Macbeth’s soliloquies trace a mind that sees the consequences of murder in vivid pictures, learns to act against them, and ends with nothing left to see: the man who began by imagining his life as a grand drama finishes by calling it “a tale / Told by an idiot.”
This guide takes the play’s six key soliloquies in order: five spoken by Macbeth and one by Lady Macbeth. Each gets its key lines, what they mean in plain English, and what they show about the speaker at that point. For the plot and characters, see our full guide to Macbeth, and for the play’s other famous lines, see our Macbeth quotes.
At a Glance
Here are the six key soliloquies in Macbeth for quick reference.
Soliloquies and Asides in Macbeth
A soliloquy is a speech a character makes alone on stage, thinking aloud, so the audience hears what the character truly thinks. An aside is similar but shorter, spoken while other characters are present and unable to hear. Macbeth uses both, and our guide to Shakespeare’s soliloquies explains how the devices work across the plays.
The speeches matter in this play because Macbeth and his wife spend so much of it hiding what they intend. In public they are loyal hosts and grieving subjects; alone, they plan murder. The soliloquies are the only place the audience sees the gap. They also invite comparison with Hamlet’s soliloquies, which work in the opposite direction: Hamlet thinks instead of acting, while Macbeth acts in spite of what he thinks.
Act 1, Scene 3: Two Truths Are Told
Macbeth has just been told that the king has made him Thane of Cawdor, exactly as the witches predicted. Two of their three prophecies have come true, and the third says he will be king.
Two truths are told,
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme.
Macbeth speaks these lines as asides, turning between his private thoughts and polite thanks to the messengers beside him. He sees the two fulfilled prophecies as the opening of a grand play in which he will be crowned. Then he stops to wonder whether the witches’ message is good or evil. If evil, why did it begin with a truth? If good, why does an idea he can’t yet name make his hair stand on end and his heart knock against his ribs?
The idea is murder, and he has already pictured it. “Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings,” he says: what he imagines frightens him more than any real danger. The thought of killing is still “fantastical,” but it shakes him so much that “nothing is / But what is not.” Only the imagined future feels real. This is Macbeth’s defining trait from the start: he sees the deed before he does it.
Act 1, Scene 5: The Raven Himself Is Hoarse
Lady Macbeth has just read her husband’s letter about the witches and learned that King Duncan will stay at their castle that night. Earlier in the scene she worried that Macbeth is “too full o’ the milk of human kindness” to seize the crown. Now she prepares herself instead.
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. 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!
The raven, a bird of ill omen, has croaked itself hoarse announcing Duncan’s arrival. Lady Macbeth then calls on evil spirits to strip away everything soft in her: to “unsex” her, thicken her blood, and block every path to remorse, so that no natural pity can shake her purpose. She asks them to take her milk and turn it to gall. Finally, she calls on night to hide the deed, “That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, / To cry ‘Hold, hold!’”
Where Macbeth’s imagination frightens him, Lady Macbeth sets out to shut hers down. Her speech is a prayer for numbness, and the play grants it only for a while. Her feelings return in Act 5, when she sleepwalks, trying to wash away a spot of blood no one else can see.
Act 1, Scene 7: If It Were Done When ’Tis Done
Duncan is feasting in Macbeth’s castle. Macbeth has left the table and, alone, weighs the murder one last time.
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success.
If the killing could end with the killing, Macbeth says, it would be best done fast. But crimes come back on those who commit them: “we but teach / Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return / To plague the inventor.” Then he lists the reasons against it. Duncan is his king, his kinsman, and his guest, and a host should shut the door against a murderer, not carry the knife himself. And Duncan has ruled so gently that his virtues “Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued,” against his killer.
The speech rises to one of the play’s great images: pity, “like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast,” will blow the horrid deed into every eye until tears drown the wind. Against all this, Macbeth finds only one motive, “Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on the other.” When his wife enters, he tells her they will go no further. She talks him back into it within the scene.
Act 2, Scene 1: Is This a Dagger Which I See Before Me
It is past midnight. Macbeth waits for his wife’s signal that Duncan’s guards are asleep, and as he waits, he sees a dagger in the air.
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Macbeth reaches for the dagger and can’t grasp it. He wonders whether it is “A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain,” and as he watches, drops of blood appear on the blade. He decides it isn’t real: “It is the bloody business which informs / Thus to mine eyes.” The night around him fills with images of witchcraft and murder moving “like a ghost” toward its victim.
