Macbeth

Overview

Macbeth is barely two thousand lines, about half the length of Hamlet, and it moves faster than anything else Shakespeare wrote. There is no subplot to speak of. The murder that would be the climax of another play happens in Act II, and the remaining three acts are about what it is like to have done it.

The text is probably not entirely his. The Folio version, our only source, is short even by the standards of a short play, and the scenes involving the goddess Hecate, along with two songs, almost certainly come from Thomas Middleton, whose play The Witch contains them. Many productions cut them. Nothing essential turns on it, but it explains why the witch material sometimes changes register abruptly.

The source is Holinshed’s Chronicles, which Shakespeare rearranged freely. The historical Macbeth reigned for seventeen fairly successful years; Holinshed’s Banquo was an accomplice in the murder. Shakespeare compressed the reign into what feels like weeks and made Banquo innocent, which is usually explained by the fact that James I, on the throne since 1603, claimed descent from him and had written a treatise on witchcraft. The play was probably first performed in 1606, months after the Gunpowder Plot and the trial of the Jesuit Henry Garnet, whose defence of equivocation under oath is what the drunken Porter is joking about.

What happens

Three witches agree to meet Macbeth on the heath. Scotland has just survived a rebellion and a Norwegian invasion, put down by Macbeth with extraordinary personal violence, described admiringly in the second scene. Riding home with Banquo, he meets the witches, who greet him as Thane of Glamis, which he is, Thane of Cawdor, which he does not know he has just become, and king hereafter. They tell Banquo he will father kings though he will not be one. Within minutes, messengers arrive with the Cawdor title, and Macbeth is already imagining a murder and frightening himself with it.

Duncan names his son Malcolm as heir, and announces he will spend the night at Macbeth’s castle. Lady Macbeth, reading her husband’s letter, decides for both of them, and asks the spirits to unsex her and fill her with cruelty. Macbeth arrives and tries twice to stop: his soliloquy in Act I scene 7 lists every reason not to do it, kinship, hospitality, Duncan’s virtues, the certainty that such deeds return on the doer, and ends by admitting he has no motive but ambition. He tells his wife they will proceed no further. She asks whether he is a man, offers to dash her own nursing child’s brains out rather than break such a promise, and he agrees.

He follows a dagger he can see and cannot touch, kills Duncan offstage, and comes back holding the grooms’ daggers, unable to go back, unable to say amen. She takes them from him. The knocking begins, the Porter jokes his way to the gate about equivocators and drink, and Macduff discovers the body. Macbeth kills the grooms before they can speak. Duncan’s sons flee, which makes them look guilty, and Macbeth is crowned.

From here the play is about maintenance. He fears Banquo and the prophecy about Banquo’s line, and hires murderers, but Banquo’s son Fleance escapes. At the banquet that night Banquo’s ghost takes Macbeth’s seat and only he can see it, and the court is dismissed in disorder. He goes back to the witches, who show him three apparitions: beware Macduff; none of woman born shall harm him; he is safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. The last thing they show him is a line of eight kings stretching into the future, all Banquo’s.

Reassured of the wrong things, he sends men to Macduff’s castle and has his wife and children killed. In England, Malcolm tests Macduff by pretending to be worse than Macbeth, and then tells him what has happened at home. Macduff’s reaction, asking twice whether all his pretty ones are gone, and being told to take it like a man, and answering that he must also feel it as a man, is the play’s quiet centre.

In Act V the two halves fall in together. Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep, washing hands that are not dirty, saying the things she must not say, watched by a doctor who says her trouble is beyond his practice. Macbeth, besieged, hears a cry and is told his wife is dead, and answers with the tomorrow speech. Malcolm’s army cuts branches from Birnam Wood to hide its numbers. Macduff, born by caesarean section, is not of woman born in the required sense. Macbeth, told this at the last moment, fights anyway, and is killed. Malcolm is proclaimed king.

How to read it

Read the soliloquies as arguments, not as mood. Act I scene 7 and Act II scene 1 are Macbeth thinking, in real time, with the conclusions changing under him, and the play depends on our hearing him decide.

Watch the marriage. It reverses. In the first half she is decisive and he is unstrung; in the second he stops telling her anything, plans the murders alone, and she is left with hands she cannot clean. They are never alone together after the banquet.

Pay attention to what the witches actually say. They make predictions, not commands. They never mention murder. Everything they tell him is true, and every disaster comes from what he assumes it means. Whether that makes them innocent is a good question for a seminar.

Read the Porter scene rather than skipping it. It is the only comedy in the play, it is about damnation and equivocation, and its placement immediately after the murder is deliberate.

Notice the imagery. Blood, sleep, children, clothing that does not fit, and light and darkness recur so insistently that tracking one of them through the play is a genuinely useful way to read it.

The common misreading is that Lady Macbeth is the villain and Macbeth her instrument. He is imagining the murder in Act I scene 3, before she has read his letter, and she collapses long before he does.

Questions it raises

• Do the witches cause anything? Would Macbeth have acted without them, and does the play let you answer?
• He lists every reason against the murder and does it anyway. What kind of knowledge is that, and is it the same failure Phaedra and Medea describe?
• Lady Macbeth asks to be unsexed in order to be cruel. Does the play accept that cruelty is masculine, or is that the belief it is examining?
• Macbeth gets the crown and finds it worthless almost immediately. Is that a fact about crime, or about ambition, or about him?
• The tomorrow speech says life signifies nothing. Is that the play’s view, or the view of a man who has made it true for himself?
• Malcolm’s restoration puts everything back. Does the ending repair Scotland, or is it just the next reign?