Drama notes

Three witches wait on a heath: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” The play will mix fair and foul from this first sound. A bleeding captain tells King Duncan that Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, has won against the rebels. The witches then hail Macbeth with three titles: Glamis (already true), Cawdor (he does not yet know it), and “king hereafter.” They tell Banquo he will beget kings though he himself will not be king. Ross arrives: Cawdor is forfeit to Macbeth. The second title has come true without a crime. Macbeth’s mind leaps to the third title and to murder, then draws back. That leap-and-draw is the start of hamartia: ambition is awake, choice is not yet made.

Duncan names his son Malcolm Prince of Cumberland — the next heir — and will sleep in Macbeth’s castle at Inverness. Lady Macbeth reads her husband’s letter. She fears he is too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way, so she calls on spirits to “unsex” her: to take pity out of her so she can do the killing in will. When Macbeth hesitates (“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly”), she drives him on. He sees a dagger in the air pointing to Duncan’s room — a soliloquy: the mind visible. He kills Duncan offstage. He cannot say amen. Lady Macbeth smears the grooms with blood. A knocking begins.

The Porter, drunk, imagines he is porter of hell-gate. The scene is comic relief, yet hell is the right word for the house. Macduff finds the king. Macbeth, pretending rage, kills the grooms. Malcolm and Donalbain flee, which lets Macbeth look like the next king. He is crowned. Banquo suspects. Macbeth, now afraid of Banquo’s prophesied line, hires murderers. Banquo dies; his son Fleance escapes — so the prophecy about Banquo’s children is not killed. At the feast Banquo’s ghost sits in Macbeth’s place. The lords see a king rave at empty air. Lady Macbeth dismisses them. Macbeth will go again to the witches. Acts I–III are the rise: from thane to king by blood, and already the crown does not sit.

The witches show three apparitions, each a riddle that sounds like safety. An armed head: beware Macduff. A bloody child: none of woman born shall harm Macbeth — so he thinks he cannot be killed by any man. A crowned child with a tree: he shall not be vanquished until Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane — so he thinks a forest cannot walk. Then a show of kings, Banquo’s line, stretching out: the Banquo prophecy still stands. Macbeth, in rage, seizes Macduff’s castle; Lady Macduff and her small son are murdered. In England, Malcolm tests Macduff’s loyalty, then they plan war. Ross brings news of the murdered family. Macduff will fight, not only weep.

Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep, rubbing her hands: “Out, damned spot.” The little water she promised in Act II cannot wash her. The doctor cannot cure a mind diseased. Malcolm’s army cuts branches from Birnam wood to hide their numbers — the forest “comes.” Macbeth hears that the queen is dead. His soliloquy “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” empties time: life is a walking shadow, a poor player, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. That is metaphor (life is shadow / player / tale), not simile. A messenger says the wood moves. Macduff was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped” (born by caesarean), so not “born” of woman in the witches’ twisting sense. He kills Macbeth. Malcolm will be crowned at Scone. The apparitions were true as word-tricks. That is equivocation: language that keeps a technical truth and hides the death inside it.

Macbeth is thane, then king, then isolated butcher. His hamartia is ambition, woken by prophecy and fed by Lady Macbeth, but the choice to kill is his. He sees the horror as he does it; that inner sight is why he is a tragic hero, not a flat villain. Lady Macbeth is the stronger will at first (“look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under’t”), then the mind that breaks in sleep. Duncan is the gracious king whose murder disorders Scotland. Banquo hears the same witches and does not kill. Macduff is the avenger “not of woman born.” Malcolm is the legitimate line restored.

The witches open the play with “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Alliteration ties the opposites; the rest of the play lives in that mix. The Porter’s hell-gate, the dagger, Banquo’s ghost, and the apparitions are the supernatural on the English stage. Comic relief is not a second play; it is one scene that still talks of damnation.

After the murder Macbeth asks whether Neptune’s ocean will wash blood from his hand, then says that hand would redden the seas: hyperbole of guilt. Lady Macbeth says a little water will clear them; her sleepwalking proves her wrong. Kingship in the play is not only a crown. Duncan’s rule is measured, Macbeth’s is sleepless and bloody, Malcolm’s return is the land’s cure. Appearance and reality stay crossed: fair looks, foul acts; moving wood; “not of woman born.”

The dagger speech and “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” are soliloquies: the man alone, the mind audible. “Life’s but a walking shadow” is metaphor, not simile. Pity “like a naked new-born babe” is simile. Blood, darkness, sleeplessness, and borrowed clothes (a title that does not fit) run through the verse. A long answer on this play needs the fall, the flaw, one supernatural fact, and one speech tied to guilt or emptiness — all from the Norton text of Macbeth, not from another tragedy.