Macbeththe whole play in modern English, scene by scene
A victorious general hears a prophecy that he will be king — and with his wife's help makes it come true, one murder at a time. Shakespeare's shortest, darkest tragedy. Every scene below shows Shakespeare's original text and a plain modern English translation side by side — free, printable, no account, no paywall.
Act 1
- Scene 1Three witches on a stormy heath arrange to meet again when the battle ends — to intercept Macbeth.
- Scene 2A bleeding captain reports Macbeth's battlefield valor; Duncan condemns the traitor Thane of Cawdor and awards his title to Macbeth.
- Scene 3The witches hail Macbeth as Thane of Cawdor and future king; Ross delivers the Cawdor title, and Macbeth begins to dream of the crown.
- Scene 4Duncan thanks Macbeth for his service, then names his son Malcolm heir to the throne — an obstacle Macbeth privately resolves to overleap.
- Scene 5Lady Macbeth reads Macbeth's letter, learns Duncan comes tonight, and calls on spirits to steel her for the king's murder.
- Scene 6Duncan arrives at Inverness praising the castle's sweet air; Lady Macbeth graciously welcomes the king she plans to kill.
- Scene 7Macbeth talks himself out of the murder; Lady Macbeth attacks his manhood and lays out the plan until he recommits — Duncan dies tonight.
Act 2
- Scene 1Past midnight, Macbeth parries Banquo's talk of the witches, then follows a hallucinated dagger toward Duncan's chamber.
- Scene 2Macbeth returns from murdering Duncan, unnerved and still clutching the daggers; Lady Macbeth plants them on the guards as knocking begins.
- Scene 3The drunken Porter admits Macduff, who discovers Duncan murdered; Macbeth kills the framed guards, and Malcolm and Donalbain flee.
- Scene 4Ross and an old man trade unnatural omens; Macduff reports the fled princes are suspected and Macbeth has been named king.
Act 3
- Scene 1Fearing the prophecy that Banquo's heirs will reign, King Macbeth hires two murderers to kill Banquo and Fleance before the banquet.
- Scene 2Macbeth, envying dead Duncan's peace, hints to Lady Macbeth at a 'deed of dreadful note' against Banquo — without telling her the plan.
- Scene 3Three murderers ambush Banquo at dusk and kill him, but his son Fleance escapes into the dark.
- Scene 4Banquo's ghost twice takes Macbeth's seat at the banquet; his ravings break up the feast, and he resolves to seek the witches again.
- Scene 5Hecate scolds the witches for dealing with Macbeth without her and plots to lure him to ruin through false security.
- Scene 6Lennox and another lord voice their suspicion of Macbeth; Macduff has gone to England to raise an army with Malcolm and King Edward.
Act 4
- Scene 1The witches' apparitions warn Macbeth of Macduff yet promise safety till Birnam Wood moves; hearing Macduff fled, he vows to kill his kin.
- Scene 2Ross and a messenger warn Lady Macduff too late — Macbeth's hired killers storm the castle and murder her and her young son.
- Scene 3In England, Malcolm tests Macduff's loyalty; Ross brings news of Macduff's slaughtered family, and Macduff vows revenge on Macbeth.
Act 5
- Scene 1A doctor and gentlewoman watch Lady Macbeth sleepwalk, rubbing her hands and confessing the murders of Duncan, Banquo, and Lady Macduff.
- Scene 2Scottish lords Menteith, Caithness, Angus, and Lennox desert Macbeth and march to join Malcolm's English army near Birnam Wood.
- Scene 3Macbeth, deserted by his thanes, clings to the witches' prophecies; the doctor reports Lady Macbeth's illness is beyond his medicine.
- Scene 4At Birnam Wood, Malcolm orders every soldier to cut and carry a branch — unknowingly setting the witches' prophecy in motion.
- Scene 5Told Lady Macbeth is dead ('Tomorrow, and tomorrow...'), Macbeth then hears Birnam Wood is moving and marches out to die fighting.
- Scene 6Before Dunsinane, Malcolm's soldiers throw down their branches; he, Siward, and Macduff sound the assault on the castle.
- Scene 7Macbeth cuts down young Siward in the battle; Macduff hunts him across the field as the castle falls to Malcolm.
- Scene 8Macduff, 'from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd,' voids the last prophecy and kills Macbeth; Malcolm is hailed King of Scotland.
