Guillotine

The Guillotine is both a literal execution device and a central piece of theatrical machinery in the play’s representation of state violence. First revealed alone and then multiplied into a forest, it becomes the fixed image around which executions are ordered, watched, and mechanically repeated. Its use against Candor’s defeated soldiers and the Officer connects public punishment to Duncan’s arbitrary power.

Appearance and Stage Design

The scene begins with the lights revealing a guillotine; as the stage brightens, a whole forest of them gradually comes into view. This expansion makes the device more than an isolated prop: the execution apparatus fills the audience’s field of vision before the condemned are processed through it. The gradual reveal gives the scene a striking visual scale, while the guillotine’s familiar function is rendered unnervingly abundant.

The directions offer more than one way to stage the executions. In one version, Candor’s soldiers pass in a continuous procession to the guillotine, with the same actors following one another around. An alternative has the scaffold and guillotine appear after Duncan gives the order; Banco pushes a button, and the heads fall. These possibilities emphasize different aspects of the same action: the procession makes repetition bodily and prolonged, while the button-operated version compresses killing into an abrupt mechanical operation.

Execution of Candor’s Army

After Candor speaks before the assembled company, Duncan rejects torture and orders him put to death. He then declares that justice requires the execution of Candor’s soldiers as well, specifying their number as 137,000 and urging that the work be completed by dawn. The scale of the sentence is conveyed not only through that number but through the ensuing stage action: the soldiers move past the guillotine one after another, while the heads accumulate in a basket.

Banco is made part of the procedure. He has already arranged his own head on the guillotine, having had to get rid of his axe, and then urges the execution forward. Each repetition of his command is followed by the blade falling. The guillotine thus organizes a grim rhythm: an order, a hurried prompt, a fall, and another head added to the pile. Rather than treating each death as a separate dramatic encounter, the staging presents mass execution as a process that can be continued until the condemned are exhausted.

The rulers and their companions watch the spectacle. Duncan invites Macbett to sit beside Lady Duncan, positioning both where the audience can see them; Lady Duncan counts heads as the executions proceed. The seating arrangement makes observation part of the scene’s action. The guillotine is not hidden away as an instrument of punishment: its work is watched from a place of comfort, and the count turns the accumulating deaths into something that can be followed as a spectacle.

Punishment and Political Power

The guillotine’s later use against the Officer sharpens the connection between execution and Duncan’s authority. When the Officer brings unwelcome news, Duncan threatens him with beheading and tells Banco that the Officer will lose his head for delivering it. A soldier drags the Officer upstage to the guillotine; he yells, and they cut off his head. The execution follows the threat directly, making the device an immediately available answer to speech that displeases the ruler.

This second killing differs from the sentence imposed on Candor’s army in scale, but not in its demonstration of power. Duncan has presented mass execution as justice; against the Officer, the stated reason is simply that the report is disagreeable. The guillotine’s recurrence exposes how easily official punishment can move from a proclaimed collective sentence to violence against an individual messenger. Its presence turns Duncan’s threat into an executable command.

Dramatic Significance

The Guillotine links the play’s spectacle of mass death to the routine administration of political terror. Its multiplication, the alternative button-operated staging, Banco’s repeated prompts, and the accumulating heads all make the means and rhythm of killing visible. At the same time, the surrounding behavior—Duncan directing the proceedings and Lady Duncan counting—places execution within a social scene of watching rather than presenting it only as an isolated act of violence. The later beheading of the Officer carries that machinery beyond the defeated army: under Duncan, the instrument that disposes of rebels also enforces obedience among those who serve him.