MacbethWilliam Shakespeare
About Macbeth
Shakespeare's , written around 1606, is the shortest of the major tragedies and the most concentrated. A Scottish general meets three witches on a heath, hears a prophecy that he will be king, murders the reigning Duncan in his own castle, and descends through a sequence of further murders into the tyranny and madness that end with his head on a pole. The compression is part of the argument. The distance from virtue to damnation is shorter than a man would wish.
The play turns on the relation between prophecy and will. The witches tell Macbeth what will happen. They do not tell him to do anything. His wife supplies the push the witches withhold, and after the first murder he needs no further prompting. Shakespeare leaves open whether the prophecy caused the action or only described what Macbeth's own ambition would produce when given the occasion, and makes the openness itself the horror. Fate and freedom are indistinguishable from the inside.
is the play the tradition returns to on tyranny and on the corrosion of the soul by a single act of blood. Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking, her attempt to wash a stain no one else can see, is Shakespeare's most compressed image of guilt as an inward condition that outlasts the concealment of the deed. Macbeth's own final speeches, on a tale told by an idiot and on the yellow leaf, register the exhaustion of a self that has consumed its own grounds for living. The play is the Syntopicon's chief source on tyranny and one of its central texts on sin.