Macbeth Act V | ISC Class 12 English Literature Notes

This note covers William Shakespeare’s Macbeth Act V: where the act sits in the play, a summary of all eight scenes, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, Macbeth at Dunsinane, the “Tomorrow” speech, the fulfilled prophecies, the play’s ending, the characters, dramatic techniques, imagery, themes, tone, key quotations, difficult words and exam-style questions with model answers.

Where does Act V sit in the play, and what are its settings?

Act V is the last of the play’s five acts. It brings both partners in Duncan’s murder to their end: Lady Macbeth breaks down in her sleep and dies offstage, Macbeth is killed by Macduff, and Malcolm is hailed King of Scotland.

How did Act IV end?

At the end of Act IV, Scene 3, Macduff has learned that his wife and children were slaughtered. He prays to meet “this fiend of Scotland” within his sword’s length, and Malcolm declares that Macbeth “Is ripe for shaking”. Act V shows their army arriving in Scotland.

Where are the eight scenes set?

The act cross-cuts: castle scenes alternate with scenes of the army closing in, and each side enters “with drum and colours”, mirroring the other.

Note: Editions differ in small details of wording and punctuation, and in how they divide the final battle into scenes. Quotations and scene numbers here follow one widely available text, which has eight scenes in Act V; the student should follow the edition used in class.

What happens in the scene-by-scene summary of Act V?

Scene 1: Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep

A Doctor of Physic and a Waiting-Gentlewoman watch as Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep with a taper. She rubs her hands as if washing them and speaks in broken phrases of a spot, of blood, of the Thane of Fife’s wife and of Banquo’s burial.

Scene 2: The thanes march to join Malcolm

Menteith, Caithness, Angus and Lennox march towards Birnam wood to meet the English power led by Malcolm, his uncle Siward and Macduff; Siward’s son and many beardless youths are with them. Macbeth, they hear, is fortifying Dunsinane. Some call him mad, others valiant in his fury.

Scene 3: Macbeth trusts the prophecies

Trusting the prophecies, Macbeth wants no more reports. He abuses a pale servant who brings news of ten thousand English soldiers, admits that he has lived long enough, calls for his armour and asks the Doctor to cure his wife’s mind.

Scene 4: The army cuts boughs at Birnam

At Birnam wood, Malcolm’s army, now joined by the thanes, hears that Macbeth will endure a siege. Malcolm orders every soldier to cut a bough and carry it before him, to hide their numbers.

Scene 5: The Queen’s death and the moving wood

Macbeth orders banners hung on the outer walls. A cry of women is heard, and Seyton reports that the Queen is dead. Macbeth reflects on the emptiness of life. A Messenger reports that Birnam wood seems to move, and Macbeth orders his men out to fight.

Scene 6: The boughs are thrown down

Before the castle, Malcolm’s soldiers throw down their “leafy screens”. Old Siward and his son are to lead the first battle, and Macduff calls for the trumpets to sound.

Scene 7: Macbeth kills young Siward

Macbeth compares himself to a bear tied to a stake. He kills young Siward, who calls him an “abhorred tyrant”. Macduff seeks only Macbeth, refusing to strike hired soldiers. Old Siward tells Malcolm that the castle has been “gently render’d”, given up with little resistance.

Scene 8: Macbeth’s death and Malcolm’s victory

Macbeth refuses to kill himself. Macduff finds him, and Macbeth boasts of a “charmed life” until Macduff reveals the manner of his birth. Macbeth will not yield, and the two go off fighting. Old Siward learns that his son died bravely. Macduff enters with Macbeth’s head and hails Malcolm as King, and Malcolm invites all to his crowning at Scone.

What does the sleepwalking scene reveal about Lady Macbeth?

How do the two watchers prepare the audience?

The scene opens on two witnesses. The Gentlewoman will repeat what she has heard “Neither to you nor anyone”; her caution can be read as a sign that in Macbeth’s Scotland even knowing a secret is dangerous.

The taper matters: “she has light by her continually; ’tis her command.” In Act I, Scene 5, she called on “thick night” to hide the murder; now she cannot be without light. Her eyes are open, “but their sense are shut”: she sees only her memories.

