Literature: Macbeth - Themes in Depth
In GCSE English Literature, Macbeth's themes are the ideas the play argues about, including ambition, kingship, appearance and reality, guilt, fate and free will, and the supernatural, each of which a thematic essay must track as it develops across the whole play rather than describing it in isolation. Ambition is the engine, prompted into action by the witches and Lady Macbeth before destroying the man who holds it; guilt is dramatised physically in the imaginary dagger, the unwashable blood and the sleepwalking; and the disordered kingdom is mirrored throughout in disordered weather, animals and sleep.
Method
- Convert the theme into an argument before you write. Not what does the play say about ambition, but what does the play show ambition doing, and does that change between Act 1 and Act 5.
- Choose four moments spread across the play, one of them from the printed extract if the question supplies one. A thematic essay built entirely from Act 1 cannot show development.
- Start from the extract if there is one, since the mark scheme expects it, then move outwards with a phrase such as this is developed later when.
- Analyse the language of a short quotation in detail: one image, one verb, one piece of form. A whole-line quotation you do not unpick earns less than three words you do.
- Give a paragraph to form and structure as well as language: soliloquy giving the audience private access, the compressed pace of Act 1, the shift to prose in the sleepwalking scene, the cyclical return to a severed head.
- Tie context to the effect on a contemporary audience rather than listing facts. James I's interest in witchcraft and his descent from Banquo matter because they change what the show for Banquo's line would have meant in the theatre.
- End each paragraph on the theme, and end the essay with a judgement about how the play finally positions the audience.
Worked example
Plan a response to: starting with the soliloquy in Act 1 Scene 7 in which Macbeth weighs the murder, how far does Shakespeare present ambition as a destructive force in Macbeth?
- Write the thesis first: Shakespeare presents ambition as destructive not because it is wicked in itself but because it can only be satisfied by acts that destroy the person committing them, and the play tracks that destruction from conscience to numbness.
- Paragraph one, the extract. In the soliloquy Macbeth can find no reason to kill Duncan except ambition, which he calls vaulting and which he says o'erleaps itself. The image is of a rider spurring so hard that he goes over the far side of the horse: ambition contains its own failure. Note that the speech is a soliloquy, so the audience hears him talk himself out of the murder before Lady Macbeth talks him back into it.
- Paragraph two, ambition needs a second voice. Lady Macbeth's attack in the same scene is on his manhood, so ambition is shown as socially produced rather than purely internal. Her unsex me here in Act 1 Scene 5 shows her paying a price for it too.
- Paragraph three, the change after the first murder. By Act 3 Macbeth arranges Banquo's death without consulting his wife and without a soliloquy of doubt. The absence of hesitation is the evidence: ambition has stopped being weighed and become habit, and the destruction is now of his own capacity to deliberate.
- Paragraph four, the end state. In Act 5 Scene 5 the response to his wife's death is she should have died hereafter and the tomorrow speech, in which life is a walking shadow signifying nothing. What ambition promised was meaning; what it delivers is a man who can no longer feel a death.
- Add the counter-argument that keeps it in the top band: Malcolm and Macduff also want power, and the play does not condemn them, so the destructive element is specifically ambition pursued against the natural order and against a good king.
- Conclude with the judgement: the play presents ambition as destructive above all to the self, since Macbeth gets exactly what he wanted and finds it worth nothing.
Practice questions
Try each question, then tap to reveal the answer.
Q1Name three themes in Macbeth other than ambition, and give one moment in the play where each is most visible.Show answer
Answer: Appearance and reality: the witches' fair is foul, and Lady Macbeth's advice to look like the innocent flower. Guilt: the blood that Lady Macbeth cannot wash from her hands in the sleepwalking scene. Kingship: Malcolm's testing of Macduff in Act 4 Scene 3, where the qualities of a good king are listed.
Q2Explain what equivocation means in the play and why it matters to the theme of appearance and reality.Show answer
Answer: Equivocation is telling a truth in a form designed to mislead. The witches' prophecies about Birnam Wood and the man not born of woman are literally true but false in the sense Macbeth takes them, so the theme is not merely that people lie but that truth itself can be made deceptive.
Q3Why is the sleepwalking scene written in prose when Lady Macbeth speaks in verse elsewhere?Show answer
Answer: The loss of verse marks the loss of control. Her disordered mind cannot sustain the ordered rhythm of blank verse, so the form itself shows the breakdown that the content describes.
Q4How does the natural world reflect the disorder Macbeth causes?Show answer
Answer: After Duncan's murder the night is unruly, darkness covers the day, an owl kills a falcon and Duncan's horses eat each other. The inversion of the natural hierarchy mirrors the inversion of the political one.
Q5Give one way to bring in context on witchcraft without simply reciting a fact.Show answer
Answer: Argue from audience response: James I had written about witchcraft and many in the audience believed in it, so the witches would have been genuinely frightening rather than symbolic, which makes Macbeth's decision to seek them out in Act 4 look reckless rather than merely unwise.
Q6Explain why a thematic essay should not be organised character by character.Show answer
Answer: The question asks how the idea is presented across the play, so organising by character produces four descriptions rather than one argument. Paragraphs should be organised by stages in the theme's development, drawing on whichever characters serve the point.
Q7What is the effect of ending the play with Macbeth's severed head displayed on a pole?Show answer
Answer: It mirrors the opening report of Macbeth cutting down the traitor Macdonwald, so the play closes the circle and makes him the traitor of his own first scene. It also suggests the restored order is founded on the same violence, which unsettles the neat ending.
Exam-style questions
Written in the style of a English exam paper, with a full mark scheme.
Starting with the moment in Act 5 Scene 1 in which Lady Macbeth sleepwalks and tries to wash her hands, explore how Shakespeare presents guilt in Macbeth. Write about how Shakespeare presents guilt in this extract, and how he presents guilt in the play as a whole.
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How far does Shakespeare present Macbeth as responsible for his own downfall? Write about the roles of the witches, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth himself.
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See real English past-paper questions, with official mark schemes →
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