Writer’s Toolkit

Macbeth — 6 sections · A4 printable

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

Language

Technique

Example

What It Reveals

Diction

"Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires"

The adjectives 'black' and 'deep' reveal Macbeth's awareness that his ambition is morally corrupt — he must conceal it even from the natural world, suggesting an instinctive guilt that precedes the murder.

Metaphor

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage"

Macbeth reduces human existence to a theatrical illusion — the extended metaphor of life as a bad actor conveys nihilistic despair and his complete loss of meaning after Lady Macbeth's death.

Simile

"Look like th'innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't"

Lady Macbeth's advice draws on the Biblical image of the serpent in Eden — the simile aligns their planned regicide with original sin, casting Duncan's murder as a fall from grace.

Personification

"Macbeth does murder sleep — the innocent sleep"

Sleep is personified as an innocent victim, paralleling Duncan — Shakespeare suggests that in killing the king, Macbeth has murdered his own capacity for peace, rest, and natural order.

Imagery of blood

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?"

Blood becomes a permanent stain symbolising guilt — the hyperbolic reference to Neptune's ocean emphasises that Macbeth's guilt is cosmic in scale and can never be cleansed.

Imagery of darkness and light

"Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell"

Lady Macbeth invokes darkness to conceal their crime from heaven — the imperative 'Come' and hellish imagery suggest she is actively summoning evil, aligning herself with the supernatural forces of the play.

Animal imagery

"It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman"

The owl, a nocturnal predator, symbolises death and ill omen — Lady Macbeth recasts a natural sound as a death knell, showing how the murder has corrupted their perception of the natural world.

Religious imagery

"Besides, this Duncan / Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been / So clear in his great office, that his virtues / Will plead like angels"

Duncan is associated with divine grace and angelic virtue — Macbeth's own language condemns his planned regicide as an assault not just on a king but on God's anointed representative on earth.

Alliteration / sound patterning

"Double, double, toil and trouble; / Fire burn and cauldron bubble"

The trochaic rhythm and plosive alliteration create an incantatory, ritualistic tone — the witches' language sounds fundamentally different from the rest of the play, marking them as agents of chaos and the supernatural.

Oxymoron / paradox

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair"

The witches' opening paradox collapses moral distinction — it establishes the play's central theme that appearances deceive and that the boundary between good and evil is dangerously unstable.

Symbolic adjectives

"this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen"

Malcolm's final judgement reduces Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to archetypes of brutality and demonic evil — the adjectives 'dead' and 'fiend-like' strip them of their humanity and complexity.

Hyperbole

"The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red"

The exaggerated image of turning the entire ocean red with blood conveys the enormity of Macbeth's guilt — the shift from Latinate 'incarnadine' to plain 'red' translates horror into simple, inescapable truth.

Euphemism

"If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well / It were done quickly"

Macbeth cannot name the murder directly — the repeated, vague 'done' and 'it' reveal his psychological evasion; he wants the act without having to confront what it actually is.

Repetition

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow"

The triple repetition stretches time into meaningless monotony — Macbeth's despair reduces the future to an endless, purposeless repetition, reflecting his total spiritual collapse.

Imperatives

"Bring me no more reports; let them fly all"

Macbeth's desperate commands in Act 5 reveal a tyrant who has lost control — the imperatives are attempts to impose order on a world that is disintegrating around him.

Rhetorical questions

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?"

The question expects the answer 'no' — Macbeth interrogates his own guilt and finds it permanent, using the rhetorical form to dramatise the impossibility of moral recovery.

Structural Techniques

Technique

Example / Description

Effect / Purpose

Five-act tragedy structure

Exposition (Act 1), rising action (Acts 2–3), climax (Act 3), falling action (Act 4), catastrophe (Act 5)

Follows the classical tragic arc — the audience watches Macbeth's rise and inevitable fall, creating a sense of tragic inevitability that reinforces the play's moral framework.

Rising action and climax

Macbeth's ambition builds through the witches' prophecy, Lady Macbeth's persuasion, and Duncan's murder, climaxing with Banquo's assassination

Each act of violence escalates the stakes — Shakespeare shows how the initial crime creates a chain of increasingly desperate murders, dramatising the corrupting momentum of unchecked ambition.

Turning point (peripeteia)

Banquo's ghost appears at the banquet (Act 3, Scene 4), publicly exposing Macbeth's guilt

Marks the moment Macbeth's power begins to unravel — his inability to conceal his guilt in public signals the beginning of his political and psychological collapse.

