The war between Duncan and the rebels

The war between Duncan and the rebels turns the stage into a landscape of mass death, while exposing the distance between Macbett’s immense violence and his calm insistence that he has merely done his duty. The battle is presented not as a clean victory but as destruction on a scale that overwhelms the language of military success.

The Battle as Staged Devastation

The battle first fills the empty stage through sound and light: gunfire flashes across the scene, a conflagration spreads across the painted sky, and storm-like brightness gives way to a tragic red horizon. As the sky clears, machine-gun fire grows less frequent and recedes. This theatrical shift makes the fighting’s apparent ebb visible without showing its full machinery; the violence is registered through its effects and the changing soundscape.

Macbett then enters exhausted and sits on a milestone, looking at his naked, blood-red sword. He counts the dead in escalating totals: officers and men killed by his own hand, firing-squad executions, people burned in forests, families suffocated beneath rubble, and fugitives drowned in the Channel. He extends the toll to millions dead from fear, suicide, anger, or grief, and describes a landscape so saturated with corpses that the dead have consumed the water and there are too few vultures to dispose of them. The speech makes the victorious commander’s weapon a concrete measure of slaughter, while its mounting numbers turn the battlefield into a catastrophe beyond ordinary accounting.

The violence continues even in Macbett’s account of its aftermath. Survivors are still fighting; severed heads seem to mock the soldiers, and detached limbs keep striking or brandishing weapons. Macbett calls the defeated traitors and enemies of Duncan, claiming they sought to overthrow him with foreign help. Yet he admits that in battle soldiers strike indiscriminately and wonders whether he killed any of his own allies while they fought shoulder to shoulder. His uncertainty briefly unsettles the certainty of his official justification, but he quickly returns to it: there are no regrets because he followed his sovereign’s orders and did his duty.

Command, Substitution, and the Battle’s Return

The battle’s pauses do not settle into an ending. Macbett leaves the stage to surround Glamiss, insisting that the rebel must not escape; in the next beat, Banco enters wearing the same costume and beard, carrying a naked sword and appearing in the same exhausted posture. The visual resemblance makes command seem transferable even as the fighting continues. Banco reports that the enemy is almost in retreat, then accepts Macbett’s call to join him and finish the pursuit. When Banco goes upstage, the sounds of battle swell again and the painted conflagration brightens. The scene’s repeated departures and returns turn the war into a cycle of apparent reprieve followed by renewed violence.

The commanders’ language also echoes across their brief exchanges. Banco, like Macbett, rejects regret by invoking obedience to his sovereign and the performance of duty. That repetition places the two allies within the same logic of justification: killing is treated as an obligation, while the human consequences recede behind the language of service. The staging sharpens the irony. A jug of wine and the commanders’ momentary rest interrupt the battle, but neither pause changes its course; each man is soon summoned back toward the fighting.

Duncan’s entrance brings the first formal declaration that the battle is over. Blazing fanfares and cheering announce him, and he asks whether his side has won. Macbett answers that the danger has passed, while Duncan immediately asks whether Candor has been executed and orders his beheading. Glamiss, by contrast, remains surrounded but not yet captured. Duncan praises Macbett and says he cannot thank him enough; the soldiers and crowd answer with cheers. The victory is thus presented through the sovereign’s questions, commands, and public acclaim, even though the preceding battlefield account has made its cost almost impossible to contain. The jubilant ceremony closes the immediate conflict without undoing the devastation that produced it.

The Commander’s Ordinary Aftermath

After recounting destruction on an immense scale, Macbett’s attention contracts to the discomforts of his own body. He wipes his face with a large handkerchief, says he feels queasy, and notes that his wrist aches, though he judges the injury minor. He has little appetite despite the exertion, and describes the day as pleasant before calling for his sword to be cleaned in the river and for something to drink. These practical gestures do not interrupt his command; they sit beside the slaughter as if both belonged to the same routine.

The contrast makes the end of battle less a moment of moral recognition than a return to ordinary military business. Macbett rests, drinks wine, and prepares to go back to the fighting, while the bloody sword is handed to the Orderly for cleaning. His attention to minor bodily strain and refreshment gives the violence an unsettling everyday scale: the killing is immense, but its perpetrator treats its aftermath as a temporary pause in a working day.

Victory and the Unfinished Pursuit

The declaration that the battle is over settles its immediate military question but leaves its political violence in motion. Candor’s execution is treated as an order to be carried out, while Glamiss remains the object of a continuing pursuit. Victory therefore appears less as reconciliation than as the sovereign’s power to decide who is punished and who must still be hunted. The fanfares and cheers give this transition a public, triumphant face; set against the devastation already described, they make acclaim itself part of the machinery by which the war’s outcome is authorized.