macbeth hands essay

The Use of Hands as a Motif in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

The play presents readers with the world of royalty and the well-knit state; the world of Duncan, his two sons, Banquo, Macbeth and the whole of Scotland and England. This world must have been recreated on Shakespeare’s stage. It is seen; it is always present, and even when some parts of it are repudiated it is there by implication. In Macbeth, “hands” are used a symbol of wrong actions and justice: also, they have direct and indirect meaning depicting inner feelings of characters and real world.

The motif of hands in Macbeth reveals friendship and warm relations between men. The sergeant’s extravagant account of the battle has its special point. In addition to his picture of two exhausted swimmers dragging each other down, the two contestants are described in almost similar terms. Macdonwald is aided by Fortune, an unreliable mistress; Macbeth is the minion or darling of Valour. Fortune, like the whore she is, deceives Macdonwald, while Macbeth rages like a spoilt child, for he behaves most ruthlessly and unceremoniously towards his foe.

Which neu’r shooke hands, nor bad farwell to him, Till he vnseam’d him from the Naue toth’ Chops, And fix’d his Head vpon our Battlement (Shakespeare).

The reference seems to stress the difference between noble courtesy, such as is expected of a host, and Macbeth’s actual treatment of the person he met. Of course, it describes the logical code of conduct in war, but the violent image and the praise of Macbeth by Duncan which immediately follows should be noted.

Before the crime, which is not represented directly on the stage, is committed, the dramatist carefully builds up the atmosphere of darkness and the heavy sense of the presence of evil, contrasting with it touches from the world of light and graciousness. If anything could have recalled Macbeth to the world of order to which he should have belonged, the gift of the diamond from the king should. It was peerless among stones, and it protected its possessor. We should remember that he has this on him when he goes to kill the kinsman and king who sent it to him. Macbeth’s ambiguous words about the Weird Sisters are met by Banquo’s frank statement that so long as his mind is ‘free’ and his loyalty without stain, he is ready to discuss any suggestion made by his friend. These words cannot recall Macbeth to reality. His duty to the king, the honours done him, his position as host, have to give way to what he has willed — the murder to which he is to be summoned by the bell. The scene when Lady Macbeth cannot clean her hands from the blood depicts that “hands” have a symbolic meaning connected with personality and destiny of the main character. Macbeth trying to bolster up his confidence by remembering the words of the spirits who know the future and immediately after, upset by the pale and frightened face of the servant, plunging into despair. When he asks the doctor about his wife, in a moment his attention shifts from her to himself.

The motif of “hands” has a special meaning during the murder scene. Macbeth is again contemplating himself from outside himself. Lady Macbeth and himself develop what resembles a musical figure: the one, Macbeth, descanting on the fantastical or imagined world which evil has brought into being; the other, with a ground bass of practical, commonsense short lines trying to recall him to the world of reality. In every case each of these ‘sensible’ remarks has ironic overtones which she cannot at this stage realize: “a little water clears us of this deed’; ‘how easy is it then”. (Shakespeare) Lady Macbeth exclaims:

What will these hands ne’re be cleane? No more o’that my Lord, no more o’that: you marre all with this starting (Shakespeare).

To some extend, “hands” are connected with order and peace. It is interesting that the man who has deliberately placed himself outside the world of men and order, should yet be dependent on the order he has rejected. It is not just a man whom he needs for his task. The murderers may be men in the ‘catalogue’ (the mere list which distinguishes men from vegetables). He requires a man of spirit from the ‘valued file’ (the list which makes distinctions between men and places them in an order). The difference between the reality as Macbeth understands it and the world of human reality is clear.

In sum, the motif of “hands” symbolizes guilt and responsibility for crimes both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth planned and committed. Macbeth is much more than the straight record of the defeat of the agents of the evil one by the instruments of the ‘powers’. In Macbeth’s sensitiveness to the evil in which he is caught, in Lady Macbeth’s process of education, in which she learned that a little water does not clear her of this deed, is to be found the play’s real significance. Macbeth may illustrate a moral principle or lend support our observations of human beings, but these, as we set them down, do not seem to be as meaningful as the living experience of the play.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, W. Macbeth . 1999. Web.