Which earlier moments do her broken words replay?

Her sentences jump between nights and crimes. Each can be read as recalling an earlier scene.

She also says that “Banquo’s buried”. Macbeth kept that plan from her in Act III, Scene 2, so the words can be read as showing that she guessed the truth.

What do her prose and repetitions show?

Lady Macbeth earlier spoke mostly in commanding verse. Here she speaks in prose, in fragments, to a husband who is not there, and repetition marks a mind caught in a loop: “Come, come, come, come” and “To bed, to bed, to bed.”

What does the Doctor conclude?

The Doctor admits, “This disease is beyond my practice”. Her secrets go to “deaf pillows”, personified as listeners that cannot hear, and she needs “the divine”, a priest, more than a doctor. His order to remove from her “the means of all annoyance” can be read as a guard against self-harm. He ends, “I think, but dare not speak.”

How does Macbeth prepare for the battle in Scenes 3 and 5?

Why does he lean on the prophecies?

Scene 3 opens with “Bring me no more reports”. Macbeth recites the promises to steady himself and seals his confidence with a rhyming couplet: “The mind I sway by, and the heart I bear, / Shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear.” The alliteration sounds certain, yet the next moment he is raging.

Why does he insult the servant?

Most of the insults are about paleness: “cream-fac’d loon”, “lily-liver’d boy”, “linen cheeks” and “whey-face”. The fury can be read as the fear he denies in himself, seen in another man’s face.

What does the “yellow leaf” speech reveal?

Calling for Seyton, Macbeth breaks off: “I am sick at heart”. His life “Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf”: like a tree in autumn, it has withered. He knows he cannot expect what should come with old age, “honour, love, obedience, troops of friends”.

Instead he will have “Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour”: subjects who praise him aloud and curse him inwardly. This can be read as his clearest moment of self-knowledge, yet he soon vows to fight “till from my bones my flesh be hack’d.”

What does he ask of the Doctor?

He asks the Doctor to “minister to a mind diseas’d”, to pluck out “a rooted sorrow” and raze out “the written troubles of the brain”. Told that the patient must cure himself, he snaps, “Throw physic to the dogs”. He then asks what “rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug” would “scour these English hence”.

Here lies the irony: in Scene 2, Caithness called Malcolm “the med’cine of the sickly weal”, so the disease to be purged is Macbeth’s own rule.

What has happened to his fear by Scene 5?

Hearing the cry of women, he says, “I have almost forgot the taste of fears.” Once a “night-shriek” would have chilled him; now “I have supp’d full with horrors”, as if horror were a meal eaten until full. In Act I, Scene 3, the mere thought of murder made his “seated heart knock at my ribs”; now he feels almost nothing.

What does the “Tomorrow” speech say about time and life?

How does Macbeth receive the news of the Queen’s death?

Told “The Queen, my lord, is dead”, Macbeth answers, “She should have died hereafter. / There would have been a time for such a word.” The lines can be read in two ways: she would have died at some time anyway, or she should have died later, when there was time to mourn. Either way, there is no outburst of grief.

The word “hereafter” can also be heard as an echo of the witches’ “king hereafter” in Act I, Scene 3: the promised future has come to this.

How do the images of time work?

In “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”, the repetition makes the days follow one another without change, and “Creeps in this petty pace” makes time slow and small. It runs on to the last “syllable” of recorded time, as if history were a written record ending at its final word.

Looking back, “all our yesterdays” have only lit fools to “dusty death”: the past is a lamp showing them the road to the grave.

How do the images of light and theatre work?

“Out, out, brief candle!” Life is a candle that burns briefly; the cry may recall the taper his wife kept by her in Scene 1. Life then becomes “a walking shadow”, without substance, and a “poor player” who “struts and frets his hour upon the stage” and is forgotten. The metaphor of the actor, spoken by an actor on a stage, turns the play back on itself.

Finally, life is a tale “Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” The short last line falls into silence.

What does the speech show about Macbeth?

Seyton is not marked as leaving, but the speech works like a soliloquy: Macbeth thinks aloud rather than speaking to anyone. It is the play’s darkest view of life, judged from inside a life that has lost its meaning.

