William Shakespeare · c. 1606
Shakespeare's Macbeth is his shortest tragedy and his most concentrated. There is almost no subplot, almost no comic relief, almost no waste. The play moves with the inevitability of a thrown object. To read it well is to track three things: the language (which has its own dense music), the recurring images (blood, sleep, equivocation), and the way Shakespeare uses the Aristotelian tragic vocabulary at every turn.
Like Hamlet, Macbeth is built on the classical tragic apparatus Aristotle described in the Poetics:
The three witches are the play's signature motif. They open the play in eleven lines of trochaic tetrameter (the only major characters not in iambic pentameter — Shakespeare gives them their own metre, marking them as outside the world's order). Their famous chiasmus — "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" — is the play's governing paradox. The witches do not cause the murder; they articulate a possibility Macbeth was already entertaining. Critics still debate whether they are external evil, projections of Macbeth's ambition, or both.
The play was written in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot (1605), and the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation — the moral defence of speaking ambiguously under oath — is woven through it. The witches equivocate ("none of woman born," "until Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane"). The Porter in his drunken speech jokes about an "equivocator" being damned. The play asks: what happens to a person who is misled by language that is technically true? Macbeth's tragedy is partly the tragedy of being defeated by his own literal reading of prophecy.
Blood appears in every act. Some key occurrences:
The motif is doing thematic work: blood does not wash away; murder is not erasable; the play is partly an argument about the permanence of moral consequence.
The play's other great motif is sleep. Macbeth, immediately after the murder, hears a voice: "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep — the innocent sleep, / Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care." Lady Macbeth eventually loses her sleep entirely (the sleepwalking scene). The play sets up sleep as the symbol of conscience and innocence, then has Macbeth forfeit it.
Lady Macbeth's "unsex me here" speech is one of Shakespeare's most discussed passages. She asks the spirits to take from her the gendered traits that would, she believes, prevent the murder — milk, gentleness, the "compunctious visitings of nature." Her later collapse is the play's argument that this inversion is not sustainable; the conscience she tried to repress returns in her sleep. Critics have read her as one of Shakespeare's most psychologically complex female characters and as a Jacobean version of the demonic-female archetype. The play supports both readings.
Macbeth's response to news of his wife's death is one of the most famous nihilistic speeches in English:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
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.
Read carefully, this is Macbeth's anagnorisis — the recognition of what his life has been. The metaphors compound: life as candle, walking shadow, poor player, tale told by an idiot. Each is more dismissive than the last. The speech is the emotional centre of the play's final act, and one of the greatest concentrated expressions of nihilism in English literature.
Most editors believe the surviving text has been cut — that the Folio version of 1623 represents an abridgment of an earlier, longer play. Whether or not that's true, the play we have is structured by compression: there is no subplot, no extended comic relief, no leisurely middle. Every scene is moving the catastrophe forward. The compression is part of why the play feels relentless.
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