Macbeth

Summary

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

With those six words, three witches open one of the darkest, most compelling plays ever written. Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, but it packs more murder, madness, and moral ruin into its five acts than any other work in the canon. It’s a play about what happens when ambition meets opportunity—and when a man decides to reach for power by the bloodiest means possible.

Let’s descend into the darkness together.

The Hero at the Beginning

When we first meet Macbeth, he’s a hero. Scotland is at war, and Macbeth has just won a decisive battle against rebel forces and Norwegian invaders. A wounded soldier describes how Macbeth carved through the enemy ranks and “unseamed” the rebel leader “from the nave to the chops”—split him open from navel to jaw. King Duncan praises his “valiant cousin” and rewards him with a new title: Thane of Cawdor, taken from a traitor who will be executed.

Macbeth doesn’t know this yet. He’s walking across a desolate heath with his friend and fellow general, Banquo, when they encounter something strange: three figures, withered and wild, who seem to appear from nowhere.

“What are these,” Banquo asks, “that look not like the inhabitants of the earth, and yet are on it?”

The witches greet Macbeth with three titles: Thane of Glamis (which he already is), Thane of Cawdor (which he’s about to become), and “king hereafter.” Then they turn to Banquo with a riddling prophecy: he will be “lesser than Macbeth, and greater. Not so happy, yet much happier.” His descendants will be kings, though he himself will never wear the crown.

Before Macbeth can demand an explanation, the witches vanish “into the air.”

Moments later, messengers arrive with news: the king has named Macbeth Thane of Cawdor. The first prophecy has come true. Macbeth’s mind immediately leaps to the third: “The greatest is behind.”

And here, already, we see the seed of his destruction. Banquo warns him that “the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest consequence.” But Macbeth isn’t listening. He’s imagining the crown.

The Murder of Duncan

Macbeth writes to his wife, telling her everything. Lady Macbeth reads the letter and knows instantly what must be done. She also knows her husband’s weakness: “I do fear thy nature; it is too full o’ the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way.”

She’s not wrong. Macbeth is ambitious, but he’s not ruthless. He wants the crown, but he recoils from what it would take to seize it. When King Duncan arrives at their castle as a guest, Macbeth lists all the reasons he shouldn’t kill him: Duncan is his kinsman, his king, and his guest. Duncan has been a good ruler. There’s no justification except “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself.”

He tells his wife he won’t do it.

Lady Macbeth’s response is one of the most chilling speeches in all of Shakespeare. She questions his manhood. She tells him that she herself has nursed a baby, and she knows how tender it is to love the child at her breast—but she would have “dashed the brains out” rather than break a promise like he’s breaking now.

It works. Macbeth agrees to the plan. That night, while Duncan sleeps, Macbeth will murder him. Lady Macbeth will drug the king’s guards with wine so heavily they won’t remember anything. Then they’ll smear the guards with blood and blame them for the crime.

The deed happens offstage, but we see everything that surrounds it. We see Macbeth, alone in the dark, hallucinating a dagger floating before him: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?”

We see him return from Duncan’s chamber, his hands covered in blood, unable to say “Amen” when the sleeping guards cried out “God bless us.” We hear him describe a voice that seemed to cry through the whole house: “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep.”

Lady Macbeth takes charge. She retrieves the daggers he was supposed to leave behind, smears blood on the guards, and tells him that “a little water clears us of this deed.” She’s calm where he’s shattered.

But she’s wrong. Nothing will clear them of this deed.

The Unraveling

The murder is discovered the next morning, and Macbeth puts on a show of grief. He even kills the two guards in what he claims is a fit of righteous anger—conveniently silencing the only witnesses. Duncan’s sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, flee the country, fearing they’ll be next. Suspicion falls on them, and Macbeth is crowned king.

But the crown brings no peace. Macbeth remembers what the witches said to Banquo: his descendants will be kings. If that’s true, then Macbeth has murdered Duncan only to put Banquo’s children on the throne. He’s “filed his mind” for Banquo’s benefit.

So Macbeth hires murderers to kill Banquo and his son Fleance.

The murder goes half right. Banquo is killed with twenty gashes on his head. But Fleance escapes into the darkness.

That night, at a royal banquet, Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost sitting in his chair. No one else can see it. Macbeth shouts at the apparition—“Never shake thy gory locks at me!”—while his guests stare in horror and Lady Macbeth desperately tries to explain away his behavior.

The ghost appears twice. Both times Macbeth comes unhinged. By the end of the night, Lady Macbeth has to dismiss the guests. The kingdom is beginning to see that something is very wrong with their king.

“It will have blood, they say,” Macbeth tells his wife. “Blood will have blood.”

He decides to visit the witches again. He needs to know more.

The Prophecies

In a dark cave, the witches are brewing something foul: eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, tongue of dog, and worse. When Macbeth arrives, they summon apparitions to answer his questions.