Falling action

Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking, Macbeth's increasing isolation, the gathering of opposing forces under Malcolm

Shakespeare accelerates the pace of decline — the parallel collapse of both Macbeths demonstrates that the consequences of tyranny destroy the tyrant from within as well as from without.

Cyclical morality structure

The play opens with a battle against a traitor (Cawdor) and ends with the defeat of another traitor (Macbeth)

The circular pattern suggests that the moral order is self-correcting — tyranny may disrupt the natural hierarchy, but divine justice ensures it is eventually restored.

Foreshadowing

"By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes"

The witches' premonition signals Macbeth's arrival and his complete descent into evil — even supernatural forces now recognise him as 'wicked', confirming his moral transformation.

Parallelism / mirroring

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth mirror each other's trajectories — he moves from hesitation to tyranny while she moves from ruthlessness to guilt-ridden madness

Their inverse arcs create a structural chiasmus — Shakespeare argues that guilt cannot be escaped, only redistributed; what one represses, the other eventually expresses.

Contrast / juxtaposition

Duncan's gracious arrival at Inverness is immediately followed by Lady Macbeth's plotting his murder

The sharp juxtaposition between hospitality and treachery heightens dramatic irony — the audience experiences the horror of violated trust in real time.

Short fractured speeches (late acts)

Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking: 'Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One, two —'

The fragmented syntax mirrors psychological disintegration — the ordered iambic pentameter of her earlier speech has collapsed into broken prose, reflecting her shattered mind.

Pace and rhythm

Act 1 builds slowly through deliberation; Act 5 races through a series of rapid, short scenes

The accelerating pace mirrors Macbeth's loss of control — as his tyranny crumbles, Shakespeare denies both character and audience time to reflect, creating breathless momentum toward catastrophe.

Entrances and exits

Duncan enters Macbeth's castle commenting on its pleasant air; he never exits alive

Shakespeare uses stage movement to dramatise entrapment and fatal hospitality — Duncan walks willingly into the space of his own murder, deepening the horror of betrayed trust.

Imagery patterning

Blood imagery escalates from 'bloody execution' (heroic) to 'blood will have blood' (guilt) to Lady Macbeth's obsessive handwashing

The evolving blood motif tracks the moral arc of the play — the same image shifts from valour to guilt to madness, showing how violence corrupts everything it touches.

Use of soliloquies

Macbeth's seven soliloquies chart his inner moral conflict from 'If it were done' to 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow'

Soliloquies give the audience privileged access to Macbeth's conscience — they create tragic sympathy by showing that he understands the horror of what he does, even as he does it.

Interrupted verse / prose

Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene is in prose, not verse — a departure from her earlier controlled iambic pentameter

The shift from verse to prose signals the collapse of order and reason — Shakespeare uses form itself to dramatise mental disintegration.

Dramatic Techniques

Technique

Example / Description

Purpose / Effect

Dramatic irony

Duncan praises Macbeth's castle — 'This castle hath a pleasant seat' — unaware he will be murdered there

The audience's knowledge of the murder plot transforms Duncan's innocent appreciation into unbearable tension — his trust makes the betrayal more horrifying.

Asides

"The Prince of Cumberland — that is a step / On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap"

Macbeth's aside reveals his private ambition to the audience while concealing it from other characters — Shakespeare creates complicity between Macbeth and the audience, deepening tragic engagement.

Soliloquies

"Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?"

The dagger soliloquy externalises Macbeth's inner turmoil — the hallucination dramatises the moment of moral crisis, showing a mind torn between conscience and murderous ambition.

Pathetic fallacy

"The night has been unruly... chimneys were blown down... lamentings heard i'th'air"

Nature reflects the moral chaos of Duncan's murder — Shakespeare uses the storm to suggest that regicide violates not just political but cosmic order.

Stage directions

Enter Lady Macbeth, with a taper / Enter the Ghost of Banquo, and sits in Macbeth's place

Minimal but powerful — Banquo's ghost silently taking Macbeth's seat is a visual metaphor for usurped kingship; Lady Macbeth's candle symbolises her desperate need for light against inner darkness.

Supernatural elements (witches / visions / ghosts)

The Weird Sisters' prophecies, the floating dagger, Banquo's ghost, the apparitions in Act 4

Create ambiguity between external fate and internal psychology — the audience cannot determine whether Macbeth is driven by supernatural forces or his own corrupted imagination, deepening the tragedy.

