book review macbeth

Book Review: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Title: Macbeth Author: William Shakespeare Genre: Classic | Play Format : Paperback Length : 127 pages Publisher : Oxford University Press Publication Date: 1606 My Rating: ★★★ (3 stars) Goodreads | Storygraph

One night on the heath, the brave and respected general Macbeth encounters three witches who foretell that he will become king of Scotland. At first sceptical, he’s urged on by the ruthless, single-minded ambitions of Lady Macbeth, who suffers none of her husband’s doubt. But seeing the prophecy through to the bloody end leads them both spiralling into paranoia, tyranny, madness, and murder. This shocking tragedy – a violent caution to those seeking power for its own sake – is, to this day, one of Shakespeare’s most popular and influential masterpieces.

Oh Macbeth, the play I had to study in Secondary school. I haven’t read this play since those days and this month seemed to be a month of revisiting books, I read a long time ago.

Macbeth is a play about a nobleman who enters the path of evil and makes the ultimate decision to murder the king. This is turn begins a vicious circle of crime for which he cannot shake. He can’t wash the blood off his murderous greedy hands.

I enjoyed the inclusion of witchcraft, ghosts and destiny. We get to see Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness, and how Macbeth is both a hero and a villain. This story isn’t black and white, good vs evil and that made the play more interesting to me.

This play isn’t one of my favourites by Shakespeare, but I did like revisiting it. Maybe one day I’ll be able to see it on stage.

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BOOK REVIEW: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

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Macbeth is the tale of how a little nudge can send an ambitious man on a catastrophic and murderous course. Three witches tell Macbeth, a victorious military commander, that he will be king. With this tidbit of information, the seed of ambition in Macbeth sprouts. He begins to think about what he must do to make the witches’ prophecy come true. The sprout is watered and nurtured by Lady Macbeth, his wife, who encourages her husband to take an active approach.

When the king, Duncan, comes to visit to bestow an additional title on Macbeth for service well rendered, the opportunity presents itself. Macbeth kills the king, making it look like Duncan’s own servants did it. From that point on the murder train starts picking up steam — though Macbeth outsources the rest of the dirty work. The murder that most devastates Macbeth is that of Banquo, who was a close friend and confidant, but whom a paranoid Macbeth felt needed to be killed. (Banquo was present when Macbeth met the witches, and thus he knew too much for his own good.) Banquo’s murder triggers a nervous breakdown in Macbeth, who sees his old friend’s ghost at a dinner party. The vilest of the murders that Macbeth is responsible for are those of the wife and children of Macduff. Macduff is competitor for the crown, and, while Macduff isn’t home to be assassinated, all his potential heirs [and the wifely potential to make new ones] are executed.

Macbeth is joined in madness by his wife, who famously can’t seem to get a spot of blood off her hands and — ultimately — commits suicide. Besides Macbeth’s madness-skewed worldview, he becomes foolhardy because the witches present him with another prophesy, that no person born of a woman can defeat Macbeth. This seems pretty iron-clad. Macbeth brandishes this prophecy as a weapon along side his sword. It seems to be working out for him, too, until he tees up for battle with Macduff – the same Macduff whose wife and children Macbeth had murdered, and who – apparently – was delivered by caesarian section.

This is said to be the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. I didn’t count lines, but it certainly seems right – the play reads very quickly. Despite being short, it does include its share of great Shakespearean language. It may not be a quotable as (the much longer) “Hamlet,” but it has comparable moments. Most famously in what is called the “To morrow and To morrow and To morrow” soliloquy that gives us these gems about the nature of life:

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”

I’d highly recommend this play. In fact, it’s probably one of the better entry points into Shakespeare because it’s short, not a complex story – though a rich one, and is one of the more familiar works. [However, chronologically, it is the sixth of Shakespeare’s ten tragedies.]

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5 thoughts on “ BOOK REVIEW: Macbeth by William Shakespeare ”

Thanks for your compelling review. I read Macbeth in high school, but I think I might look it up again.

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Definitely worth the time.