How are the prophecies fulfilled, and why do they destroy Macbeth?

How does Birnam wood come to Dunsinane?

Nothing supernatural moves the wood. In Scene 4, Malcolm orders each soldier to “hew him down a bough” so as to “shadow / The numbers of our host”. The audience learns this before Macbeth, creating dramatic irony when he boasts that his castle “Will laugh a siege to scorn”.

The Messenger is cautious: “I look’d toward Birnam, and anon, methought, / The wood began to move.” Macbeth calls him “Liar, and slave!” but then admits, “I pull in resolution; and begin / To doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend, / That lies like truth.”

Equivocation is speech with a double meaning, used to mislead. The Porter joked about an “equivocator” in Act II, Scene 3; now the word names what the witches did to Macbeth.

How does the promise about “woman born” fail him?

In Scene 8, Macbeth warns Macduff that he bears “a charmed life, which must not yield / To one of woman born.”

Macduff replies, “Despair thy charm”, and says that he “was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d.” He was cut from the womb before the natural time of birth, so he was not born in the ordinary way Macbeth assumed.

How does Macbeth respond to the truth?

“Accursed be that tongue that tells me so, / For it hath cow’d my better part of man!” He now calls the witches “juggling fiends” that “palter with us in a double sense”.

In hindsight, two apparitions of Act IV, Scene 1 can be read anew. The bloody Child may point to Macduff’s bloody birth, and the Child crowned with a tree in his hand to the young prince whose soldiers carry branches.

Why does he fight on?

Told to yield and be shown “as our rarer monsters are, / Painted upon a pole”, Macbeth will not “kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet”. With both promises failed, he will “try the last”, crying “lay on, Macduff”.

His end can be read as a return of the soldier praised in Act I, Scene 2, though his courage now has no hope behind it.

How does Act V end, and what order is restored?

How does old Siward receive his son’s death?

Ross tells him, “Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt”. Siward asks one question, “Had he his hurts before?” Told “Ay, on the front”, he is content, since wounds on the front show that his son died facing the enemy: “Why then, God’s soldier be he!” When Malcolm says the boy is “worth more sorrow”, Siward answers, “He’s worth no more.”

What does Macduff’s entrance show?

Macduff enters with Macbeth’s head: “Behold, where stands / Th’ usurper’s cursed head: the time is free.” In Act I, Scene 2, Macbeth fixed the rebel Macdonwald’s head on the battlements; now his own head is displayed as a traitor’s, a mirror that can be read as closing the circle.

All then cry “Hail, King of Scotland!” The witches greeted Macbeth with “All hail” in Act I; the greeting can be heard as passing, from loyal subjects, to the rightful heir.

What does Malcolm’s closing speech promise?

Malcolm speaks with measured authority. He makes his thanes and kinsmen earls, “the first that ever Scotland / In such an honour nam’d.” He will call home exiles who “fled the snares of watchful tyranny” and seek out the “cruel ministers” of Macbeth’s rule.

He reports Lady Macbeth’s end with care: she, “as ’tis thought, by self and violent hands / Took off her life”. All else he will do “by the grace of Grace”, and he invites everyone to see him “crown’d at Scone”, where Macbeth went to be invested in Act II, Scene 4.

How do the characters appear in Act V, and how have they changed?

Macbeth: isolated, numbed and defiant

Macbeth is more alone than ever. He tells the Doctor that “the Thanes fly from me” (Scene 3), and Angus says those he commands “move only in command, / Nothing in love” (Scene 2). He threatens to hang a messenger alive (Scene 5).

A trace of conscience survives. Meeting Macduff, he says, “my soul is too much charg’d / With blood of thine already” (Scene 8).

Lady Macbeth: from control to collapse

Lady Macbeth appears only in Scene 1. In Acts I to III she planned, steadied her husband and covered his failures; she was absent from Act IV. The partners never share the stage in Act V.

Malcolm: from fugitive to king

Macbeth sneers at “the boy Malcolm” (Scene 3), but Malcolm plans the boughs (Scene 4), assigns command (Scene 6), and grieves for young Siward (Scene 8). The prince who fled in Act II and tested Macduff in Act IV now rules.

