Macbeth

Shakespeare presents Macbeth's ambition not as a heroic drive but as a desire he knows to be indefensible¹ even while he gives in to it. In this soliloquy his ambition is strikingly thin: he can list many reasons not to kill Duncan and only one reason to do it. Across the play, that single reason grows into a force that ‘o'erleaps itself’, consuming Macbeth, his marriage and Scotland. For a Jacobean audience ruled by James I, who believed kings were appointed by God, the play works as a warning about the damnation that follows from grasping at what God has not given.

The opening lines reveal an ambition that wants the reward without the cost. The conditional ‘If it were done’ and the triple repetition of ‘done’ show Macbeth circling the act without naming it²; ‘assassination’ is the only blunt word he allows himself, and even that is cushioned by the conditional ‘If’. He wishes the murder could ‘trammel up the consequence’, a metaphor of catching consequences in a net, and the sibilance of ‘surcease success’ makes the fantasy sound smooth and easy. Yet the phrase ‘We'd jump the life to come’ shows he understands exactly what is at stake: he would gamble his soul. His ambition is therefore presented as a conscious moral choice, which makes him more culpable, and more tragic, than a simple villain.

Structurally, the soliloquy is built like a legal case against himself³. He lists his ‘double trust’ – kinsman, subject and host – and the religious imagery escalates as he does so: Duncan's virtues ‘plead like angels, trumpet-tongued’ against ‘the deep damnation of his taking-off’. The heavy alliteration of ‘deep damnation’ echoes the trumpets of the Day of Judgement, reminding an audience shortly after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605⁴ that killing a king was treason against God as well as the state. The simile of pity ‘like a naked newborn babe / Striding the blast’ is a paradox: something utterly vulnerable becomes overwhelmingly powerful. Shakespeare hints here at the structure of the whole tragedy, in which innocence – Fleance's escape, Macduff's murdered children – eventually defeats Macbeth.

The final image is the most revealing. Macbeth has ‘no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition’. The horse-riding metaphor presents ambition as a rider who leaps so eagerly that he ‘falls on th' other’ side; Macbeth predicts his own downfall in the very speech in which he considers the crime. The line is left unfinished because Lady Macbeth enters⁵, and this interruption is structurally significant: Macbeth's ambition is not strong enough on its own and needs an outside spur. She supplies it by attacking his masculinity, insisting that he was a man only when he dared to act.

Once Duncan is dead, Shakespeare shows ambition turning into paranoia. Even earlier, in Act 1 Scene 4, Macbeth had begged ‘Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires’, linking ambition to darkness and concealment. As king he complains that ‘To be thus is nothing, / But to be safely thus’, and his ambition now demands the murder of Banquo, whose descendants the witches have promised the throne. By Act 3 Scene 4 he admits he is ‘in blood / Stepped in so far’ that turning back would be as tiresome as wading on; the metaphor of a river of blood shows ambition reduced to grim momentum. ambition is a choice⁷) rather than listing extra scenes.">The contrast with Banquo⁶, who prays to ‘merciful powers’ to restrain his ‘cursèd thoughts’, shows that the witches' prophecy did not force anyone's hand: ambition is a choice.

Finally, ambition fulfilled brings only emptiness. In the ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ soliloquy Macbeth sees life as ‘a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’. The crown he wanted so badly has become meaningless, and Malcolm's closing judgement of him as a ‘dead butcher’ strips away the ‘brave Macbeth’ of Act 1. Shakespeare therefore presents ambition as self-destroying: the man who once argued so eloquently against murder ends the play unable to find meaning in anything, and order returns only when the rightful heir is restored.

At first Lady Macbeth seems the most powerful figure in the play, but Shakespeare shows that her power is borrowed¹: it depends on calling up darkness and crushing her own nature, and it collapses once that nature returns. This speech, which looks like a declaration of strength, already contains the fears that will destroy her.

From the first line she claims authority. The raven, a traditional omen of death, croaks Duncan's ‘fatal entrance’ under ‘my battlements’; the possessive pronoun is telling², because in a patriarchal Jacobean household the castle would be seen as her husband's. The speech is then driven by imperatives – ‘Come, you spirits’, ‘unsex me here’, ‘make thick my blood’ – so that she speaks like a commander giving orders to the supernatural. To an audience that knew James I had written Daemonologie (1597) and supported witch trials, a woman summoning ‘murd'ring ministers’ would have seemed shockingly close to witchcraft, linking her to the witches who also disrupt the natural order.

However, the content of her commands reveals weakness as much as strength. She asks to be ‘unsex[ed]’ because she associates womanhood with compassion, and to be filled ‘from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty’. The pun on ‘crown’ ties her body to the ambition for the throne⁴, while the superlative ‘direst’ shows how extreme she must become. Crucially, she fears ‘compunctious visitings of nature’ and wants to block ‘th' access and passage to remorse’: the physical metaphor of sealing up her blood suggests she knows guilt would otherwise reach her. Her power, then, is not natural to her; it has to be manufactured.

The most disturbing image inverts motherhood: the spirits are to ‘take my milk for gall’, replacing nourishment with bitterness. Shakespeare develops this in Act 1 Scene 7, when she claims she would have ‘dashed the brains out’ of her nursing baby rather than break such a promise, using the same violent maternal imagery to shame Macbeth into action. Her power over him is rhetorical: she redefines manhood as daring to kill, and he cannot answer her.

The final lines turn to darkness: ‘Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell’. A ‘pall’ is the cloth over a coffin⁵, so the night she summons is already funereal. She wants darkness so that her ‘keen knife see not the wound it makes’ and so that heaven cannot ‘peep through the blanket of the dark / To cry “Hold, hold!”’. The personification of heaven as a watcher shows that, beneath her bravado, she knows the deed is a sin. Shakespeare plants the irony that someone who needs to hide from her own knife may not be able to live with it.

Across the play this power drains away. In Act 2 Scene 2 she admits she could not kill Duncan herself because he ‘resembled / My father as he slept’ – the ‘visitings of nature’ she feared have already broken through. Her confident claim that ‘A little water clears us of this deed’ is dramatic irony. By Act 3 she is shut out of Macbeth's plans; he calls her ‘dearest chuck’ and tells her to be ‘innocent of the knowledge’ of Banquo's murder, a reversal of their earlier relationship. In the sleepwalking scene she speaks in broken prose rather than verse⁶, scrubbing at an imaginary ‘damned spot’ and lamenting that ‘all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’. The Gentlewoman reveals that she now keeps a light by her continually – a reversal of her earlier plea for ‘thick night’⁷. Her death happens offstage, reported only by a cry, and Malcolm's label ‘fiend-like queen’ is the play's last word on her.

So Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth as powerful only for a short time and at terrible cost. Her strength comes from suppressing her humanity, and the play suggests that humanity – and the guilt that comes with it – cannot be suppressed for ever. A modern audience might pity her more than Malcolm does, seeing a woman whose only route to power in a male world was through her husband.