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Interesting review

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 0 )

Macbeth . . . is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other. There is nothing but what has a violent end or violent beginnings. The lights and shades are laid on with a determined hand; the transitions from triumph to despair, from the height of terror to the repose of death, are sudden and startling; every passion brings in its fellow-contrary, and the thoughts pitch and jostle against each other as in the dark. The whole play is an unruly chaos of strange and forbidden things, where the ground rocks under our feet. Shakespear’s genius here took its full swing, and trod upon the farthest bounds of nature and passion.

—William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

Macbeth completes William Shakespeare’s great tragic quartet while expanding, echoing, and altering key elements of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear into one of the most terrifying stage experiences. Like Hamlet, Macbeth treats the consequences of regicide, but from the perspective of the usurpers, not the dispossessed. Like Othello, Macbeth centers its intrigue on the intimate relations of husband and wife. Like Lear, Macbeth explores female villainy, creating in Lady Macbeth one of Shakespeare’s most complex, powerful, and frightening woman characters. Different from Hamlet and Othello, in which the tragic action is reserved for their climaxes and an emphasis on cause over effect, Macbeth, like Lear, locates the tragic tipping point at the play’s outset to concentrate on inexorable consequences. Like Othello, Macbeth, Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, achieves an almost unbearable intensity by eliminating subplots, inessential characters, and tonal shifts to focus almost exclusively on the crime’s devastating impact on husband and wife.

What is singular about Macbeth, compared to the other three great Shakespearean tragedies, is its villain-hero. If Hamlet mainly executes rather than murders, if Othello is “more sinned against than sinning,” and if Lear is “a very foolish fond old man” buffeted by surrounding evil, Macbeth knowingly chooses evil and becomes the bloodiest and most dehumanized of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists. Macbeth treats coldblooded, premeditated murder from the killer’s perspective, anticipating the psychological dissection and guilt-ridden expressionism that Feodor Dostoevsky will employ in Crime and Punishment . Critic Harold Bloom groups the protagonist as “the culminating figure in the sequence of what might be called Shakespeare’s Grand Negations: Richard III, Iago, Edmund, Macbeth.” With Macbeth, however, Shakespeare takes us further inside a villain’s mind and imagination, while daringly engaging our sympathy and identification with a murderer. “The problem Shakespeare gave himself in Macbeth was a tremendous one,” Critic Wayne C. Booth has stated.

Take a good man, a noble man, a man admired by all who know him—and destroy him, not only physically and emotionally, as the Greeks destroyed their heroes, but also morally and intellectually. As if this were not difficult enough as a dramatic hurdle, while transforming him into one of the most despicable mortals conceivable, maintain him as a tragic hero—that is, keep him so sympathetic that, when he comes to his death, the audience will pity rather than detest him and will be relieved to see him out of his misery rather than pleased to see him destroyed.

Unlike Richard III, Iago, or Edmund, Macbeth is less a virtuoso of villainy or an amoral nihilist than a man with a conscience who succumbs to evil and obliterates the humanity that he is compelled to suppress. Macbeth is Shakespeare’s greatest psychological portrait of self-destruction and the human capacity for evil seen from inside with an intimacy that horrifies because of our forced identification with Macbeth.

Although there is no certainty in dating the composition or the first performance of Macbeth, allusions in the play to contemporary events fix the likely date of both as 1606, shortly after the completion and debut of King Lear. Scholars have suggested that Macbeth was acted before James I at Hampton Court on August 7, 1606, during the royal visit of King Christian IV of Denmark and that it may have been especially written for a royal performance. Its subject, as well as its version of Scottish history, suggest an effort both to flatter and to avoid offending the Scottish king James. Macbeth is a chronicle play in which Shakespeare took his major plot elements from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587), but with significant modifications. The usurping Macbeth’s decade-long (and largely successful) reign is abbreviated with an emphasis on the internal and external destruction caused by Macbeth’s seizing the throne and trying to hold onto it. For the details of King Duncan’s death, Shakespeare used Holinshed’s account of the murder of an earlier king Duff by Donwald, who cast suspicion on drunken servants and whose ambitious wife played a significant role in the crime. Shakespeare also eliminated Banquo as the historical Macbeth’s co-conspirator in the murder to promote Banquo’s innocence and nobility in originating a kingly line from which James traced his legitimacy. Additional prominence is also given to the Weird Sisters, whom Holinshed only mentions in their initial meeting of Macbeth on the heath. The prophetic warning “beware Macduff” is attributed to “certain wizards in whose words Macbeth put great confidence.” The importance of the witches and the occult in Macbeth must have been meant to appeal to a king who produced a treatise, Daemonologie (1597), on witch-craft.

