While Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s longest play, as well as his most important, Macbeth is his shortest and second most important.
It has been called many things, as it is the greatest story of hatred ever written, a tale of ambition and bloodshed, or the tragedy of a noble and courageous man regressing into the worst aspects of human nature...
Written in 1606, the play begins with two Scottish generals, Macbeth and Banquo, making their way back home after having defeated the invading armies of Ireland and Norway. Along the way, they run into three witch sisters. They tell Macbeth that he will become Thane of Cawdor and then king of Scotland. Meanwhile, Banquo is told that he will never be king, but his children will be.
Macbeth calls the witches “imperfect speakers” and casts doubt over their claims. However, he would indeed become Thane of Cawdor shortly after their encounter. And so, he writes to his wife, Lady Macbeth, who always seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown: We are going to become a royal family; all we have to do is to kill the king. It is at this juncture his neurotic wife begins leading him on a bloody path. Toying with his emotions, she demonstrates how a strong man like Macbeth can easily succumb to a blend of love and ambition.
After the witches’ prophecy brings Lady Macbeth to a state of ecstasy, King Duncan visits Macbeth’s castle, where she and her husband hatch up and execute a plot to murder him. However, in true Shakespearean fashion, the second half of their plot swiftly falls apart. Macbeth becomes overwhelmed with fears about his sons, who would not become kings, as well as Banquo’s son, who would. He then establishes a tyrannical regime that takes him from bloodshed to bloodshed and crime to crime that are accompanied by persistent, powerful feelings of guilt.
However, when Banquo’s son manages to evade the assassins who killed his father and had been hired by Macbeth, the latter is overwhelmed by hallucinations. We thus see him seek the witches, who tell him that he must stay away from Thane Macduff and that if he does so, “no man born of woman can harm him.” Indeed, he would be fine so long as the Birnam Forest by his castle remained in place.
While the fact that the trees remained in place reassures him, Macbeth takes his cruelty to new lengths, killing the Macduff family and trying to quell the growing resistance against him and his rule. As for Lady Macbeth, unable to wipe the blood stain from her dress, she also continues to be haunted by her role in the assassination of a king who had lavished them with gifts.
And so, in what is among the play’s most powerful and famous scenes, she wanders aimlessly in the night, referencing terrifying images and impressions from her personal history. After that, like someone killed by an acute sense of guilt, she dies in what is likely a suicide. As for Macbeth, upon reflecting on his wife’s fate, he wakes up to the absurdity of life and the futility of ambition, as death awaits us all. However, his discovery comes too late, because his wife’s death seems to herald his own imminent end.
In coordination with Malcolm, King Duncan’s son, Macduff swiftly assembles an army to wage war on Macbeth. His forces chop down the trees of Birnam Forest to allow them to conceal themselves, which is reminiscent of the witches’ prophecy about the trees. As Macbeth meets Macduff on the battlefield, the former tells the latter that no man born of a woman can harm him. However, Macduff, whose seventh-month-pregnant mother died giving birth, proceeds to behead Macbeth before handing the crown over to Duncan’s son Malcolm, the new king of Scotland.
Macbeth is a historical tragedy that is based, like King Lear, on real events, though Shakespeare does make extensive changes imposed by the political dictates of his time, particularly the need to keep his patron King James I happy. The necessities of storytelling may have imposed these changes as well: murder and despotism are more captivating and less boring than virtue and good deeds.
Macbeth took the witches seriously, and his actions thus led him to disaster. However, would his fate have changed if he had not met the witches? This is not Macbeth’s problem alone, as this quandary touches on the question of whether the future is predetermined or the making of our free will.
In fact, the predestination question was central to the religious disputes raging in Europe at the time, and Elizabethan England was at the heart of this dispute due to the depth of its religious schism, which was not allayed by Henry VIII’s conversion to Protestantism. However, Shakespeare took things further, raising the question of the difficult distinction between fate and choice: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth made many choices, but they also carried out all of the witches’ prophecies that seemed to serve their own ambitions.
With his murder of the king, we see Macbeth grapple with the clash between ethical constraints tied to the threat of earthly punishment and eternal damnation because of “the divine right of kings,” and the opportunity to become king. Since he could not resist his ambition, a dagger quickly loomed in the air - the “dagger of reason,” which symbolizes the criminal choice he simultaneously sought and feared. This is his moral dilemma.
The play teaches us how to deal with ambition and the evil and guilt that stem from letting it take us too far. It also dives into the depths of humanity to come out with both moral and practical lessons: Politics has the capacity to ruin a righteous person like Macbeth, and there is no escaping responsibility for one’s actions. Meanwhile, one must be cautious of those he trusts and loves, and always give independent thought precedence over what others say.
Of course, some critics have also pointed to the play’s patriarchal overtones, which correspond to the values of the time and are manifested in the character of Lady Macbeth, who reflects “women’s nature.”
In fact, as soon as the three witches state that “fair is foul and foul is fair” in the first act, hinting at the events that would unfold over the remainder of the play, it becomes clear that we are facing a piece of theater brimming with contradictions and double meanings, as does the extent to which reading Macbeth is an exercise in humanity’s constant oscillation between attraction and repulsion, decisiveness and hesitation, and always, doubt and certainty...