Then he catches himself talking: “Whiles I threat, he lives: / Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.” He knows speech cools the will to act. A bell rings, and he goes: “Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell.” The soliloquy ends not with a decision but with an interruption. Our guide to what “Is This a Dagger” means reads the speech in more detail.
Act 3, Scene 1: To Be Thus Is Nothing
Macbeth is now king. He has just spoken warmly to Banquo, who shared the witches’ prophecy and was told his descendants would be kings.
To be thus is nothing;
But to be safely thus.
Being king means nothing, Macbeth says, unless he is safe on the throne, and he isn’t. He fears Banquo, whose courage is matched by the wisdom to use it. Worse, the witches gave Macbeth the crown but promised the future to Banquo’s children: “Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown, / And put a barren sceptre in my gripe.” No son of Macbeth’s will succeed him.
The thought is unbearable. He has “filed” (defiled) his mind, murdered “the gracious Duncan,” and given “mine eternal jewel,” his soul, “to the common enemy of man,” the devil, only to make Banquo’s line kings. So he challenges fate itself to fight him to the death. Moments later, he hires murderers to kill Banquo and his son. The man who argued so long against the first murder now arranges the second in a single scene, and with no Lady Macbeth to persuade him.
Act 5, Scene 5: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Macbeth’s castle is under siege. Moments before, he has said that he has almost forgotten what fear tastes like, having “supped full with horrors.” Then a cry goes up, and he is told that the queen is dead.
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
His first response is flat: she would have died sometime, or she should have died at a better time. Then the speech widens into despair about all of life. Each day crawls to the next until the end of time, and every day behind us only lit the way to the grave. Life is “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.”
Macbeth doesn’t grieve for his wife here. He can’t; he has lost the capacity to feel. What remains is the conclusion that nothing means anything, the natural end for a man who has killed everything that once made life matter to him. Our guide to what “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” means reads the speech in more detail.
A Closer Reading: From Prologue to Poor Player
Macbeth’s first soliloquy and his last are both about the theater, and the distance between them is the whole tragedy.
In Act 1, the prophecies are “happy prologues to the swelling act / Of the imperial theme.” Macbeth imagines his life as a grand play, with himself as its hero and the crown as its climax. In Act 5, life is “a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,” and the play has become “a tale / Told by an idiot.” He has gone from the lead in an epic to a bad actor in a story that makes no sense.
What happens between the two is the loss of his imagination. In the early soliloquies, Macbeth sees everything. The murder is a “horrid image” that makes his hair stand up. Pity is a newborn baby riding the wind. The knife hangs before him, dripping blood. These pictures are his conscience: they are how he knows the deed is wrong, and they are what nearly stop him. So he learns to act against them. In the dagger speech he stops talking because words cool his resolve, and he walks off while the images are still in front of him.
By Act 3 the pictures have narrowed to fear, and by Act 5 they are gone. He has “supped full with horrors” and can no longer be frightened. The images in the last soliloquy are thin and fading: a candle going out, a shadow, an actor who is then “heard no more.” The man whose imagination once made the future feel more real than the present now sees nothing ahead but “tomorrow,” repeated until it means nothing. Macbeth got the crown by learning to stop seeing, and the price was that he could no longer see any reason to live.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the soliloquies in Macbeth, answered briefly.
How Many Soliloquies Are in Macbeth?
Counts vary, but most guides list four or five for Macbeth, depending on whether his asides in Act 1, Scene 3 are included, and one major soliloquy for Lady Macbeth, in Act 1, Scene 5. This guide covers all six.
What Is the Most Famous Soliloquy in Macbeth?
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” in Act 5, Scene 5, where Macbeth calls life “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” The dagger speech in Act 2, Scene 1 is a close second.
What Does “Vaulting Ambition” Mean?
In Act 1, Scene 7, Macbeth says his only motive for murder is “Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on the other.” He pictures ambition as a rider leaping onto a horse so eagerly that he jumps too far and falls on the other side.
What Does “Unsex Me Here” Mean?
Lady Macbeth asks the spirits to take away the qualities her world associated with women, such as tenderness and pity, and fill her with cruelty instead, so that nothing can stop her from helping to kill Duncan.
What Is the Difference Between a Soliloquy and an Aside?
A soliloquy is spoken alone on stage and is usually long. An aside is a brief comment spoken while others are present, who by convention can’t hear it. Macbeth’s “Two truths are told” is a series of asides; his other speeches here are soliloquies.
Related Reading
Three pages that take the speeches of Macbeth further.