The uncanny sets the tone of moral ambiguity from the play’s outset as the three witches gather to encounter Macbeth “When the battle’s lost and won” in an inverted world in which “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Nothing in the play will be what it seems, and the tragedy results from the confusion and conflict between the fair—honor, nobility, duty—and the foul—rank ambition and bloody murder. Throughout the play nature reflects the disorder and violence of the action. Opening with thunder and lightning, the drama is set in a Scotland contending with the rebellion of the thane (feudal lord) of Cawdor, whom the fearless and courageous Macbeth has vanquished on the battlefield. The play, therefore, initially establishes Macbeth as a dutiful and trusted vassal of the king, Duncan of Scotland, deserving to be rewarded with the rebel’s title for restoring peace and order in the realm. “What he hath lost,” Duncan declares, “noble Macbeth hath won.” News of this honor reaches Macbeth through the witches, who greet him both as the thane of Cawdor and “king hereafter” and his comrade-in-arms Banquo as one who “shalt get kings, though thou be none.” Like the ghost in Hamlet , the Weird Sisters are left purposefully ambiguous and problematic. Are they agents of fate that determine Macbeth’s doom, predicting and even dictating the inevitable, or do they merely signal a latency in Macbeth’s ambitious character?

When he is greeted by the king’s emissaries as thane of Cawdor, Macbeth begins to wonder if the first predictions of the witches came true and what will come of the second of “king hereafter”:

This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is But what is not.

Macbeth will be defined by his “horrible imaginings,” by his considerable intellectual and imaginative capacity both to understand what he knows to be true and right and his opposed desires and their frightful consequences. Only Hamlet has as fully a developed interior life and dramatized mental processes as Macbeth in Shakespeare’s plays. Macbeth’s ambition is initially checked by his conscience and by his fear of the unforeseen consequence of violating moral laws. Shakespeare brilliantly dramatizes Macbeth’s mental conflict in near stream of consciousness, associational fashion:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly. If th’assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease, success: that but this blow Might be the be all and the end all, here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases We still have judgement here, that we but teach Bloody instructions which, being taught, return To plague th’inventor. This even-handed justice Commends th’ingredients of our poison’d chalice To our own lips. He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, Who should against his murderer shut the door, Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off, And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself And falls on the other.

Macbeth’s “spur” comes in the form of Lady Macbeth, who plays on her husband’s selfimage of courage and virility to commit to the murder. She also reveals her own shocking cancellation of gender imperatives in shaming her husband into action, in one of the most shocking passages of the play:

. . . I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this.

Horrified at his wife’s resolve and cold-blooded calculation in devising the plot, Macbeth urges his wife to “Bring forth menchildren only, / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males,” but commits “Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.”

With the decision to kill the king taken, the play accelerates unrelentingly through a succession of powerful scenes: Duncan’s and Banquo’s murders, the banquet scene in which Banquo’s ghost appears, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, and Macbeth’s final battle with Macduff, Thane of Fife. Duncan’s offstage murder contrasts Macbeth’s “horrible imaginings” concerning the implications and Lady Macbeth’s chilling practicality. Macbeth’s question, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” is answered by his wife: “A little water clears us of this deed; / How easy is it then!” The knocking at the door of the castle, ominously signaling the revelation of the crime, prompts the play’s one comic respite in the Porter’s drunken foolery that he is at the door of “Hell’s Gate” controlling the entrance of the damned. With the fl ight of Duncan’s sons, who fear for their lives, causing them to be suspected as murderers, Macbeth is named king, and the play’s focus shifts to Macbeth’s keeping and consolidating the power he has seized. Having gained what the witches prophesied, Macbeth next tries to prevent their prediction that Banquo’s descendants will reign by setting assassins to kill Banquo and his son, Fleance. The plan goes awry, and Fleance escapes, leaving Macbeth again at the mercy of the witches’ prophecy. His psychic breakdown is dramatized by his seeing Banquo’s ghost occupying Macbeth’s place at the banquet. Pushed to the edge of mental collapse, Macbeth steels himself to meet the witches again to learn what is in store for him: “Iam in blood,” he declares, “Stepp’d in so far that, should Iwade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

