The themes of Macbeth, ambition, fate, guilt, sleep, deception, and the order of nature, all trace what happens when a man tries to seize his future by force: he gets the crown, and loses everything the crown was supposed to give him.
This guide explains the seven major themes of the play, with the lines that express each one, and then shows how they connect. For the plot and famous quotations, see our full guide to Macbeth; for the people, see the characters of Macbeth.
At a Glance
Here are the major themes of Macbeth for quick reference.
Ambition
Ambition is the force that drives the play, and Shakespeare shows it without any of the usual excuses. Macbeth has no grievance against Duncan and no need of anything the king can give him; he has just been honored and rewarded. Weighing the murder, he admits it himself: “I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on th’ other.” Like a rider jumping too hard into the saddle, ambition carries him straight over and down the far side.
Lady Macbeth sees that ambition alone is not enough. Her husband, she says, is “not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it”: he wants greatness but lacks the ruthlessness to take it. She supplies that ruthlessness herself.
The play is clear about where ambition leads. After Duncan’s death, Ross laments the “Thriftless ambition, that will ravin up / Thine own lives’ means,” devouring the very life that feeds it. That is exactly what happens to the Macbeths: they win the crown and lose their peace, their marriage, and finally their lives.
Fate and Free Will
The witches tell Macbeth he will be king. Does that mean he had no choice? The play leaves room for both answers, but it gives strong hints. At first Macbeth himself imagines simply waiting: “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me / Without my stir.” Then he chooses to stir.
Banquo, who hears a prophecy just as flattering, shows the other path. He is tempted too, but he does nothing, and he warns Macbeth about what such voices are for: “oftentimes, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s / In deepest consequence.”
Later, Macbeth tries to fight the very fate he once embraced. Afraid that Banquo’s descendants will inherit the crown, he challenges destiny directly: “Rather than so, come fate into the list, / And champion me to th’ utterance.” He cannot win. Fleance escapes, and in Act 4 the witches show him a line of kings descended from Banquo. The prophecies come true, but every murder along the way was Macbeth’s own choice.
Guilt
In Macbeth, guilt is something you can see and feel on your skin. Just after the murder, Macbeth stares at his bloody hands and asks, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” No, he answers: his hand would sooner turn all the seas red. Lady Macbeth is dismissive: “A little water clears us of this deed.”
Guilt also cuts Macbeth off from God. Hearing the king’s sleeping servants pray, he tries to answer “Amen” and cannot: “I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’ / Stuck in my throat.” As king, he says his mind is “full of scorpions,” and after Banquo’s ghost appears he senses that one crime demands another: “It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.”
The two Macbeths meet their guilt in opposite ways. He hardens himself until he feels almost nothing. She, who once thought a little water was enough, ends the play walking in her sleep, rubbing at a stain only she can see: “Out, damned spot, out, I say!” The doctor who watches her concludes that her sickness is beyond medicine.
Sleep
Duncan is killed in his sleep, and from that moment the Macbeths lose their own. Returning from the murder, Macbeth reports hearing a voice cry, “Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep,” and he describes everything sleep gives: “Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, / The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, / Balm of hurt minds.” He has destroyed that for himself: “Macbeth shall sleep no more.”
The prophecy of sleeplessness comes true. As king, Macbeth complains of “the affliction of these terrible dreams / That shake us nightly,” and he envies the man he killed: “Duncan is in his grave. / After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.” Lady Macbeth tells him, “You lack the season of all natures, sleep,” without knowing that she will lose it too, and end the play walking through the castle at night, awake in her sleep.
Even the witches deal in sleeplessness. In their first scene together, one of them curses a sailor so that “Sleep shall neither night nor day / Hang upon his penthouse lid.” It is a small preview of the curse the Macbeths bring on themselves.
Appearance and Deception
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” the witches chant in the first scene, and nothing in the play is what it seems. Duncan learns this painfully about the first Thane of Cawdor, “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face,” and then gives his complete trust to the second.
The Macbeths make deception a method. “Your face, my thane, is as a book where men / May read strange matters,” Lady Macbeth warns her husband, and instructs him to “Look like th’ innocent flower, / But be the serpent under ’t.” Macbeth learns the lesson: “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.” As king, he tells his wife they must “make our faces vizards to our hearts,” masks for what they are. Duncan’s son Donalbain sums up the court as he flees: “There’s daggers in men’s smiles.”