Macduff: the avenger

Macduff urges “Industrious soldiership” (Scene 4) and refuses to strike “wretched kerns” (Scene 7). In Scene 8 he says, “I have no words; / My voice is in my sword”. The grieving father of Act IV becomes the instrument of justice and the first to hail Malcolm.

Old Siward and young Siward

Old Siward, Malcolm’s uncle, trusts “strokes” rather than speculation (Scene 4). Young Siward, named in Scene 2 beside the “unrough youths”, dares to fight Macbeth (Scene 7).

The thanes, the Doctor, the Gentlewoman and Seyton

Lennox, who attended Macbeth in Act IV, Scene 1, now marches against him, and Ross again brings painful news. The Doctor is honest but frightened, the Gentlewoman loyal but appalled, and Seyton stays loyal.

What dramatic techniques and imagery does Act V use?

Prose, verse and rhyme

Scene 1 is mostly prose until the Doctor’s last speech turns to verse. The rest of the act is mainly blank verse, unrhymed lines of ten syllables, broken in battle into short, quick exchanges.

Rhyming couplets mark decisions and endings: Lennox’s last speech rhymes “needs” and “weeds”, Macbeth ends Scene 5 on “wrack” and “back”, and Malcolm closes the play with “place” and “Grace”, then “one” and “Scone”.

Short soliloquies in battle

Macbeth’s “They have tied me to a stake” opens Scene 7, and Macduff speaks alone after young Siward’s death. In Scene 8, Macbeth asks alone, “Why should I play the Roman fool, and die / On mine own sword?” These soliloquies are only a few lines long, and no speech in the act is marked as an aside.

Dramatic irony in Scene 1

Asleep, Lady Macbeth asks, “What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?” She says it before a doctor who has just said he will “set down what comes from her”, with a witness beside him.

Sound, spectacle and the absent witches

Offstage sound carries much of the act: the stage directions call for “A cry of women within”, alarums, a retreat and flourishes. The supernatural no longer appears on stage: the witches never enter Act V, and their power works only through remembered words that come true against him.

Which imagery patterns run through the act?

What themes and tone emerge from Act V?

Guilt and the diseased mind

Guilt takes opposite forms in the two partners: she cannot forget, and he can hardly feel. It breaks her mind and empties his.

Equivocation, fate and choice

His courage hangs on the witches’ words, and when the words fail he still chooses to fight. Appearance deceives in more than one way: the army hides behind boughs until told to “show like those you are”.

Time and the meaning of life

For Macbeth, time is an empty march of tomorrows. For Malcolm it can be set right: he will act “in measure, time, and place”. The act sets despair beside renewal.

Tyranny and true kingship

Malcolm says that Macbeth is served only by “constrained things, / Whose hearts are absent too”, while he himself thanks his followers “all at once, and to each one”. Rule by fear gives way to rule by consent.

Manhood and the honourable death

In Act I, Lady Macbeth told her husband he was a man when he dared to propose the murder. Act V measures manhood differently: young Siward “only liv’d but till he was a man” and died fighting a tyrant. Macbeth’s courage at the end is real, but it serves no just cause.

What is the tone of the act?

Scene 1 is hushed and eerie, and Scenes 3 and 5 are feverish and bleak. The battle scenes are quick and loud, and the ending is formal, grateful and hopeful.

Which key quotations help answer questions on Act V?

A strong answer names the speaker and scene and comments on particular words rather than retelling the plot.

“Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

Lady Macbeth, Scene 1: the hyperbole sets all Arabia’s perfumes against one “little hand”. In Act II, Scene 2, Macbeth feared “great Neptune’s ocean” could not clean his hand; now she seems to feel the same.

“I would not have such a heart in my bosom for the dignity of the whole body.”

The Gentlewoman, Scene 1: she would not have such a heart even for the royal dignity of the queen’s whole person (one reading of “the whole body”); she seems to pity her mistress.

“now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief.”

Angus, Scene 2: the simile makes Macbeth a small thief in stolen clothes far too big for him, unfit for the crown he seized.

“My wife and children’s ghosts will haunt me still.”

Macduff, Scene 7: revenge is a duty to the dead; if another man kills Macbeth, Macduff will have failed his family.

