ABSTRACT
Macbeth’s words are desperately heroic because they fly in the face of Fate and the warning he has been given to ‘beware Macduff’. Macbeth is the tragedy most obviously relevant to the time it was written, with its final scene obviously calculated to appear reassuring. Macbeth, like Hamlet, is continually caught up in thinking, except that his thinking, until the very end, is constrained by what the Witches have revealed, and later is followed by swiftness of action. Lady Macbeth, while encouraging him to get a grip on himself, is resolute and practical enough to return the daggers Macbeth had foolishly carried away, and then smear ‘the faces of the grooms’ with blood. She it was who had ‘laid their daggers ready’, yet despite her invocation to the infernal ‘spirits’ to ‘unsex’ her, it was Duncan’s likeness to her ‘father as he slept’ that prevented her from killing him herself.
