Acts 1-2: Prophecies & Murder
The Witches' Prophecies (Act 1, Scenes 1–3)
The play opens with the witches planning to meet Macbeth on the heath after a battle. When they encounter Macbeth and Banquo in Act 1, Scene 3, they deliver three prophecies: Macbeth is 'Thane of Glamis' (his current title), 'Thane of Cawdor' (which he does not yet know he has been awarded), and 'king hereafter.' To Banquo, they say he will be 'lesser than Macbeth, and greater' and 'not so happy, yet much happier' — his descendants will be kings, though he himself will not.
The witches' language is deliberately equivocal. Their paradoxes ('lesser than Macbeth, and greater') make it impossible to determine whether they are offering genuine prophecy or planting seeds of ambition. Shakespeare raises the central question of the play: do the witches control Macbeth's fate, or do they simply reveal desires already within him?
The witches prophesy that Macbeth will be Thane of Cawdor and 'king hereafter,' while Banquo's descendants will be kings. These prophecies ignite Macbeth's hamartia — his 'vaulting ambition' — and set the tragedy in motion.
Macbeth's Inner Conflict (Act 1, Scenes 3–7)
When Ross confirms that Macbeth is indeed the new Thane of Cawdor, the first prophecy's fulfilment makes the others seem possible. Macbeth's immediate reaction reveals his ambition and his fear: in an aside, he admits that the 'horrid image' of murder 'doth unfix my hair / And make my seated heart knock at my ribs.' His imagination is already running ahead of events. The phrase 'If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me / Without my stir' shows him trying to resist the idea of action — but it also reveals that the thought of murder has already occurred.
By Act 1, Scene 7, Macbeth delivers his famous soliloquy: 'If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well / It were done quickly.' He lists reasons not to kill Duncan: he is Duncan's kinsman, his host, and his subject. Duncan is a good king. Macbeth has 'no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself.' He recognises his own fatal flaw but cannot overcome it.
Lady Macbeth receives Macbeth's letter about the prophecies in Act 1, Scene 5 and immediately resolves that Duncan must die. Her soliloquy 'Unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty' is a deliberate invocation of dark spirits. She asks to have her femininity removed so she can act without the compassion associated with women in Jacobean society. The verb 'unsex' is violent and transgressive, suggesting she must become something unnatural to commit murder.
When Macbeth wavers in Act 1, Scene 7, Lady Macbeth attacks his masculinity: 'When you durst do it, then you were a man.' She also uses the horrifying image of dashing out the brains of a nursing infant to show the lengths she would go to for power. Her manipulation works because Macbeth's sense of manhood is bound up with his courage and ambition. She reshapes his definition of masculinity to mean the willingness to kill.
The Murder of Duncan (Act 2, Scenes 1–2)
Before the murder, Macbeth hallucinates a dagger: 'Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?' The dagger leads him towards Duncan's chamber and becomes covered in blood. Shakespeare leaves it deliberately ambiguous whether this is a supernatural vision (the witches' influence) or a projection of Macbeth's guilt-ridden imagination. Either way, it shows his mental state fracturing under the weight of what he is about to do.
After the murder, Macbeth is immediately tormented. He hears a voice cry 'Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep.' Sleep, which Shakespeare presents as innocent and restorative, is now denied to Macbeth forever. He is so traumatised that he brings the daggers back with him instead of leaving them to frame the guards. Lady Macbeth must take charge: 'Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures.' Her calmness here contrasts sharply with Macbeth's panic, but it also foreshadows her later breakdown in Act 5.
Macbeth's hyperbole about Neptune's ocean reveals his overwhelming guilt. The blood on his hands is not just physical evidence — it symbolises the moral stain of regicide that can never be removed. This image will recur in Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene (Act 5, Scene 1), where she obsessively tries to wash imaginary blood from her hands: 'Out, damned spot!' The reversal is significant: Macbeth is consumed by guilt immediately, while Lady Macbeth's guilt surfaces later, suggesting it was always present beneath her apparent control.
Macbeth also says 'this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red.' The shift from the Latinate 'multitudinous seas incarnadine' to the blunt monosyllables 'making the green one red' mirrors Macbeth's shift from grand self-justification to raw, horrified simplicity. This is a key technique to analyse for AO2 in the OCR exam.
The dagger hallucination (Act 2, Scene 1) is deliberately ambiguous: it may be supernatural or psychological. After the murder, Macbeth's guilt is immediate ('Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?'), while Lady Macbeth appears calm — a contrast Shakespeare will reverse by Act 5.