Macbeth Literary Elements

Tragedy

English

The play is set in Scotland in the eleventh century.

There is no singular narrator to the play, but it closely follows the experience of its lead character, Macbeth, as he aspires to kingship and descends into madness.

The tone of the play is anxious and uncertain. The mood of the play is bleak and doomed.

There is no clear protagonist in the play, as Macbeth is both a sympathetic character and the catalyst for Duncan's murder. Many have argued that Lady Macbeth is an antagonist in the play, given how much she influences her husband's behavior.

The major conflict in the play is that Macbeth cannot quiet his kingly ambition after hearing the witches' prophecy, which leads him to commit a series of crimes out of anxiety and paranoia.

Many maintain that the climax of the play actually appears rather early – in Act Two, with the murder of King Duncan. After Macbeth murders Duncan, the rest of the play dramatizes his slow descent into madness and eventually his own demise.

Foreshadowing plays a major role in Macbeth. Most notably, the witches at the beginning of the play predict Macbeth's ascent to power, but at the same time also foreshadow Macbeth's descent into madness and eventual demise. Macbeth's hallucinations further foreshadow his inability to think rationally, as does Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking and attempts to wash the blood from her hands.

In Act Two, after Lennox describes all the ominous noises he heard in the night, Macbeth responds by saying, "'Twas a rough night" (2.2). This remark is an example of understatement because Macbeth himself is so haunted by the omens that he cannot express his anxiety in an honest way.

Like many of Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth makes frequent use of mythological allusions to ancient Greek and Roman culture. These allusions were conventional on the early modern stage, as the term "Renaissance" (used to describe this period of English history, even while it was happening) denoted a return to the arts and culture produced in antiquity. The mythological allusions also lend moral credence to the play, as certain characters are compared to figures from Greek and Roman mythology whose stories are told primarily as lessons to be learned.

Macbeth is rife with dark, sinister, and supernatural imagery: the dagger that presumably floats before Macbeth's eyes, Banquo's ghost, the invisible blood that will not wash off Macbeth's hands, etc. These images help craft the bleak and doomed mood of the entire play, and are compounded by the frequent appearance of the witches as they predict what is to come.

The three witches often speak in paradoxical phrases and riddles throughout the play, most notably in Act One when they say, "fair is foul, and foul is fair" (1.1). Their words are meant to both intrigue the listener (especially Macbeth) while leaving some room for confusion and doubt. The witches' use of paradox also suggests the importance of perspective in interpreting their prophecies, as not everyone would receive the same message.

In Act Five, Lady Macbeth uses parallelism when she says, "Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed!" (5.1). These are the last words Lady Macbeth speaks, and the parallel structure through repetition emphasizes her inability to form coherent thoughts and her own descent into madness.

When Macbeth hallucinates the dagger in front of him, he speaks to it as if it were a person. He longs to grab the handle, which would lead him to murder Duncan. The personification of the dagger imbues it with a sense of power, which is both enticing and scary for Macbeth.

Macbeth is a play known for its unique use of the early modern stage through setting and special effects. The weather events, strange noises, and supernatural appearances of ghosts and other hallucinatory objects cast an eerie mood onto the entire play, and as such modern performances of Macbeth have become increasingly creative in the way they dramatize elements like stage direction and secondhand description that would not have been possible to represent on the early modern stage.