The witches reassure him that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” and that he will never be vanquished until “Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him.” Confident that he is invulnerable, Macbeth responds to the rebellion mounted by Duncan’s son Malcolm and Macduff, who has joined him in England, by ordering the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her children. Macbeth has progressed from a murderer in fulfillment of the witches predictions to a murderer (of Banquo) in order to subvert their predictions and then to pointless butchery that serves no other purpose than as an exercise in willful destruction. Ironically, Macbeth, whom his wife feared was “too full o’ the milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way” to serve his ambition, displays the same cold calculation that frightened him about his wife, while Lady Macbeth succumbs psychically to her own “horrible imaginings.” Lady Macbeth relives the murder as she sleepwalks, Shakespeare’s version of the workings of the unconscious. The blood in her tormented conscience that formerly could be removed with a little water is now a permanent noxious stain in which “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten.” Women’s cries announcing her offstage death are greeted by Macbeth with detached indifference:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears: The time has been, my senses would have cool’d To hear a nightshriek, and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in’t. Ihave supp’d full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, Cannot once start me.

Macbeth reveals himself here as an emotional and moral void. Confirmation that “The Queen, my lord, is dead” prompts only the bitter comment, “She should have died hereafter.” For Macbeth, life has lost all meaning, refl ected in the bleakest lines Shakespeare ever composed:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Time and the world that Macbeth had sought to rule are revealed to him as empty and futile, embodied in a metaphor from the theater with life as a histrionic, talentless actor in a tedious, pointless play.

Macbeth’s final testing comes when Malcolm orders his troops to camoufl age their movement by carrying boughs from Birnam Woods in their march toward Dunsinane and from Macduff, whom he faces in combat and reveals that he was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d,” that is, born by cesarean section and therefore not “of woman born.” This revelation, the final fulfillment of the witches’ prophecies, causes Macbeth to fl ee, but he is prompted by Macduff’s taunt of cowardice and order to surrender to meet Macduff’s challenge, despite knowing the deadly outcome:

Yet I will try the last. Before my body I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

Macbeth returns to the world of combat where his initial distinctions were honorably earned and tragically lost.

The play concludes with order restored to Scotland, as Macduff presents Macbeth’s severed head to Malcolm, who is hailed as king. Malcolm may assert his control and diminish Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as “this dead butcher and his fiendlike queen,” but the audience knows more than that. We know what Malcolm does not, that it will not be his royal line but Banquo’s that will eventually rule Scotland, and inevitably another round of rebellion and murder is to come. We also know in horrifying human terms the making of a butcher and a fiend who refuse to be so easily dismissed as aberrations.

Macbeth Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

Macbeth Ebook pdf (8MB)

Macbeth: Analysis and Themes

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Macbeth is, along with the character of Iago in Othello and his earlier portrayal of Richard III, William Shakespeare’s most powerful exploration and analysis of evil.

Although we can find precursors to Macbeth in the murderer-turned-conscience-stricken-men of Shakespeare’s earlier plays – notably the conspirator Brutus in Julius Caesar and Claudius in Hamlet – Macbeth provides us with a closer and more complex examination of how a brave man with everything going for him might be corrupted by ambition and goading into committing an act of murder.

It’s worth examining how Shakespeare creates such a powerful depiction of one man persuaded to do evil and then wracked by his conscience for doing so. What follows is a short analysis, but one which attempts to address some of the key – not to mention the most interesting – aspects of Macbeth . You can read our summary of Macbeth here .

The sources for Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Macbeth was a real Scottish king, although he was somewhat different from the ambitious, murderous creation of William Shakespeare. His wife was real too, but Lady Macbeth’s real name was Gruoch and Macbeth’s real name was Mac Bethad mac Findlaích.