Blank verse (iambic pentameter)

"So foul and fair a day I have not seen" — regular iambic pentameter reflecting Macbeth's status

Noble characters speak in verse to signal their elevated status — disruptions in the meter mirror disruptions in the moral and political order of Scotland.

Prose

Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene and the Porter's comic scene are both in prose

Prose signals a departure from rational control — Lady Macbeth's shift to prose dramatises her mental collapse, while the Porter's prose provides grotesque comic relief that heightens surrounding horror.

Equivocation

"None of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth" — true only in a technical, deceptive sense

The witches' prophecies are literally true but deliberately misleading — equivocation was a politically charged concept in Jacobean England, linked to the Gunpowder Plot and Catholic conspiracies.

Witches' double meanings

"Macbeth shall never vanquished be until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him"

The seemingly impossible condition creates false security — Shakespeare demonstrates that language itself is treacherous; the witches exploit the gap between literal and intended meaning to destroy Macbeth.

The banquet scene (Act 3, Scene 4)

Macbeth's public breakdown before his thanes when he sees Banquo's ghost

The formal banquet setting magnifies Macbeth's loss of control — his private guilt erupts into the public sphere, and Lady Macbeth's frantic attempts to manage the situation reveal the unsustainability of their deception.

The Porter scene (Act 2, Scene 3)

"Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate..."

Comic relief that is simultaneously darkly thematic — the Porter imagines Macbeth's castle as hell, an equation the audience knows to be literally true after Duncan's murder.

Form and Genre

Form / Technique

Description

Effect / Purpose

Tragic hero

Macbeth begins as a noble, valiant warrior — 'brave Macbeth' — but is destroyed by his own ambition

Follows the Aristotelian model of a great man brought low — the audience feels pity and fear because Macbeth's fall demonstrates that even the virtuous can be corrupted by unchecked desire.

Tragic flaw (hamartia)

"I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition"

Macbeth himself identifies ambition as his fatal weakness — Shakespeare makes the flaw self-diagnosed, deepening the tragedy because Macbeth sees his destruction coming but cannot stop it.

Catharsis

Macbeth's death and Malcolm's restoration of order provide emotional release for the audience

The audience experiences purgation of pity and terror — the restoration of legitimate kingship reassures that moral order will ultimately prevail, offering closure after sustained horror.

Supernatural elements

Witches, ghosts, prophecies, and visions permeate the play's world

Tap into Jacobean fears about demonic influence and witchcraft — for Shakespeare's original audience, the supernatural was not metaphorical but a genuine source of anxiety and theological debate.

Blank verse / iambic pentameter

The dominant verse form for noble characters, with ten syllables and five stressed beats per line

Establishes the elevated, formal register appropriate to tragedy — the regularity of the verse creates a baseline of order against which disruptions (broken lines, shared verse) signal moral and psychological chaos.

Prose

Used for the Porter, the sleepwalking scene, and the Doctor's observations

Marks departure from noble order — prose is associated with madness, low status, or the collapse of rational thought, providing a formal contrast to the verse that dominates the play.

Equivocation

The witches' prophecies, the Porter's references to equivocators, Macbeth's deceptive speech to Banquo

A pervasive formal principle — equivocation operates at every level of the play, from individual words to the structure of fate itself, reflecting Jacobean anxieties about truth and deception.

Nemesis

Macduff, whose family Macbeth slaughtered, becomes the agent of his destruction

The instrument of retribution is directly created by the tyrant's own cruelty — Shakespeare demonstrates that tyranny generates the very forces that destroy it, making Macbeth the architect of his own doom.

Christian morality play echoes

Macbeth's temptation, fall, and damnation mirror the Christian narrative of sin and divine punishment

The play echoes the medieval morality tradition — Macbeth is an Everyman figure tempted by evil and destroyed by his failure to resist, reinforcing the Jacobean worldview of divine justice.

Violence and spectacle

On-stage murders, severed heads, bloody hands, and the final display of Macbeth's head on a pike

Shakespeare makes violence viscerally present — the spectacle forces the audience to confront the physical reality of tyranny rather than abstracting it into political theory.

Gender inversion

"Unsex me here" — Lady Macbeth rejects femininity; Macbeth is repeatedly challenged to prove his manhood

The play interrogates Jacobean gender norms — Lady Macbeth's rejection of her sex and Macbeth's anxiety about masculinity suggest that the link between violence and manhood is both constructed and destructive.

