How is Macbeth presented in Macbeth?

How does Macbeth change across the play?

Act 1 opens with praise. Before we even meet Macbeth, a wounded captain describes him cutting a rebel open "from the nave to th' chops", from the belly button to the jaw, and King Duncan calls him "O valiant cousin, worthy gentleman!" So the first Macbeth we hear about is loyal and frighteningly good at violence. In Act 1 Scene 3, three witches greet him as Thane of Glamis (a thane is a Scottish lord), as Thane of Cawdor and as the future king. Minutes later he learns that Duncan has made him Thane of Cawdor. One prophecy has come true, and the thought of murder arrives in his head. It terrifies him.

By Act 1 Scene 7 he has talked himself out of it: "We will proceed no further in this business." His wife, Lady Macbeth, mocks his courage and he gives way. In Act 2 he sees a floating dagger pointing towards Duncan's room, then kills the king offstage. He comes back unable to say "Amen" and haunted by a voice crying "Sleep no more!" The next morning he kills Duncan's two grooms, the servants who slept in the king's room, and claims his love for Duncan drove him to it.

Act 3 shows him as king, but not a safe one. "To be thus is nothing, / But to be safely thus," he says. The witches promised the crown to the descendants of his old friend Banquo, so he hires murderers to kill Banquo and Banquo's son Fleance. This time he keeps the plan from his wife. Fleance escapes, and at the feast in Act 3 Scene 4 Banquo's ghost sits in Macbeth's seat, where only Macbeth can see it.

In Act 4 he goes looking for the witches himself. Their apparitions (magical visions) warn him about Macduff, a Scottish lord, but promise that "none of woman born" can harm him. When he hears that Macduff has fled to England, he has Macduff's wife and children killed. For many readers, this is where any sympathy for him runs out.

In Act 5 his lords are deserting him. He says his life has "fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf", like a leaf dying in autumn. When he hears that Lady Macbeth is dead, he calls life "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing." Then the prophecies turn on him. Malcolm, Duncan's elder son, returns with an army whose soldiers carry branches cut from Birnam Wood, so the wood seems to move. Macduff reveals he was "from his mother's womb / Untimely ripped", cut from her body rather than born in the usual way. Macbeth fights on anyway, and Macduff kills him.

What are the key moments for Macbeth?

Act 1 Scene 4: "Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires." Duncan has just named his son Malcolm as the next king, and Macbeth speaks these lines as an aside, words the other characters on stage do not hear. He asks the stars to go out so that nobody, perhaps not even Macbeth himself, has to look at what he wants. Light stands for goodness in this play, so wanting darkness puts him on the side of evil before he has done anything. The rhyme of "fires" and "desires" gives the lines the sound of a spell, not unlike the witches' chanting.

Act 1 Scene 7: "I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent". In this soliloquy Macbeth lists the reasons not to kill Duncan: he is the king's relative, his subject and his host that night. Then he admits that nothing drives him on except "Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself / And falls on th' other". The metaphor, describing one thing as if it were another, turns his plan into a horse and his ambition into a rider who leaps for the saddle so eagerly that he sails right over it. He can see exactly how this ends. That is what makes the choice tragic rather than simply evil.

Act 2 Scene 2: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?" Straight after the murder, Macbeth asks whether the whole sea could clean his hands, then answers that his hand would sooner turn the green sea red. Neptune was the Roman god of the sea, so the image is enormous on purpose. This exaggeration, called hyperbole, shows guilt that feels bigger than the world. Lady Macbeth's reply in the same scene, "A little water clears us of this deed", will be proved badly mistaken.

Act 5 Scene 5: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player". Told that his wife has died, Macbeth says only "She should have died hereafter", meaning at some later time. Then he compares life to a "player", an actor, who "struts and frets his hour upon the stage" and is forgotten. Said by a character on a real stage, the metaphor is unsettling. The man who killed to control his future now believes nothing means anything. The slow repetition just before it, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow", makes time itself sound like a weary trudge.

What context matters when writing about Macbeth?

Macbeth is usually dated to around 1606, early in the reign of James I. James had been King of Scotland before he also became King of England in 1603, and he was the patron of Shakespeare's acting company, which became known as the King's Men. A play about the murder of a Scottish king would have felt pointed in front of that audience. James's family line was also traced back to Banquo, the friend Macbeth has killed.

Killing a king was more than murder to a Jacobean audience. ("Jacobean" means from the reign of James, whose name in Latin is Jacobus.) Many believed in the divine right of kings: the idea that God chooses the monarch, so killing one is a crime against God as well as the country. James himself wrote in support of the idea. That is why nature goes wrong after Duncan's death, with darkness in the daytime and Duncan's horses eating each other. The Gunpowder Plot of November 1605, when a group of Catholic plotters planned to blow up James and Parliament, had made treason feel very close.

Ideas about manhood matter too. A man was expected to be brave in battle and loyal to his king. Lady Macbeth turns that ideal against her husband: "When you durst do it, then you were a man." Macbeth's answer, "I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none", draws a line that she pushes him across. It also helps to know the idea of the tragic hero: a man of high status whose own flaw, here ambition, brings about his downfall.

What might an exam question on Macbeth ask?

On AQA, the Shakespeare question is Section A of Paper 1. It prints an extract from the play, asks you to start with it, and then asks about the play as a whole. It is worth 30 marks, plus 4 more for spelling, punctuation and grammar (AO4). The exam is closed book, so every quotation beyond the extract has to come from memory. Every major board sets a Shakespeare play and most build the question around an extract, but the wording and marks differ, so check your own board's past papers.

A question on Macbeth himself is a chance to show how he changes, so plan one early moment, one from the middle and one late one. Two focuses you could practise with:

• Starting with Macbeth's soliloquy in Act 1 Scene 7, explore how Shakespeare presents Macbeth's conscience.
• Starting with Macbeth's speech in Act 5 Scene 3, explore how far Shakespeare presents Macbeth as a tragic hero rather than a villain.

What does a strong paragraph on Macbeth look like?

Here is an original model paragraph for the first focus. It makes an argument in its first sentence, then spends every sentence after that proving it.

Shakespeare presents Macbeth's conscience as strong, but not strong enough. Alone in Act 1 Scene 7, he admits that nothing drives him to murder "but only / Vaulting ambition". The metaphor turns ambition into a reckless rider who leaps at the saddle so eagerly that it "o'erleaps itself" and crashes down the other side. Macbeth can already see his own fall, which makes the murder more disturbing, because he cannot claim he was fooled. For a Jacobean audience who believed kings were chosen by God, this is a man who knows the killing would damn him. Yet within minutes Lady Macbeth talks him round, suggesting that his conscience can see clearly but cannot hold him back.

Notice that the quotations are short enough to fit inside the sentences, and that the context explains the speech instead of sitting beside it as a separate fact.

Key Macbeth quotations to learn

Short quotations are easier to remember exactly and easier to analyse word by word. These six follow Macbeth from his first line to his last act.

• "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" (Act 1 Scene 3): his first line echoes the witches' "Fair is foul", linking him to them before they have even met.
• "Stars, hide your fires" (Act 1 Scene 4): his ambition already needs darkness to hide in.
• "Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself" (Act 1 Scene 7): he names his own flaw and predicts where it will take him.
• "O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!" (Act 3 Scene 2): being king has brought torment, and the scorpions make his thoughts poisonous and restless.
• "I am in blood / Stepped in so far" (Act 3 Scene 4): murder has become a river of blood, and turning back feels as hard as wading on.
• "I have lived long enough" (Act 5 Scene 3): the warrior who once fought for his life now sounds tired of it.