Summary

What bloody man is that?

Trumpets sound: Scotland is at war. Duncan and his sons meet a wounded soldier, and the King's first words give the play its colour: ‘What bloody man is that?’ The Captain, who saved Malcolm from capture, reports a deadlock, the armies ‘As two spent swimmers that do cling together / And choke their art’. The rebels were led by ‘The merciless Macdonwald’, and at first ‘Fortune, on his damnèd quarrel smiling, / Showed like a rebel's whore’.

Analysis: Scotland faces rebellion, then invasion. Perhaps the order Macbeth destroys was never as secure as Duncan's court believes.

Courage's darling

It was not enough, the Captain says. Fortune smiled on the rebels, but one soldier made his own luck with his sword, and the Captain names him with an epithet the rest of the play will put on trial:

No handshake, no farewell

Macbeth is nowhere on stage: our first picture of the hero is a sword, described by someone else. It hacked a path through the rebel army to Macdonwald, and when it reached him there was no handshake and no farewell, only this:

Valiant cousin

Duncan is thrilled: ‘O valiant cousin, worthy gentleman!’ But, the Captain warns, good news can turn at its source: ‘from that spring whence comfort seemed to come / Discomfort swells’. Just as the rebels flee, a fresh Norwegian army attacks. Were Macbeth and Banquo dismayed? ‘Yes, as sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion’: not remotely. Like overloaded cannons they redoubled their blows, and he cannot say why, ‘Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds / Or memorize another Golgotha’. Then he grows faint, and Duncan praises his words and gashes alike, ‘They smack of honor both’, and sends for surgeons.

A traitor's title

Ross rushes in from Fife: Norway's king had invaded, ‘Assisted by that most disloyal traitor, / The Thane of Cawdor’, until ‘Bellona's bridegroom’, Macbeth in armour, met him blow for blow. Scotland has won. Duncan's verdict is swift: ‘No more that Thane of Cawdor shall deceive / Our bosom interest’. Cawdor is to die, his title goes to Macbeth, and the King sums up: ‘What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won.’

Spite on the heath

Thunder again, and the Witches swap news. The Second Witch has been killing pigs. The First has a grudge against a sailor's wife who ‘munched and munched and munched’ her chestnuts and told the Witch to be gone, so she will hound the husband at sea and curse him with sleeplessness: ‘Sleep shall neither night nor day / Hang upon his penthouse lid’. Then she admits a limit: ‘Though his bark cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-tossed’. They can torment this man, it seems, but not sink him, though she shows off a shipwrecked pilot's thumb as a trophy.

The charm is wound up

A drum: Macbeth is coming. The three join hands and circle nine times until the spell is sealed: ‘Peace, the charm's wound up’. On that word he walks on with Banquo, and his first words in the play borrow the Witches' own chant from 1.1:

Three titles

Banquo sees them first, ‘So withered, and so wild in their attire’, like nothing on this earth, and cannot settle what sex they are: ‘your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so’. Macbeth orders them to speak. Each Witch answers with a title, climbing from the one he holds, to one he does not know he already has, to the one he has perhaps dreamed of.

Two men, two futures

Macbeth flinches, and Banquo notices: ‘why do you start and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?’ While his partner stands ‘rapt’, Banquo challenges the Witches to ‘look into the seeds of time’ for him too, though he claims to want nothing from them. He gets three riddles, one from each Witch, and the last is a promise that will haunt Macbeth far more than it troubles Banquo:

Tell me more

As the Witches turn to go, Macbeth, silent since the prophecy, finds his voice: ‘Stay, you imperfect speakers. Tell me more.’ Glamis he understands, but Cawdor lives, and ‘to be king / Stands not within the prospect of belief’. The Witches vanish.

Analysis: Banquo asks; Macbeth commands. One encounter, two appetites.

Would they had stayed

Banquo calls them bubbles thrown up by the earth. Macbeth watches them melt into the air, ‘As breath into the wind. Would they had stayed!’ Banquo looks for a rational cause: ‘have we eaten on the insane root / That takes the reason prisoner?’ Then, half joking, the two friends swap prophecies, and it is Macbeth who brings up Banquo's children first.

The Cawdor prophecy comes true

Ross and Angus arrive with the King's thanks, and Ross praises Macbeth for standing among the enemy dead, ‘Nothing afeard of what thyself didst make, / Strange images of death.’ Then the proof: ‘He bade me, from him, call thee Thane of Cawdor’. Banquo reacts at once, ‘What, can the devil speak true?’ Macbeth is puzzled, and his question starts one of the play's great chains of images:

The greatest is behind

Angus explains: the old Thane lives, but he has confessed to treason and is condemned. Macbeth turns aside, speaking his private thoughts to us while the messengers stand a few feet away: ‘Glamis and Thane of Cawdor! / The greatest is behind.’

Banquo's warning

In a low voice Macbeth tests his friend: ‘Do you not hope your children shall be kings, / When those that gave the Thane of Cawdor to me / Promised no less to them?’ Banquo is wary. Believed completely, he warns, the prophecy ‘Might yet enkindle you unto the crown’: it could set Macbeth's ambition alight. Then, before turning back to Ross and Angus, he explains exactly how a trap like this is sprung:

The word nobody said

Macbeth does not listen. Aside again: ‘Two truths are told / As happy prologues to the swelling act / Of the imperial theme.’ Then he argues with himself: ‘This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill, cannot be good’. If it is good, he asks, why does one picture ‘unfix my hair / And make my seated heart knock at my ribs’? The picture has a name, and he is the first in the play to say it:

Chance may crown me

Banquo notices his partner is rapt again: 'Look how our partner's rapt.' Macbeth pulls back from the picture he has just painted, and for now he hands the whole business to fate:

Things forgotten

Banquo covers for him in front of the messengers: ‘New honors come upon him, / Like our strange garments’, they take wearing in. Macbeth settles on a proverb, ‘Come what come may, / Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.’ Then he tells his first lie: his mind, he says, was on things forgotten.

Analysis: The murder has been imagined, then shelved. But notice who imagined it.

A traitor dies well

King Duncan asks whether the traitor Cawdor has been executed. Malcolm reports that he confessed, repented and died well: ‘Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it’. The King draws a lesson from the man he never saw through:

An absolute trust

Duncan had built ‘an absolute trust’ on that gentleman, he admits, and on those very words the new Thane of Cawdor walks in, with Banquo, Ross and Angus behind him.

Thanks, and more than thanks

Duncan greets his 'worthiest cousin' almost with an apology: ‘The sin of my ingratitude even now / Was heavy on me’. Macbeth replies with a polished speech of duty, ‘The service and the loyalty I owe / In doing it pays itself’. The King answers like a gardener, promising that his reward will go on growing:

The harvest

Then he embraces Banquo and promises to hold him to his heart too. Banquo answers in two plain lines, and hands the gardener's image straight back to the King: ‘There, if I grow, / The harvest is your own.’

