Macduff

At a glance

Macduff is the Thane of Fife who discovers Duncan's body and kills Macbeth, and Shakespeare uses him as the play's avenger and moral opposite: loyal to Scotland, openly grieving, and a model of manhood with room for feeling.

• Role in the plot: he finds Duncan dead, refuses to attend Macbeth's coronation, flees to England to join Malcolm, loses his whole family, and kills Macbeth in single combat.
• Defining traits:
  • Loyal to Scotland and the rightful line: "Bleed, bleed, poor country!" (Act 4, Scene 3).
  • Morally clear and devout: the murdered king is "The Lord's anointed temple" (Act 2, Scene 3).
  • Deeply feeling: "All my pretty ones? / Did you say all?" (Act 4, Scene 3).
  • Resolute in action: "My voice is in my sword" (Act 5, Scene 8).
• Themes he carries: loyalty and betrayal, masculinity, kingship, revenge and justice, family, grief.
• Relationships and foils: Macbeth (the thane who serves himself); Malcolm (the king he hails); Banquo (who stayed silent where Macduff acts).

Their journey

1. Discoverer (Act 2, Scene 3). He arrives with the knocking and finds Duncan's body: "O horror, horror, horror!" He asks Macbeth the dangerous question about the killing of the grooms: "Wherefore did you so?"
2. Refusal (Act 2, Scene 4). He will not go to Scone for the coronation. His parting line, "Lest our old robes sit easier than our new!", hints at suspicion through an image of clothing.
3. Defiance (Act 3, Scene 4 to Act 4, Scene 1). He stays away from Macbeth's feast, flees to England, and is named by an Apparition: "Beware Macduff" (Act 4, Scene 1). Macbeth's revenge falls on his family (Act 4, Scene 2).
4. Grief (Act 4, Scene 3). He passes Malcolm's test of loyalty, then hears from Ross that his wife and children have been slaughtered. He grieves, then turns grief into purpose. This is his turning point.
5. Avenger (Act 5, Scenes 7 and 8). He hunts only Macbeth, reveals he was "from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd", and returns with Macbeth's head to hail Malcolm as king.

His journey ends in justice paid for with his family, so he is never simply a hero.

Key quotations

• "Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord's anointed temple" (Act 2, Scene 3). The metaphor turns Duncan's body into a church, and "anointed" echoes the Bible's phrase for a king. Regicide is presented as a crime against God.
• "Bleed, bleed, poor country! / Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure" (Act 4, Scene 3). Personification makes Scotland a wounded body, and the repeated "bleed" makes the wound ongoing. His first thought is for Scotland, not himself, which is exactly what Malcolm's test is looking for.
• "All my pretty ones? / Did you say all?" (Act 4, Scene 3). Broken questions and the repeated "all" show a mind refusing to take the news in. He then calls Macbeth a "hell-kite" who took "all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop": a bird of prey snatching helpless young, which picks up his wife's image of the wren and the owl (Act 4, Scene 2).
• "But I must also feel it as a man" (Act 4, Scene 3). Malcolm tells him to "Dispute it like a man"; Macduff answers that a man also grieves. It is the play's reply to Lady Macbeth's "When you durst do it, then you were a man" (Act 1, Scene 7): here manhood includes feeling, not just daring to kill.
• "Sinful Macduff, / They were all struck for thee!" (Act 4, Scene 3). He turns on himself by name and speaks to himself as "thee", taking the blame: unlike Macbeth's, a good man's guilt is spoken aloud.
• "Macduff was from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd." (Act 5, Scene 8). A birth by caesarean section unlocks the Apparition's riddle. "Ripp'd" is violent, so even his birth carries the play's brutality. The line kills Macbeth's last hope before the sword does.
• "Hail, King, for so thou art. Behold, where stands / Th' usurper's cursed head: the time is free." (Act 5, Scene 8). "Hail" echoes the Witches' greeting to Macbeth in Act 1, Scene 3, now given to the rightful king. "The time is free" declares Scotland healed, but it is said over a severed head.

How Shakespeare builds them

• His entrance at the knocking. The Porter lets in the man who will destroy Macbeth (Act 2, Scene 3).
• His absence. He is offstage when his family is killed (Act 4, Scene 2), so the audience sees the cost of his choice before he learns of it.
• The shape of Act 4, Scene 3. A long, slow test comes first, then the terrible news. Ross delays with double meanings ("they were well at peace when I did leave 'em"), so we watch Macduff's grief happen in real time.
• Plain language. His speech is direct and religious, and at the climax he refuses words altogether: "I have no words; / My voice is in my sword" (Act 5, Scene 8). Set beside Macbeth's eloquence, his plainness looks like honesty.
• A mirror in Young Siward. The son of the English general dies fighting Macbeth, and Ross reports "like a man he died" (Act 5, Scene 8). His father's calm "Why then, God's soldier be he!" offers one more version of manhood, clean and dutiful, around Macduff's grief.

Context

• Holinshed gave Shakespeare the slaughter and the birth. In the chronicle, Macbeth "most cruellie caused the wife and children of Makduffe" to be killed, and Macduff tells him he was "ripped out of her wombe". Shakespeare keeps both, and builds a scene around the moment Macduff hears.
• Divine right. "The Lord's anointed" is the Bible's phrase for a king (1 Samuel 24:6, where David refuses to harm King Saul). Macduff's language places Duncan under God's protection, which makes Macbeth's crime a sin as well as a murder.

Interpretations

• The ideal avenger. Loyal, grieving and righteous, he fulfils the prophecy by a "natural" means and restores the rightful king. Read this way, he is the man Macbeth should have been.
• A flawed patriot whose flight cost his family. Lady Macduff calls it "madness" (Act 4, Scene 2), and Malcolm asks why he left "wife and child" without saying goodbye (Act 4, Scene 3). Bradley's balance is useful: the flight was "noble", but "not wise or judicious in the interest of his family", and that "does not show that it was wrong".
• Part of a cycle. The critic Alan Sinfield argues that at the end Macduff stands in the same relation to Malcolm as Macbeth did to Duncan at the start: the warrior on whom the king depends. Evidence: he enters with a severed head, as Macbeth once fixed a rebel's head on the battlements (Act 1, Scene 2).

How to write about them

Three arguments a grade 9 answer could build:

1. Macduff redefines manhood. He grieves and then fights, answering both Lady Macbeth's idea that manhood means daring to kill and Macbeth's collapse into numbness.
2. He embodies loyalty to Scotland over loyalty to a crown. "Fit to govern? / No, not to live" (Act 4, Scene 3): he serves good kingship, not whoever wears the crown.
3. He shows the price of resistance. The play restores order through him, but only after the murder of his family, so justice in Macbeth is never clean.

Moments to reach for:

• Loyalty and kingship: "The Lord's anointed temple" (Act 2, Scene 3), "No, cousin, I'll to Fife" (Act 2, Scene 4), "Bleed, bleed, poor country!" (Act 4, Scene 3), "Turn, hell-hound, turn!" (Act 5, Scene 8). The monosyllabic command and the "hell-hound" metaphor make Macbeth one of the damned souls the Porter imagined at "hell gate" (Act 2, Scene 3), and Macduff, the man the Porter actually let in, now hunts him.
• Masculinity: "feel it as a man" (Act 4, Scene 3), with Lady Macbeth's "then you were a man" (Act 1, Scene 7) and "like a man he died" (Act 5, Scene 8).
• Family and grief: "All my pretty ones?" and "Sinful Macduff" (Act 4, Scene 3).