Macbeth

“Present fears/Are less than horrible imaginings.”

In an aside to the audience, Macbeth confesses that he is enraptured by the idea of being king but can’t see himself killing Duncan. At this stage, Macbeth is yet to act. He has not entirely decided what he will do. Already, though, his horrible visions of committing the murder has a physical effect on his body and bring even more doubt into his character, no matter how much he dismisses them.

“Yet do I fear thy nature;/It is too full o' the milk of human kindness.”

After receiving the letter from Macbeth, Lady Macbeth ruminates on her ambitions and those of her husband. She fears that he does not have to the stomach to take the throne—his nature contains “the milk of human kindness,” an ironic image since it is Lady Macbeth who should be full of maternal milk. Lady Macbeth sees Macbeth’s loyalty, kindness, and self-reflection as weaknesses.

“Come, you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts! unsex me here,/And fill me from the crown to the toe top full/Of direst cruelty”

In her soliloquy, Lady Macbeth addresses her feminine nature. To murder Duncan, she must divest herself of those qualities typically associated with the femininity. Instead, she wishes to be ‘unsexed’ to become cruel and determined to achieve her goals.

“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”

The rhyming iambic pentameter of the final line of Act I emphasizes Macbeth’s moment of resolution: He is determined to hide his evil intentions to murder his king behind his false face. This self-awareness and the hint of guilt will gradually eat away at Macbeth’s conscience.

“A falcon, towering in her pride of place,/Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.”

In a play replete with signs portents, the image of the hawk killing an owl suggests a complete breakdown in the natural order, a chaos that has turned reality on its head. The image of a mouse killing a falcon feeds into the growing sense of dread felt by the characters. They are aware something is very wrong but don’t know exactly what.

“Is this a dagger which I see before me,/The handle toward my hand?”

In one of the most famous lines in the play, Macbeth addresses the strange spectral dagger he imagines floating before him. The handle is pointing toward his hand, which he reads as a signal of his intent to commit murder. Macbeth decides that the dagger is a ghostly metaphor for the heinous act he is about to commit, but does not stop.

“Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell/That summons thee to heaven or to hell.”

Macbeth’s rhyming couplet contains another ominous sign that builds on the sense of dread conjured by the dagger. The bell ringing is a sign from Lady Macbeth that the stage is set for the murder, but for Macbeth it sounds like the knell rung during a funeral. His words to Duncan take on a sonorous quality, almost like a lullaby which urges Duncan to sleep. By leaving the soul of Duncan to “heaven or to hell,” Macbeth is mentally stepping back from the murder even as he is committing it—it is not his place to judge Duncan.

“Wherefore could I not pronounce 'Amen'?”

Macbeth’s guilt manifests when he hears the chamberlains praying, Macbeth cannot join them in saying the closing word of the prayer. He knows that he has ventured too far from the grace of God, becoming too profane to utter holy words. Quite suddenly, Macbeth feels his world collapsing inward under the weight of his own conscience.

“Had I but died an hour before this chance,/I had lived a blessed time, for from this instant/There’s nothing serious in mortality.”

Now party to murder, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth must play their parts. They deliver over-the-top lamentations; Lady Macbeth pretends to feel faint while Macbeth curses the nature of time and his inability to stop the murder of the king. In contrast to the actual guilt he feels, these words ring hollow.

“I must become a borrower of the night/For a dark hour or twain.”

Banquo’s lines are heavy with foreboding. He plans to arrive after sunset, alluding to the metaphor of death being akin to an attempt to outrun a setting sun. Banquo will not make it to the castle; he will not live to see the feast or to see the sun rise ever again. He becomes a borrower of the night living on borrowed time.

“Things without all remedy/Should be without regard; what's done is done.”

Macbeth fatalistically accepts the inevitability of his situation: If there is no remedy to his situation, he does not need to pay it any regard. He is resigned to the course that he is set upon, accepting that “what’s done is done” (14) and there is no way to undo his terrible deeds.

“Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.”

