Malcolm

At a glance

Malcolm is Duncan's elder son and heir, and Shakespeare uses him to define true kingship against Macbeth's tyranny and to restore order, while his caution shows how tyranny poisons trust.

• Role in the plot: named heir as Prince of Cumberland, he flees after his father's murder, tests Macduff in England, leads the English-backed army and is hailed king.
• Defining traits:
  • Shrewd: "To show an unfelt sorrow is an office / Which the false man does easy" (Act 2, Scene 3).
  • Suspicious, with reason: "Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell" (Act 4, Scene 3).
  • Understands kingship: he lists "the king-becoming graces" (Act 4, Scene 3).
  • A strategist: every soldier must "hew him down a bough" (Act 5, Scene 4).
• Themes he carries: kingship and tyranny, appearance and reality, order restored, good and evil.
• Relationships and foils: Duncan (the trusting father he learns not to copy); Macbeth (the anti-king); Macduff (the thane he tests, then leads); Donalbain (his brother, who flees to Ireland).

Their journey

1. Loyal prince (Act 1, Scenes 2 and 4). He thanks the soldier who saved him from capture, reports that the traitor Cawdor died well, and is named heir.
2. Flight (Act 2, Scene 3). With Donalbain, who warns "There's daggers in men's smiles", he decides that grief can be faked and that flight is safest. Their escape briefly makes them look guilty (Act 2, Scene 4).
3. The test (Act 4, Scene 3). Fearing Macduff may be Macbeth's spy, he falsely accuses himself of lust, greed and every vice, then takes it all back when Macduff despairs for Scotland. This is his turning point.
4. Leader (Act 4, Scene 3 to Act 5, Scene 6). He counsels the grieving Macduff, then leads the army and orders the Birnam boughs as camouflage.
5. King (Act 5, Scene 8). In measured closing couplets he rewards his thanes, passes judgement on "this dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen", and invites all to his coronation at Scone.

He grows from a boy who runs to a king who judges, and the play's order rests on the caution he learned in running.

Key quotations

• "Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it" (Act 1, Scene 4). He is describing the traitor Cawdor's dignified death. Ironically, it sets up the question of how Macbeth, the next traitor Cawdor, will die.
• "To show an unfelt sorrow is an office / Which the false man does easy. I'll to England." (Act 2, Scene 3). He sees through the performances around him, and the short, decisive "I'll to England" shows a cool head where others are shouting.
• "Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell" (Act 4, Scene 3). An allusion to Lucifer, the brightest angel, who fell to become Satan. Macbeth is the fallen angel, and good men must still be trusted, carefully. It explains his test.
• "It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds." (Act 4, Scene 3). Scotland is personified as a wounded woman. The present tense and "each new day" make the suffering ongoing. The country itself becomes the victim of tyranny.
• "the king-becoming graces, / As justice, verity, temp'rance, stableness, / Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness" (Act 4, Scene 3). A list without joining words (asyndeton) piles up the virtues a king needs. It is a checklist Macbeth fails on every count, and it gives you a definition of good kingship to quote.
• "Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak / Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break." (Act 4, Scene 3). A rhyming couplet of humane advice. He encourages grief, but a few lines later tells Macduff to "Let grief / Convert to anger", using feeling as fuel for war.
• "this dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen" (Act 5, Scene 8). The public verdict: blunt and final. It restores order, but it flattens two people we have watched suffer, so the audience knows more than the new king says.
• "by the grace of Grace, / We will perform in measure, time, and place." (Act 5, Scene 8). The play ends in rhyme and in God's "grace". "Measure" means moderation, the opposite of Macbeth's excess. Harmony returns in the sound of the verse.

How Shakespeare builds them

• Framing. He is named heir in Act 1, Scene 4, just before Macbeth's "Stars, hide your fires!", and hailed king at the end, with his coronation at Scone to follow. His line frames Macbeth's reign as an interruption.
• The slow test scene. Act 4, Scene 3 is long and almost static after the violence of Act 4, Scene 2. The play pauses to define kingship, and tests the audience along with Macduff.
• Public language. He speaks in measured blank verse, lists and closing couplets: formal and outward-facing, unlike Macbeth's private soliloquies. We never hear his inner thoughts, which keeps him slightly out of reach.
• Medicine imagery. He turns revenge into "med'cines" (Act 4, Scene 3), and Caithness calls him "the med'cine of the sickly weal" (Act 5, Scene 2). Set against the Doctor who cannot cure "a mind diseas'd" (Act 5, Scene 3), the imagery casts Malcolm as the cure for a sickness Macbeth brought on the whole country.
• An offstage good king. Malcolm describes Edward the Confessor, the English king who heals the sick with a touch (Act 4, Scene 3). Edward never appears, but the holy model he offers stands behind Malcolm.

Context

• The test comes from Holinshed. In the chronicle Malcolm also pretends to "vnquenchable auarice" and lust to test Macduff. Shakespeare keeps the long scene, so the definition of kingship was a deliberate choice.
• The King's Evil. English kings claimed to cure scrofula, "the King's Evil", by touch, a power said to descend from Edward the Confessor; James, though uneasy about it, kept up the ceremony. Malcolm's praise of Edward's healing, which passes to "the succeeding royalty" (Act 4, Scene 3), links James's own line to a saintly king.
• English support. In Holinshed, Malcolm recovers the realm "by support of king Edward". In the play England lends "Old Siward, with ten thousand warlike men" (Act 4, Scene 3), so Scotland is saved by an Anglo-Scottish alliance: a pointed picture for a Scottish king newly on the English throne.

Interpretations

• The ideal king who restores order. The list of virtues, his piety, the English alliance and the rhyming close all present him as the cure for Scotland's sickness.
• A politician whose verdict flattens tragedy. "Dead butcher" ignores the conscience and suffering the audience saw. Read this way, he rules through public image, and the play leaves a gap between his story and ours.
• Is he really so different? Alan Sinfield argues the cycle may repeat, with Macduff now the king-maker on whom the new king depends. Evidence: Malcolm lies skilfully in Act 4, Scene 3 ("my first false speaking / Was this upon myself"), uses manhood to push Macduff to violence ("Dispute it like a man"), and wins through disguise at Birnam. The counter: his lies are tests and tactics for Scotland, not for himself.

How to write about them

Three arguments a grade 9 answer could build:

1. Malcolm defines kingship by its opposite. Every one of his "king-becoming graces" is something Macbeth lacks.
2. He is a king shaped by Macbeth's world. He learns from his father's fatal trust that faces lie, so the new king must be suspicious to survive.
3. His ending is order, not the whole truth. "Dead butcher" closes the play politically, but the audience remembers a more complicated man.

Moments to reach for:

• Kingship: "the king-becoming graces" (Act 4, Scene 3), Edward's healing (Act 4, Scene 3), "the grace of Grace" (Act 5, Scene 8).
• Appearance and reality: "an unfelt sorrow" (Act 2, Scene 3), "Angels are bright still" (Act 4, Scene 3), the Birnam boughs (Act 5, Scene 4).
• Scotland's suffering: "It weeps, it bleeds" (Act 4, Scene 3).
• Judging the Macbeths: "this dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen" (Act 5, Scene 8).