• Inside the Narrator's Mind: "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe
• “King Lear” by William Shakespeare: A Play Review by Jeremy Bryson
• Macbeth: An Analysis of the Play by Shakespeare
• Betrayal in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”
• Shakespeare Literature: Prophecy and Macbeth Morality
• J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and Its Popularity
• Literary Subjects in British Literature after 1798
• Torture in Shakespeare's Literature
• Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: Act 1 Scene 4 Review
• The Changes in British Literature
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, October 9). The Use of Hands as a Motif in Shakespeare's "Macbeth". https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-use-of-hands-as-a-motif-in-shakespeares-macbeth/

"The Use of Hands as a Motif in Shakespeare's "Macbeth"." IvyPanda , 9 Oct. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/the-use-of-hands-as-a-motif-in-shakespeares-macbeth/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'The Use of Hands as a Motif in Shakespeare's "Macbeth"'. 9 October.

IvyPanda . 2021. "The Use of Hands as a Motif in Shakespeare's "Macbeth"." October 9, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-use-of-hands-as-a-motif-in-shakespeares-macbeth/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Use of Hands as a Motif in Shakespeare's "Macbeth"." October 9, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-use-of-hands-as-a-motif-in-shakespeares-macbeth/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Use of Hands as a Motif in Shakespeare's "Macbeth"." October 9, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-use-of-hands-as-a-motif-in-shakespeares-macbeth/.

IvyPanda uses cookies and similar technologies to enhance your experience, enabling functionalities such as:

• Basic site functions
• Ensuring secure, safe transactions
• Secure account login
• Remembering account, browser, and regional preferences
• Remembering privacy and security settings
• Analyzing site traffic and usage
• Personalized search, content, and recommendations
• Displaying relevant, targeted ads on and off IvyPanda

Please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy for detailed information.

Certain technologies we use are essential for critical functions such as security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and ensuring the site operates correctly for browsing and transactions.

Cookies and similar technologies are used to enhance your experience by:

• Remembering general and regional preferences
• Personalizing content, search, recommendations, and offers

Some functions, such as personalized recommendations, account preferences, or localization, may not work correctly without these technologies. For more details, please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy .

To enable personalized advertising (such as interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. These partners may have their own information collected about you. Turning off the personalized advertising setting won't stop you from seeing IvyPanda ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive.

Personalized advertising may be considered a "sale" or "sharing" of the information under California and other state privacy laws, and you may have the right to opt out. Turning off personalized advertising allows you to exercise your right to opt out. Learn more in IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy .

A Short Analysis of Macbeth’s ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’ Soliloquy

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?’ So begins one of the most famous soliloquies in Shakespeare’s Macbeth – indeed, perhaps in all of Shakespeare. Before we offer an analysis of this scene – and summarise the meaning of the soliloquy – here is a reminder of the famous speech. (If you would like an overview of the whole of  Macbeth , we have analysed the play here .)

Note: the soliloquy beginning ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’ appears in Act II Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth .

‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’ is often staged, and filmed, with the dagger suspended in mid-air. But this makes the implied boundary between the real and the hallucinatory too clear-cut: as numerous critics have pointed out, the point is that Macbeth believes that the dagger is real at first, rather than knowing it to be an illusion from the outset.

For this reason, perhaps we’re better off picturing a dagger resting on a nearby table, lying flat; this also makes it easier to understand how the ‘handle’ of the dagger is ‘towards’ Macbeth’s hand, as if inviting him to pick it up.

After Macbeth has ‘seen’ the dagger before him, the handle towards his hand, he then begins to doubt himself.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

This line indicates that Shakespeare intended the actor playing Macbeth to attempt to pick up the dagger, only to find that it’s made of air. There’s an implied stage direction here for Macbeth to reach to grab the dagger, only to find there’s no dagger there.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

In other words, if this is a ‘fatal vision’ or hallucination, it appears to be one that is assailing his sense of sight only. In other words, ‘sensible’ here means pertaining to the senses, rather than the modern meaning of the word. Macbeth is a play obsessed with touch and the tangible, with what can be grasped and touched: it is a play full of hands, a most hand-y play.

But here, we are seeing the first of many hallucinatory (or are they merely hallucinatory, or perhaps supernatural?) experiences Macbeth will have. The question is whether this dagger is a result of his ‘heat-oppressed’ (the second word should be pronounced with three syllables, for the metre of the line) or fevered brain.

I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw.

Another piece of implied stage direction: the actor playing Macbeth goes to his belt (or similar) to draw a real dagger he has in his possession (the one he will use to murder Duncan shortly after this scene).

Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going;

More implied stage direction – the dagger seems to point in the direction of the room where Duncan lies asleep. But which dagger? Still the imagined one, presumably. Though this isn’t certain: it could be that Shakespeare is now referring to the real dagger that Macbeth has just drawn, and which audiences in the theatre can see with their own eyes. The very soliloquy seems to blur the boundaries between real and imaginary, as if we ourselves are meant to lose track of the real dagger and the imagined one.

