The world of Macbeth explores the destructive nature of power and ambition through the collapse of individual identity and the Christian emphasis on the moral hierarchy.

Published in 1623, nearly twenty years after it was first performed, Macbeth was written shortly after James VI of Scotland ascended the English throne, and Shakespeare’s play clearly supports his divine right to the throne. Shakespeare was inspired by Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicle of the reigns of Duncan and Macbeth (A.D. 1034-57), but the invention of the framework of the witches who tempt both Banquo and Macbeth with prophecies of greatness are his own.

A story of witchcraft, murder and vengeance, Macbeth can be read as a morality play which warns against the dangers of ambitious power. Clearly, Macbeth is a figure whose ambition and hubris result in his fall from power, echoing the biblical story of the fall from grace; however, the play also expresses a profound fear of feminine power as subversive and destructive.

The very text of Macbeth itself reflects the single-minded ambition of its main character. With only 2,100 lines, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays, and with the exception of such characters as the porter, is devoid of the subplots which characterise Shakespearean tragedies.

Coleridge has noted that the play begins at an aggressive pace with Hamlet‘s ‘gradual ascent from the simplest forms of conversation to the language of impassioned intellect’, and Bradley follows by describing the beginning of the play as one in which ‘the action burst into wild life’. Shakespeare’s typical tragic worldview represents a complex human world of infinite variety. Macbeth, in contrast, is sparse and single-minded because it is a symbolic play which resorts to soliloquy and symbolic locales to echo the dichotomous world of the Christian morality plays.

The focus of Macbeth,

like that of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Richard III, is an egotistical man with measureless will power who murders his way to the crown and, in doing so, alienates himself from the very world which he wishes to rule. It is commonly said by Shakespearean critics that Macbeth’s tragic flaw is ambition, and he himself admits that he has no drive but ‘vaulting ambition’, but it is ambition without reason or application.

He does not, like Shakespeare’s Tamburlaine, believe it to be ‘passing brav