The real Macbeth killed Duncan in battle in 1040 and Macbeth (or Mac Bethad) actually went on to rule for 17 years, until he was killed and Macbeth’s stepson, known as Lulach the Idiot, became king (though he only ruled for less than a year – then Malcolm, as Malcolm III, took the crown). Where did Shakespeare get the story from, then, and what did he change?

The plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a combination of two stories: the story of Macbeth and the story of the murder of King Duffe by Donwald and his wife, which Shakespeare read about in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles . The Three Witches appear in Holinshed, but as ‘nymphs or fairies’, suggesting beautiful young women rather than old, ugly hags.

Holinshed’s King Duncan is a weak and feeble ruler, who has unfairly named his own son Prince of Cumberland (and thus heir to the throne), thwarting Macbeth’s own (just) claim to the throne, through his wife’s previous marriage and her son by her first husband.

In Holinshed, then, Macbeth has every reason to have a grievance against Duncan, rather than being motivated solely by ‘vaulting ambition’. When Duncan proclaims Malcolm his heir and Prince of Cumberland, Macbeth does not see it as a slight on him and his claim to the throne – for he appears to have no genuine claim. Instead, he sees it as the turning point: if he is to become King then he must take the crown by force.

What’s more, in Holinshed’s chronicle, Banquo actually helps Macbeth to murder Duncan. Shakespeare altered the character of Banquo because his King, James I of England (James VI of Scotland, of course) claimed descent from Banquo. This explains the scene in Macbeth with the mirrors displaying Banquo’s descendants – eventually culminating in King James himself. Banquo will certainly ‘get’ (i.e. beget) kings, all right.’

This is what led the critic William Empson to regard Shakespeare’s version of Macbeth as a ‘Just-So Story’, like ‘How the Elephant Got Its Trunk’: it explains how James came to be King, over half a millennium after the events of Macbeth .

The other story from Holinshed, detailing the murder of King Duffe, is much closer to the plot of Shakespeare’s play. In the tenth century, a century before the real Macbeth lived, Donwald, egged on by his wife, murders King Duffe (although in this version Donwald gets the servants to commit the murder rather than bearing the knife himself). Donwald and his wife get Duffe’s personal attendants drunk, and then to divert suspicion Donwalde blames them for their master’s murder, killing them in pretend rage.

Themes of Macbeth

Macbeth is a play that begins with the Weird Sisters discussing their future meeting, and ends with Macduff and the other survivors preparing to go and see Malcolm crowned King.

Even the soliloquies in Macbeth seem unusually focused on not just the contemplation of a future course of action (for that’s a common feature of many soliloquies in many other plays) but on the displacement of time that the play is preoccupied with: ‘If it were done, when ’tis done’, begins one of Macbeth’s most famous speeches, while he greets the news of Lady Macbeth with his celebrated meditation on ‘tomorrow’:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.

The first words Lady Macbeth speaks to her husband in the play show how her ambitions for her and her husband are already making her mind leap from the present into the future:

Thy letters have transported me beyond This ignorant present, and I feel now The future in the instant.

But the glue that keeps all of these future meditations in place, and acts as the main device in Macbeth linking present to future, is the role of prophecy.

It’s worth stopping to consider and analyse the role of prophecy in Macbeth . It’s true that the Witches are clearly meant to be supernatural, and their prophecies are supposedly founded on – well, on their witchcraft. One of the reasons Shakespeare may have been drawn to the story of Macbeth is that, as well as speaking to King James I’s Scottish blood, it also played to his interest in witchcraft, black magic, and the supernatural.

Indeed, the King even wrote a book about it, Daemonologie , which had been published in 1597, six years before he came to the English throne. But the clever thing about the prophecies is that we are left to decide how much what happens in the play was foretold in the Witches’ prophecy and how much was a result of the course of action Macbeth decided on, once he had knowledge of the prophecy.

We talk of ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’, and Macbeth as a piece of drama leaves us in some doubt as to the relationship between Fate and free agency. If Macbeth had never been told by the Witches that he would be Thane of Cawdor, he would still have been made Thane of Cawdor. But would he still have become King?

