Shakespeare · Tragedies

Macbeth

c. 1606

Tragedy — from Holinshed's Chronicles

The shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies, written early in the reign of James I, who traced his line from Banquo. Three witches hail a victorious Scottish general as a future king; goaded by his wife, he murders Duncan in his bed and seizes the crown, then kills again to keep it, until conscience, sleeplessness and a wood that walks destroy them both. Its themes of equivocation, witchcraft and regicide answer directly to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and to James's own book Daemonologie.

How to spot them

▸A blasted heath in Scotland; three witches round a cauldron
▸Duncan murdered in his bed at Inverness, followed by a knocking at the gate
▸Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, at around 2,100 lines
▸Actors will not speak its name inside a theatre, calling it 'the Scottish play'
▸A prophecy that no man of woman born can harm him, and that a wood must march on his castle

Scenes, characters & lines

'Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?'

The hallucinated dagger leading him to Duncan's chamber

'Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble'

The witches' brew, with eye of newt and toe of frog

'Out, damned spot! out, I say!'

The sleepwalking scene, watched by a doctor and a gentlewoman

'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow'

Life as a tale 'told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'

'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand'

The guilt that will not wash off

A wood is prophesied to march on a castle — and does, as an army carries branches before it

Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane

A murdered general's ghost takes his seat at the banquet, visible to one man only

Banquo, whose descendants the witches promise will be kings

A drunken Porter imagines himself keeping the gate of hell, and lets in an equivocator

A topical joke at the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation aired at the Gunpowder Plot trials

Key ideas

The prophecies are true in the letter and ruinous in the meaning — the play's own word for this is 'equivocation'
Banquo is written as a virtuous ancestor for the Stuart line, flattering James I, who claimed descent from him

Quick-fire facts

•The source is Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587), though the historical Mac Bethad ruled Scotland for seventeen fairly settled years
•At roughly 2,100 lines it is the shortest of the tragedies, less than half the length of Hamlet
•The first recorded performance was at the Globe in April 1611, described in the notebook of the astrologer Simon Forman
•The Hecate scenes and two songs are generally thought to be additions by Thomas Middleton, borrowed from his play The Witch
•Theatrical superstition forbids naming the play inside a theatre; it is called 'the Scottish play'
•Phrases it gave English include 'the be-all and the end-all', 'the milk of human kindness', 'one fell swoop' and 'sound and fury'
•Macduff was 'from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd', and so is not, in the prophecy's terms, born of woman
•Verdi's opera Macbeth (1847, revised 1865) was his first Shakespeare setting; Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957) relocates the story to feudal Japan
•Orson Welles directed an all-Black 'Voodoo Macbeth', set in Haiti, for the Federal Theatre Project in Harlem in 1936

Drill it — 10 cards

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Sources

Folger Shakespeare Library — Macbeth
A. R. Braunmuller (ed.) — Macbeth (The New Cambridge Shakespeare)