An heir is named

Weeping with joy, Duncan names his heir before the court: ‘We will establish our estate upon / Our eldest, Malcolm, whom we name hereafter / The Prince of Cumberland’. Honours will shine on the rest ‘like stars’, he promises, and he will visit Macbeth's castle at Inverness. Macbeth offers to ride ahead as ‘the harbinger’ to tell his wife, and Duncan waves him off: ‘My worthy Cawdor.’

A step to leap

As he leaves, Macbeth turns aside. Malcolm's new title is not an honour to him but an obstacle across his path, a stair he must either trip on or jump:

To the heavens

He knows exactly what he is wishing for, and that it cannot bear to be seen, not even by the heavens. So, before he rides ahead to Inverness, he turns to the sky:

Let the eye wink

A second couplet splits his body in two: ‘The eye wink at the hand, yet let that be / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.’ He exits. Duncan, who has heard none of it, agrees with Banquo's praise of him (hearing Macbeth commended is 'a banquet' to him) and sets off after him to Inverness with the scene's last words: ‘It is a peerless kinsman.’

A letter from the heath

Inverness. Macbeth's wife walks on alone, reading a letter, so we meet her through his words. The Witches, he writes, knew more than mortals, and just as he ‘burned in desire to question them further, they made themselves air’. Then the King's messengers hailed him Thane of Cawdor, exactly as the Witches had. So he has written at once to his wife, and what he calls her is worth weighing:

Too full of kindness

Is the letter news, or an invitation? He shares the prophecy before he shares any plan. Then the letter ends and she speaks for herself, in a line that sounds like one more prophecy, the Witches' 'shalt be' in her mouth: ‘Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be / What thou art promised.’ She never doubts that the crown is coming, or asks whether it is right. What she doubts is the man who has to take it, and nobody knows him better:

Ambition without the illness

She takes him apart like a case study. He is ‘not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it’: the desire is there, the wickedness is not. He wants to rise and stay good, and she pins the contradiction in a knot of 'wouldst': he ‘wouldst not play false / And yet wouldst wrongly win’. So she will supply the hardness herself, and calls to her absent husband: ‘Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear’.

Analysis: Her assumption: goodness is weakness, and ambition must be ill to win.

The King comes here tonight

A messenger breaks in: the King is coming, tonight. Her reply is out before she can stop it: ‘Thou 'rt mad to say it.’ She recovers at once (surely Macbeth would have sent word?), but the slip gives her away: she was picturing the crown, and now its owner is walking into her house. The runner, the servant adds, was almost too breathless to speak. Alone, she hears a darker messenger: ‘The raven himself is hoarse’, croaking Duncan's 'fatal entrance' under her walls.

Make thick my blood

Then the invocation turns physical. She wants her blood thickened and every road for conscience blocked: ‘Stop up th' access and passage to remorse’. She offers the spirits her own body, ‘Come to my woman's breasts / And take my milk for gall’. Last she calls on the dark itself, thick enough to hide the deed from her own knife and from heaven:

The future in the instant

A scene ago Macbeth begged 'Stars, hide your fires'; now his wife calls down the same darkness, and neither has heard the other. He walks in as if summoned, and she greets him the Witches' way, three titles climbing to the crown: ‘Great Glamis, worthy Cawdor, / Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter!’ His letter, she says, has carried her ‘beyond / This ignorant present’. His answer is tender, then loaded: ‘My dearest love, / Duncan comes here tonight.’ She tests him, 'And when goes hence?', and he answers carefully: ‘Tomorrow, as he purposes.’ Her reply finishes his verse line and leaves no room for doubt: ‘O, never / Shall sun that morrow see!’

Look like the time

She can read his thoughts in his face already, and so, she warns, could anyone: ‘Your face, my thane, is as a book where men / May read strange matters.’ The cure is performance. To fool the world he must look exactly as it expects, with a host's welcome in ‘your eye, / Your hand, your tongue’. Then she gives him the image that sums up the play's deceit:

Leave all the rest to me

Then the plan, dressed up as housekeeping: ‘He that's coming / Must be provided for’. A good hostess provides for her guest; this one means to kill him, and she wants the night's 'great business' in her own hands. Macbeth does not say yes: ‘We will speak further.’ She does not wait for him to. She finishes his verse line and closes the scene with orders, one for his face and one for everything else:

Torches at dusk

Oboes play and torches flare as King Duncan arrives at Inverness with his sons, Banquo and his thanes. Inside these walls, Lady Macbeth has just pictured a raven croaking 'the fatal entrance of Duncan' and sworn he will never see tomorrow's sun. Now the King looks up at the battlements, breathes in, and praises the place where he will die:

The martlet's proof

Banquo agrees, and offers his own proof from nature: the birds that nest all over these castle walls are the ones that come to holy places.

The perfect hostess

Every ledge holds one, a ‘pendant bed and procreant cradle’ full of new life, and where they most breed and haunt, he has observed, 'The air is delicate.' Then Lady Macbeth comes out alone, and the King greets her: ‘See, see our honored hostess!’ She answers with courtly humility: their service, ‘twice done and then done double’, could never repay him. Duncan notices the gap beside her: ‘Where's the Thane of Cawdor?’ Macbeth's love, he decides, ‘sharp as his spur’, has raced him home. He puts himself in her care, ‘Fair and noble hostess, / We are your guest tonight.’ Then, with ‘Give me your hand’, he goes in holding hers.

Analysis: She plays the 'innocent flower' she told her husband to be.

If it were done

Oboes play as servants carry Duncan's supper across the stage by torchlight. Then Macbeth walks on alone: the host has left his own guest's table. At first he calls the murder only 'it':

The life to come

If the killing could ‘trammel up the consequence’, ending everything with one blow, he would ‘jump the life to come’ and gamble his soul. Then he finds the flaw in his own wish. Murder is never the end of it: a killer only teaches ‘Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return / To plague th' inventor’. Justice is ‘even-handed’: the poisoner drinks from his own cup.

Every reason not to

Next come the moral reasons. Duncan is ‘here in double trust’: Macbeth is his cousin, his subject and tonight his host, who should bar the door against a murderer, not carry the knife. And Duncan has been so good a king that his virtues ‘Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued’ against his killer. Then his imagination takes over, and pity arrives as the strangest picture in the speech:

Only one motive

Against kinship, hospitality, goodness and pity he can set only one motive, and he admits it just as his wife walks in, so the thought breaks off mid-line:

We will proceed no further

She has come to fetch him: Duncan has almost finished supper and has asked for his host. Macbeth's answer is plain and final: ‘We will proceed no further in this business.’ Yet the reason he gives her is not the one he gave himself. Duncan has honoured him, and he has ‘bought / Golden opinions from all sorts of people’, new clothes he would rather wear while they still shine.