For Macbeth to become King, he needed to know that it was ordained that he would one day sit on the throne, so he could then murderously take it from the current incumbent. If Macbeth had not acted upon the prophecy, it may not have come true.

A similar ambiguity surrounding the role of fate and the role of individual agency governs the plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex ; although Shakespeare’s tragic model was more Senecan than ancient Greek, Macbeth is perhaps the play in his oeuvre which comes the closest to following the model for a good tragedy set out in Aristotle’s Poetics .

Similarly, Banquo starts to take his prophecy seriously once he sees Macbeth’s coming true. Nevertheless, the idea that no man of woman born being able to harm Macbeth isn’t ever tested to the full: Macbeth may simply be unusually lucky in combat, and Macduff, regardless of his caesarean section, may just have proved lucky; at the same time, believing that having been ‘from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped’ made him invincible against the tyrannical Macbeth may have given him the self-belief that he could bring the usurper down. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, and our destinies, shape what we do.

Ambition – or ‘vaulting ambition’ as Macbeth himself puts it – is another central theme of the play. Hearing the prophecy from the Witches convinces Macbeth that he could be King. Indeed, more than that, the prophecy suggests that he is meant to be King. Although Duncan has ‘honour’d [him] of late’, and Macbeth knows that to kill the king who had raised him to the title of Thane of Cawdor would be, among other things, an act of supreme ingratitude, Macbeth is driven to commit murder so he can seize the crown.

Everything that happens afterwards – his dispatching of the hired killers to murder Banquo, the attempted murder of Fleance, the killing of Macduff’s wife and children, and the final battle at Dunsinane – is a result of this one act, an act that was inspired by both Macbeth’s private ambition and his wife’s lust for power.

It’s worth remembering that Macbeth was almost certainly written shortly after the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot in November 1605. (There are a number of local allusions to this recent attempt at politically and religiously motivated terrorism: the numerous instances of the word ‘equivocation’ in the play refer to the Jesuit Father Garnet, who knew of the Plot and consorted with the conspirators.)

The ‘moral’ of Macbeth , if we can run the risk of reducing the play to an ethical message in this way, is that to usurp the ruler of a kingdom is usually a Bad Idea, at least if the ruler is generally thought to be a good one and your motivation for wanting to kill and replace them is your own grasping ambition to be monarch yourself. Which brings us to the last major theme of Macbeth worth mentioning in this short analysis (before the analysis becomes somewhat less than short)…

It would be inaccurate to say Macbeth feels remorse for the murder of Duncan. Even Claudius, the ‘smiling villain’ of Hamlet who killed a king so he could take the throne for himself, expresses something approaching a pricking of conscience for murdering his own brother, acknowledging that he cannot very well appear penitent before God if he doesn’t relinquish everything he’s gained by his murderous deed.

But Macbeth’s guilt over the murders of Banquo and Duncan is less remorse than it is fear of being discovered, and one bad deed gives birth to another, each of which has to be carried out to make Macbeth and his wife ‘safe’, to use the word that recurs throughout the play (a dozen times, including ‘safely’, ‘safety’, and other variants).

Even when Banquo’s ghost appears to Macbeth at the banquet, and appears to him alone, suggesting it is a manifestation of his own guilty conscience, he is terrified that the ghost’s presence will betray his secret, rather than wracked with remorse for killing his friend. Angus’ wonderfully vivid image of Macbeth’s guilt (‘Now does he feel / His secret murders sticking on his hands’) reminds us that ‘hands’ and ‘eyes’ and other body parts are often somewhat disembodied in this play, as numerous critics have acknowledged.

From Macbeth’s bloody hand (‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?’) to Lady Macbeth’s feverish somnambulistic hand-washing, to Macbeth’s early words in an aside, signalling his deadly ambition (‘The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be, / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see’), eyes and hands are at odds in this play, as if the eye countenances the evil carried out by the hand, with the wielder of the dagger turning a blind eye.

But as Angus’ words and Lady Macbeth’s night-time mimed ablutions demonstrate, one cannot so easily remove one’s mind from the hand that does a terrible deed.

