In the play’s final act, Macbeth receives the emotional and physical recompense for his crimes. Lady Macbeth signals her deep guilt over Duncan’s murder. Her suicide prompts Macbeth’s most famous soliloquy, a distillation of nihilistic despair. His fight against Macduff ends the play where it began: a rebel’s head paraded on a spear.
- Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking indicates that her trajectory is the opposite of her husband’s. She starts the play unworried about punishment. Now, she says, “What’s done cannot be undone.” The blood on her hands will not come off. Macbeth, on the other hand, began the play fearful of the moral consequences for his crime. This act shows him without a conscience, a man in a moral coma.
- The doctor indicates that the problem afflicting Lady Macbeth demands a “divine” more “than the physician.” The ultimate judge of Lady Macbeth and Macbeth will be God, not man.
- The second scene features Menteith and Caithness’s political analysis. How desperate is Macbeth’s position, they wonder, when his own people and his own person judge him? His people don’t follow because of love, and Macbeth himself knows that he’s a murderer so that he “recoils” at himself.
- We finally see Macbeth in scene three. In many ways, this final act mirrors the first act. In that act, the witches spoke of Macbeth followed by the court speaking of Macbeth’s valiant fury. Then we finally saw Macbeth in the third scene. Everything Lady Macbeth said in scene one and that Menteith and Caithness reported in scene two is confirmed. Macbeth is agitated. He wants Lady Macbeth’s illness cured as easily as one washes one’s hands.
- Macduff mentions “just censures” in scene four. This is the subject of Act 5: true judgement.
- Macbeth’s reaction to Lady Macbeth’s death is famous because it sums up his hopelessness. He relies on three different metaphors: a creeping creature, a candle, and an actor. Macbeth has been obsessed with “tomorrow” since the first act where he worried what kind of judgment Duncan’s murder would merit. Now Macbeth fears it doesn’t matter. He’s not worried about eternity. He’s worried about the repetition of a meaningless tomorrow. He’s taken the wrong message from his wife’s death. The problem isn’t that life is meaningless. The problem is that life is meaningful. Actions have consequences. Sin requires judgment.
- Macbeth suffers the same fate as Macdonwald. Macduff is now Macbeth. The usurper’s cursed head as has been crushed.
- Malcolm invokes the “grace of grace” in the finale. This is an important theological concept: that all are guilty and require punishment. The problem is that we know Malcolm can’t stay king for long. Fleance and his line are going to have to take over somehow. The nation will continue to suffer upheaval until that prophecy is fulfilled.
Experiments in Criticism 