Was the hope drunk?

She replies with a volley of questions that leave no room to answer. His ambition, she sneers, was a drunk who has woken up sick: ‘Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dressed yourself?’ She makes it a test of their marriage, and of his nerve: ‘Art thou afeard’? He wants the crown but lets fear wait on desire, ‘Like the poor cat i' th' adage’ who wants the fish but will not wet its paws.

What a man dares

Macbeth has had enough of being called a coward. He stops her mid-attack, and draws a line under the argument with the play's clearest definition of manhood:

What beast?

A real man knows where the line is, and anyone who crosses it is no man at all. She turns his words inside out. If daring more makes him 'none', then ‘What beast was 't’ that first proposed the plan to her? And she redefines the word he has just defended:

The babe that milks me

She presses harder. When there was no chance to kill Duncan, she says, he wanted to make one; now the King's visit has handed them the perfect time and place, and the chance that has made itself has unmade him. Then, to prove what a sworn promise means to her, and to shame him, she offers the most shocking picture in the whole play:

The sticking place

Macbeth's next question is practical, not moral: what if they fail? His conscience has quietly left the argument. She throws the word back at him in scorn:

The plan

Then comes the plan. Duncan will sleep soundly after his long ride, and she will ply his two chamberlains with wine until ‘memory, the warder of the brain, / Shall be a fume’. With the servants ‘in swinish sleep’, the unguarded King is theirs, and the drunks can take the blame.

Nothing but males

Macbeth is won over, and his admiration shows it: ‘Bring forth men-children only’, he tells her, since her nerve is fit only for sons. Now he improves the plan himself: they will have ‘marked with blood those sleepy two’ and used their own daggers. Who would dare doubt it, she asks, while their ‘griefs and clamor roar / Upon his death’? Even the mourning is rehearsed.

Settled

His 'no further' is reversed. The man who weighed every reason against the murder now commits his whole body to it: ‘I am settled and bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.’ Then he sends them both back to the feast, ending the act with a rhyming couplet that could be hers:

Bold with wine

Lady Macbeth waits alone in the dark. She drank from the grooms' wine herself, and what knocked them out has ‘made me bold’. An owl shrieks: ‘the fatal bellman’, tolling Duncan's death. The grooms snore over drugged bedtime drinks, so heavily that ‘death and nature do contend about them’. Then Macbeth cries out inside, and she panics: ‘Alack, I am afraid they have awaked, / And 'tis not done. Th' attempt and not the deed / Confounds us.’ She laid their daggers ready, so he could not miss them, and then she admits something more: she could have done the killing herself, and something stopped her hand.

Analysis: Borrowed courage, already cracking: she needs wine to be bold, and panics at a single cry.

I have done the deed

Macbeth comes in carrying two bloody daggers. While she waited, he killed the King; now he tells her so, and in the same breath flinches at a sound.

Analysis: Five words for the murder; the rest of the scene is living with it.

A sorry sight

Only the owl and the crickets, she says. Their verse breaks into frightened scraps, ‘Did not you speak? / When? / Now. / As I descended?’ He asks who sleeps in the second chamber (Donalbain, the King's younger son), then stares at his red hands, ‘a sorry sight’, and she throws the phrase back at him as a foolish thought.

Amen stuck in my throat

He cannot stop describing the two sleepers in that second room. One laughed in his sleep and one cried 'Murder!'; they woke, prayed and slept again, as if they had seen ‘these hangman's hands’. When they said 'God bless us', he could not answer. 'Consider it not so deeply,' she tells him, but he still cannot understand why:

It will make us mad

She tries again, and this time warns him what will happen if he goes on: ‘These deeds must not be thought / After these ways; so, it will make us mad.’ But he has heard something worse than prayers.

Analysis: He feels damned within minutes, before anyone suspects him: the punishment has begun inside his head.

Sleep that knits

He mourns what he has lost, ‘Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care’, the balm of hurt minds. The voice, he says, cried to the whole house and ran through his titles to his bare name: ‘Macbeth shall sleep no more’. She calls it brainsick talk, flattering and scolding at once, ‘Why, worthy thane, / You do unbend your noble strength’, and gives him a job: go and ‘wash this filthy witness from your hand’.

Infirm of purpose!

Then she sees the daggers still in his hands: ‘Why did you bring these daggers from the place? / They must lie there’. He must take them back and smear the grooms with blood. He refuses: ‘I'll go no more. / I am afraid to think what I have done. / Look on 't again I dare not.’ Her answer is a sneer and an order:

A painted devil

She takes the daggers herself. The sleeping and the dead, she tells him, are only pictures, and only a child's eye ‘fears a painted devil’. If Duncan still bleeds, she will ‘gild the faces of the grooms’ with it, so the guilt looks theirs.

Analysis: The soldier cannot face one body; the wife who could not kill Duncan goes back to it.

Whence is that knocking?

Alone, Macbeth hears knocking at the castle gate. ‘Whence is that knocking? / How is 't with me when every noise appalls me?’ He looks down at his hands as if they belonged to a stranger, ‘What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.’ Then, with the knocking still going, he asks the question at the heart of the scene.

Analysis: At the knock, his first thought is not escape but his own hands.

A heart so white

Lady Macbeth returns, her hands now as bloody as his, and says she would be ashamed to wear ‘a heart so white’. To her, red hands are a badge and a pale heart is the shame. Another knock, at the south entry. She wants them in their bedroom before anyone comes, and she has a much smaller answer to his ocean:

Wake Duncan

The knocking goes on. She tells him to ‘get on your nightgown’, so that, if called, they will look as if they have been asleep, and not to be lost in his thoughts. His answer splits him in two: ‘To know my deed 'twere best not know myself.’ As she pulls him away, he speaks to the knocker he cannot see, ‘Wake Duncan with thy knocking. I would thou couldst.’

Analysis: The scene ends on regret, not triumph: his last wish is to undo it.

Hell's doorman

The knocking from 2.2 goes on. A Porter, still drunk from the night's party, stumbles to the gate and turns the noise into a comic routine: ‘If a man were porter of hell gate, he should have old turning the key’. He welcomes the damned one by one with ‘Knock, knock, knock! Who's there, i' th' name of Beelzebub?’ First comes a greedy farmer. Then, knocking 'in th' other devil's name', a sinner the first audience would have recognised from the news:

Too cold for hell

Next comes an English tailor caught stealing cloth, and then the Porter tires of the game: ‘this place is too cold for hell’. At last he opens the gate, and asks the visitors for a tip: 'I pray you, remember the porter.'

