Macbeth Summary: What Happens in Shakespeare's Shortest Tragedy
What Macbeth is about
Macbeth is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, thought to have been first performed in 1606 and first published in the Folio of 1623, possibly set from a prompt book. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, and the compression shows. The play moves from loyal service to murder in a matter of scenes, then keeps accelerating.
The story is set in eleventh century Scotland. Macbeth, a Scottish general, meets three witches on a heath who hail him as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and king hereafter. When the second title is granted to him within the hour by King Duncan, the third begins to look less like madness and more like a plan. His wife, Lady Macbeth, is the one who turns the thought into action. Duncan is to spend the night at their castle in Inverness. She persuades Macbeth to kill him there.
What follows is the subject of the play: the physical violence and the psychological damage caused by political ambition. One murder does not settle anything. It creates the need for the next. Macbeth kills to take the crown, then kills to keep it, and the killing hollows out both him and his wife.
Shakespeare took the outline from Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland and Ireland that his audience would have known. The play departs from the historical Macbeth considerably. Scholars note that of all the plays Shakespeare wrote during the reign of King James I, Macbeth carries the most allusions to James, who was patron of Shakespeare's acting company.
The main characters
Macbeth begins as a brave soldier praised by his king for putting down a rebellion. His ambition is described as latent, something already present that the witches merely name aloud. He is not a confident villain. He hesitates, hallucinates a bloody dagger before the murder, and comes back from Duncan's chamber so shaken that he is still holding the knives he was supposed to leave behind.
Lady Macbeth is resolute where her husband wavers. She reads his letter about the prophecy and decides immediately that Duncan must die. She plans the framing of the drunken chamber attendants, she scolds Macbeth for his nerves, and she returns the daggers herself. Later, at the banquet, she covers for him in public with a lie about a lifelong illness. The play's violence eventually unmakes her too.
Banquo fights beside Macbeth and hears the witches tell him that he will father a line of kings although he will never be one. He survives the first murder and starts to suspect his friend, which makes him the second target.
Duncan is the generous king whose trust is his undoing. Macduff, Thane of Fife, discovers the body, refuses to attend Macbeth's banquet, and goes to England to find allies. Malcolm, Duncan's named heir, flees with his brother Donalbain after the murder, which conveniently throws suspicion onto them. The three witches deliver the prophecies, and Hecate, queen of witchcraft, later scolds them for approaching Macbeth without her and instructs them to feed him false confidence.
The themes
Ambition is the engine, but the play is more interested in what ambition costs than in what it wins. Macbeth gets the crown in Act II and spends the rest of the play unable to enjoy it. Power arrives and immediately turns into fear of losing power.
Guilt is physical in this play. Blood that will not wash, a dagger in the air, a dead friend taking a seat at the dinner table. Banquo's ghost appears at the banquet and is visible only to Macbeth, so the other lords see their king shouting at an empty chair. The supernatural and the psychological are deliberately hard to separate.
Corruption spreads outwards. A private crime in a bedchamber becomes a national condition. By Act III, Lennox is speaking in careful irony about a murdering tyrant, and Scotland itself is described as a country people flee.
There is also the question of fate. The witches state what will happen, but they never tell Macbeth to do anything. He chooses each step himself, which is what makes the prophecy work.
Why it still matters
Macbeth is short, fast and almost entirely free of subplot, which is part of why it is staged constantly and why it is taught so widely. The two central roles have drawn some of the most renowned actors in the history of the theatre, and the play has been adapted into film, television, opera, novels and comics.
It also carries its own folklore. A long-standing stage superstition holds that the title should not be spoken in a theatre, so it is called The Scottish Play instead. Few works of literature have generated a taboo around their own name.
The appeal is plain enough. Macbeth is the story of a capable, well-regarded person who does one terrible thing and cannot stop. That shape of story has not aged.