And such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses, Or else worth all the rest;

In other words, either his sight is in conflict with all his other senses (such as touch), or else his eyes are worth more than the rest of his other senses put together, and he should trust what he sees. Indeed:

I see thee still, And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, Which was not so before. There’s no such thing: It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes.

As so often with a Shakespeare soliloquy, here we find Macbeth arguing with himself, changing his mind mid-line. The detail of the dagger intensifies: he now sees (or thinks he can see) drops of blood on the blade and ‘dudgeon’ (the handle of the dagger).

But he immediately says there isn’t any blood on the dagger (whether or not a dagger is there, he seems to know the blood is imagined), and merely a result of his thoughts being so turned towards bloody deeds (i.e. the planned murder of Duncan).

Now o’er the one halfworld Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtain’d sleep;

It’s night time, and across the whole northern hemisphere or ‘half-world’, things seem to have come to a halt. Dreams of witchcraft and evil disrupt Macbeth’s sleep: he’s up and about, but the boundary between dreaming and waking seems to have been disturbed.

witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate’s offerings, and wither’d murder, Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost.

Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft in classical mythology, performs ‘offerings’ or rituals – we’re back to Macbeth’s encounter with the three Witches or Weird Sisters.

The word ‘murder’ should perhaps be capitalised (it is in some editions) to make it clear that Macbeth is personifying it as Murder: Murder has been roused awake by his watchdog, the wolf, and like Tarquin – the man who raped Lucrece in a story Shakespeare had earlier written about in his narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece , hence ‘ravishing’ – moves towards his prey, silently and stealthily like a ghost.

Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which now suits with it.

Macbeth calls upon the earth to render his steps similarly silent, so that nobody will be alerted to his plans as he enters Duncan’s chamber and murders him. It’s become clear by this point that the dagger appearing to him has made Macbeth’s mind up: he plans to go through with the deed.

The phrase ‘take the present horror from the time’ is a little more difficult to interpret: the most likely meaning is that Macbeth thinks that if he moves silently that will remove the horror from this moment, since the sound of his footsteps will fill him with fear over what he is going to do. As things stand, though, horror and this moment are perfectly ‘suited’ or matched, i.e. ‘Which now suits with it.’

Whiles I threat, he lives: Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

Although it’s ungrammatical (it was common in Shakespeare’s time to have a plural paired with a singular verb, so ‘Words … gives’), the second line means that it’s no good talking about all this: he just needs to go ahead and commit the deed itself. The deed is ‘hot’ but his words are ‘cold’, i.e. the more he talks about doing it, the weaker (or cooler) his resolve grows.

[ a bell rings ] I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

Macbeth now takes the sound of the bell as a sign that he should go and kill Duncan. And this is where the scene ends, a scene that had begun with that unsettling vision of a dagger that wasn’t really there. Macbeth will next murder Duncan, an act that will cause him to ‘see’ more visions, ghosts, and hallucinations later in the play.

Macbeth is, of all of Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps the most attuned to the various senses: sight, sound, and touch are all vividly felt here. But the most powerful sense of all is that imaginary sense of something being there when it isn’t.

About Macbeth

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragic heroes, not least because he represents the Man Who Has It All (seemingly) and yet throws it away because of his ‘vaulting ambition’ to have Even More: to be king. A brave and effective soldier who is rewarded by the King, Duncan, for quelling a rebellion against his king, Macbeth decides to kill this same king, while Duncan is a guest under Macbeth’s own roof, just so Macbeth can seize the crown for himself.

Every deed Macbeth commits after the first one is justified by Macbeth’s desire to make his position ‘safely thus’, as he puts it in his soliloquy in III.1. He justifies having Banquo murdered and attempting to kill Fleance because Banquo, too, has been given a prophecy from the Three Witches, and seeing Macbeth’s prophecy comes true, he knows his friend will do his best to ensure Fleance and his descendants end up on the throne. As Macbeth puts it in III.2, ‘Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.’

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Type your email…

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

• Ask LitCharts AI
• Discussion Question Generator
• Essay Prompt Generator
• Quiz Question Generator

• Literature Guides
• Poetry Guides
• Shakespeare Translations
• Literary Terms

Macbeth Shakescleare Translation

Macbeth Translation Act 2, Scene 2

LADY MACBETH enters.

LADY MACBETH

That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold. What hath quenched them hath given me fire. Hark! Peace! It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman, Which gives the stern’st good-night. He is about it. The doors are open, and the surfeited grooms Do mock their charge with snores. I have drugged their possets, That death and nature do contend about them, Whether they live or die.