Symbolism and Motifs

Symbol / Motif

Meaning / Context

Example

Blood

Guilt, violence, and moral stain — blood becomes increasingly difficult to remove as guilt deepens

'Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?' — Macbeth's guilt after Duncan's murder is presented as a permanent, physical contamination that no power can cleanse.

Darkness / night

Evil, concealment, and moral blindness — characters invoke darkness to hide their crimes from heaven

'Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell' — Lady Macbeth summons darkness as a co-conspirator, suggesting that evil requires the absence of divine light to operate.

Light / candle

Truth, goodness, divine grace, and the fragility of life against overwhelming darkness

'Out, out, brief candle!' — Macbeth's metaphor reduces life to a flickering flame easily extinguished, symbolising both his nihilism and the way tyranny snuffs out hope and meaning.

Weather / thunder

Moral disorder and supernatural disruption — storms accompany the witches and follow Duncan's murder

'Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches' — the opening stage direction immediately connects the supernatural with atmospheric chaos, establishing that the natural world reflects moral reality.

Sleep

Innocence, peace of conscience, and natural order — its loss symbolises the destruction of moral harmony

'Macbeth does murder sleep' — by killing Duncan in his sleep, Macbeth destroys not just a life but the very concept of innocent rest; insomnia becomes his permanent punishment.

Disease / decay

Scotland under Macbeth's tyranny is described as sick, wounded, and in need of healing

'Bleed, bleed, poor country!' — Malcolm and Macduff use disease imagery to describe Scotland under tyranny, positioning Malcolm's return as a curative and legitimate kingship as the body's natural health.

Clothing imagery

Ill-fitting borrowed robes symbolise Macbeth's illegitimate claim to the throne

'Why do you dress me / In borrowed robes?' — Macbeth's titles do not fit him because they were not earned through legitimate succession; the clothing motif externalises his fraudulent kingship.

Animals / nature

Predatory animals represent violence; disrupted nature reflects moral chaos

'A falcon, towering in her pride of place, / Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed' — the unnatural killing of a noble bird by a lesser one mirrors Macbeth's murder of his king.

Witches' cauldron

A symbol of chaos, corruption, and the mixing of natural order into unnatural evil

'Eye of newt and toe of frog' — the grotesque ingredients represent the perversion of nature; the cauldron is an anti-creation, producing prophecies that destroy rather than sustain.

Dagger

Temptation, hallucination, and the border between intention and action

'Is this a dagger which I see before me?' — the floating dagger dramatises the moment between thought and deed; its ambiguity (real or imagined?) mirrors Macbeth's unstable grip on reality.

Crown / kingship

Legitimate authority versus tyrannical usurpation — the crown represents divine right and political order

'Thou play'dst most foully for't' — Banquo's suspicion that Macbeth cheated his way to the crown highlights the difference between earned sovereignty and violent seizure.

Children / lineage

The future, legacy, and dynastic continuity — Macbeth's childlessness contrasts with Banquo's prophesied royal line

'Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown' — Macbeth's barren kingship has no future; his violence is ultimately pointless because he cannot establish a dynasty, making his crimes doubly tragic.

Light vs dark imagery

A sustained moral binary running throughout the play — virtue is light, evil is darkness

'Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires' — the opposition structures the play's moral universe, with characters constantly positioning themselves in relation to illumination or concealment.

Higher Concepts

Concept

Explanation / Example

Application in Macbeth

Hamartia

The tragic hero's fatal flaw that leads to their downfall — from Aristotle's Poetics

Macbeth's 'vaulting ambition' is his hamartia — he identifies it himself ('I have no spur... but only / Vaulting ambition'), yet cannot resist it, making his destruction both self-aware and inevitable.

Hubris

Excessive pride or self-confidence that defies the natural or divine order

Macbeth's belief that he can control fate after the witches' second prophecies demonstrates hubris — he trusts equivocal promises over moral truth, assuming himself invulnerable until reality destroys him.

Catharsis

The emotional purging of pity and fear experienced by the audience through tragedy

Macbeth's death and Malcolm's coronation provide catharsis — the audience's sustained horror is released through the restoration of legitimate order, fulfilling tragedy's moral and emotional function.

Equivocation

Deliberately ambiguous language that is technically true but intended to deceive

The witches' prophecies equivocate systematically — 'none of woman born' exploits a loophole (Caesarean birth), reflecting Jacobean anxieties about Jesuit equivocation during the Gunpowder Plot.

