Things that every student who learns Macbeth should know

As many fresh, eager students with shiny shoes and brand-new Oxford tins show up to school, ready to tackle the start of their GCSE course, for almost all of them, the first literature challenge they'll face is Macbeth.

If students are studying Language and Literature (English automatically forms two GCSEs), then Shakespeare has to be part of the course. Most schools opt for Macbeth. I've known schools study Romeo and Juliet, and I've known schools study The Merchant of Venice, but as a rule, Macbeth is the one most students end up tackling.

Why? Glad you asked. It's filled with everything that makes a stonking story: love, loyalty, the supernatural, betrayal, ambition, madness, murder, with a light sprinkling of violence throughout. Let's take a closer look — perhaps you can inform yourself, or shove this in front of an obliging teen, who might come away with a slightly stronger grasp of what Macbeth is really about.

At school, students do a slow read-through of the entire text, examining the motives, thoughts, fears, and interactions of the key characters in detail. Teachers will also encourage study of the historical context the play was written in, along with the key themes that frame the story.

Meeting Macbeth

When the play opens, we don't even meet Macbeth until Act 1, Scene 3. By then, we've already learned that the witches are plotting to meet him, and that the king loves him for his outstanding contribution to a war against Scottish rebels, aided by the Norwegians.

On his way back from battle, arguably the most important scene of the play occurs: Macbeth and his friend Banquo are accosted by three witches, who offer predictions about the future. To Macbeth, they offer a couple of new titles as "thane" (roughly, being made a lord of somewhere) — but most importantly, they tell him he will be "King, hereafter." To Banquo, they promise not kingship in his own lifetime, but that he will father a line of kings, making him "Lesser than Macbeth and greater." At no point do the witches suggest murder.

Lady Macbeth's Ambition

Macbeth sends a letter to Lady Macbeth, who instantly — instantly — starts not only plotting Duncan's murder, but calling on spirits to make her less like a woman and more like a man, in order to do what she believes needs doing. This is interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, it presents Lady Macbeth as a woman of drive and ambition, wholly unlike most women as written in Jacobean literature.

Macbeth's reaction, however, is just as telling. He points out that he's already been "promoted" multiple times and, after his victory for the king, is everyone's darling: the king "hath honoured me of late, and I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people, which would be worn now in their newest gloss." It's worth remembering that Macbeth isn't devoid of ambition — he's simply risen so high already that he's deeply uncomfortable committing the ultimate atrocity to gain the "golden round" (the crown). In the end, his ambition to climb even higher proves to be his hamartia (his fatal flaw). He half-suspects this himself when he says, "I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself" — in other words, ambition alone may be what causes his fall from honour.

The Murder

Despite his reticence, Macbeth eventually agrees to commit murder in his own castle that night. Famously, while wondering whether he can go through with it, he sees something: "Is this a dagger which I see before me?" — a line many people know even without having read the play. Films often portray the dagger as a real object, but given the play was originally staged, it's likely meant to be purely metaphorical: Macbeth envisions himself committing the act, and this vision leads him to the exact spot in the castle where the murder will take place.

As readers, we never actually see the murder — we can only imagine it from the description given afterward.

Motifs: Blood, Hands, and Sleep

Blood is used frequently as a motif throughout the play, heightening the sense of violence that runs through it. Hands are another recurring motif, symbolising the power to help or harm. Immediately after the murder, Macbeth asks, "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?" This is echoed later by Lady Macbeth, who uses a similar image to express her own horror: "Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." The final recurring motif is sleep, often used to symbolise either the peaceful sleep of a clear conscience, or the sleeplessness brought on by guilt.

Guilt and the Divine Right of Kings

Macbeth senses how far he's strayed from God. He notes that one of the guards muttered a prayer in his sleep, but that he himself couldn't say "Amen": "Wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'? I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen' stuck in my throat." He's so shaken that he forgets to smear blood on the faces of the sleeping, drunk guards — a detail crucial to Lady Macbeth's plan. She takes the knife from him herself, snapping that he is "infirm of purpose."

While we're on the subject, it's worth touching on the Divine Right of Kings, a term students will become very familiar with — the belief, common at the time, that God had personally chosen the king. This matters for exam writing for a couple of reasons. Students are expected to reference the play's social and historical context, and King James, recently crowned, had written his own book on witches — a genuine area of personal interest for him. It's also worth knowing that James was the patron of Shakespeare's theatre company, The King's Men.