The wine that made the servants drunk has made me bold. The liquor that put them to sleep has filled me with fire. Listen! Quiet! That was the shriek of an owl—an omen of death like the bell struck at midnight by the night watchman before the cell of a man condemned to death. Macbeth is killing Duncan right now. The doors to Duncan’s chamber are open, and the snores of the drunk servants make a mockery of their job of guarding him. I drugged their drinks to make them sleep so soundly that they seem dead.

[within] Who’s there? What, ho!

[Offstage] Who’s there? What’s that!

Alack, I am afraid they have awaked, And ’tis not done. Th’ attempt and not the deed Confounds us. Hark! I laid their daggers ready; He could not miss ‘em. Had he not resembled My father as he slept, I had done ’t.

Oh no, I’m afraid the servants woke up, and the job is not done. It would ruin us completely to fail in our attempt to murder the king. [She hears a noise] Listen! I placed the servants’ daggers where Macbeth could not miss seeing them. I would have killed Duncan myself if he didn't look so much like my own father while he slept. 

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

MACBETH enters, holding bloody daggers.

My husband!

I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?

I have done the deed. Didn’t you hear a noise?

I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. Did not you speak?

I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. Did you say something?

As I descended?

As I came down?

Hark! Who lies i’ th’ second chamber?

Listen! Who’s sleeping in the second bedroom?

[looking at his hands] This is a sorry sight.

[Looking at the blood on his hands] This is a sorry sight.

A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight.

That’s a foolish thing to say, that it’s a “sorry sight."

There’s one did laugh in ’s sleep, and one cried. “Murder!” That they did wake each other. I stood and heard them. But they did say their prayers, and addressed them Again to sleep.

One servant laughed in his sleep, and one cried, “murder!” so that they woke each other up. I stood and listened, but they just said their prayers and fell back asleep.

There are two lodged together.

Malcolm and Donalbain are asleep in the same room.

One cried, “God bless us!” and “Amen” the other, As they had seen me with these hangman’s hands. List’ning their fear I could not say “Amen,” When they did say “God bless us!”

One servant cried, “God bless us!” and the other said, “Amen,” as if they’d seen me with my blood-stained hands. Though I heard the fear in their voices, I couldn’t respond “Amen” when they said “God bless us!”

Consider it not so deeply.

Try not to think about it so much.

But wherefore could not I pronounce “Amen?” I had most need of blessing, and “Amen” Stuck in my throat.

But why couldn’t I say “Amen?” I needed God’s blessing most profoundly, but the word “Amen” got stuck in my throat.

These deeds must not be thought After these ways. So, it will make us mad.

We must not think in that way about what we’ve done. Thinking that way will drive us crazy.

Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

I thought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth murders sleep.” Innocent sleep. Sleep that smooths away all our fears and worries; that puts an end to each day; that eases the aches of the day’s work; and soothes hurt minds. Sleep, the main and most nourishing course in the feast of life.

What do you mean?

What’s your meaning?

Still it cried, “Sleep no more!” to all the house. “Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more.”

The voice cried and cried, “Sleep no more!” to the entire house. “Glamis has murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor will sleep no more. Macbeth will sleep no more.”

Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy thane, You do unbend your noble strength to think So brainsickly of things. Go get some water, And wash this filthy witness from your hand. Why did you bring these daggers from the place? They must lie there. Go carry them and smear The sleepy grooms with blood.

Who was it that cried out these words? Oh, my noble thane, you make yourself weak and unable to act when you think so obsessively about things. Go get some water and wash this filthy evidence from your hands. Why did you bring these daggers from the room? They must remain there. Go return them and smear the sleeping servants with the blood.

I’ll go no more: I am afraid to think what I have done; Look on ’t again I dare not.

I won’t go back. I’m afraid just to think about what I’ve done. I don’t dare to look at it again.

Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures. ‘Tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed, I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, For it must seem their guilt.

You weakling! Give me the daggers. Dead and sleeping people are as harmless as pictures: it’s childish to fear a scary painting. If Duncan is still bleeding, I’ll cover the faces of the servants with the blood. They must appear to be guilty.

LADY MACBETH exits.

A knock sounds offstage.

Whence is that knocking? How is ’t with me when every noise appals me? What hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes. Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.

Where is that knocking coming from? What’s wrong with me, that every noise terrifies me? [Looking at his hands] Whose hands are these? Ha! They’re plucking out my eyes. Could even all the water in the ocean wash this blood from my hands? No, my hands would instead stain the seas crimson, turning the green water entirely red.

