Remorse and evasion of guilt

Remorse and evasion of guilt are set against each other through Banco and Macbett after Duncan’s murder. Banco admits his part in the killing and finds that success cannot silence his regret; Macbett, by contrast, answers his own violence with counteraccusation and the claim that he acted first. Their conflict makes guilt more than private feeling: it is bound to ambition, prophecy, political legitimacy, and the attempt to control what violence will mean.

Banco’s remorse and the bargain of ambition

Banco’s soliloquy begins with a calculation of the future. He expects Macbett to become king, with Candor and Glamiss preceding him in the witches’ sequence, and notes that the predictions have come true one by one. Yet the prophecy did not mention Duncan’s murder, in which Banco acknowledges he had a hand, or the prospect of Lady Duncan becoming Lady Macbett. The omissions matter to Banco because they expose how much of the rise to power has depended on choices and violence, not prediction alone. He reasons that Macbett could not have gained the throne unless Duncan had died or abdicated, and that abdication was constitutionally impossible: force was the remaining route.

Banco compares his own position with Macbett’s apparent rewards—wealth, fame, power, and a wife—and finds that his participation in Duncan’s death has brought him no comparable advantage. Macbett has promised to make him chamberlain, but Banco doubts the promise because Macbett had once pledged fidelity to Duncan and then killed him. That comparison turns Banco’s suspicion into self-accusation: people may judge Banco by the same standard, and he cannot deny that he helped bring about Duncan’s death. Unlike Macbett, he has no public success or fame to smother remorse. He says he cannot get the deed out of his mind and is sorry now, while recognizing that his regret does not undo his complicity.

Prophecy, responsibility, and self-deception

The Witches’ prediction that Banco will father a line of kings, princes, presidents, and dictators offers him consolation, but it also feeds a new ambition. Banco recalls that before meeting them he wanted only to serve his king; afterward, he finds himself consumed by envy and jealousy, grasping at a future he had not previously sought. His remorse therefore coexists with appetite rather than replacing it. He can regret Duncan’s murder while imagining the political dynasty that might compensate him for Macbett’s present advantage.

That future is uncertain even to Banco. He has no children and is unmarried, so he turns the prophecy into a practical plan: he will ask the Lady in Waiting to marry him, then become chamberlain, begin a family, and curtail Macbett’s power from within. He even entertains the possibility that the Witches may revise their predictions and that he may rule in his own lifetime. The contrast is consequential: Banco’s guilt is real, but he attempts to live beyond it by converting a prediction into a program of marriage, succession, and political maneuver. Prophecy supplies hope, while his own choices supply the means he intends to use.

Macbett turns suspicion into violence

Hidden nearby, Macbett overhears Banco’s plans and interprets them as betrayal. He resents Banco’s doubt about the chamberlainship and is disturbed to learn that his wife and her maid had told Banco he would father a line of rulers without telling him. Rather than treat Banco’s words as an expression of remorse and frustrated expectation, Macbett reads the prophecy as a plot against his own dynasty. The possibility that he has killed Duncan only to place Banco’s descendants on the throne becomes, in his reasoning, a threat that must be stopped at its source.

Macbett calls Banco to him and stabs him in the heart. The killing is deliberate prevention: he says the issue must be destroyed at the fountainhead, then invokes the unborn kings as he leaves, declaring that they will rot with Banco. The scene gives Macbett a chance to interrupt the predicted succession, but it also deepens the chain of violence he is trying to command. Banco had already admitted complicity in Duncan’s death; Macbett now kills Banco because he fears what Banco’s future descendants might mean. The murder does not erase the prophecy or settle the moral question. It makes Macbett’s effort to secure his rule another act requiring justification.

The victim returns, the accusation reverses

At the later encounter, Banco appears as a ruined presence and can do little but curse Macbett. Macbett says Banco cannot make him feel remorse. He defends the murder as self-preservation: had he not killed Banco first, Banco would have killed him, just as Banco had killed Duncan. Banco answers by reminding him that Macbett took Duncan’s place, and that Duncan had twice raised Macbett’s rank. The dispute does not establish a clean moral distinction between them; instead, each man points to the other’s violence, turning guilt into a contest over who struck first and who owes whom.

Banco also names the betrayal in their relationship: he trusted Macbett and followed him, then says Macbett and the Witches put a spell on him. Macbett replies that Banco wanted to substitute his progeny for Macbett’s, and insists that he simply got there first. His defense converts fear of a foretold succession into a claim of priority, as though striking before a rival could act made the killing less culpable. Banco’s warning that Macbett will pay remains unanswered. Macbett instead reduces the apparition to remnants of a personality, leftovers, and a robot. Banco then disappears, and Duncan appears mounting the throne almost at once: the staging moves from one murdered man to another, leaving Macbett’s denial surrounded by the dead he has helped create.

Guilt as a struggle over meaning

The contrast is not simply between a guilty Banco and an untroubled Macbett. Banco admits responsibility, but his remorse does not prevent envy, dynastic ambition, or plans to limit Macbett’s authority. Macbett declares himself beyond remorse, yet his actions reveal how closely his rule is governed by the possibility of Banco’s descendants and by the Witches’ predictions. He cannot make the prophecy harmless, so he tries to destroy its human source; afterward, he cannot silence Banco’s accusation except by declaring the dead man barely a person.

The repeated logic of prior violence—Banco helped kill Duncan, Macbett killed Banco first, and each accuses the other of intending the next blow—makes guilt both personal and political. Each ruler or would-be ruler presents violence as a response to an earlier threat, while the consequences become the next person’s grievance and justification. Banco’s regret acknowledges the cost without freeing him from the ambitions that follow; Macbett’s denial protects his self-image only by multiplying the acts he must defend. In this sequence, power can reward, threaten, and reorder people, but it cannot make the past disappear: Banco’s remorse survives as speech, and his return gives Macbett’s evasion a visible opponent.