It's therefore no coincidence that witches feature so prominently, or that the idea of the Divine Right of Kings runs throughout. After Queen Elizabeth, no successor was going to be universally popular — least of all James, whose Catholic mother made many expect (unhappily) that he'd favour Catholics. It's hardly a stretch, then, that a play from a playwright in the king's own pay would suggest, in essence: this is the king you've been given, so accept it, because God chose him. Maybe don't phrase it quite that bluntly in an exam answer.

In a brief, seemingly minor scene (Act 2, Scene 4), two men discuss the strange, unnatural events following Duncan's murder — the day as dark as night, horses stampeding and turning on each other. Most symbolically: "A falcon, tow'ring in her pride of place, was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed" — a majestic creature at the top of the food chain brought down by something far lesser. The point Shakespeare is making should be clear enough.

Macbeth's Descent

Once crowned, Macbeth turns ruthless toward everyone around him. He first murders the guards who might have confessed or not, an act that first warns Banquo to be wary of his old friend. On the back of a false rumour, both Duncan's heir and his brother flee the country. Still, it isn't enough — Macbeth can't shake the witches' promise that Banquo's line, not his own, will inherit the throne. His growing dread is clear when he tells Lady Macbeth, "Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife... we have scotched the snake, not killed it."

From here, the dynamic between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth shifts noticeably. Macbeth becomes the driving force, while Lady Macbeth begins to fade. Notably, for the first time, she asks him, "What is to be done?" and he replies, "Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, till thou applaud the deed." Macbeth is now firmly in charge.

The plan he keeps from her is the murder of Banquo — and the escape of Banquo's son, Fleance, ensuring the witches' prophecy could still come true. Macbeth witnesses the consequences of his actions when Banquo's ghost appears to him alone at a banquet, an event that not only makes his followers question his sanity but signals just how consumed by obsession he's becoming.

The Witches' Final Prophecies

Macbeth doubles down on his faith in the supernatural, seeking the witches out again. In a key scene, they show him an endless line of Banquo's descendants in a mirror, alongside several truths dressed up as lies. First: "none of woman born shall harm Macbeth" — since being born of a woman is, seemingly, universal to every human, Macbeth considers himself essentially untouchable. He's further reassured that no harm will come to him until Great Birnam Wood moves toward his castle, prompting him to reasonably (he thinks) conclude he's all but immortal: "Who can impress the forest, bid the tree unfix his earth-bound root?"

Warned by the witches to "beware Macduff," Macbeth's obsession leads him to murder Macduff's family — Macduff himself having fled to England with Malcolm, Duncan's son. This proves a pivotal plot point. Upon learning of the murder, Macduff grieves, "What, all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop?" before quickly moving, egged on by Malcolm, toward anger and a determination to kill Macbeth in revenge.

The Fall

Confident in the witches' promises, Macbeth retreats to his castle at Dunsinane as Lady Macbeth begins to unravel. In Act 5, Scene 1, a doctor and a servant witness her sleepwalking, reliving the horror of what she's done through the same motifs of blood and hands: "Out, damned spot!" and "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" She's not seen again — by this point she's become so peripheral to the plot that the audience only hears her scream before her death is announced to Macbeth, who responds with detached numbness: "She should have died hereafter." He muses briefly that life is too short a tale to mean much of anything.

After her death, the play accelerates, with short, high-impact scenes drawing both armies closer together. Macbeth's confidence finally cracks when a messenger reports, "I looked toward Birnam, and anon methought the wood began to move" — in reality, the English army concealing their numbers behind cut branches. At the play's climax, Macduff reveals he was "from his mother's womb untimely ripped" — delivered by what we'd now call a caesarean, and therefore not "born" in the conventional sense.

This is the moment of Macbeth's anagnorisis — his realisation that everything he believed was either untrue or twisted. The forest didn't literally walk, and he can, after all, be killed. He recognises the trickery for what it was: "these juggling fiends no more believed, that palter with us in a double sense." In his final moments, we glimpse a brief return to the heroic Macbeth we met at the play's start. Knowing death is now certain, he cries, "Lay on, Macduff, and damned be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'" And that, reader, is the end of him.

Order is restored: Duncan's rightful heir is crowned King of Scotland.

Questions to Think About

• Was Macbeth just a pawn of the witches? Did he have free will, or was he pushed around by fate?
• Who was more responsible for the events that unfolded — Macbeth, or his overambitious wife?
• Why might the witches have targeted Macbeth specifically?
• How do you think audiences watching this play at the time might have felt?