“That keep the word of promise to our ear, / And break it to our hope!”

Macbeth, Scene 8: the balanced lines, ear against hope, keep against break, sum up how the prophecies deceived him: true in words, false in meaning.

“Had I as many sons as I have hairs, / I would not wish them to a fairer death:”

Old Siward, Scene 8: a soldier’s pride in an honourable death outweighs a father’s grief, at least aloud.

“Of this dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen,”

Malcolm, Scene 8: the victors’ verdict reduces the pair to a killer and a demon; having seen their torment, the audience may find it true but incomplete.

Glossary

• Divine: A clergyman or priest; the Doctor says Lady Macbeth needs “the divine” more than a physician.
• Mated: Bewildered or confounded; the Doctor says Lady Macbeth has “mated” his mind and amazed his sight.
• Unrough: Beardless; Lennox’s word for the young soldiers who are only now showing their “first of manhood”.
• Weal: The commonwealth or state; Caithness calls Malcolm “the med’cine of the sickly weal”.
• Loon: A worthless fellow or rogue; Macbeth calls the pale servant a “cream-fac’d loon”.
• Skirr: To scour or ride swiftly over; Macbeth orders horsemen to “skirr the country round”.
• Sere: Dry and withered; Macbeth says his way of life has “fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf”.
• Physic: Medicine; Macbeth cries “Throw physic to the dogs” after the Doctor says the patient must treat himself.
• Cast the water: To examine a patient’s urine to find a disease; Macbeth wishes the Doctor could diagnose his whole land this way.
• Harness: Armour; Macbeth vows that at least he will “die with harness on our back”.
• Intrenchant: Unable to be cut; Macbeth says Macduff could as easily wound the “intrenchant air” as make him bleed.
• Palter: To deal deceitfully or quibble; Macbeth says the fiends “palter with us in a double sense”.

Common errors and misconceptions

• Misconception: The Doctor in Act V is the doctor from the English court. Correct: The Doctor of Act IV, Scene 3 is in England; the Doctor of Physic in Act V serves at Dunsinane.
• Misconception: Lady Macbeth knowingly confesses her crimes to the Doctor. Correct: She is asleep and speaks to her absent husband; the Doctor and the Gentlewoman overhear her.
• Misconception: The play shows Lady Macbeth killing herself. Correct: She dies offstage; Seyton reports only that the Queen is dead, and Malcolm says she took her own life “as ’tis thought”.
• Misconception: Birnam wood moves by witchcraft. Correct: Malcolm orders each soldier to cut a bough and carry it, to hide the size of the army.
• Misconception: The prophecy about “woman born” was simply false. Correct: Macduff was “Untimely ripp’d” from his mother’s womb; the words held true, but Macbeth took them to cover every man.
• Misconception: Macbeth kills himself at the end. Correct: He refuses to “play the Roman fool”; in this text he and Macduff go off fighting, and Macduff returns with his head.
• Misconception: The “Tomorrow” speech is a lament for his wife. Correct: He shows little grief; the speech moves from her death to the meaninglessness of all life.

Exam-style questions with model answers

Q1. In Scene 1, Lady Macbeth says in her sleep: “Out, damned spot! out, I say!” and then “Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard?” She goes on to speak of “the old man” and his blood. In Act I, Scene 7, she had asked Macbeth, “Art thou afeard”. (a) What is the spot, and why can she not remove it? (1 mark) (b) Whom does she address in “Fie, my lord, fie!”, and what does it recall? (1 mark) [2 marks]

1. (a) It is an imagined spot of Duncan’s blood on her hand; the stain is in her guilty mind, so no washing can remove it.
2. (b) She addresses her absent husband, repeating her taunt of Act I, Scene 7, when she asked whether he was “afeard”.

Q2. At the end of Scene 1, the Doctor says: “Foul whisp’rings are abroad. Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds / To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. / More needs she the divine than the physician.” (a) Explain “Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles”. (1 mark) (b) What is the effect of “deaf pillows”? (1 mark) (c) Why does she need “the divine”? (1 mark) [3 marks]

1. (a) Crimes against nature, such as murder, produce disorders against nature, such as walking and talking in sleep.
2. (b) The pillow is personified as a listener that cannot hear, so the guilty mind confesses to nothing that can help it.
3. (c) Her sickness is of the soul, caused by guilt, so she needs a priest’s spiritual help rather than medicine.