One of the most important themes of the play is the notion that violence begets violence. In these lines, Macbeth announces this explicitly. He states that his bad actions—“things bad begun” (57)—are made stronger by the negative emotions. Thus, the negativity increases and every bad deed he commits or orders to be committed on his behalf leads to more bad deeds in the future.

“Blood will have blood.”

Macbeth acknowledges that blood spilled will incur revenge. He has spilled the blood of his friends and his king, so already expects that others will attempt to exact revenge. Violence begets violence, and Macbeth’s only solution is to spill further blood.

“I am in blood/Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o'er.”

Macbeth uses the image of a river of blood to acknowledge the impossible situation in which he finds himself. He is so far “in blood” (142), that wading out of it is impossibly exhausting. It is now equally difficult to stop killing and to carry on killing, so he decides to continue the bloodshed. Macbeth is becoming lost amid the violence and, even as he acknowledges his sins, he finds it impossible to escape.

“Double, double toil and trouble;/Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”

The three witches chant this incantation while stirring a cauldron filled with a potion crafted from obscene ingredients. The couplet’s internal and end rhymes, its iambic heptameter, and its repetition add to the mystical quality of the witches.

“By the pricking of my thumbs,/Something wicked this way comes.”

The witches can augur the future through blood magic, marking them as evil. This makes it all the more ironic when they refer to Macbeth as “wicked” (45). They have dragged Macbeth down to their moral level, now seeing him as a ‘thing’—a puppet that they can manipulate. out of his humanity and into violence, ambition, and tragedy.

“Saw you the weird sisters?”

The witches as “weird” (142) in the sense of the Old English word ‘wyrd’, which connotes abnormality veering into the unnatural and the demonic. Macbeth’s desperation in asking Lennox whether he is able to see the witches demonstrates his confusion between reality and his hallucinations. When Lennox can’t confirmation that the witches were present in the cavern, Macbeth grows even more unhinged.

“Then the liars and swearers are fools.

Macduff’s son has very few lines in the play before he is brutally murdered, but we still get a sense of him as a character with insight and mental fortitude. He is a smart boy, able to go toe-to-toe with his mother in an argument, and his ruminations on the nature of traitors add an extra dimension of pathos to his murder.

“Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak/Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.”

Malcolm’s reaction to Macduff’s grief shows him to be an emotionally intelligent man and a good leader. He knows that nothing can alleviate Macduff’s grief but aims to direct this raw, devastating emotion into a tangible political goal, turning Macduff even further against Macbeth.

“Unnatural deeds/Do breed unnatural troubles.”

Having seen Lady Macbeth sleepwalking through the halls, the doctor recognizes the unmistakable signs of all-consuming guilt in her actions. Her unnatural deeds (murder) have led to unnatural troubles (hallucinations, sleepwalking). Once again, immorality leads to characters disconnecting from the natural world.

“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,/Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,/Raze out the written troubles of the brain,/And with some sweet oblivious antidote/Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff/Which weighs upon the heart?”

While Macbeth is pleading with the doctor to cure his wife’s psyche, he is unwittingly describing his own state of mind, diseased with a heavy weight placed upon it. Just as Macbeth pleads for a cure for his wife, he pleads for a cure for himself.

“I have almost forgot the taste of fears.”

Macbeth has left his humanity behind to the point that he no longer feels human emotions such as fear. No real threats like an approaching army can compare to visions of daggers or bloody ghosts. Macbeth’s numbness to fear is not a positive attribute—he is not brave, but rather a shell of a man. He is longing for the sensation of fear, if only to make him feel human once again.

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/To 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/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.”

Perhaps the most famous lines in the play, Macbeth’s soliloquy comes just after he learns that his wife has died (likely via suicide). The two loved each other and were doomed by their insatiable ambitions. But rather than feeling despair or anger, Macbeth is numb. He turns the news of his wife’s death into a mediation on the pointlessness of life. It is a moment of self-reflection, in which he realizes that everything he and his wife have done in order to win the throne is meaningless. But as the speech is also a defense of his actions: if, as Macbeth states, there is no point to life, then the significance of his sins diminishes. If the “sound and fury” (28) ultimately signal nothing, then why would he be held accountable for the violence he has enacted?