Witches’ prophecy and fate

Witches’ prophecy and fate is a political force in Macbett: The Witches’ predictions seem to disclose the future, but their effects depend on how characters interpret and act upon them. Prophecy first appears to confirm a destined order; then it breeds envy, murder, and defensive violence. Its apparent certainty is unsettled when Macbett’s invulnerability is exposed as a trick of interpretation, and the final image of a forest advancing toward him turns a prediction into a visible threat.

Predictions, Ambition, and Remorse

Reflecting alone, Banco recounts a sequence of predictions that have come true, including Macbett’s rise to kingship and the advancement of Candor and Glamiss. He also remembers what The Witches foretold for himself: although he would not become archduke or king, he would father a line of rulers. The prediction offers consolation, but it cannot give him the present status he envies in Macbett. Macbett, he observes, has gained wealth, fame, power, and a wife, while Banco has received only a promise of the chamberlainship.

That contrast makes prophecy an engine of inward change as well as political action. Banco says that before meeting The Witches he had no ambition beyond serving his king; now he is consumed by envy and jealousy, carried along by an appetite he feels unable to control. His prediction of future descendants offers a form of compensation, yet it also sharpens the gap between the promised dynasty and his current life: he has no children and is not married. He considers marrying the Lady in Waiting, whose supposed ability to foresee danger might help them guard against it, and imagines becoming Macbett’s chamberlain before curtailing his power. Prophecy does not merely describe a future here; it gives Banco a new ambition and a plan for trying to reach it.

The same reflection brings a reckoning with the past. Banco admits that he took part in Duncan’s murder because he bore Duncan a grudge, and recognizes that others may judge him by the same standard he applies to Macbett, who broke faith with Duncan and killed him. Unlike Macbett, Banco has no success or fame to stifle his remorse. The promise of descendants consoles him, but it cannot erase his awareness of complicity.

Macbett’s Attempt to Defeat the Prediction

Hidden nearby, Macbett hears Banco’s plans and learns that The Witches predicted a royal line descending from Banco. He is particularly disturbed that Lady Duncan and her maid apparently disclosed this prediction to Banco without telling him. The forecast immediately changes how he understands his own accession: he wonders whether he killed Duncan only to place Banco’s descendants on the throne, and imagines that the prophecy forms part of a plot against him.

Macbett answers this uncertainty with violence. Rather than accept the future or test Banco’s loyalty, he decides to attack what he calls the source of the predicted dynasty. He summons Banco and stabs him in the heart. The sequence makes the prophecy’s political effect stark: a forecast about descendants, which Banco had treated partly as consolation, becomes a threat in Macbett’s mind and precipitates the murder of their father. Macbett’s effort to prevent the predicted future thus becomes another consequence of the prediction itself.

The scene also exposes the difference between the two men’s responses to uncertain promises. Banco doubts Macbett will honor the chamberlainship because Macbett previously promised fidelity to Duncan and then killed him. Macbett, in turn, treats the prophecy about Banco’s issue as evidence of a sinister design. Neither man can secure the future by trusting another’s word; each interprets the other through the violence already committed or anticipated.

Invulnerability and the Limits of Interpretation

Later, Macbett relies on The Witches’ assurance that no man born of a woman can harm him. When Macol confronts him, Macbett dismisses him as incapable of injury and repeats the condition under which he believes he can be defeated: only when the forest marches against him. The claims appear to make his safety absolute, but their wording leaves room for a concealed qualification.

Macol tells him that The Witches have misled him. Lady Duncan then reveals the fact that overturns Macbett’s confidence: Macol is not her biological son. Banco was his father, while his mother was a gazelle transformed into a woman by a witch; after giving birth, she changed back into a gazelle. Duncan adopted Macol and wanted an heir, while Lady Duncan had left court secretly before the birth so no one would know she was not pregnant. The revelation links the prophecy about Banco’s future line to the political crisis now confronting Macbett, and supplies the explanation for why Macol falls outside the apparent protection of the prophecy about those born of women.

The play therefore distinguishes between a prophecy’s apparent meaning and the circumstances that make its terms operative. Macbett’s certainty rests on the broad, reassuring interpretation; Macol’s reply and Lady Duncan’s disclosure expose the hidden exception. Fate is not presented as a simple, transparent script. Characters act on partial knowledge, and the resulting actions—especially Macbett’s attempt to eliminate Banco’s line—help bring the threatened future nearer.

The Marching Forest

Macbett’s other condition for defeat is that the forest march against him. At the confrontation with Macol, men and women approach carrying placards marked with trees. The stage direction offers a more elaborate version in which the upstage set itself moves forward to encircle Macbett. The image turns the prediction into theatrical action: what had sounded like an impossible condition begins to take shape through the bodies and scenery advancing onstage.

The episode makes prophecy both verbal and material. A forest can appear as a phrase Macbett uses to reassure himself, then as a procession of tree-marked signs, and finally, in the proposed staging, as the moving set surrounding him. The evidence here presents the advance and the staging instruction, not the completed outcome of Macbett’s confrontation with Macol. Even so, the contrast is decisive: Macbett’s confidence depends on treating the prophecy as remote and literal impossibility, while the scene gives its terms a form that can be approached, assembled, and enacted.