Macbeth
William Shakespeare (1606)
“A Scottish general receives a prophecy, murders a king, and discovers that the real horror isn't the crime — it's living with it.”
Language Register
High — blank verse throughout with strategic prose for Porter, sleepwalking scene, and low-status characters
Syntax Profile
Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) as default for high-status characters in formal situations. Rhyming couplets for the witches' incantations and at scene endings (a theatrical signal that the scene is closing). Prose for the Porter scene, Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking, and soldiers' casual conversation — marking these as outside the court's formal register. Macbeth's soliloquies begin long and periodic (Act I), becoming shorter and more percussive by Act V.
Figurative Language
Extremely high — among the densest in Shakespeare. Dominant metaphors: blood (guilt made visible), darkness (concealment of crime), clothing (appearance vs. reality — 'borrowed robes'), nature inverted (horses eat each other, owls kill falcons). The play operates through metaphor clusters rather than single extended conceits.
Era-Specific Language
Scottish feudal lord, equivalent to earl — signals the play's Scottish setting and feudal power structure
Archaic for 'uproar, tumult' — used by the witches; signals their pre-modern, folk idiom
Stage direction term for battle trumpet signal; from French 'à l'arme' (to arms)
One who deceives through technically true statements — directly named by the Porter, thematically central to the witches
To make blood-red; Latinate, extremely rare — Macbeth's one word that outreaches common speech
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Macbeth
Formal iambic pentameter in soliloquies, increasingly fragmented after the murder. Military diction ('armed head,' 'tramples,' 'bear-like'). His language deteriorates from elaborate Latinate periods to short, defiant monosyllables by Act V.
A man of rank and education who defined himself through military glory. As that identity is corroded by murder, his language loses its elaboration. The poetry of ambition becomes the prose of desperation.
Lady Macbeth
Imperatives and commands in soliloquies ('Come,' 'Fill,' 'Stop up,' 'Unsex me'). Elegant verse in manipulation scenes. Fragmented prose in the sleepwalking scene. No ornamental metaphor — her language is transactional and purposive.
The most linguistically controlled character in the play until she loses control entirely. Her shift to prose in Act V is the play's most dramatic register collapse — it signals that willpower, which was her defining attribute, has completely failed.
Banquo
Clear, measured pentameter. Skeptical questions ('Are ye fantastical, or that indeed / Which outwardly ye show?'). More interrogative and cautious than Macbeth's accepting declarations.
The ethical counter-weight to Macbeth. His language is questioning where Macbeth's is declarative — he doesn't receive the prophecy as truth but as suspicious possibility. This is the right response that Macbeth fails to have.
Macduff
Direct, comparatively plain speech. When emotional, his syntax breaks: 'My children too? / Wife, children, servants, all / That could be found?' — repetition, fragments, caesuras. His grief disrupts his syntax.
The play's most humanized character. His plain language signals authenticity; his broken syntax signals genuine feeling, not performed emotion. He grieves in the register of real speech.
The Witches
Trochaic tetrameter ('DOUBLE DOUBLE TOIL and TROUBLE') — stressed syllable first, four stresses per line. Rhyming couplets. Incantatory, repetitive. Entirely different from every other character's meter.
They are not human and do not speak human rhythms. Iambic pentameter is the heartbeat; trochees are the inverted heartbeat. Their meter enacts inversion — the 'fair is foul' principle made rhythmic.
Malcolm
Careful, testing, institutional verse. His speech to Macduff listing his supposed vices is deliberately excessive — a performance to test loyalty. His final speech is formal, public, political.
A prince who has learned, from his father's murder, to test everything and trust nothing. His language is a performance of political caution. At the end, institutional prose replaces poetic ambition — order succeeds where passion failed.
Narrator's Voice
There is no narrator. The play unfolds through dialogue and soliloquy — Macbeth's soliloquies provide direct access to his consciousness in a way that no narrator could improve. The audience becomes Macbeth's only confessor.
Tone Progression
Act I
Ominous, electric, seductive
Thunder, prophecy, military glory. The atmosphere crackles with possibility. Even the murder plan has the quality of forbidden excitement.
Act II
Tense, fragmentary, horrified
The murder and its immediate aftermath. Syntax breaks. Verse fragments. The prose of the Porter scene provides grotesque relief.
Act III
Paranoid, escalating, publicly contained
The second murder and the banquet collapse. Macbeth maintains a public face while his private world implodes.
Act IV
Reckless, atrocious, grief-struck
Macbeth becomes genuinely dangerous. Macduff's grief at act's end reintroduces the human scale the play has been losing.
Act V
Exhausted, elegiac, resolving
Macbeth's defiance, Lady Macbeth's dissolution, the restoration of order. The tone achieves a melancholy catharsis.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Hamlet — opposite tragic structure: Macbeth acts too quickly, Hamlet too slowly; both fail
- King Lear — another study in power and its psychological cost, longer and more panoramic
- Othello — another study in a warrior manipulated into destruction; Iago is a human equivalent of the witches
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions