73 pages • 2 hours read
William ShakespeareMacbeth
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1623A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Ambition and Corruption
The principal theme of the play is the corrupting force of ambition. The theme follows the Ancient Greek concept of hubris,—a protagonist’s overreaching pride brings him from a position of strength to one of humility in a tragic and typically irredeemable fall.
The play begins with Macbeth in a position of strength. He has won a great battle, enjoys the love of his king, and has been rewarded with a noble title—in sum, he has used his ambition for the benefit of his country and liege lord. For most men, this would be enough. But the witches’ prophecy changes everything. The idea of himself as king takes root in Macbeth’s mind, growing until he can no longer think of anything else. Now, his ambition takes on a darker cast. Lady Macbeth’s ambition matches that of her husband and together they conspire to take the throne through violent, sinful deeds. Their ambition erases all moral boundaries until Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are entirely corrupted.
But this cannot last. Macbeth’s ambition soon turns to paranoia and hysteria. By the final act of the play, Macbeth has achieved his ambition and become king. But it has come at a great cost: In order to achieve his goal, he has murdered a king, friends, and an innocent woman and children. When Lady Macbeth kills herself, consumed by guilt over what they have done, Macbeth briefly has clarity: his ambition has ultimately accomplished nothing.
Violence Begets Violence
Macbeth is a gruesomely violent play featuring many murders, battles, and gruesome events, and plays on its contemporary audience’s expectation of spectacle. In the play, violence leads only to more violence. Macbeth is not able to stop at the murder of Duncan. To hold the throne, he must kill Banquo, Banquo’s son, Macduff’s family, until soon he has crossed every moral line. Violence never ends.
Rather than devolving into pure bloody spectacle, the play’s murders—even the brutal onstage slaying of Macduff’s wife and child—fulfill an important narrative purpose, showing Macbeth’s slide from planned assassination to vindictive
bloodlust. His earlier violence has led to violence of a more obscene and random nature. Furthermore, the audience gets to know the characters as individuals before they are killed. Macduff’s son is an intelligent and questioning young man, while Lady Macduff is a cynical and steely woman. They are interesting people, which makes it all the more tragic when they are cut down by a gang of murderers.
A large amount of violence takes place off-stage. Many of the most important deaths—Duncan’s murder, Lady Macbeth’s suicide, Macbeth’s beheading—are not witnessed by the audience. This separates the most important acts of violence from the sheer spectacle of the act, leaving only the emotional framework. The audience focuses on the play’s core thematic messages—Macbeth’s hubris is punished, violence begets violence—rather than glorying in its gore.
Masculinity and Femininity
For Lady Macbeth, gender is a clear construct which is sometimes useful and sometimes counter to her plans. Traditional masculinity is the lever by which Lady Macbeth most effectively manipulates her husband. Whenever he expresses any doubts about regicide, she questions Macbeth’s manliness—a method that works every time.
Lady Macbeth is also in conflict with her femininity. When plotting violence, she explicitly asks to be stripped of her gender. She wishes to “unsex” (1.5.31) herself, removing from her the feminine qualities that would hold her back from participating in the violent coup against her king. At other times, Lady Macbeth deploys traditional feminine qualities. She plays the part of consummate host during the feast, and performatively faints when seeing the body of Duncan to avert suspicion. Both Lady Macbeth and the audience are aware that she is putting on an act, performing the role of ‘woman’ and using societal gender norms to her advantage.
The play is a mediation on the theme of masculinity. When Macduff learns of his family’s fate, for example, he is encouraged to react in a masculine fashion. At first, he breaks down into incoherent sorrow, but soon he girds his loins for violence vengeance—a version of masculinity that seems honorable and purposeful. Macduff desire to “feel [the murders of his family] as a man” (4.3.223) suggests an emotionally intelligent dimension to masculinity missing from Macbeth’s machismo. To Macduff, at least, being a man is not just about strength, but being also able to acknowledge the true depths of one’s emotions.
Related Titles
By William Shakespeare