Famous lines
- “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” — Act 1, Scene 1
- “What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won.” — Act 1, Scene 2
- “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” — Act 1, Scene 3
- “All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter!” — Act 1, Scene 3
- “Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it” — Act 1, Scene 4
- “There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face” — Act 1, Scene 4
- “It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” — Act 1, Scene 5
- “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here” — Act 1, Scene 5
- “This castle hath a pleasant seat.” — Act 1, Scene 6
- “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.” — Act 1, Scene 7
Macbeth plot summary, act by act
Act 1
Scotland is at war, and the general Macbeth crushes a rebellion backed by Norway. Returning from battle, he and Banquo meet three witches who hail Macbeth as future Thane of Cawdor and king — and the first title arrives minutes later, as Duncan awards him the executed traitor Cawdor's thaneship. When Duncan names his son Malcolm heir instead, Macbeth confesses to “black and deep desires,” and Lady Macbeth, reading his letter at Inverness, calls on spirits to “unsex” her and steel them both for murder. Duncan arrives to spend the night at their castle; Macbeth talks himself out of killing him, and his wife taunts him back into it.
Act 2
Past midnight, Macbeth hallucinates a floating dagger pointing toward Duncan's room, then murders the sleeping king. He returns shattered — still carrying the daggers he was meant to plant — so Lady Macbeth takes them back herself and smears the drugged guards with blood. At dawn Macduff discovers the body; Macbeth kills the guards, supposedly in fury, and Duncan's sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee the country, drawing suspicion onto themselves. Amid unnatural omens — darkness at noon, horses eating each other — Macbeth is named king.
Act 3
Crowned but terrified by the prophecy that Banquo's descendants will inherit the throne, Macbeth hires murderers to kill Banquo and his son Fleance before a state banquet — without telling his wife. Banquo is butchered, but Fleance escapes, leaving the prophecy alive and Macbeth “cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd” by fear. At the banquet, Banquo's blood-matted ghost appears in Macbeth's seat, and his public breakdown in front of the nobles wrecks the feast. Macbeth resolves to revisit the witches, while Macduff skips the banquet and slips away to England, where Malcolm shelters at King Edward's court.
Act 4
The witches show Macbeth three apparitions: beware Macduff; “none of woman born” shall harm him; he is safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. Reassured by the seemingly impossible conditions — exactly the overconfidence Hecate planned — but warned about Macduff, he orders Macduff's castle seized and his wife and children slaughtered. In England, Malcolm tests Macduff's loyalty with a false confession of vice before revealing his true virtue. When news of the massacre arrives, Malcolm tells Macduff to “give sorrow words” and turn grief to revenge: an English army will march on Scotland.
Act 5
Lady Macbeth sleepwalks at Dunsinane, endlessly scrubbing an imaginary bloodstain — the guilt she once dismissed with “a little water” now impossible to wash away. Malcolm's soldiers cut branches from Birnam Wood as camouflage, making the impossible prophecy come true by perfectly ordinary means. Told of his wife's death, Macbeth answers with the play's bleakest speech — life is “a tale told by an idiot… signifying nothing” — then fights on as the castle falls. Macduff, “from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd,” voids the last prophecy and kills him, and Malcolm is restored as Scotland's rightful king.
Main characters in Macbeth
- Macbeth.
- A genuinely heroic general who murders his king on the strength of a prophecy and his wife's goading, then keeps killing to feel safe. His arc runs from tortured conscience — the dagger vision, the voice crying “Macbeth does murder sleep” — to numb despair, ending as a man who finds his hard-won crown “signifying nothing.”
- Lady Macbeth.
- The colder, steadier partner at the start: she calls on spirits to “unsex” her, plans Duncan's murder, and returns the daggers her husband can't touch. The suppressed guilt destroys her — by Act 5 she is sleepwalking, scrubbing at a bloodstain no one else can see, and dies offstage.
- The Three Witches.
- The “instruments of darkness” whose prophecies frame the whole tragedy. They never order a single murder — they name outcomes and let Macbeth supply the methods, hooking him with small truths (the Cawdor title) and destroying him with equivocations (“none of woman born”).
- Banquo.
- Macbeth's fellow general, who hears the same prophecies and does nothing about them — the play's control experiment in resisting temptation. Promised that his descendants will be kings, he is murdered on Macbeth's orders in Act 3, but his son escapes and his ghost wrecks Macbeth's banquet.
- King Duncan.
- Scotland's trusting, generous king, murdered in his sleep as a guest under Macbeth's roof. His fatal blind spot is stated in his own line — “There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face” — spoken just as his next betrayer walks in.
- Macduff.
- The Thane of Fife who distrusts Macbeth from the coronation onward and abandons his family to raise an army in England — a choice that costs his wife and children their lives. Delivered by caesarean, he falls outside the “none of woman born” protection and kills Macbeth in the final scene.
- Malcolm.