Anagnorisis

The tragic hero's moment of recognition — when they finally understand the truth of their situation

Macbeth's anagnorisis comes in Act 5 when he realises the witches have deceived him — 'And be these juggling fiends no more believed' — but this recognition arrives too late to save him.

Peripeteia

A sudden reversal of fortune — the turning point in the tragic hero's journey from prosperity to ruin

The banquet scene marks Macbeth's peripeteia — Banquo's ghost publicly exposes his guilt, and from this point his power, sanity, and political control all begin their irreversible decline.

Pathetic fallacy

The attribution of human emotions to nature or weather to reflect characters' inner states

The unnatural storm on the night of Duncan's murder — 'The night has been unruly... lamentings heard i'th'air' — suggests that regicide violates not just human law but the cosmic order itself.

Foil

A character who contrasts with another to highlight particular qualities

Banquo serves as Macbeth's foil — both hear the witches' prophecies, but Banquo resists temptation while Macbeth surrenders to it, proving that the witches do not compel action and that Macbeth freely chose evil.

Paradox

A statement that seems self-contradictory but reveals a deeper truth

'Fair is foul, and foul is fair' — the play's opening paradox establishes that moral categories are unstable; heroism conceals ambition, loyalty conceals treachery, and prophecy conceals destruction.

Imagery cluster

A recurring group of related images that accumulate meaning across the text

Blood, darkness, sleep, and disease form an imagery cluster in Macbeth — together they create a cumulative portrait of moral corruption, with each motif reinforcing and deepening the others.

Tragic inevitability

The sense that the hero's destruction is fated and cannot be avoided once set in motion

From the moment Macbeth hears the prophecy, the audience senses his doom is sealed — Shakespeare creates tragic inevitability through dramatic irony, foreshadowing, and Macbeth's own tortured awareness of where his path leads.

Iambic pentameter

A line of verse with five metrical feet, each consisting of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable (da-DUM)

Shakespeare uses regular iambic pentameter for controlled, rational speech — when the metre breaks (shared lines, trochaic inversions, short lines), it signals emotional disturbance, loss of control, or moral crisis.

Divine Right of Kings

The Jacobean belief that monarchs are appointed by God and that regicide is therefore a sin against heaven

Duncan's murder is presented as a cosmic violation — the unnatural events that follow (storms, earthquakes, horses eating each other) demonstrate that killing God's anointed representative disrupts the entire natural order.

Great Chain of Being

The Elizabethan/Jacobean hierarchical model placing God at the top, then angels, king, nobles, commoners, animals, and plants

Macbeth's regicide breaks the chain — the resulting chaos (unnatural weather, predatory reversals, political disorder) reflects the Jacobean belief that disrupting any level of the hierarchy destabilises all of creation.

Gender expectations

Jacobean society expected women to be submissive and nurturing, and men to be courageous but also merciful

Lady Macbeth's 'Unsex me here' and her taunting of Macbeth's manhood subvert these norms — Shakespeare interrogates whether violence is truly masculine or whether the equation of manhood with murder is itself the source of tragedy.

Witchcraft and superstition

James I authored Daemonologie (1597) and was deeply invested in the reality of witchcraft

The Weird Sisters would have terrified Shakespeare's original audience — the play both exploits and explores Jacobean fears, leaving ambiguous whether the witches cause Macbeth's fall or merely predict his existing capacity for evil.

Kingship and tyranny

The play contrasts Duncan's and Edward's virtuous kingship with Macbeth's violent tyranny

Shakespeare defines good kingship through its opposite — Duncan's gentleness, Malcolm's testing of Macduff, and Edward's healing touch all serve to condemn Macbeth's rule by force and fear.

Loyalty and betrayal

Macbeth betrays Duncan (his king and guest), Banquo (his friend), and Macduff (his thane)

Each betrayal escalates in moral severity — Shakespeare structures the play so that Macbeth violates increasingly sacred bonds (subject–king, host–guest, friend–friend), making each crime worse than the last.

Violence and masculinity

"When you durst do it, then you were a man" — Lady Macbeth equates murder with manhood

The play critiques the link between violence and masculinity — characters who define manhood through aggression (Macbeth, Lady Macbeth) are destroyed, while Macduff's weeping for his family is presented as true courage.

Political anxiety

Written shortly after the Gunpowder Plot (1605), the play explores regicide, succession, and the legitimacy of power

Shakespeare addresses James I's deepest political fears — the play dramatises the horror of regicide and affirms the divine right of legitimate succession, functioning as both entertainment and political reassurance for the new Stuart king.