Analysis: Each sinner is a small Macbeth, ruined by greedy hope, double-talk or theft.

A rough night

Macduff and Lennox have come to wake the King. Asked why he lay in bed so late, the Porter blames drink, which ‘may be said to be an equivocator with lechery’. Macbeth greets the visitors with easy courtesy, ‘The labor we delight in physics pain’, and shows Macduff the King's door. While Macduff goes in, Lennox passes the time describing the night they have all just lived through:

Four words

Macbeth, who spent that night killing his King, answers in four words: ‘'Twas a rough night.’ Then Macduff stumbles out of the chamber, and his language breaks: ‘O horror, horror, horror! / Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!’ When the words do come, they are holy ones:

The great doom's image

Macduff will not describe it. He sends Macbeth and Lennox in to look, ‘Approach the chamber and destroy your sight / With a new Gorgon’, and has the alarm bell rung to wake the castle: ‘Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit’. Lady Macbeth hurries in, playing the startled hostess woken by the din: ‘What's the business, / That such a hideous trumpet calls to parley / The sleepers of the house?’ Macduff tries to shield her: ‘'Tis not for you to hear what I can speak’. But when he tells Banquo that the King is murdered, she answers first: ‘Woe, alas! / What, in our house?’ She thinks of the house, not the King, and Banquo quietly corrects her: ‘Too cruel anywhere.’ Now Macbeth comes back from the chamber. He does not stammer like Macduff. He has a speech ready:

Killing the witnesses

Malcolm and Donalbain arrive, and Macbeth breaks the news with a flourish: ‘The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood / Is stopped’. Lennox reports that the grooms seem guilty: ‘Their hands and faces were all badged with blood’. Then Macbeth confesses something that was never in the plan: ‘O, yet I do repent me of my fury, / That I did kill them.’ Macduff asks the obvious question, 'Wherefore did you so?', and Macbeth claims his love outran ‘the pauser, reason’. And, as if to prove it, he paints the scene in the King's chamber:

Help me hence

He dresses the dead grooms in the same rich language, their daggers ‘Unmannerly breeched with gore’, and ends on a question that dares anyone to blame him: ‘Who could refrain / That had a heart to love, and in that heart / Courage to make 's love known?’ The speech has grown dangerously ornate, and Lady Macbeth cries out and collapses: ‘Help me hence, ho!’ Every eye turns to her.

Daggers in men's smiles

Under cover of the commotion, the King's sons whisper together. Why stay silent, Malcolm asks, when the matter concerns them most? Donalbain's answer is fear: ‘What should be spoken here, where our fate, / Hid in an auger hole, may rush and seize us? / Let's away. Our tears are not yet brewed.’ As Lady Macbeth is helped out, Banquo swears to hunt the hidden traitor: ‘In the great hand of God I stand’. Everyone agrees, and Macbeth, quick to lead, sends them off to ‘put on manly readiness’. Left alone, the sons refuse to join the mourning. Malcolm sees through it: ‘To show an unfelt sorrow is an office / Which the false man does easy’. He will flee to England, Donalbain to Ireland, and Donalbain explains why:

No mercy left

Malcolm agrees that the killer has not finished, and that the King's heirs may be the next target: ‘This murderous shaft that's shot / Hath not yet lighted, and our safest way / Is to avoid the aim. … There's warrant in that theft / Which steals itself when there's no mercy left.’ They slip away at once, without goodbyes. It is the safest choice and the most suspicious one: by the next scene, their flight has made them the suspects.

Nothing like it in seventy years

Outside the castle, Ross walks and talks with an Old Man who has lived a full seventy years and seen dreadful things, yet nothing to match ‘this sore night’. Ross points to the sky: ‘the heavens, as troubled with man's act, / Threatens his bloody stage’. It should be morning, and it is not:

Even like the deed

Has evil seized the day, Ross wonders, or is goodness hiding its face: ‘Is 't night's predominance or the day's shame’? The Old Man draws the link the whole scene turns on: ‘'Tis unnatural, / Even like the deed that's done.’ Then he adds a portent of his own, from last Tuesday, and it is the murder replayed among birds:

Horses, grooms and runaway sons

Ross caps it: Duncan's own horses, the finest in his stables, ‘Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out, / Contending 'gainst obedience’. The Old Man has heard worse: ‘'Tis said they eat each other.’ Ross swears he watched it happen. Then Macduff arrives. Asked how the world goes, he answers with a grim question of his own, 'Why, see you not?', and gives them the official story. Who killed the King? ‘Those that Macbeth hath slain.’ The grooms, he means, and they were bribed: Malcolm and Donalbain have fled, which ‘puts upon them / Suspicion of the deed’. Ross, taking the story at face value, is appalled that sons would kill a father, and works out where the crown must go:

Scone or Fife

Macduff reports that the crown has passed already: ‘He is already named and gone to Scone / To be invested.’ Duncan's body has gone to Colmekill, the holy island where Scotland's kings are buried. Ross will ride to the coronation. Macduff will not: ‘No, cousin, I'll to Fife.’ His goodbye to Ross carries a doubt he does not say outright.

Analysis: The first open refusal of Macbeth's reign is five polite words long.

Friends of foes

As Ross leaves for Scone and Macduff for Fife, the Old Man sends them off with a blessing on all ‘That would make good of bad and friends of foes’. In a country where daggers now hide in smiles, nobody can tell a friend from a foe, let alone make one of the other.

A few words with the King

The palace at Forres, a few hours before the royal feast. Lady Macbeth's first question is about Banquo ('Is Banquo gone from court?'). He is away, and back tonight. Then she sends a servant with a formal request: ‘Say to the King I would attend his leisure / For a few words’. In 1.5 she was his 'dearest partner of greatness'; now she must make an appointment to see her own husband. The servant goes, and for four lines she is alone with the truth about the crown:

What's done is done

Macbeth comes in alone, and at once her mask is back on. She scolds him for brooding: ‘why do you keep alone, / Of sorriest fancies your companions making’? Such thoughts, she says, should have died with the men they are about. Her cure is brisk: ‘Things without all remedy / Should be without regard. What's done is done.’ Macbeth does not agree that anything is finished. Banquo and Fleance still live, so the crown is not safe:

Better be with the dead

The wound will close, and the snake will bite again. She wants the past shut; he knows the danger is still alive, and where she has just hidden her despair, he lets his pour out. Rather than live like this, he would see the universe come apart, ‘let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer’, sooner than go on eating in fear and sleeping with nightmares. Then comes a murderer's envy of his victim:

He sleeps well

Duncan, at least, is out of reach: ‘Duncan is in his grave. / After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.’ No blade, no poison, no ‘Malice domestic, foreign levy’ can hurt him now.