My hands are of your color, but I shame To wear a heart so white.

My hands are red like yours, but I’d be ashamed if my heart were as bloodless and cowardly as yours.

I hear a knocking At the south entry. Retire we to our chamber. A little water clears us of this deed. How easy is it, then! Your constancy Hath left you unattended.

I hear knocking at the south gate. We must return to our bedroom. A little water will wash away all the evidence of what we’ve done. It is so easy! Your determination has deserted you.

Hark! More knocking. Get on your nightgown, lest occasion call us And show us to be watchers. Be not lost So poorly in your thoughts.

Listen! More knocking. Put on your sleeping robe, so that when we have to appear it won't seem as if we’ve been awake and watching this whole time. Break free of the sad thoughts that hold you down.

To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself.

The only way I can acknowledge what I’ve done is to forget who I am.

Wake Duncan with thy knocking. I would thou couldst.

Wake Duncan with your knocking. I wish you could.

• Quizzes, saving guides, requests, plus so much more.

Website navigation

A Modern Perspective: Macbeth

By Susan Snyder

Coleridge pronounced Macbeth to be “wholly tragic.” Rejecting the drunken Porter of Act 2, scene 3 as “an interpolation of the actors,” and perceiving no wordplay in the rest of the text (he was wrong on both counts), he declared that the play had no comic admixture at all. More acutely, though still in support of this sense of the play as unadulterated tragedy, he noted the absence in Macbeth of a process characteristic of other Shakespearean tragedies, the “reasonings of equivocal morality.” 1

Indeed, as Macbeth ponders his decisive tragic act of killing the king, he is not deceived about its moral nature. To kill anyone to whom he is tied by obligations of social and political loyalty as well as kinship is, he knows, deeply wrong:

         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.                  ( 1.7.12 –16)

And to kill Duncan, who has been “so clear in his great office” (that is, so free from corruption as a ruler), is to compound the iniquity. In adapting the story of Macbeth from Holinshed’s Chronicles of Scotland, Shakespeare created a stark black-white moral opposition by omitting from his story Duncan’s weakness as a monarch while retaining his gentle, virtuous nature. Unlike his prototype in Holinshed’s history, Macbeth kills not an ineffective leader but a saint whose benevolent presence blesses Scotland. In the same vein of polarized morality, Shakespeare departs from the Holinshed account in which Macbeth is joined in regicide by Banquo and others; instead, he has Macbeth act alone against Duncan. While it might be good politics to distance Banquo from guilt (he was an ancestor of James I, the current king of England and patron of Shakespeare’s acting company), excluding the other thanes as well suggests that the playwright had decided to focus on private, purely moral issues uncomplicated by the gray shades of political expediency.

Duncan has done nothing, then, to deserve violent death. Unlike such tragic heroes as Brutus and Othello, who are enmeshed in “equivocal morality,” Macbeth cannot justify his actions by the perceived misdeeds of his victim. “I have no spur,” he admits, “To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition” ( 1.7.25 –27). This ambition is portrayed indirectly rather than directly. But it is surely no accident that the Weïrd Sisters accost him and crystallize his secret thoughts of the crown into objective possibility just when he has hit new heights of success captaining Duncan’s armies and defeating Duncan’s enemies. The element of displacement and substitution here—Macbeth leading the fight for Scotland while the titular leader waits behind the lines for the outcome—reinforces our sense that, whatever mysterious timetable the Sisters work by, this is the psychologically right moment to confront Macbeth with their predictions of greatness. Hailed as thane of Glamis, thane of Cawdor, and king, he is initially curious and disbelieving. Though his first fearful reaction ( 1.3.54 ) is left unexplained, for us to fill in as we will, surely one way to read his fear is that the word “king” touches a buried nerve of desire. When Ross and Angus immediately arrive to announce that Macbeth is now Cawdor as well as Glamis, the balance of skepticism tilts precipitously toward belief. The nerve vibrates intensely. Two-thirds of the prophecy is already accomplished. The remaining prediction, “king hereafter,” is suddenly isolated and highlighted; and because of the Sisters’ now proven powers of foreknowledge, it seems to call out for its parallel, inevitable fulfillment.