Q3. In Scene 3, told that his wife is troubled with “thick-coming fancies”, Macbeth asks the Doctor: “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d, / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain,” The Doctor replies: “Therein the patient / Must minister to himself.” Macbeth answers, “Throw physic to the dogs, I’ll none of it.” (a) What does Macbeth ask for? (1 mark) (b) Comment on the images of plucking and razing. (1 mark) (c) What does the Doctor’s reply mean? (1 mark) (d) What does Macbeth’s answer show? (1 mark) [4 marks]

1. (a) He asks the Doctor to cure his wife’s diseased mind by wiping painful memories and troubled thoughts from it.
2. (b) Sorrow is a rooted plant to pull up and trouble is writing to scrape off, as if guilt could be removed physically.
3. (c) Only the sufferer can heal such a sickness, through her own conscience; the words can be heard as applying to Macbeth too.
4. (d) His impatient rejection of medicine shows frustration and a refusal to face the inner cause of their suffering.

Q4. In Scene 5, the Messenger reports: “I look’d toward Birnam, and anon, methought, / The wood began to move.” Macbeth later says: “I pull in resolution; and begin / To doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend, / That lies like truth.” He ends the scene: “At least we’ll die with harness on our back.” In Scene 4, Malcolm had ordered each soldier to carry a bough before him. (a) What has the Messenger really seen? (1 mark) (b) Explain “equivocation of the fiend”. (1 mark) (c) What does “I pull in resolution” show? (1 mark) (d) What does the last line show? (1 mark) [4 marks]

1. (a) He has seen Malcolm’s soldiers advancing with boughs cut from Birnam wood, carried to hide their numbers.
2. (b) The witches’ words had a double meaning: they seemed to promise safety but were true only in a sense Macbeth never expected.
3. (c) His confidence weakens; he reins in the certainty that rested on the prophecy as he begins to suspect the trick.
4. (d) Even in despair he chooses to die fighting in his armour, showing the soldier’s courage that remains in him.

Q5. In Scene 5, told that the Queen is dead, Macbeth replies, “She should have died hereafter”, and continues: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day”. He says that “all our yesterdays” have lit fools to “dusty death”, and calls life a “brief candle”, a “poor player” who “struts and frets his hour” and is then heard no more, and a tale “Signifying nothing.” How does this speech reveal Macbeth’s state of mind? [6 marks]

1. His flat reply to her death, that she should have died hereafter, shows a man too numbed by horror to grieve openly.
2. The repeated “tomorrow” and the verb “Creeps” show that the future has become a dull, meaningless sequence of days.
3. The image of yesterdays lighting fools to “dusty death” shows that he sees the past as leading only to the grave.
4. The “brief candle” presents life as short and easily put out, a thought prompted by his wife’s death.
5. The player who “struts and frets” and is forgotten shows that he sees all human effort, his own included, as empty show.
6. The tale “Signifying nothing” is his final despair: having destroyed every bond, he finds no meaning left.

Q6. In Act I, Scene 5, Lady Macbeth called, “Come, thick night”; in Act II, Scene 2, she said, “A little water clears us of this deed”; in Act III, Scene 2, “what’s done is done”. In Act V, Scene 1, she has “light by her continually”, rubs her hands as if washing them, asks “will these hands ne’er be clean?” and says “What’s done cannot be undone”, in broken prose. The Doctor says she needs “the divine”. How has Lady Macbeth changed? [5 marks]

1. She once called on darkness to hide the murder, but now must keep a light by her at all times, a sign of terror.
2. She once believed a little water would clear them, but now she washes endlessly and asks whether her hands will ever be clean.
3. Her earlier “what’s done is done” becomes “What’s done cannot be undone”, turning calm dismissal into hopeless regret.
4. Her commanding verse has broken into fragments of prose, showing that her self-control has collapsed.
5. The Doctor’s judgement that she needs a priest rather than a physician shows that guilt has become a sickness of the soul.

