Act I: The Prophecy and the Temptation
Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Explanation and analysis
The play opens in thunder and lightning, with the Witches arranging where they will meet Macbeth after the battle. They answer the call of their familiars, the gray cat and the croaking toad, and the scene ends with this line spoken in chorus. Before any human character speaks, the play already suggests that here things are not what they seem.
The line swaps beauty and rot, good and evil, and leaves the spectator unsure on which side each thing stands. It is a good key to what follows. When Macbeth enters in scene 3, his first words repeat the same game: "So ugly and so lovely, a day like this I had never seen." He has not yet spoken with the Witches, but he already speaks their language, and the phrase suggests that the ground on which he will lose himself was prepared before he arrived.
The inversion returns several times throughout the play: the Thane of Cawdor, who seemed noble and was a traitor; the king who says there is no art to read the mind's character in the face and walks with open arms into the house of the man who plans to kill him; the promises that sound like guarantees and work as traps. One can read this chorus as the rule of the game for the whole play: here, what is seen almost never tells what the thing is. The Witches do not yet order anyone to do anything, but they already define the territory in which Macbeth will go wrong.
Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. [...] Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.
Explanation and analysis
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Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires.
Explanation and analysis
Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty. [...] Come to my woman's breasts / And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers
Explanation and analysis
Prithee, peace! / I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none.
Explanation and analysis
Act II: The Murder of Duncan
Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? [...] I see thee still, / And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, / Which was not so before.
Explanation and analysis
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.'
Explanation and analysis
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.
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If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key.
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'Gainst nature still! / Thriftless ambition, that will ravin up / Thine own life's means!
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Act III: The King Ruled by Fear
If 't be so, / For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind; / For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered, / Put rancors in the vessel of my peace / Only for them [...]
Explanation and analysis
We have scorched the snake, not killed it. [...] Better be with the dead, / Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace, / Than on the torture of the mind to lie / In restless ecstasy.
Explanation and analysis
O, treachery! Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly! / Thou mayst revenge.
Explanation and analysis
I drink to th' general joy o' th' whole table, / And to our dear friend Banquo, whom we miss. [...] Avaunt, and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee! / Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold; / Thou hast no speculation in those eyes / Which thou dost glare with.
Explanation and analysis
And you all know security / Is mortals' chiefest enemy
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Act IV: Deceptive Prophecies and Massacre
Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth! Beware Macduff; / Beware the Thane of Fife.
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Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.
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Macbeth shall never vanquished be until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him.
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Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them.
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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?
Explanation and analysis
Act V: Sleepwalking, Birnam, and the Fall
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?
Explanation and analysis
now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief
Explanation and analysis
Let every soldier hew him down a bough / And bear 't before him. Thereby shall we shadow / The numbers of our host and make discovery / Err in report of us.
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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time; [...] Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.
Explanation and analysis
I bear a charmèd life, which must not yield / To one of woman born. [...] Macduff was from his mother's womb / Untimely ripped. [...] Accursèd be that tongue that tells me so, / For it hath cowed my better part of man!