by Maureen Cutajar

Created on: July 11, 2010   Last Updated: August 27, 2010

The sequence of events in Shakespeare’s Macbeth that leads to Macbeth’s downfalls kicks off when the witches stop Macbeth and Banquo on the blasted heath. They welcome Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, and then reach into what seems like an impossible future when they greet him successively as Thane of Cawdor and then king.

Many critics assert that even at this early stage of the play, Macbeth already has within him the seeds of ambition and the Witches have startled him by expressing what he hoped were private thoughts. In Banquo’s words, Macbeth seems “rapt” or entranced in a world of his own soon after the witches’ prophecies.

• Macbeth’s Ambition

Macbeth’s ambition is soon given free reign and he cannot easily dismiss the witches’ prophecies. In his soliloquy he attempts to sort out his thoughts: 

This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth?

The critic L.C. Knights describes “the sickening see-saw rhythm” of Macbeth’s soliloquy as conveying the impression of a wildly searching mind. Shakespeare explores basic moral opposites by going deep with the hero’s mind and its struggles. Initially Macbeth is presented as a noble hero, a valiant defender of the king. But after the witches’ prophecy and the fulfilling of the first two prophecies he starts thinking of murder: “My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical”. His soliloquy ends with Macbeth personified as ambition, who vaults onto his horse but overreaching himself in the leap, collapses on the other side. 

• Lady Macbeth’s Ambition 

As soon as Lady Macbeth’s gains knowledge of the witches’ prophecy she takes it upon herself to incite Macbeth to usurp the crown. When Macbeth seems to doubt whether to “proceed […] further in this business”, his wife, who has committed herself to the powers of darkness calls him a coward: 

... Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour,
As thou art in desire?

Lady Macbeth organises the proceedings for murdering Duncan and reminds her husband to give a convincing performance of “griefs and clamour”. In the first Act Lady Macbeth is the stronger of the two and she leads Macbeth to commit the atrocious murder. 

• The Witches’ Prophecies 

The action in the play ultimately explores a criminal’s tortured mind. Macbeth soon determines to pay the witches a second visit, because knowledge of the future, however bad, may reduce the troubles in his mind. He means to have his own good through the means of evil and he thus convinces himself that his insecurity is because of his inexperience: “We are yet but young in deed”. 

However, the witches’ actions and prophecies spell out Banquo’s predictions earlier in the play as true: 

The instruments of darkness tell us truths;
Win us with honest trifles, to betray us
In deepest consequences.

Macbeth tries to reassure himself with the prophecies that the Witches gave him but he soon realises that the fiend tells you falsity that appears like truth when he is informed that Birnam Wood is moving towards Dunsinane and he is finally defeated by Macduff who was “from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripped”.

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