his father is dead. After a messenger has warned them that they are in danger, murderers sent by Macbeth enter and stab the son. We learn later that the whole family has been killed.
The scene switches to the English, court where Malcolm and Macduff have a long and strange conversation. Macduff is urging Malcolm to return to Scotland to attempt to destroy Macbeth, but Malcolm is suspicious: he thinks Macduff (on Macbeth’s behalf) may be trying to lure him back to Scotland. He tests Macduff by describing himself as a thoroughly wicked man, totally unsuited to be king in Macbeth’s place. He wants to see if Macduff will go on encouraging him beyond all reasonable limits, in which case he will know that he is being deceived. Up to a point Macduff accepts Malcolm’s supposed vices, but eventually he despairs, says Malcolm is not even fit to live, let alone govern Scotland, and prepares to leave. This convinces Malcolm that Macduff is honest. When a doctor suddenly appears to tell them that King Edward is about to cure sick people by the laying on of hands, a new note of hope is introduced (the implication is that he will help Malcolm cure the social and political sickness in Scotland). Malcolm and Macduff are reconciled. Ross comes from Scotland with the appalling news of the destruction of Macduff’s family and, after cursing himself for neglecting them, Macduff determines to seek revenge. The English army under Siward is ready and Malcolm, Macduff and Ross prepare to march northward.
ACT V
The last Act begins with talk between a doctor and a gentlewoman about the serious illness of Lady Macbeth. We are told that she is in the habit of sleepwalking in a state of great agitation. She says things that seem to incriminate herself and her husband. Then Lady Macbeth herself enters with a lighted taper and the doctor prepares to record what she says. She appears to be washing her hands, and, in a fragmentary way, gives details of the murder of Duncan. She also refers to the killing of Lady Macduff and of Banquo. The watchers express their horror at the significance of what she has said.
A Scottish army is about to combine with the English forces under Malcolm and Siward, and attack Macbeth at Dunsinane. In Scene iii, Macbeth declares his desperate trust in the statements of the witches’ apparitions: Birnam Wood cannot possibly move, and all men are born of women. Soon after this he is brought news of the approach of an army of ten thousand men; he sinks temporarily into a state of despair, seeing his own life as near its end. The doctor tells him that there is no change in Lady Macbeth’s state. Macbeth rouses himself and prepares for battle.
The combined army halts near Birnam Wood and Malcolm gives orders for the soldiers to camouflage themselves with leafy boughs cut from the trees. In Dusinane Castle Lady Macbeth’s death is announced and Macbeth reacts by commenting on the meaninglessness of life. A messenger tells him that Birnam Wood is moving towards them. Macbeth flies into an almost insane rage, then lapses into weary resignation, and finally determines to die fighting. Two brief scenes follow (vii and viii) in which the battle is presented. Macbeth is still half-depending on the statement that he cannot be killed by any man ‘of woman born’ and, when he kills young Siward, is re-encouraged. He encounters the angry Macduff, who tells him that he was born by Caesarian section (i.e. cut from his mother’s body). The last of the supernatural assurances is shown to be a deception. Macbeth refuses to fight Macduff and then, after all, decides to rely on his own strength and courage. They go off fighting. Soon afterwards Macduff returns with Macbeth’s severed head. Malcolm ends the play by heralding a new era for his kingdom of Scotland.
Characterization
Even in such a prosaic summary of the plot, attitudes and relationships in the war between good and evil have to be presented and to some extent explained. In the process, certain characters stand out. It has often been said that Shakespeare’s supreme achievement is in the depth and range of the characters he creates – that he constantly presents us with totally credible individuals. In most of his plays, certainly, the characters ‘ring true’. Some of them are profound and convincing portraits, ‘psychologically accurate’, to use a familiar modern phrase. Shakespeare seems to have succeeded in creating people. He is assisted, of course, by the fact that we usually meet these characters as they are embodied by skilful actors and actresses. We watch a human being in the part, speaking the lines, frowning, moving, gesticulating. Gradually the illusion takes a grip upon us, our imaginations take over (guided by the imagination of the playwright) and we react for a time as though we are watching and listening to real people living their own real lives. In Macbeth there are certainly two characters who are presented skilfully, imaginatively and fully enough to have this effect upon us from the stage and, indeed, even from the pages of a book: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. A good deal has been said about them in this introduction already, but it may be helpful to say a little more. It has been pointed out that the play is one battle in the universal war of good and evil, and that the battle is not between thoroughly bad people and thoroughly good ones. Notwithstanding, by the middle of the play, Macbeth and his wife epitomize the evil which is feared and hated by almost everyone else and, by the end, it is virtually Macbeth versus the rest. The battle also goes on within the two chief characters. There is some danger of seeing them as figures in a sensational horror, story, but close attention dispels this tendency. We have to believe Lady Macbeth when she says that her husband is full o’ th’ milk of human kindness when we listen to what he says. No-one expresses the positive side of human nature more truly, from Macbeth’s early comments on Duncan:
this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels…
(Act I, Scene vii, lines 16–19)
to his poignant regrets at the end of his life:
My way of life
is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf…
(Act V, Scene iii, lines 22–3)
How does a man who knows what human goodness is, and respects it, decline so rapidly into a murderous tyrant? Essentially, he chooses to do so, and knows that it is his choice, because of his ambition, the influence of a beloved wife, and the value he attaches to being thought a brave man. None of these aspects of his character is, in itself, evil, but he allows himself to be led by them into evil Ambition becomes an insatiable hunger, his love for his wife leads him to agree to frightful deeds, and his fighting quality degenerates into bloodlust. Accordingly, he alienates all our respect, yet evokes genuine pity at the last. We recognize a human being.
Lady Macbeth seems to alienate respect in playgoers and readers even more completely, and may not evoke pity, even at the end of her life. Yet she is, potentially, a ‘partner in greatness’ who, like Macbeth, takes it for granted that greatness is all that matters. Like so many other words in the play, this word is interpreted in various ways by various people. Lady Macbeth is a woman who will ‘do anything’ for her husband, just as he will ‘do anything’ for her. She is even willing, and able, to deny her own deepest feelings as a woman and a human being: it is at the moment when she declares that she would kill her own child rather than go back on her word that she inspires most repugnance; and it is at this moment that they are at one. It is the moment of commitment for both of them, and the signal for the train of events which plunges the whole of their society into tragic suffering. She is broken by it, and before long becomes a pathetic, deranged creature, as much a prey to guilt as Macbeth is.
No other character in the play is nearly as fully drawn as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Duncan is a good old man, reluctant to see evil in anyone. Malcolm is a tougher version of his father, and his personality seems at one point to veer towards interesting complexity (in the
