weird Sisters.
Does Macbeth learn anything by the play’s end? He understands what he has done and why it was wrong, but it doesn’t matter to him anymore. His life has become meaningless. The language accorded to the isolated, brittle king is some of the finest Shakespeare ever gave to any character. Its mixture of aesthetic quality and desolation of spirit shows an intellect undebased, but constrained now to describing and coming to terms with a situation that would horrify anyone with normal sensibilities.
Macbeth’s fine words are insightful, but hollow, as if he himself can’t feel them and finds no comfort in them. They are empty words, not a curative and certainly no better than the “physic” he had earlier cast to the dogs.
Shakespeare takes great interest in how key characters handle the relationship between actions and words: Macbeth’s words provide him no relief.
Shakespeare’s plays have various ways of dealing with the consequences of tragic mistakes, with respect to the ability to act. King Lear gains insight at the expense of being able to wield power. By the end of the play, he and his daughter Cordelia are at the mercy of their enemies.
Macbeth follows a different pattern—once he makes his choice, he must take on the ruthlessness of the tyrant who holds his throne by injustice. Blood draws on blood until, as Macbeth says, there’s no point in going back. He acts boldly and dies fighting, but such desperation hardly makes him a hero. Instead, he’s the puppet of actions that stem from his own perverted will.
The witches shoot an arrow into Macbeth’s soul, but they are not ultimately responsible for his crimes. Ambition is a lucid madness: images present themselves to Macbeth, truth comes as presentiment, but his own ambition drives him to inhabit the vision. The consequences of his behavior are predictable, if strange: we should not be too surprised by Macbeth’s sin. Shakespeare’s genius is to take what might have been a stage villain and make him a three-dimensional character, but one who is nonetheless a stunning failure as a human being.
As for the play’s politics, it’s difficult to see how some critics’ claims that Macbeth is tinged with nihilism can be correct, given that the play was written for King James I.
The more tenable view of Macbeth’s moral arc is that sin punishes itself inexorably, even if the interval between commission and punishment is long. Anarchy shadows this play, but only in the sense that Macbeth makes a bad but free choice, and from then on, his choice generates chaos for others who live in his realm.
Macbeth marches to his death, behaves like a beast (losing his title to humanity), and dies fighting. The Christian point is that free will, misused, becomes the slave of so-called fate, or necessity. This is a point made by Augustine in his Enchiridion and other works. Oscar Wilde said that when we act, we become puppets. Shakespeare might add, “Only when we act badly.” Apparent disorder does not imply disorder in the heavens, or chaos in the fundamental nature of things, the “great chain of being.”
Still, in his Norton intro to Macbeth, Stephen Greenblatt wisely notes the strangeness and equivocal quality of the play’s supernatural realm. Greenblatt suggests that the secular and the demonic, the material and the spiritual, are hard to keep separate. The witches’ “equivocation” is a power stalking human desire and endeavor, an opening into the demonic, leading us to the everlasting bonfire. No doubt it receives a strong assist from the inherent ambiguity of language itself.
Edition. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies + Digital Edition. 3rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93860-9.
Copyright © 2012, revised 2024 Alfred J. Drake
Endnotes have been removed from these “teaching notes.” They may be found in the author’s full commentary on Macbeth.
Last Updated on October 24, 2024 by ajd_shxpr