Analysis: They killed Duncan to win peace of mind, and only Duncan got it. Without knowing, Macbeth says to her face the thought she kept to herself.

Faces as masks

She does not admit that she feels the same. Instead she steers him towards the feast: ‘Sleek o'er your rugged looks. Be bright and jovial / Among your guests tonight’. He promises, calls her 'love', and asks her to single out one guest for honour: ‘Let your remembrance / Apply to Banquo’. Then he admits what kingship costs them. They are 'unsafe', and must go on flattering and ‘make our faces vizards to our hearts’. She tells him to stop ('You must leave this'), and the fear he has been circling breaks out of him:

A deed of dreadful note

She answers with a line that may be a hint: ‘But in them nature's copy's not eterne.’ Banquo and his son will not live forever. Macbeth seizes on it: ‘There's comfort yet; they are assailable.’ He tells her to be cheerful, then paints the dusk with bats, beetles and the witch-goddess Hecate: before night falls, ‘there shall be done / A deed of dreadful note’. The woman who once said 'Leave all the rest to me' has to ask: ‘What's to be done?’ His answer shuts her out:

Come, seeling night

She has no time to answer. He turns away from his wife, as if she were no longer there, and calls instead on the darkness that will hide the murder:

Light thickens

Outside, dusk falls as he speaks: ‘Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to th' rooky wood’. He sees her amazement and tells her to ‘hold thee still’, then gives her a rule instead of an explanation: ‘Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.’ Then, 'So prithee go with me.' They leave together, and only one of them knows what the night will bring.

A third man at dusk

Near the palace gate, the two killers Macbeth hired in 3.1 find a stranger has joined them: ‘But who did bid thee join with us?’ The stranger's one-word answer is 'Macbeth.' While they wait, the First Murderer watches the last of the daylight, ‘The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day’, the hour when late travellers hurry for shelter.

Rain tonight

Hoofbeats, then a voice calling for a light. Banquo and Fleance walk the last stretch to the gate with a torch, as on the night Duncan died (2.1). Banquo glances at the sky: ‘It will be rain tonight.’ The First Murderer answers with a brutal pun, ‘Let it come down!’ and all three attack. Banquo's last breath goes to his son:

Half the job

The torch goes out and Fleance runs for his life into the dark. ‘Who did strike out the light?’ the Third Murderer demands. He counts: ‘There's but one down. The son is fled.’ The Second admits failure: ‘We have lost best half of our affair.’ Leaving Banquo dead on the road, they slip away to tell Macbeth how much is done: half.

A feast in perfect order

Macbeth seats his lords by rank, ‘You know your own degrees; sit down’, and plays the humble host. Promising a toast round the table, he spots a man at the door and slips across: ‘There's blood upon thy face.’ It is Banquo's. His throat is cut. Macbeth hails the killer as ‘the best o' th' cutthroats’, and if the same man killed Fleance too, he is ‘the nonpareil’. Then the news that spoils everything: ‘Most royal sir, Fleance is 'scaped.’ Aside, the King counts the cost:

Safe in a ditch

'But Banquo's safe?' The murderer answers in the King's own word: ‘Safe in a ditch he bides, / With twenty trenchèd gashes on his head’. Father and son become snakes: ‘There the grown serpent lies’, but the young one that fled will breed venom in time. They will talk again tomorrow, and the murderer goes.

Analysis: Murder reaches the feast before the Ghost does: a bloody face at the door, a corpse in a ditch, and a host who calls it safe.

The table's full

Lady Macbeth calls him back to his guests: without ceremony, a feast is just eating. On that word the Ghost of Banquo enters and sits in Macbeth's place. Macbeth, not yet looking, regrets the one absence: ‘Here had we now our country's honor roofed, / Were the graced person of our Banquo present’, and hopes Banquo is only rude, not hurt. Ross invites the King to sit. ‘The table's full.’ Lennox points to the empty place. Macbeth looks, sees who is in it, and demands, 'Which of you have done this?' Then, to the Ghost itself:

Are you a man?

Ross tells the lords to rise. Lady Macbeth overrules him with a quick lie, ‘My lord is often thus / And hath been from his youth’, and tells them to eat and pay him no attention. Then she draws her husband aside and, low, so that the guests cannot hear, asks him:

The very painting of your fear

Bold enough, he answers, to look on what would frighten the devil. She scoffs that this is fear painting pictures, like ‘the air-drawn dagger’ that led him to Duncan. His terror, she jeers, suits ‘A woman's story at a winter's fire’, and he is staring at a stool.

The dead rise again

The Ghost nods at him and vanishes. ‘What, quite unmanned in folly?’ she hisses. 'If I stand here, I saw him,' he insists. Murdered men used to stay dead, he complains; now they rise with twenty wounds on their heads and ‘push us from our stools’. Reminded of his guests, he blames 'a strange infirmity' and toasts the absent Banquo: ‘Would he were here!’ Behind him, the Ghost has already returned.

Take any shape but that

This time Macbeth faces it: ‘Avaunt, and quit my sight!’ It is a corpse, he insists, its blood cold and its eyes blind, yet it glares at him. Lady Macbeth begs the peers to take it as 'a thing of custom'. He squares up to the Ghost:

A man again

Or let Banquo live again and dare him to the desert with a sword. If he trembles then, call him ‘The baby of a girl’. The Ghost goes, and he straightens: ‘Why so, being gone, / I am a man again’.

Most admired disorder

His wife surveys the wreck: he has broken up the feast with ‘most admired disorder’. Macbeth, a stranger to himself, turns to the guests: how can they see such sights, he asks, ‘And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks / When mine is blanched with fear’? 'What sights, my lord?' asks Ross. Before the King can answer, Lady Macbeth clears the hall: ‘Stand not upon the order of your going, / But go at once.’ The Macbeths are left alone:

By the worst means

Nature, he fears, will give him away, as it has exposed murderers before: ‘Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak’. His mind jumps to Macduff, who would not come when bidden. Macbeth heard it only by the way, but he keeps a spy in every noble's house: ‘I keep a servant fee'd’. Tomorrow he will seek out the Witches, determined to know ‘By the worst means the worst’. There is no going back:

Young in deed

He has more plans, and will act before he thinks: ‘Strange things I have in head that will to hand, / Which must be acted ere they may be scanned.’ Lady Macbeth has no scheme to offer, only a diagnosis: ‘You lack the season of all natures, sleep.’ He takes her advice, and explains the whole night away as a beginner's nerves:

The queen of witches

Macbeth means to seek the Witches out. Before he can, they meet a new figure on the thundering heath: Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, whom Macbeth has already named twice. She is furious. How did the Witches dare ‘To trade and traffic with Macbeth / In riddles and affairs of death’ without ‘The close contriver of all harms’? Worse, it was all for ‘a wayward son, / Spiteful and wrathful’, who wants what they give and cares nothing for them.