The deepest deception comes from the witches, who never lie outright but speak in double meanings. The drunken porter jokes about an “equivocator,” someone who lies that way, and at the end Macbeth recognizes the trick: the witches are “juggling fiends” who “keep the word of promise to our ear / And break it to our hope.”
The Natural Order
To Shakespeare’s audience, killing a king was a crime against the whole order of the world, and the play shows nature itself thrown into chaos. On the night of the murder, Lennox reports chimneys blown down, “strange screams of death” in the air, and that the earth “was feverous and did shake.”
The next day, an old man and Ross compare the portents. It is daytime, but “dark night strangles the traveling lamp.” A falcon, “tow’ring in her pride of place,” has been killed by a mousing owl, the humbler bird destroying the royal one, just as Macbeth has destroyed his king. Duncan’s horses have broken loose, turned wild, and, it is said, eaten each other.
Macbeth deliberately allies himself with darkness. Before killing Banquo, he calls on night to blind the day: “Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.” The play ends with nature seeming to rise against him in return: the forest of Birnam marches to his castle, and he is killed by a man who was not born in the natural way.
Kingship and Tyranny
The play sets two kinds of king side by side. Duncan rules like a gardener, rewarding loyalty and helping his subjects grow: “I have begun to plant thee,” he tells Macbeth, “and will labor / To make thee full of growing.” Macbeth rules by fear, with spies in every noble’s house and murder as policy.
Under him, the whole country suffers. Lennox prays for help to reach “this our suffering country / Under a hand accursed.” Macduff cries, “Bleed, bleed, poor country!” and Malcolm agrees that Scotland “weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds.”
In the same scene, Malcolm lists what a true king should be: the “king-becoming graces” of “justice, verity, temp’rance, stableness, / Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, / Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude.” Macbeth has none of them. By the end, even his enemies no longer call him king; he is simply “the tyrant.”
A Closer Reading: The Theft of the Future
Underneath all of these themes runs a single idea about time: the Macbeths try to seize the future in the present, and they end up with no future at all.
From the start, they are impatient with time. Reading her husband’s letter, Lady Macbeth says she can “feel now / The future in the instant.” Macbeth, weighing the murder, wishes that “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly,” and hopes the blow could be “the be-all and the end-all,” so that he could “jump the life to come.” He wants the prize without the consequences that time will bring.
As his crimes multiply, he tries to abolish delay altogether. On learning that Macduff has fled, he vows, “From this moment / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand”: every thought will become an action immediately. But the future he grabbed is empty. He has no children to inherit it; the witches placed “a fruitless crown” on his head and “a barren scepter” in his hand. The throne will pass to Banquo’s line.
So when his wife dies, time itself becomes meaningless to him: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.” The man who could not wait for the future has only a string of empty tomorrows left. Ambition, guilt, sleeplessness, and tyranny are all versions of the same theft, and the same punishment.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the themes of Macbeth, answered briefly.
What Is the Main Theme of Macbeth?
Ambition, and what happens when it is not held in check by conscience. The play follows the destruction that ambition brings to the Macbeths, to the people around them, and to Scotland itself.
Is Macbeth’s Fate Decided by the Witches?
The witches predict his future, but they never tell him to kill anyone. Macbeth himself considers letting chance crown him without his help, and Banquo hears a prophecy and does nothing. The play suggests that the murders are Macbeth’s own choices.
What Does Blood Symbolize in Macbeth?
Guilt, above all. The blood on the Macbeths’ hands after Duncan’s murder becomes the stain Lady Macbeth tries to wash away in her sleep, and Macbeth’s realization that “blood will have blood” shows how one crime leads to the next.
What Does Sleep Symbolize in Macbeth?
Innocence and peace of mind. Duncan is murdered in his sleep, and afterward neither Macbeth nor his wife can rest: he is haunted by terrible dreams, and she walks in her sleep, reliving the murders.
What Does “Fair Is Foul, and Foul Is Fair” Mean?
That appearances cannot be trusted, and that good and evil have been turned upside down. The witches’ chant sets up a play in which a hero becomes a murderer, a welcoming hostess plans a killing, and every promise hides a trick.
Related Reading
Three pages that take the themes of Macbeth further.