One final piece of Macbeth trivia…

Macbeth is supposed to be cursed. The idea of the ‘curse’ of Macbeth has a complicated origin, though it was certainly given a leg up in 1898 when the novelist and wit Max Beerbohm put about the idea that the play was unlucky.

That said, it has had its fair share of tragedies and disasters: in a 1942 production starring John Gielgud, four people involved in the production died, including two of the Witches and the man playing Duncan. If you say ‘Macbeth’ in a theatre, you are meant to walk three times in a circle anti-clockwise, then either spit or say a rude word.

In 1849, Macbeth even caused a riot in New York . The Astor Place Riot was caused by two rival actors arguing about whose portrayal of Macbeth was better. American actor Edwin Forrest and English thespian William Charles Macready were both playing the role of Macbeth in different productions at different theatres on the same night, and a longstanding rivalry erupted.

Another notable nineteenth-century production of the play (featuring acting rivalry) involves the so-called ‘worst poet in the English language’, who once played Macbeth on stage – and refused to die at the end.

As we revealed in our selection of interesting facts about Scottish poet William McGonagall , when McGonagall – who has a reputation for being the worst poet in English – played the role of Macbeth in a stage production, he was so annoyed at being upstaged by his co-star, who was playing Macduff, that when Macduff went to kill Macbeth at the end of the play, he found his foe mysteriously unvanquishable.

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6 thoughts on “Macbeth: Analysis and Themes”

Eqivocation: Shakespeare (whose father was a friend of William Catesby, the father of Robert Catesby, one of the leaders in the alleged Gunpowder Plot) may well have been drawing attention to his own loyalist credentials when he shows the Porter admitting ‘an equivator’ to Hell. On the other hand he may have been doing a bit of equivocating himself. It depends how you say the line “who committed treason enough for God’s sake” it can simply be an exclamation “for God’s sake!” or mean “he committed treason enough for God’s sake…” he was one of ‘God’s traitors’ as John Shakespeare almost certainly, and William very probably were.

To create a breach of time hundreds of years in each direction: The Scotland that the historical Macbeth occupied was a tough, violent place demanding that a monarch be capable of meeting all challenges. If a monarch could be bested, deposed, all the better for the kingdom. Duncan’s nobility, a soft virtue, requires Bellona’s bridegroom succeed on the battlefield, and he doesn’t realize how dangerous such a warrior can be, especially with an ambitious woman goading him on. Now rocket forward hundreds of years to see the philosophical realization predicted in the tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech Macbeth ruminates upon hearing of Lady Macbeth’s death. (N.B. She dies off stage like most of the deaths in the play which conform to Aristotle’s Poetics which holds that violence on stage “but teaches bloody instruction.”) What does life signify? Nothing. Macbeth’s speech anticipates the 20th C. philosophy of existentialism. We come from nothing and we go to nothing. Any performance of the Scottish play in which the Three Sisters are performed exceedingly well enters the dreamscape of all the audience. The play is bloody, yes, and eerie too, as it travels in time.

I will refrain from the kind of lofty comments already given on here and just say your last story made me snort out loud :D

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Book Review: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Books: Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb Picture This! Shakespeare: Macbeth by Philip Page and Marilyn Petit Macbeth: A Retelling by Adam McKeown Macbeth by William Shakespeare, annotated by Burton Raffel

Genre: play Publication date: from the 1623 Folio, probably first produced in 1606, according to Burton Raffel’s Introduction

Summary: Macbeth, a Scottish baron, and his wife plot regicide after witches predict that Macbeth is to become king. Macbeth is of two minds about the whole affair, but does the deed with the help of Lady Macbeth. They frame the king’s guards, who Macbeth then kills in his supposed outrage at the king’s murder. The king’s sons doubt that the guards are to blame and flee in the fear that they will be next on the murderer’s list. Macbeth uses their escape to spread the story that the king’s sons paid the guard to murder their father and, thus, Macbeth takes over the throne.