The first, an armored head, warns him: “Beware Macduff.” Macduff is a Scottish nobleman who has refused to attend Macbeth’s feasts and is now suspected of disloyalty.

The second apparition, a bloody child, tells him something reassuring: “None of woman born shall harm Macbeth.” That sounds like invincibility.

The third, a crowned child holding a tree, adds another guarantee: “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him.” Since woods don’t move, Macbeth takes this as a promise that he’ll never be defeated.

But he still needs to know about Banquo. The witches show him a vision: eight kings, all descended from Banquo, stretching out to the crack of doom. Macbeth’s line will end with him. Everything he’s done has been for nothing.

Enraged, Macbeth decides to act on the first warning. He’ll kill Macduff. But Macduff has already fled to England to join Malcolm and raise an army. So Macbeth does something even worse: he sends murderers to Macduff’s castle to slaughter his wife and children.

The scene is devastating. Lady Macduff and her young son talk about what it means to be a traitor. Then the murderers arrive. The boy is stabbed onstage, crying out “He has killed me, mother! Run away, I pray you!” Lady Macduff runs, but we know she won’t escape.

When Macduff hears the news in England, his grief is almost unbearable. “All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What, all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop?”

Malcolm tells him to convert his grief to anger. Macduff will. He has a very particular revenge in mind.

The Sleepwalking Queen

Back in Scotland, something is happening to Lady Macbeth. A gentlewoman and a doctor watch her walk in her sleep, rubbing her hands as if washing them, muttering fragments of confession.

“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 woman who once told her husband that “a little water clears us of this deed” now wanders through the castle trying to wash blood that isn’t there. The guilt she suppressed has surfaced as madness.

The doctor can do nothing. “More needs she the divine than the physician.”

The End of All Things

Malcolm’s army marches on Dunsinane, Macbeth’s stronghold. On Malcolm’s order, each soldier cuts a branch from Birnam Wood and carries it as camouflage. When a messenger tells Macbeth that the wood appears to be moving, one prophecy crumbles.

Then comes word that Lady Macbeth is dead—by her own hand, it seems. Macbeth’s response is one of the most famous speeches in literature:

“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. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

But Macbeth doesn’t surrender. He still has one prophecy left: no man born of woman can harm him. He fights on, killing young Siward in single combat.

Then he meets Macduff.

Macbeth warns him: “I bear a charmed life, which must not yield to one of woman born.”

Macduff’s reply destroys his last hope: “Despair thy charm. Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.”

A cesarean birth. Macduff was not, in the technical sense, “born” of woman at all. The witches’ prophecy was true—and completely misleading.

Macbeth sees now how he’s been played. “These juggling fiends,” he says, “that palter with us in a double sense, that keep the word of promise to our ear, and break it to our hope.”

He could surrender. Macduff offers him the chance to live as a captive, displayed as a monster. But Macbeth refuses. Whatever else he is, he’s still a warrior.

“Lay on, Macduff, and damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”

They fight. When Macduff emerges, he carries Macbeth’s head.

Malcolm is hailed as the new king. Order is restored. Scotland will heal.

What It Means

Macbeth is a play about the cost of evil. Not the external cost—though that’s staggering—but the internal one. From the moment Macbeth kills Duncan, he loses everything that made life worth living: peace, sleep, trust, love, honor, friends. By the end, his life signifies nothing, even to himself.

It’s also a play about the seductive nature of evil. The witches don’t force Macbeth to do anything. They simply tell him what he wants to hear. The choice is always his. He could have waited for the crown to come naturally. He could have stopped after Duncan. At every point, he chooses to go deeper.

Lady Macbeth is often seen as the villain, the one who pushes her husband to murder. But look at what happens to her. She’s the first to crack. She’s the one washing imaginary blood from her hands while her husband hardens into a tyrant. Perhaps she thought she could compartmentalize the guilt. Perhaps she thought willpower would be enough.

It wasn’t.

Shakespeare wrote Macbeth around 1606, during the reign of King James I—a king who believed in witches and had written a book about demonology. The play flatters James: Banquo, according to legend, was his ancestor, and the vision of eight kings stretching to the crack of doom represents the Stuart line. But the play is more than flattery. It’s a meditation on power, on the difference between a king who rules by right and one who rules by force, on what happens when ambition breaks the bonds of loyalty and law.

And at its center is one of the most psychologically complex characters in all of drama: a man who knows the difference between right and wrong, who sees clearly the horror of what he’s about to do, and who does it anyway. Macbeth is not a simple villain. He’s a man who destroys himself, step by step, with his eyes wide open.

“I am in blood stepped in so far,” he says, “that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

There’s no going back. There’s only forward, into the darkness.

This has been Macbeth by William Shakespeare.