Analysis: Even the powers of darkness say Macbeth is using them.

A drop from the moon

To make amends they must meet her at the pit of Acheron, a way down to the underworld, because ‘Thither he / Will come to know his destiny’. Hecate will catch ‘a vap'rous drop profound’ from the corner of the moon and distil it into ‘artificial sprites’ whose illusions will lead him to ruin. The aim is not terror but confidence: ‘He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear / His hopes 'bove wisdom, grace, and fear.’ Then the moral of her plan:

Things strangely borne

Lennox watched the King rave at an empty stool. Now, alone with an unnamed Lord, he talks like a man who knows the walls have ears: ‘Only I say / Things have been strangely borne’. Then the facts, each with a sting in its tail, starting with Duncan:

The same straight face

Next comes Banquo's death, told with the same straight face. His son ran away, so, by the court's own logic, you may as well blame the boy:

Was not that nobly done?

The same mock logic covers Duncan's sons. Who could fail to see ‘how monstrous / It was for Malcolm and for Donalbain / To kill their gracious father’? And how it grieved Macbeth! ‘Did he not straight / In pious rage the two delinquents tear’, the drunken grooms, before they could speak? Wise, too: their denials would have angered anyone. The verdict: ‘He has borne all things well’. Then the mask slips: had Macbeth caught the princes (heaven forbid, Lennox adds), they would learn ‘What 'twere to kill a father’.

The word nobody has said

Lennox has said as much as he dares. He catches himself with 'But peace', then asks after the one lord who has openly defied the King, and as he does so a word slips out that nobody in the play has yet used of Macbeth:

A holy king in England

The Lord takes up Lennox's word at once. Malcolm, from whom ‘this tyrant holds the due of birth’, is honoured by England's saintly King Edward, and Macduff has gone ‘to pray the holy king upon his aid’. With an army and God's blessing, Scotland could live normally again:

Sir, not I

The King, enraged, prepares for war. He summoned Macduff and got a flat refusal, ‘Sir, not I’, and his messenger turned his back with a hum, as if to say Macduff would regret it. Lennox hopes Macduff keeps his distance. Then, with no irony left in his voice, he prays aloud:

I'll send my prayers

The Lord's reply ends the scene and the act: ‘I'll send my prayers with him.’ An act that opened with Banquo keeping his suspicion to himself ends with two lords sharing theirs, and praying openly against the King.

Analysis: Three ways to resist a tyrant, all in one scene: Macduff's blunt refusal, Lennox's careful irony, and at last open prayer.

A husband gone

At Fife, Macduff's wife demands to know why her husband has fled to England. Her cousin Ross urges patience. 'He had none,' she snaps: ‘His flight was madness. When our actions do not, / Our fears do make us traitors.’ Under a tyrant, she means, running away looks like a confession. Wisdom, Ross suggests? Wisdom, to leave his wife and babes in a place he himself dare not stay? She reaches for a hedgerow image:

Cruel are the times

Her verdict: ‘All is the fear, and nothing is the love’. Ross calls Macduff noble and wise, then dares say no more. He can only describe a country where ‘we are traitors / And do not know ourselves’, tossed on a wild sea of rumour. Offering the thin hope that ‘Things at the worst will cease or else climb upward’, he blesses the boy. His mother answers: ‘Fathered he is, and yet he's fatherless.’ Ross hurries out before his tears shame him.

Poor bird

Alone with her son, she teases him: his father is dead, so how will he live? ‘As birds do, mother.’ A bird like him, she jokes, would never fear ‘the net nor lime, / The pitfall nor the gin’. The game turns to traitors. Was his father one? 'Ay, that he was.' A traitor, she explains, is ‘one that swears and lies’, and the honest men must hang them all. The boy does the sums: ‘there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them’. And he has seen through her teasing all along: 'If he were dead, you'd weep for him.'

Nowhere to fly

A stranger rushes in, risking his life to warn her: ‘Be not found here. Hence with your little ones!’ He dares not stay a moment longer, and is gone. Alone with her son, she weighs the warning, and her own innocence:

What are these faces?

Murderers fill the room. Where is her husband? Having called him a traitor herself, she now shields him: ‘I hope in no place so unsanctified / Where such as thou mayst find him.’ One calls Macduff a traitor, and the boy shouts back: ‘Thou liest, thou shag-eared villain!’ The answer is a sneer and a knife:

Run away

Dying, the child thinks only of his mother: ‘He has killed me, mother. / Run away, I pray you.’ She runs, crying 'Murder!', and the killers follow, carrying the boy's body. Her death happens offstage; the next we hear of it, Ross is trying not to tell her husband.

Weep or fight

Outside holy King Edward's palace, two Scottish exiles meet. Malcolm suggests they find a lonely spot and ‘Weep our sad bosoms empty’; Macduff would rather fight, because at home ‘Each new morn / New widows howl, new orphans cry’. Malcolm is wary. The tyrant, he reminds Macduff, ‘Was once thought honest’, and Macduff was his friend. Perhaps he has come to sell Malcolm to Macbeth. 'I am not treacherous,' Macduff protests. 'But Macbeth is,' Malcolm replies, and a good face proves nothing either way:

Bleed, bleed, poor country

Then the question that stings: ‘Why in that rawness left you wife and child’? Macduff hears himself suspected of treachery and gives up: ‘Bleed, bleed, poor country!’ As he turns to go, Malcolm calls him back. He feels the wound too, ‘It weeps, it bleeds’, and England has promised him soldiers. But the next king, he warns, would be worse than Macbeth: himself.

Malcolm paints himself black

It is a test, though Macduff cannot know it. His vices, Malcolm claims, are so rooted that, once revealed, ‘black Macbeth / Will seem as pure as snow’. Macduff will not have it: hell holds no ‘devil more damned / In evils to top Macbeth’. Malcolm agrees that Macbeth is ‘bloody, / Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful’, then swears his own lust and greed have no bottom. Macduff excuses both. So Malcolm plays his last card: he has none of the virtues a king needs, and he names them all.

Analysis: The test is deception used for good: unlike the Witches' equivocation, which misleads with the truth, Malcolm lies to reach it.

Not fit to live

Given power, he adds, he would ‘Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell’, and he puts the question plainly: 'If such a one be fit to govern, speak.' This time Macduff cannot forgive:

A noble passion

It is the answer Malcolm wanted: loyalty to Scotland, not to whoever inherits it. Won over by this 'noble passion', Malcolm takes back every vice (his only lie, he says, was the one about himself) and reveals that old Siward and ten thousand English soldiers are already setting out. Macduff, so certain a moment ago, falls silent: such welcome and unwelcome things at once, he says, are hard to reconcile.