Macbeth’s friends and countrymen begin to suspect Macbeth’s guilt. Banquo, who was with Macbeth during the conversation with the witches, received a prediction as well: that it would be his progeny, not Macbeth’s that hold the throne in the future. Macbeth fears Banquo’s suspicion and realizes that if all the witches’ predictions come true, Macbeth has committed murder to benefit Banquo’s son. Macbeth sends ruffians to fix the problem. They kill Banquo but his son escapes.

Banquo’s ghost, visible only to Macbeth, shows up at a banquet, unnerving Macbeth visibly which causes his guests such discomfort that they leave the table.

Macbeth visits the witches again (“double, double toil and trouble”). With visions, they offer some advice (beware Macduff) and assurances (“none of woman born shall harm Macbeth” and “Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him”) but they also continue to predict that it will be Banquo’s descendants, not Macbeth’s, who inherit the throne.

Macbeth receives word that Macduff has gone to England to help Malcolm, King Duncan’s son, regain the throne. He sends troops to Macduff’s home where they kill his wife and children.

Lady Macbeth, attended by a maid and physician, is witnessed sleepwalking and obsessively rubbing her hands (“Out, damned spot!”).

Macduff and Malcolm, the prince, march toward Macbeth’s stronghold at Dunsinane with a force of English and Scottish soldiers. They gather in Birnam Wood and order everyone to cut down branches and use them to disguise their presence and number as they proceed across the field to Dunsinane, thus fulfilling the prophecy that Birnam Wood will move against Dunsinane.

The Queen, Lady Macbeth, dies and Macbeth makes this famous speech:

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

The battle commences. The castle is lost, but Macbeth fights on, believing that he can not be killed because all men are of women born. Macduff, who demanded of his fellow fighters that he be allowed to kill Macbeth in retaliation for the deaths of his wife and children, seeks out Macbeth and fights him declaring, “Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.” Macbeth is slain, fulfilling the last of the witches’ prophecies about him.

The battle ends. Macduff presents Macbeth’s head to Malcolm with the greeting “Hail, King of Scotland,” a cry that is taken up throughout the castle.

The other three books, I read concurrently, one scene at a time. I started with the Picture This! Shakespeare version of Macbeth , a graphic novel. Then, I read the relevant chapter in Macbeth: A Retelling by Adam McKeown, part of The Young Reader’s Shakespeare series. According to the library catalog, The School Library Journal deemed McKeown’s retelling suitable for Grades 5 to 10. It’s a large format chapter book with dramatic drawings, sharp angles and expressive faces, by Lynne Cannoy. And, finally, I read the actual play using the one from The Annotated Shakespeare series by Yale University Press, annotated by Burton Raffel.

Armed with three versions, I worked my way through and I have learned it well enough that I can retell it, as above, and to Rick so that he will also be prepared to see the play tonight.

Appeal: Macbeth is a timeless tale of political intrigue interspersed with witches and battle scenes to entertain all of us who like our stories with a dash of adventure.

Reviews: Here are a couple of other book blogger reviews of Macbeth : Macbeth at Becky’s Book Reviews Macbeth by William Shakespeare at Rebecca Reads

Have you read Macbeth or seen the play? What did you think?

Book Review: Macbeth by William Shakespeare — 20 Comments

What a good system for working through the play! I have a very, very hard time with Shakespeare, but I think reading the play along with a more narrative version might work well for me.

I’m planning to read a couple of Shakespeare plays, hopefully in the near future, and I like your approach! Sometimes I do get lost reading the originals, and a familiarity with the story going in would definitely help.

I was actually in a version of Macbeth in school and have always meant to read it again!

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this play sucks!

LOL! Sorry about that Lilia. Do you have to read it for a class? That often makes literature harder to like than it needs to be.

which one is correct ? Dunisnane or Dunsinane….

Looks like Dunsinane. Thanks! I’ll fix that.

Dunsinane is the correct one. I am 100% sure!

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nice way to read drama of shakesphere………. ……………….. thankyou.

thank u so much for your help

Nice review It helped me a lot do complete my homework

it helped to complete my homework and the summary

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Thanks this really helped me.

Book Review: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

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BOOK REVIEW: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

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Macbeth: Analysis and Themes

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Book Review: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

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