44 Facts About Macbeth

Brave Scottish general named Macbeth receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland.

Macbeth sends a message ahead to his wife, Lady Macbeth, telling her about the witches' prophecies.

Lady Macbeth suffers none of her husband's uncertainty and wishes him to murder Duncan in order to obtain kingship.

When Macbeth arrives at Inverness, she overrides all of her husband's objections by challenging his manhood and successfully persuades him to kill the king that very night.

The rightful heirs' flight makes them suspects and Macbeth assumes the throne as the new King of Scotland as a kinsman of the dead king.

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Banquo reveals this to the audience, and while sceptical of the new King Macbeth, he remembers the witches' prophecy about how his own descendants would inherit the throne; this makes him suspicious of Macbeth.

Macbeth invites Banquo to a royal banquet, where he discovers that Banquo and his young son, Fleance, will be riding out that night.

Macbeth becomes furious: he fears that his power remains insecure as long as an heir of Banquo remains alive.

At the banquet, Macbeth invites his lords and Lady Macbeth to a night of drinking and merriment.

The others panic at the sight of Macbeth raging at an empty chair, until a desperate Lady Macbeth tells them that her husband is merely afflicted with a familiar and harmless malady.

Thirdly, a crowned child holding a tree states that Macbeth will be safe until Great Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill.

Macbeth is relieved and feels secure because he knows that all men are born of women and forests cannot possibly move.

Macbeth asks whether Banquo's sons will ever reign in Scotland, to which the witches conjure a procession of eight crowned kings, all similar in appearance to Banquo, and the last carrying a mirror that reflects even more kings.

Macbeth realises that these are all Banquo's descendants having acquired kingship in numerous countries.

Lady Macbeth becomes racked with guilt from the crimes she and her husband have committed.

Macbeth is certain that the witches' prophecies guarantee his invincibility, but is struck with fear when he learns that the English army is advancing on Dunsinane shielded with boughs cut from Birnam Wood, in apparent fulfillment of one of the prophecies.

Macbeth boasts that he has no reason to fear Macduff, for he cannot be killed by any man born of woman.

Macbeth realises too late that he has misinterpreted the witches' words.

The publication of Daemonologie came just a few years before the tragedy of Macbeth with the themes and setting in a direct and comparative contrast with King James' personal obsessions with witchcraft, which developed following his conclusion that the stormy weather that threatened his passage from Denmark to Scotland was a targeted attack.

In Chronicles, Macbeth is portrayed as struggling to support the kingdom in the face of King Duncan's ineptitude.

Macbeth has a long, ten-year reign before eventually being overthrown by Macduff and Malcolm.

The characters of Banquo, the Weird Sisters, and Lady Macbeth were first mentioned in 1527 by a Scottish historian Hector Boece in his book Historia Gentis Scotorum who wanted to denigrate Macbeth in order to strengthen the claim of the House of Stewart to the Scottish throne.

Boece portrayed Banquo as an ancestor of the Stewart kings of Scotland, adding in a "prophecy" that the descendants of Banquo would be the rightful kings of Scotland while the Weird Sisters served to give a picture of King Macbeth as gaining the throne via dark supernatural forces.

Macbeth did have a wife, but it is not clear if she was as power-hungry and ambitious as Boece portrayed her, which served his purpose of having even Macbeth realise he lacked a proper claim to the throne, and only took it at the urging of his wife.

Macbeth interprets the prophecy as meaning never, but in fact, the Three Sisters refer only to branches of the trees of Great Birnam coming to Dunsinane hill.

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Macbeth cannot be dated precisely, but it is usually taken to be contemporaneous to the other canonical tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.

James had argued that the tyranny was preferable to the problems caused by rebellion which were even worse; Shakespeare by contrast in Macbeth argued for the right of the subjects to overthrow a tyrant king, in what appeared to be an implied criticism of James's theories if applied to England.

Hadfield noted a curious aspect of the play in that it implies that primogeniture is the norm in Scotland, but Duncan has to nominate his son Malcolm to be his successor while Macbeth is accepted without protest by the Scottish lairds as their king despite being an usurper.

Garry Wills provides further evidence that Macbeth is a Gunpowder Play.

Macbeth was first printed in the First Folio of 1623 and the Folio is the only source for the text.

Macbeth is an anomaly among Shakespeare's tragedies in certain critical ways.

Bradley, in considering this question, concluded the play "always was an extremely short one", noting the witch scenes and battle scenes would have taken up some time in performance, remarking, "I do not think that, in reading, we feel Macbeth to be short: certainly we are astonished when we hear it is about half as long as Hamlet.

Pasternak argues that "neither Macbeth or Raskolnikov is a born criminal or a villain by nature.

Macbeth's suggested, for instance, that the child Lady Macbeth refers to in the first act died during a foolish military action.

Contrary to popular myth, Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth is not the unluckiest play as superstition likes to portray it.

Macbeth portrayed a man capable of observing himself, as if a part of him remained untouched by what he had done, the play moulding him into a man of sensibility, rather than him descending into a tyrant.

Macbeth's glided on and off the stage almost like an apparition.

Macbeth's staging was full of spectacle, including several elaborate royal processions.

Macbeth's leading lady, Ellen Tree, created a sense of the character's inner life: The Times critic saying "The countenance which she assumed.

The popular American actor Edwin Forrest, whose Macbeth was said to be like "the ferocious chief of a barbarous tribe" played the central role at the Broadway Theatre to popular acclaim, while the "cerebral and patrician" English actor Macready, playing the same role at the Astor Place Opera House, suffered constant heckling.

Irving's leading lady was Ellen Terry, but her Lady Macbeth was unsuccessful with the public, for whom a century of performances influenced by Sarah Siddons had created expectations at odds with Terry's conception of the role.

Macbeth's's going to play hostess to Duncan at Dunsinane, and 'provide' is what gracious hostesses always do.

The production, dubbed The Voodoo Macbeth, proved inflammatory in the aftermath of the Harlem riots, accused of making fun of black culture and as "a campaign to burlesque negroes" until Welles persuaded crowds that his use of black actors and voodoo made important cultural statements.

Macbeth returned to the RSC in 2018, when Christopher Eccleston played the title role, with Niamh Cusack as his wife, Lady Macbeth.