Macbeth

Higher Level · 2027 Leaving Cert

Macbeth is short, violent and written in language built to be quoted. A brave soldier hears a prophecy, murders his way to the crown to make it come true, and spends the rest of the play finding out that guilt does not stay buried any better than a body does.

Shakespeare wrote Macbeth around 1606, and every scene is doing at least two jobs: moving the plot and building the play’s argument about ambition, guilt and fate. It is popular on the Leaving Cert because it rewards close reading of language rather than long plot summary. The examiner has read hundreds of essays that state Macbeth’s ambition as a bare fact. The essays that score well quote the moment his ambition shows itself and explain what the language is doing.

The Story in Six Beats

One. Returning from battle, Macbeth and Banquo meet three witches who prophesy that Macbeth will become Thane of Cawdor and then king, and that Banquo’s descendants, not Macbeth’s, will be kings after him. Within minutes, a messenger confirms the first title.

Two. Lady Macbeth reads her husband’s letter about the prophecy and resolves to push him toward murder. When King Duncan arrives at their castle as a guest, Macbeth hesitates, but Lady Macbeth shames him into going through with it. He kills Duncan in his sleep.

Three. Macbeth frames Duncan’s guards for the murder. Duncan’s sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, flee the country in fear, which makes them look guilty and clears Macbeth’s path to the throne.

Four. Now king, Macbeth grows paranoid about the prophecy concerning Banquo’s line and has Banquo murdered, though Banquo’s son Fleance escapes. Banquo’s ghost appears at a banquet and only Macbeth can see it, unravelling in public in front of his own lords.

Five. Macbeth returns to the witches for more certainty and receives prophecies that sound safe: he cannot be harmed by anyone born of woman, and he is safe until Birnam Wood marches to Dunsinane. Reassured, he grows tyrannical and orders the murder of Macduff’s wife and children.

Six. Lady Macbeth, undone by guilt, sleepwalks and confesses what she has done before her death. Malcolm’s army approaches disguised with branches cut from Birnam Wood. Macduff, revealed to have been born by caesarean rather than born of woman in the ordinary sense, kills Macbeth in single combat, and Malcolm is restored to the throne.

Ambition Without a Brake

Macbeth’s ambition is real before the witches ever speak to him, which is worth remembering: the prophecy does not create the desire, it gives it permission. Alone, weighing what he is about to do, Macbeth admits he has no real justification beyond wanting it.

“I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself”Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 7

That image of a rider who jumps too far and falls on the other side is the whole play in miniature. Before the murder, Macbeth is already asking the dark to hide what he is planning to do, which tells an examiner he knows exactly how wrong it is.

“Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires.”Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 4

Blood That Will Not Wash

Once Duncan is dead, Macbeth’s language becomes a language of contamination. He looks at his own hands and cannot believe the size of the stain.

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?”Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 2

Guilt in this play is physical before it is moral. Macbeth hears a voice in the moment of the murder that names exactly what he has destroyed in himself.

“Macbeth does murder sleep”Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 2

He never sleeps easily again, and neither does his wife. That single line is worth building a paragraph on: Shakespeare is telling the audience that the murder buys Macbeth a crown and takes his peace of mind as payment.

Fair Is Foul: Appearance and Reality

The witches set the play’s terms in their first scene, and everything that follows tests the idea that good and bad can look identical.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair”The Witches, Act 1 Scene 1

Macbeth’s own first line in the play echoes it without his realising, which is exactly Shakespeare’s point: he is already inside the world the witches describe.

“So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 3

Lady Macbeth turns the same idea into a strategy, advising her husband to perform welcome while hiding murder underneath it.

“Look like th’ innocent flower, / But be the serpent under ‘t.”Lady Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 5

Who’s Who

Macbeth is a valiant soldier whose ambition, once given a prophecy to attach itself to, overrides his own moral sense. He is never a simple villain: Shakespeare keeps giving him the language to know exactly what he is losing.

Lady Macbeth is the play’s engine in the first half, ruthless and controlled, and its collapse in the second, undone by the guilt she once claimed she could master.

Banquo hears the same prophecy as Macbeth and does nothing about it, a contrast the play uses to show that ambition, not opportunity, is what separates the two men.

Macduff is the avenger, driven by the murder of his own family to become the one man fate has left able to kill Macbeth.

The Witches supply the prophecy but never force Macbeth’s hand. How much they cause and how much they simply predict is one of the play’s central arguments.

Macbeth: Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Anchor a Higher Level answer in four moments: the dagger soliloquy, the murder of Duncan, the banquet scene with Banquo’s ghost, and the final duel with Macduff. Between them they cover ambition, guilt, appearance and reality, and fate versus free will, so almost any question can be answered from that base. Quote the line, then explain what the imagery is doing, not just what it means.

Quick Links

Each guide takes one part of the play the paper comes back to. Start where your question points.