Who He Is
Thane of Fife, Scottish nobleman who discovers Duncan's body, does not follow the new king, flees to England to join Malcolm, and loses, in Fife, his wife and children in a massacre ordered by Macbeth. He is the man whom the first apparition tells Macbeth to fear, and the play gives him the role of executioner: after grief, he is the one who confronts the tyrant and returns to the stage with his head. The circumstance of his birth, torn from his mother's womb before his time, is what undoes the promise that protected Macbeth.
Trajectory
In Scene 3 of Act II, after waiting for the Porter to open the gate, he goes, on the king's own orders, to the king's chamber, whose door Macbeth shows him, and returns shouting that Duncan has been murdered. In Scene 4 of Act II, he tells Ross and an Old Man that the chamberlains were held to have been bribed, that the king's sons have vanished and raise suspicion, and that Macbeth has been elected and has left for Scone to be crowned. Macduff does not follow him and heads for Fife.
In Scene 4 of Act III, Macbeth, at the banquet, notices his absence. In Scene 6 of Act III, Lennox tells another lord that Macduff has fallen out of favor for speaking too freely and for missing the banquet, and the lord replies that he has gone to England to ask King Edward for support for Malcolm.
In Scene 1 of Act IV, the first apparition, the armed head, tells Macbeth to fear Macduff, and Lennox brings the news of his flight. In Scene 2 of Act IV, at Fife, Lady Macduff accuses him of cowardice for having fled, and Ross tries to defend him; the murderers arrive, and the son, who calls the first of them a liar, is stabbed.
In Scene 3 of Act IV, in England, Malcolm tests him by pretending to be ruled by lust and greed, and reveals the lie only when Macduff condemns him with indignation. Ross finally tells him that his wife and children have been killed.
Macduff:
He has no children. All my pretty ones? / Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? / What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?
Macduff then says that the sinner is he, for whose faults the family was killed, and Malcolm asks that the grief turn into anger.
In Scene 4 of Act V, beside Malcolm and Siward, he calls for focus in the campaign before Birnam Wood. In Scene 7 of Act V, he confronts Macbeth, who says he has avoided exactly him and carries a life that no man born of woman can end, and he answers that he was torn from his mother's womb before his time. Macbeth refuses to fight and then to surrender, and Macduff returns with the tyrant's head and hails Malcolm as king.
Macbeth:
Thou losest labor. [...] I bear a charmèd life, which must not yield / To one of woman born.Macduff:Despair thy charm, / And let the angel whom thou still hast served / Tell thee Macduff was from his mother's womb / Untimely ripped.Macbeth:Accursèd be that tongue that tells me so, / For it hath cowed my better part of man!
Themes Embodied
Macduff's flight is read in three ways: Lady Macduff sees it as a lack of love and of instinct, Ross as prudence, and Malcolm as a reason to suspect an ally who left his family without defense. The same gesture serves as accusation or as alibi depending on who judges it. He himself accuses himself in Scene 3 of Act IV, when he says that his family died because of his own faults.
The promise that protected Macbeth comes undone through a fact of birth: Macduff was taken from his mother's womb before his time and, therefore, is not born of woman in the sense Macbeth understood. Nothing in this is a miracle: Destiny and Free Will appear as the letter of a promise fulfilled by human means.
Macduff is the Violence that the play shows as just. He comes to the duel with the grief that Malcolm told him to turn into anger, and what moves him is vengeance for his children, not ambition, which makes him, at the end, the opposite of Macbeth. In Scene 3 of Act IV, he asks whether the Heavens saw everything and took no side, and the play's answer is himself, with the sword, in Scene 7 of Act V.
Relationships
- Macbeth: the tyrant whom the first apparition tells him to fear in Scene 1 of Act IV, whose family he massacres in Scene 2 of Act IV, and whom he confronts in the duel of Scene 7 of Act V.
- Malcolm: the heir he joins in England, who tests him in Scene 3 of Act IV, and whom he hails as king in Scene 7 of Act V.
- Duncan: the king whose body he discovers in Scene 3 of Act II.
- Banquo: the ally who, in Scene 3 of Act II, swears with him to investigate the crime.
- The Witches: whose apparitions point to Macbeth as the danger in Scene 1 of Act IV.
- Lady Macbeth: who, sleepwalking in Scene 1 of Act V, murmurs the name of his wife among the dead who haunt her.