The Tragedy of Macbeth dramatizes the consequences of the naked lust for power and political position. It is also about the devious workings of the mind: its willingness to believe and fulfill a prophecy, to see what it wants to see and overlook what it needs to overlook, and how the power of guilt and fear of retribution can lead to paranoia and desperate actions to remedy a consumptive insecurity.

We see Macbeth first as a hero, a general who has defeated an uprising by traitors and is rewarded by a grateful king with the title and property of one of the conspirators. The reward had been mysteriously forecast by The Three Witches he and colleague Banquo encountered, along with the prediction of his eventual kingship. He shares the prophecy with Lady Macbeth, who convinces him to fulfill the destiny immediately by scheming to kill King Duncan in his sleep and pin it on his chamberlains. They proceed and guilt, remorse, paranoia take over.  Macbeth becomes a vicious tyrant, ruthlessly eliminating threats from rivals real and imagined. Lady Macbeth, wracked with guilt, sleepwalks, washing her hands and babbling her regrets before taking her own life. Macbeth seeks comfort in the further prophecies of the Three Witches but misinterprets their meanings and inevitably falls victim to the campaign of his avenging enemies Malcolm and Macduff.   Double, double, toil and trouble, indeed.

Macbeth was written at about the time the Scottish King James VI ascended to the English throne as James I, and likely reflected uncertainty about England’s future in the hands of a king from its bloodied, traitorous northern neighbor.  It also contains numerous allusion to the Gunpowder Plot of 1606, which resulted in the execution of Jesuit Henry Garnet for crimes of treason and equivocation. The play carries with it a superstition that its name not be mentioned aloud in the theatre, for fear of bad luck resulting from a curse by the witches, and is often called “the Scottish play” as a result.

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