🚨 Spoilers ahead. That's the whole point. If you wanted to be surprised, you should have read the book.
Macbeth, a Scottish general, meets three witches who say he will be king. Egged on by Lady Macbeth, he murders King Duncan in his sleep and takes the throne. Paranoid, he has Banquo killed, but Banquo's son Fleance escapes. Macbeth then has Macduff's family killed. Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, haunted by guilt, and dies offstage. Malcolm, Duncan's son, marches on Dunsinane with soldiers carrying branches. Macduff kills Macbeth, and Malcolm becomes king. Ambition, murder, bad hand hygiene.
- Macbeth is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy. At roughly 2,100 lines, it runs far shorter than Hamlet. Nothing in it wastes time, which is how a king ends up dead before the play is half over.
- No copy printed before 1623 survives. Macbeth first appears in print in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after Shakespeare died. No earlier edition of the play is known to exist.
- The real Macbeth ruled for seventeen years. The historical Macbeth reigned over Scotland from 1040 to 1057, a stretch far calmer than the play suggests. Shakespeare took the story from Holinshed's Chronicles and bent it.
- “Lady Macbeth stabs King Duncan herself.” Wrong hands. She goes in, sees that Duncan looks like her father asleep, and can't do it. Macbeth kills him. She only returns the daggers and smears the guards with blood.
- “Birnam Wood literally walks to Dunsinane.” Trees don't commute. Malcolm orders every soldier to cut a branch and carry it for cover, so the wood only seems to move. Macbeth falls for the trick.
- “Malcolm kills Macbeth and takes the crown.” Crown, yes. Sword, no. Macduff kills Macbeth offstage and comes back carrying his head. Malcolm only inherits the throne, which is the point of the whole mess.
- If they say: “So Lady Macbeth just gets away with it?”
You say: “No. She unravels. In the sleepwalking scene she rubs her hands and cries 'Out, damned spot!' Later, offstage, she dies, and Malcolm says she is thought to have taken her own life.” - If they say: “The witches are the real villains of the play.”
You say: “I'd say they only predict. They also promise Banquo that kings will descend from him, and his son Fleance escapes the murderers, so the prophecy outlasts Macbeth.”
🍸 Your Bar Line
A general kills his king, and a man untimely ripped from his mother ends him behind a forest of soldiers holding branches. Lady Macbeth never stabbed anyone.