The Weïrd Sisters present nouns rather than verbs. They put titles on Macbeth without telling what actions he must carry out to attain those titles. It is Lady Macbeth who supplies the verbs. Understanding that her husband is torn between the now-articulated object of desire and the fearful deed that must achieve it (“wouldst not play false / And yet wouldst wrongly win,” 1.5.22 –23), she persuades him by harping relentlessly on manly action. That very gap between noun and verb, the desired prize and the doing necessary to win it, becomes a way of taunting him as a coward: “Art thou afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valor / As thou art in desire?” ( 1.7.43 –45). A man is one who closes this gap by strong action, by taking what he wants; whatever inhibits that action is unmanly fear. And a man is one who does what he has sworn to do, no matter what. We never see Macbeth vow to kill Duncan, but in Lady Macbeth’s mind just his broaching the subject has become a commitment. With graphic horror she fantasizes how she would tear her nursing baby from her breast and dash its brains out if she had sworn as she says her husband did. She would, that is, violate her deepest nature as a woman and sever violently the closest tie of kinship and dependence. Till now, Macbeth has resisted such violation, clinging to a more humane definition of “man” that accepts fidelity and obligation as necessary limits on his prowess. Now, in danger of being bested by his wife in this contest of fierce determinations, he accepts her simpler, more primitive equation of manhood with killing: he commits himself to destroying Duncan. It is significant for the lack of “equivocal morality” that even Lady Macbeth in this crucial scene of persuasion doesn’t try to manipulate or blur the polarized moral scheme. Adopting instead a warrior ethic apart from social morality, she presents the murder not as good but as heroic.

Moral clarity informs not only the decisions and actions of Macbeth but the stage of nature on which they are played out. The natural universe revealed in the play is essentially attuned to the good, so that it reacts to the unambiguously evil act of killing Duncan with disruptions that are equally easy to read. There are wild winds, an earthquake, “strange screams of death” ( 2.3.61 –69). And beyond such general upheaval there is a series of unnatural acts that distortedly mirror Macbeth’s. Duncan’s horses overthrow natural order and devour each other, like Macbeth turning on his king and cousin. “A falcon, tow’ring in her pride of place”—the monarch of birds at its highest pitch—is killed by a mousing owl, a lesser bird who ordinarily preys on insignificant creatures ( 2.4.15 –16). Most ominous of all, on the morning following the king’s death, is the absence of the sun: like the falcon a symbol of monarchy, but expanding that to suggest the source of all life. In a general sense, the sunless day shows the heavens “troubled with man’s act” ( 2.4.7 ), but the following grim metaphor points to a closer and more sinister connection: “dark night strangles the traveling lamp” ( 2.4.9 ). The daylight has been murdered like Duncan. Scotland’s moral darkness lasts till the end of Macbeth’s reign. The major scenes take place at night or in the atmosphere of the “black, and midnight hags” ( 4.1.48 ), and there is no mention of light or sunshine except in England ( 4.3.1 ).

Later in the play, nature finds equally fitting forms for its revenge against Macbeth. Despite his violations of the natural order, he nevertheless expects the laws of nature to work for him in the usual way. But the next victim, Banquo, though his murderer has left him “safe in a ditch” ( 3.4.28 ), refuses to stay safely still and out of sight. In Macbeth’s horrified response to this restless corpse, we may hear not only panic but outrage at the breakdown of the laws of motion:

                           The time has been

That, when the brains were out, the man would die,

And there an end. But now they rise again

With twenty mortal murders on their crowns

And push us from our stools. This is more strange

Than such a murder is.                           ( 3.4.94 –99)

His word choice is odd: “ they rise,” a plural where we would expect “he rises,” and the loaded word “crowns” for heads. Macbeth seems to be haunted by his last victim, King Duncan, as well as the present one. And by his outraged comparison at the end—the violent death and the ghostly appearance compete in strangeness—Macbeth suggests, without consciously intending to, that Banquo’s walking in death answers to, or even is caused by, the murder that cut him off so prematurely. The unnatural murder generates unnatural movement in the dead. Lady Macbeth, too, walks when she should be immobile in sleep, “a great perturbation in nature” ( 5.1.10 ).

It is through this same ironic trust in natural law that Macbeth draws strength from the Sisters’ later prophecy: if he is safe until Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane, he must be safe forever:

Who can impress the forest, bid the tree

Unfix his earthbound root? Sweet bodements, good!

Rebellious dead, rise never till the Wood

Of Birnam rise . . .                  ( 4.1.109 –12)

His security is ironic because for Macbeth, of all people, there can be no dependence on predictable natural processes. The “rebellious dead” have already unnaturally risen once; fixed trees can move against him as well. And so, in time, they do. Outraged nature keeps matching the Macbeths’ transgressions, undoing and expelling their perversities with its own.