Q7. In Scene 3, Macbeth says he “cannot taint with fear” until Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane. In Scene 4, Malcolm orders each soldier to carry a bough. In Scene 5, a Messenger sees “a moving grove”. In Scene 7, Macbeth kills young Siward and says, “Thou wast born of woman.” In Scene 8, Macduff reveals that he was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d”, and Macbeth curses the fiends that “palter with us in a double sense”. Discuss the dramatic effect of the way the prophecies are fulfilled. [5 marks]

1. Macbeth’s reliance on the prophecies in Scene 3 builds suspense, since the audience senses that his confidence will be tested.
2. Showing Malcolm’s order before the Messenger’s report creates dramatic irony: the audience knows how the wood will move.
3. Killing young Siward revives his false confidence, so the fall that follows in Scene 8 is sharper.
4. Macduff’s revelation shocks Macbeth and can surprise the audience too, giving the climax its full force.
5. The fulfilment by natural means, boughs and a man cut from the womb, shows equivocation: the words came true but deceived him.

Q8. In Scene 2, Caithness calls Malcolm “the med’cine of the sickly weal”, and Angus says Macbeth’s men “move only in command, / Nothing in love”. In Scene 3, Macbeth knows he cannot expect “honour, love, obedience, troops of friends”. In Scene 8, Macduff enters with Macbeth’s head, saying “the time is free”, and all hail Malcolm as King. Malcolm makes his thanes earls, promises to recall exiles and will act “by the grace of Grace” before his crowning at Scone. How does Act V present the restoration of order in Scotland? [6 marks]

1. Scotland is a sick body and Malcolm its medicine, so Macbeth’s defeat is presented as a cure rather than a conquest.
2. Macbeth’s followers obey from fear, not love, so his rule has lost the bonds that hold a kingdom together.
3. His own admission that honour, love and friends are lost to him confirms that tyranny has cut him off from his people.
4. Macduff’s cry that “the time is free” and the shared “Hail, King of Scotland!” mark a public return to rightful rule.
5. Malcolm’s rewards and his promise to recall exiles show a king who governs by gratitude and justice.
6. His appeal to “the grace of Grace”, ending with a crowning at Scone, presents the new order as lawful and blessed.

Key takeaways

• Act V moves between Dunsinane castle and the advancing army until both sides meet in battle and Malcolm is hailed King.
• Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking recalls Duncan’s murder, Banquo’s burial and the Fife killings: guilt she once dismissed now breaks her mind.
• Macbeth clings to the prophecies, yet admits that he has lost the honour, love and friends that should come with old age.
• The “Tomorrow” speech, prompted by the Queen’s death, presents life as a brief candle, a poor player and a tale signifying nothing.
• Birnam wood moves because soldiers carry boughs, and Macduff was “Untimely ripp’d”, so both promises prove true in words and false in meaning.
• Knowing that both promises have failed, Macbeth refuses to yield and fights on, his courage now joined to despair.
• Old Siward’s pride in his son’s death and Macduff’s entrance with the head mark the turn from tyranny to rightful rule.
• Malcolm’s closing speech promises rewards, the return of exiles and justice done “by the grace of Grace”, restoring order.

Test yourself

What has the Gentlewoman seen Lady Macbeth do in her sleep?

Rise, put on her nightgown, unlock her closet, write on a paper, seal it and return to bed, all while fast asleep.

Why will the Gentlewoman not tell the Doctor what Lady Macbeth says?

She has no witness to confirm her speech, so she will not repeat it to the Doctor or to anyone.

Why does Malcolm order the soldiers to carry boughs?

To hide the size of the army, so that Macbeth’s scouts make mistakes in reporting their numbers.

Whom does Macbeth kill in Scene 7, and what does he say?

He kills young Siward and says, “Thou wast born of woman”, scorning any weapon held by such a man.

Why is old Siward satisfied when he hears of his son’s death?

His son’s wounds were on the front, which shows that he died facing the enemy, so Siward calls him “God’s soldier”.

What new title does Malcolm give his thanes and kinsmen?

He makes them earls, the first that Scotland has ever named with that honour.