At a military camp near Forres, King Duncan of Scotland asks a wounded sergeant for news about the battle between the Scots and the Norwegians. The sergeant, who was wounded helping Prince Malcolm escape captivity by the Norwegians, replies that Macbeth has killed the traitorous Scot Macdonwald, and that Macbeth and Banquo, the Scottish generals, are fighting with great courage and violence. The Thane of Ross, a Scottish nobleman, enters and tells the king that the traitorous Thane of Cawdor has been defeated and the army of Norway repelled. Duncan decrees that the Thane of Cawdor be put to death, and that Macbeth, the hero of the victorious army, be given his title. Ross leaves to inform Macbeth of the news.

On the heath near the battlefield, thunder rolls, and the three witches appear. They discuss where they have been--one says, "Killing swine," another describes the revenge she has planned upon a sailor's wife who did not s

The latter figure also provides Shakespeare with the opportunity to inform the audience of a number of unnatural occurrences in the weather and in the behavior of animals, which cast a menacing shadow over Macbeth's ascension to the throne. In Shakespeare's tragedies (Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Hamlet, in particular), terrible supernatural occurrences often betoken wicked behavior on the part of the characters and tragic consequences for the political state. The storms that accompany the witches' appearances and Duncan's murder are more than mere atmospherics; they are indices of the connection between moral, natural, and political developments in the universe of Shakespeare's plays.

At the start of the play, after his first confrontation with the witches, Macbeth worried that he would have to commit a murder to gain the Scottish crown. Now, however, one murder has followed another, and the body count is beginning to rise to alarming levels. After Duncan, Macbeth was forced to kill the two chamberlains so as to preempt their claims of innocence; now that half of the witches' prophecy has come true, he must kill his friend Banquo and the young Fleance in order to prevent the second part's realization.

Macbeth's own dissolution is rougher and more complex. Lured into a false sense of security by the final prophecies of the witches, he gives way to boastfulness and a kind of exhausted arrogance. (Both Macbeth and his wife are unable to sleep, a fact foreshadowed by Macbeth's hallucination at the moment of the murder, when he believed that a voice cried out "Macbeth doth murder sleep.") When the battle begins, Macbeth clings against all apparent evidence to the notion that he will not be harmed, because he is protected by the prophecy; he fails to recognize that the prophecies that have previously come true did so only because he knowingly carried them out.

This section is dominated by Lady Macbeth, the most remarkable character in the play and in many ways its protagonist. (This is not to say that Lady Macbeth is the "heroine" of the play, but she is certainly the motive power behind much of the action.) Her violent, blistering monologues in Scenes v and vii testify to her strength of will, especially as compared to her husband, and she is well aware of this discrepancy in their respective resolves. Lady Macbeth fully comprehends that she will have to manipulate her husband into acting on the witches' prophecy, and wishes that she were a man so that she could act on it herself. Her claim to this effect begins the play's curious thematizing of gender, particularly of the value of masculinity--when Lady Macbeth begins to goad her husband into action in Scene vii, she does so by questioning his manhood. (It is also interesting to note that many of the play's strong female characters are associated with masculinity in some way: the witches are described as having beards, and, in a famous speech, Lady Macbeth wishes that she might be "unsexed" and transformed into a man: "Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / . . .Come to my woman's breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers. . .")

At the king's palace in Forres, Banquo paces, thinking about the coronation of Macbeth and the prophecy of the weird sisters--who foretold not only that Macbeth would be king, but also that Banquo's line would sit on the throne. Macbeth enters, attired as king, followed by his queen and the court. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth speak to Banquo, requesting his presence at the feast they will hold that night. Banquo agrees to attend the feast, but says that he will ride around the grounds in the meantime. Macbeth dismisses his court and is left alone in the hall with a single attendant. He speaks to the attendant about some men who have come to see him; he asks if they are still waiting and orders that they be fetched. Macbeth muses on the subject of Banquo, reflecting that his old friend is the only man in

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Approximate Word count = 6240
Approximate Pages = 25 (250 words per page double spaced)