In tragedies where right and wrong are rendered problematic, the dramatic focus is likely to be on the complications of choice. Macbeth, on the contrary, is preoccupied less with the protagonist’s initial choice of a relatively unambiguous wrong action than with the moral decline that follows. H. B. Charlton noted that one could see in Richard III as well as Macbeth the biblical axiom that “the wages of sin is death”; but where the history play assumes the principle, Macbeth demonstrates why it has to be that way. 2 The necessity is not so much theological as psychological: we watch in Macbeth the hardening and distortion that follows on self-violation. The need to suppress part of himself in order to kill Duncan becomes a refusal to acknowledge his deed (“I am afraid to think what I have done. / Look on ’t again I dare not”: 2.2.66 –67). His later murders are all done by proxy, in an attempt to create still more distance between the destruction he wills and full psychic awareness of his responsibility. At the same time, murder becomes a necessary activity, the verb now a compulsion almost without regard to the object: plotted after he has seen the Weïrd Sisters’ apparitions, Macbeth’s attack on Macduff’s “line” ( 4.1.174 ) is an insane double displacement, of fear of Macduff himself and fury at the vision of the line of kings fathered by Banquo.

Yet the moral universe of Macbeth is not as uncomplicated as some critics have imagined. To see in the play’s human and physical nature only a straightforward pattern of sin and punishment is to gloss over the questions it raises obliquely, the moral complexities and mysteries it opens up. The Weïrd Sisters, for example, remain undefined. Where do they come from? Where do they go when they disappear from the action in Act 4? What is their place in a moral universe that ostensibly recoils against sin and punishes it? Are they human witches, or supernatural beings? Labeling them “evil” seems not so much incorrect as inadequate. Do they cause men to commit crimes, or do they only present the possibility to them? Macbeth responds to his prophecy by killing his king, but Banquo after hearing the one directed at him is not impelled to act at all. Do we take this difference as demonstrating that the Sisters have in themselves no power beyond suggestion? Or should we rather find it somewhat sinister later on when Banquo, ancestor of James I or not, sees reason in Macbeth’s success to look forward to his own—yet feels it necessary to conceal his hopes ( 3.1.1 –10)?

Even what we most take for granted becomes problematic when scrutinized. Does Macbeth really desire to be king? Lady Macbeth says he does, but what comes through in 1.5 and 1.7 is more her desire than his. Apart from one brief reference to ambition when he is ruling out other motives to kill Duncan, Macbeth himself is strangely silent about any longing for royal power and position. Instead of an obsession that fills his personal horizon, we find in Macbeth something of a motivational void. Why does he feel obligated, or compelled, to bring about an advance in station that the prophecy seems to render inevitable anyway? A. C. Bradley put his finger on this absence of positive desire when he observed that Macbeth commits his crime as if it were “an appalling duty.” 3

Recent lines of critical inquiry also call old certainties into question. Duncan’s saintly status would seem assured, yet sociological critics are disquieted by the way we are introduced to him, as he receives news of the battle in 1.2. On the one hand we hear reports of horrifying savagery in the fighting, savagery in which the loyal thanes participate as much as the rebels and invaders—more so, in fact, when Macbeth and Banquo are likened to the crucifiers of Christ (“or memorize another Golgotha,” 1.2.44 ). In response we see Duncan exulting not only in the victory but in the bloodshed, equating honor with wounds. It is not that he bears any particular guilt. Yet the mild paternal king is nevertheless implicated here in his society’s violent warrior ethic, its predicating of manly worth on prowess in killing. 4 But isn’t this just what we condemn in Lady Macbeth? Cultural analysis tends to blur the sharp demarcations, even between two such figures apparently totally opposed, and to draw them together as participants in and products of the same constellation of social values.

Lady Macbeth and Duncan meet in a more particular way, positioned as they are on the same side of Scotland’s basic division between warriors and those protected by warriors. The king is too old and fragile to fight; the lady is neither, but she is barred from battle by traditional gender conventions that assign her instead the functions of following her husband’s commands and nurturing her young. In fact, of course, Lady Macbeth’s actions and outlook thoroughly subvert this ideology, as she forcefully takes the lead in planning the murder and shames her husband into joining in by her willingness to slaughter her own nurseling. It is easy to call Lady Macbeth “evil,” but the label tends to close down analysis exactly where we ought to probe more deeply. Macbeth’s wife is restless in a social role that in spite of her formidable courage and energy offers no chance of independent action and heroic achievement. It is almost inevitable that she turn to achievement at second hand, through and for her husband. Standing perforce on the sidelines, like Duncan once again, she promotes and cheers the killing.

