Leitmotif

A word, phrase, or image that returns several times throughout the work, tied to a character or an idea, and gains meaning with each return.

In Macbeth

Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.

The reversal of the beautiful and the rotten returns at Macbeth’s own entrance, where he says he has never seen a day so ugly and so lovely, and it reappears in Cawdor and in Duncan. The same logic of swapped appearances runs through the whole play.

Act I: The Prophecy and the Temptation, The three witches, in chorus

Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep,' the innocent sleep, / Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, / The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, / Chief nourisher in life's feast [...] 'Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor / Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more.'

Act II: The Murder of Duncan, Macbeth

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red.

Act II: The Murder of Duncan, Macbeth

Yet here's a spot. [...] Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One, two. Why, then, 'tis time to do 't. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear?

Act V: Sleepwalking, Birnam, and the Fall, Lady Macbeth

now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief

Act V: Sleepwalking, Birnam, and the Fall, Angus