A king whose touch heals

A Doctor reports that the sick are waiting for King Edward: no medicine can cure them, but 'at his touch' they recover. Malcolm explains the disease, called 'the evil', and the cure: holy prayers and a gold coin hung round the neck. Edward will leave the gift to the kings who follow him, and ‘He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy’.

Analysis: Macbeth's hand is stained with blood; Edward's heals. One king's prophecy comes from heaven, the other's from a cauldron.

Stands Scotland where it did?

Ross arrives from Scotland, and Macduff asks the question every exile asks: 'Stands Scotland where it did?' Ross's answer is a portrait of a country living in terror:

Well at peace

There, Ross goes on, good men die 'before the flowers in their caps' can wilt. Macduff asks after his wife. 'Why, well.' His children? 'Well too.' The tyrant has not attacked their peace? ‘No, they were well at peace when I did leave 'em.’ Then he stalls.

At one fell swoop

At last it comes: ‘Your castle is surprised, your wife and babes / Savagely slaughtered’. Macduff pulls his hat over his face and says nothing, until Malcolm urges him to ‘Give sorrow words’. Macduff can only ask questions. His children too? 'Wife, children, servants,' Ross replies, 'all that could be found.' Malcolm offers comfort: ‘Let's make us med'cines of our great revenge / To cure this deadly grief.’ Macduff hardly hears. His answer is about a man with no children, and readers still argue over which man.

Analysis: We watched the attack begin in 4.2; here its cost is measured, first, in one listener's silence.

Dispute it like a man

The questions keep coming: ‘What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?’ Malcolm, meaning well, reaches for the play's oldest yardstick: ‘Dispute it like a man.’ Fight it, he means, rather than feel it. Lady Macbeth measured her husband the same way: ‘When you durst do it, then you were a man’. Macduff accepts the challenge, and rewrites it:

The night is long

Remembering his family, Macduff asks why heaven did nothing, then turns on himself: ‘Sinful Macduff, / They were all struck for thee!’ Malcolm answers: ‘Let grief / Convert to anger’. Macduff will not weep or boast; he prays to heaven for one thing: ‘Front to front / Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself’. Malcolm approves: ‘This tune goes manly.’ The army is ready: ‘Macbeth / Is ripe for shaking’. The act ends on a rhyming couplet and the play's first promise of morning:

The thanes change sides

Drums and banners. Four thanes who once served Macbeth march to join the English army, and Menteith brings the news: ‘The English power is near, led on by Malcolm, / His uncle Siward, and the good Macduff. / Revenges burn in them’. Angus names the meeting place: ‘Near Birnam Wood / Shall we well meet them.’ Lennox, at Macbeth's side in 4.1, has switched too, and knows who marches with the English: ‘Siward's son / And many unrough youths that even now / Protest their first of manhood’, beardless boys in their first fight. Caithness reports that 'the tyrant' is fortifying Dunsinane, and that ‘Some say he's mad; others that lesser hate him / Do call it valiant fury’.

Guilt, seen from outside

Angus pictures what Macbeth must be going through behind his castle walls, and reaches for an image the audience has already watched both Macbeths struggle with:

Nothing in love

Nothing is secret now: even minor lords speak of the murders openly as they march. Deserters leave Macbeth every minute, and the soldiers who stay ‘move only in command, / Nothing in love’. Then Angus finds the image the play has been building towards since Act 1:

Medicine for a sick country

Menteith thinks the madness is guilt, since ‘all that is within him does condemn / Itself for being there’. Caithness calls their rebellion true obedience and Malcolm the cure: ‘Meet we the med'cine of the sickly weal’. They pledge every drop of blood; Lennox caps the vow with a couplet: ‘To dew the sovereign flower and drown the weeds’. Then they march for Birnam.

Bring me no more reports

Dunsinane, with the English army closing in. Macbeth strides in with the Doctor and his attendants, already mid-argument: ‘Bring me no more reports. Let them fly all.’ Thane after thane is deserting, so he recites the apparitions' promises like a charm: ‘Till Birnam Wood remove to Dunsinane / I cannot taint with fear.’ As for the rightful heir, ‘What's the boy Malcolm? / Was he not born of woman?’ The spirits, he insists, have sworn that no man ‘born of woman’ can touch him, so let the ‘false thanes’ run to the English. He seals the boast with a neat rhyme: ‘The mind I sway by and the heart I bear / Shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear.’

Analysis: Every certainty he has is borrowed from the Witches, and he needs to hear it said out loud.

The cream-faced loon

A servant rushes in, pale with terror. Before the boy can speak, Macbeth curses him: ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon! / Where got'st thou that goose-look?’ The servant stammers 'There is ten thousand', and Macbeth sneers 'Geese, villain?' 'Soldiers, sir.' Instead of asking about the army, Macbeth keeps attacking the face that brings the news, telling the boy to ‘prick thy face and over-red thy fear’. Only then does he hear the answer: the English force. His last order is to take that face away.

Analysis: He cannot bear to look at fear, perhaps because it looks like him.

Sick at heart

The servant gone, the swagger drains away mid-sentence. ‘I am sick at heart / When I behold’, he begins, then breaks off to bellow for Seyton, his armour-bearer, as if he cannot bear to finish the thought. The battle, he knows, will ‘cheer me ever or disseat me now’: make him safe for good, or throw him from the throne. Then the raging king falls quiet and takes stock of his life:

Curses, not loud but deep

The speech runs on. He knows what old age ought to bring a king, and what it will bring him instead, and he lists both with a terrible clarity:

Your gracious pleasure

As if on cue, Seyton arrives with a perfect courtier's phrase, ‘What's your gracious pleasure?’ and confirms every report: the English army is coming. The weariness vanishes, and with the enemy not yet in sight, the soldier of Act 1 answers:

Hang those that talk of fear

Seyton protests that the armour is not needed yet: the enemy is still some way off. Macbeth will not wait. He wants it on now, and the orders tumble out in a breathless rush:

How does your patient?

Then, between orders, he turns to the Doctor who watched Lady Macbeth sleepwalk: ‘How does your patient, doctor?’ The Doctor chooses his words carefully. She is not ill in body, but ‘troubled with thick-coming fancies / That keep her from her rest’. 'Cure her of that,' Macbeth orders, and the order turns into a plea:

Throw physic to the dogs

The Doctor will not pretend: ‘Therein the patient / Must minister to himself.’ It is the one cure on offer, and Macbeth flings it away: ‘Throw physic to the dogs. I'll none of it.’ He turns back to his armour (‘Come, put mine armor on’) and, between orders to Seyton, lets slip the truth he opened the scene denying: ‘Doctor, the thanes fly from me.’