Other situations, too, may be more complex than at first they seem. Lady Macduff, unlike Lady Macbeth, accepts her womanly function of caring for her children and her nonwarrior status of being protected. But she is not protected. The ideology of gender seems just as destructive from the submissive side as from the rebellious, when Macduff deserts her in order to pursue his political cause against Macbeth in England and there is no husband to stand in the way of the murderers sent by Macbeth. The obedient wife dies, with her cherished son, just as the rebellious, murderous lady will die who consigned her own nursing baby to death. The moral universe of Macbeth has room for massive injustice. Traditional critics find Lady Macbeth “unnatural,” and even those who do not accept the equation of gender ideology with nature can agree with the condemnation in view of her determined suppression of all bonds of human sympathy. Clear enough. But we get more blurring and crossovers when Macduff’s wife calls him unnatural. In leaving his family defenseless in Macbeth’s dangerous Scotland, he too seems to discount human bonds. His own wife complains bitterly that “he wants the natural touch”; where even the tiny wren will fight for her young against the owl, his flight seems to signify fear rather than natural love ( 4.2.8 –16). Ross’s reply, “cruel are the times,” while it doesn’t console Lady Macduff and certainly doesn’t save her, strives to relocate the moral ambiguity of Macduff’s conduct in the situation created by Macbeth’s tyrannical rule. The very political crisis that pulls Macduff away from his family on public business puts his private life in jeopardy through the same act of desertion. But while acknowledging the peculiar tensions raised by a tyrant-king, we may also see in the Macduff family’s disaster a tragic version of a more familiar conflict: the contest between public and private commitments that can rack conventional marriages, with the wife confined to a private role while the husband is supposed to balance obligations in both spheres.

Malcolm is allied with Duncan by lineage and with Macduff by their shared role of redemptive champion in the final movement of the play. He, too, is not allowed to travel through the action unsullied. After a long absence from the scene following the murder of Duncan, he reappears in England to be sought by Macduff in the crusade against Macbeth. Malcolm is cautious and reserved, and when he does start speaking more freely, what we hear is an astonishing catalogue of self-accusations. He calls himself lustful, avaricious, guilty of every crime and totally lacking in kingly virtues:

                Nay, had I power, I should

Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,

Uproar the universal peace, confound

All unity on earth.                  ( 4.3.113 –16)

Before people became so familiar with Shakespeare’s play, I suspect many audiences believed what Malcolm says of himself. Students on first reading still do. Why shouldn’t they? He has been absent from the stage for some time, and his only significant action in the early part of the play was to run away after his father’s murder. When this essentially unknown prince lists his vices in lengthy speeches of self-loathing, there is no indication—except an exaggeration easily ascribable to his youth—that he is not sincere. And if we do believe, we cannot help joining in Macduff’s distress. Malcolm, the last hope for redeeming Scotland from the tyrant, has let us down. Duncan’s son is more corrupt than Macbeth. He even sounds like Macbeth, whose own milk of human kindness ( 1.5.17 ) was curdled by his wife; who threatened to destroy the whole natural order, “though the treasure / Of nature’s germens tumble all together / Even till destruction sicken” ( 4.1.60 –63). In due course, Malcolm takes it all back; but his words once spoken cannot simply be canceled, erased as if they were on paper. We have already, on hearing them, mentally and emotionally processed the false “facts,” absorbed them experientially. Perhaps they continue to color indirectly our sense of the next king of Scotland.

Viewed through various lenses, then, the black and white of Macbeth may fade toward shades of gray. The play is an open system, offering some fixed markers with which to take one’s basic bearings but also, in closer scrutiny, offering provocative questions and moral ambiguities.

• “Notes for a Lecture on Macbeth ” [c. 1813], in Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare , ed. Terence Hawkes (New York: Capricorn, 1959), p. 188.
• H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), p. 141.
• A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 358.
• James L. Calderwood, If It Were Done: “Macbeth” and Tragic Action (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), pp. 77–89.

Stay connected

Find out what’s on, read our latest stories, and learn how you can get involved.

Pardon Our Interruption

As you were browsing something about your browser made us think you were a bot. There are a few reasons this might happen:

• You've disabled JavaScript in your web browser.
• You're a power user moving through this website with super-human speed.
• You've disabled cookies in your web browser.
• A third-party browser plugin, such as Ghostery or NoScript, is preventing JavaScript from running. Additional information is available in this support article .

To regain access, please make sure that cookies and JavaScript are enabled before reloading the page.