- Duncan's heir, who flees after the murder and matures in exile from suspect to king-in-waiting — testing Macduff's loyalty with a fake confession of vice before leading the invasion. His branch-cutting order at Birnam Wood fulfills the witches' “impossible” prophecy, and his closing verdict on “this dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen” ends the play.
- Lady Macduff.
- Macduff's abandoned wife, who gets one scene to condemn his flight — “All is the fear, and nothing is the love” — before Macbeth's hired killers murder her and her children. Her slaughter is the play's moral floor: Macbeth's first killing with no strategic point at all.
- Fleance.
- Banquo's young son, whose escape from the ambush is the play's hinge: Macbeth's plan half fails, and the prophecy that Banquo's line will reign survives. He never reappears, but his existence keeps Macbeth “cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd” for the rest of the play.
Themes in Macbeth
- Ambition.
- Macbeth names his own tragic flaw in Act 1 Scene 7: with no grievance against Duncan, he has “only vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself.” The play then audits what ambition actually buys — “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus,” he admits once crowned, and the “fruitless crown” torments him because he damned himself for another man's heirs. By Act 5 the prize is fully priced: a life “fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf,” with curses where honor and friends should be.
- Guilt.
- Guilt in Macbeth is physical and permanent, always imaged as blood: Macbeth fears “all great Neptune's ocean” cannot wash his hands, and Lady Macbeth's breezy “a little water clears us of this deed” returns in Act 5 as “Out, damned spot!” — a stain she scrubs at in her sleep. The doctor delivers the verdict: no medicine can “minister to a mind diseas'd”; the patient must cure herself, and neither Macbeth can.
- Appearance vs. Reality.
- The witches' opening chant — “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” — sets the rule: nothing in this play looks like what it is. Lady Macbeth coaches her husband to “look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't”; Duncan praises the “pleasant seat” of the castle where he'll be murdered that night; Donalbain flees because “there's daggers in men's smiles.” The witches' prophecies are the theme's sharpest weapon — true in wording, fatal in meaning.
- Fate and Free Will.
- The witches predict Macbeth's crown but never mention murder — the method is entirely his own contribution, which is why the debate starts at the first prophecy in Act 1 Scene 3. Banquo, given his own prophecy, simply waits, and his warning that “the instruments of darkness tell us truths” to “win us to our harm” is the standard evidence that Macbeth is manipulated, not controlled. Even the “impossible” prophecies come true through ordinary human means: soldiers carrying branches, a caesarean birth.
- Manhood and Gender.
- The play keeps asking what “being a man” means. Macbeth draws a moral line — “I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none” — and Lady Macbeth demolishes it in the same scene, equating manhood with daring to kill. She frames her own femininity as the obstacle, begging spirits to “unsex” her and swap her milk for gall; the tragedy is that her definition wins the argument and destroys them both.
Key quotes from Macbeth, explained
- “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” — Act 1, Scene 1
- The witches' chanted paradox is the play's thesis in six words: appearances will deceive and good and evil will trade places. Macbeth unknowingly echoes it in his own first line, proof the inversion has already reached his mind.
- “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here” — Act 1, Scene 5
- Lady Macbeth asks to be stripped of her womanhood — which she equates with pity — and filled with “direst cruelty.” It's the play's most famous statement of its gender theme and the moment the murder plot gains its engine.
- “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.” — Act 1, Scene 7
- Macbeth's great soliloquy tests one “if”: could the murder ever truly be finished? The speech finds the answer is no — violence teaches “bloody instructions” that return to plague the inventor — which is the entire plot in preview.
- “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” — Act 2, Scene 1
- The hallucinated dagger pointing toward Duncan's room is the play's most famous image of a conscience buckling before the crime is even committed. Macbeth himself can't tell whether it's supernatural or “a dagger of the mind.”
- “I am in blood Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” — Act 3, Scene 4
- The clearest explanation of why Macbeth keeps killing: not ambition anymore, but sunk-cost logic — he believes he's too far across the river of blood to turn back. It marks the pivot from guilty king to willing tyrant.
- “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.” — Act 4, Scene 1
- The apparition's promise sounds like total protection and Macbeth stakes his life on it — but it's an equivocation. Macduff, delivered by caesarean, falls outside its exact wording, making this the trap that closes in Act 5.
- “Out, damned spot! out, I say!” — Act 5, Scene 1
- The woman who said “a little water clears us of this deed” now scrubs nightly at a bloodstain that isn't there. It's the play's definitive image of guilt as compulsion — remorse buried in Act 2 resurfacing through her sleep.
- “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” — Act 5, Scene 5
- Macbeth's response to his wife's death is the most famous statement of despair in Shakespeare: time reduced to a meaningless crawl toward death. Spoken by a man who murdered to control the future, and now finds that future empty.
A free No Fear Shakespeare alternative
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