Analysis: Offered the only cure there is, looking into himself, he chooses armour instead.

Find her disease

Half-armed, he turns doctor himself. If the physician could ‘cast / The water of my land, find her disease’ and purge Scotland back to health, he would applaud until the echo applauded back. Mid-sentence he snaps at the men arming him, ‘Pull 't off, I say’, then wonders what ‘rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug’ could flush out the English. He leaves for battle clinging to the words he came in with: ‘I will not be afraid of death and bane / Till Birnam Forest come to Dunsinane.’ Aside, the Doctor has the last word: ‘Were I from Dunsinane away and clear, / Profit again should hardly draw me here.’

Analysis: The king wants his country cured, and the audience can see that the disease is standing in front of the Doctor.

The wood ahead

Malcolm, Macduff, old Siward and his son, and the Scottish thanes who have abandoned Macbeth march as one army. Malcolm's first words hope for something small and precious: ‘the days are near at hand / That chambers will be safe’. Nobody has slept safely since Duncan was killed in his bed. Siward, the English general, asks what wood lies ahead, and Menteith tells him: ‘The Wood of Birnam.’ The audience has heard that name before, in the apparition's promise. Malcolm never heard the prophecy, and gives a soldier's order:

Hearts absent

Siward's news is that ‘the confident tyrant / Keeps still in Dunsinane’, ready to sit out a siege. Malcolm knows why he hides: ‘none serve with him but constrainèd things / Whose hearts are absent too’. Macduff cuts the hopeful talk short: judge the outcome when it comes, and ‘put we on / Industrious soldiership’. Siward agrees in a rhyming couplet, ‘certain issue strokes must arbitrate’, and the army marches, every man hidden behind a branch.

Banners on the walls

Lookouts keep crying that the enemy is coming. Macbeth answers with bravado: he hangs his colours on the battlements and boasts that ‘Our castle's strength / Will laugh a siege to scorn’: hunger and fever can do the rest. But the boast has a crack in it. The hero who charged the rebels in 1.2 is hiding behind walls, because many of his soldiers have deserted. Without them, he says, he would have fought ‘beard to beard’.

A cry in the castle

A scream rings out somewhere inside. Macbeth asks what it is, and Seyton answers: ‘It is the cry of women, my good lord.’ He goes to find out why, and Macbeth waits for the old shiver of dread. This is the man who jumped at every knock after Duncan's murder and saw a ghost at his own feast. The shiver never comes:

Supped full with horrors

He remembers, almost fondly, how easily he used to frighten, as if describing a stranger. Once ‘my senses would have cooled / To hear a night-shriek’, and a grisly tale made his hair stand up as though it were alive. Not any more. He has lived on horror for so long that it has become his daily food: ‘I have supped full with horrors’.

Analysis: What sounds like courage may be emptiness: the fear that acted as his conscience has gone.

Six words

Seyton returns with the reason for the cry: ‘The Queen, my lord, is dead.’ The woman who planned Duncan's murder, summoned spirits and sleepwalked through her guilt dies offstage, reported in six words. We never see how. Macbeth's reply is short, and audiences have argued over it ever since:

Tomorrow and tomorrow

'Hereafter' sets him thinking about time, the thing the Macbeths once tried to seize. The Witches promised a future; his wife felt it 'in the instant'. Now that future has come, and it is empty. What follows is the most famous speech in the play. It never mentions her, or perhaps it is about nothing else. It begins with one word, three times:

Out, brief candle

Every yesterday, he goes on, has only lit a fool's way to the grave, and he turns on the little flame of life itself: ‘Out, out, brief candle!’ The last candle we saw was the taper Lady Macbeth carried in her sleep, the light she could not live without. Then the image shifts again, to the very stage the audience is watching:

A tale told by an idiot

The actor's hour ends and he is forgotten, and the speech reaches its last and bleakest image. Life is no longer even a bad performance, only a story with no point at all:

A moving grove

A Messenger bursts in, and the man who has just called life a tale demands another: ‘thy story quickly’. The Messenger can barely say it: ‘I looked toward Birnam, and anon methought / The Wood began to move’. ‘Liar and slave!’ Macbeth roars, but the man stands firm, ‘I say, a moving grove’. Macbeth threatens to hang him alive, then turns the threat on himself: if it is true, ‘I care not if thou dost for me as much’.

Lies like truth

The certainty that has held him together since 4.1 starts to slip. He could not be beaten, the apparition swore, until Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane, which sounded like 'never'. Now a wood is coming, and he sees how the words were built. Banquo warned in 1.3 that evil tells truths to betray us; far too late, Macbeth says it himself:

Die in armour

He recites the promise as if checking the small print, ‘and now a wood / Comes toward Dunsinane’, and sees there is ‘nor flying hence nor tarrying here’. Despair spreads until he is ‘aweary of the sun’ and wants the whole world to end with him. Yet his last words in the scene are a soldier's. He orders the alarm bell rung and marches out: ‘At least we'll die with harness on our back’.

Analysis: No hope is left, only the choice of how to die, and he makes it as a soldier.

The wood arrives

A forest is on the move. Malcolm's army has marched from Birnam behind the branches he ordered cut in 5.4, and Macbeth's lookout has just reported 'a moving grove'. The apparition's promise has come true: Birnam Wood has come to Dunsinane. Beneath the castle walls the hiding has done its work, and now Malcolm turns the forest back into men:

Every trumpet

Then he hands out the fighting like a king already. Siward and his son will ‘Lead our first battle’; Malcolm and Macduff will do the rest, ‘According to our order’. Siward answers with a couplet of plain soldier's courage: ‘Do we but find the tyrant's power tonight, / Let us be beaten if we cannot fight.’ Macduff, hunting only one man, rhymes too, calling for every trumpet, ‘Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death’. The alarums sound, and the battle begins.

Analysis: No speeches, just orders: order is back before the fighting starts.

Tied to the stake

Birnam Wood has come to Dunsinane, and Macbeth has left the safety of his walls to fight in the open. The battle is turning against him. Alone on the field, the enemy closing in on every side and the din of fighting all around, he reaches for an image from a blood sport that Shakespeare's audience paid good money to watch:

My name's Macbeth

One promise still steadies him: ‘What's he / That was not born of woman?’ Young Siward, the English general's son, blocks his way and demands a name. Told he will ‘be afraid to hear it’, the boy stands firm, so Macbeth gives it: ‘My name's Macbeth.’ ‘The devil himself’, the boy replies, could not speak a name more hateful. Macbeth adds, ‘nor more fearful’.