The character of Macbeth

We hear about Macbeth before we meet him. A wounded captain reports that ‘brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name)’ (Act 1 Scene 2) cut an enemy open ‘from the nave to th' chops’ (Act 1 Scene 2), from his belly to his jaw.

King Duncan praises him as ‘O valiant cousin, worthy gentleman!’ (Act 1 Scene 2) and rewards him with the title Thane of Cawdor.

So Macbeth begins as a hero: loyal, brave and admired. But the violence of the captain's description shows he is also very good at killing. Shakespeare starts him high so that his fall is greater.

When the witches call him future king, Macbeth is shaken. In an aside he admits he is already thinking of murder, a ‘suggestion / Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair’ (Act 1 Scene 3).

At first he hopes fate will do it for him: ‘If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me / Without my stir’ (Act 1 Scene 3). But when Duncan names Malcolm as his heir, Macbeth hides his thoughts: ‘Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires’ (Act 1 Scene 4).

The images of darkness show he knows these desires are evil. The witches did not put the idea of murder into his head; they woke up an ambition that was already there.

Alone, in a soliloquy, Macbeth argues himself out of the murder. Duncan is his king, his relative and his guest, and he has ruled so well that his virtues ‘Will plead like angels’ (Act 1 Scene 7).

Macbeth admits he has no good reason to kill: ‘I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition’ (Act 1 Scene 7). He imagines his ambition as a rider who leaps too eagerly onto a horse and falls off the other side.

He tells his wife, ‘We will proceed no further in this business’ (Act 1 Scene 7). But she shames him until he gives in. This shows that he has a conscience, but also that he is easily led.

Straight after killing Duncan, Macbeth is horrified. He thinks he heard a voice cry that ‘Macbeth does murder sleep’ (Act 2 Scene 2): he will never rest peacefully again.

He stares at his bloody hands and asks: ‘Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?’ (Act 2 Scene 2). The hyperbole shows his guilt feels too big for the whole sea to wash away. He answers himself: his hand would turn the green sea red.

Compare Lady Macbeth's ‘A little water clears us of this deed’ (Act 2 Scene 2). At this point he feels guilt and she does not; by Act 5 this is reversed.

Once he is king, Macbeth is never safe. ‘To be thus is nothing, / But to be safely thus’ (Act 3 Scene 1): being king means nothing unless he is secure. He has Banquo murdered and tells his wife, ‘O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!’ (Act 3 Scene 2).

After the banquet he admits ‘I am in blood / Stepped in so far’ (Act 3 Scene 4) that he may as well carry on. By Act 4 he acts without thinking: he decides ‘The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand’ (Act 4 Scene 1), and has Macduff's wife and children killed.

Other characters now call him a tyrant. The hesitating man of Act 1 has become a killer of children.

When Macbeth hears that his wife is dead, he speaks these lines:

She should have died hereafter.

There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

5To 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

10And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

The repeated ‘tomorrow’ and the slow rhythm make time drag. He compares life to a ‘brief candle’ and to ‘a poor player’, an actor who has his moment on stage and is forgotten. Life is ‘a tale / Told by an idiot’, ‘Signifying nothing’ (Act 5 Scene 5).

He feels no grief, only emptiness. Murder has cost him everything that made life matter.

Macbeth is a tragic hero: a great man destroyed by his own flaw, his ambition. Even at the end he keeps some courage. Knowing he is doomed, he fights on: ‘Lay on, Macduff’ (Act 5 Scene 8).

For a Jacobean audience, Macbeth's story was a warning. Killing a king was a crime against God and nature, and the play shows it bringing nothing but fear, guilt and death. The play was written soon after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, an attempt to kill King James.