Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Hallucinations
Visions and hallucinations recur throughout the play and
serve as reminders of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s joint culpability
for the growing body count. When he is about to kill Duncan, Macbeth sees
a dagger floating in the air. Covered with blood and pointed toward
the king’s chamber, the dagger represents the bloody course on which
Macbeth is about to embark. Later, he sees Banquo’s ghost sitting
in a chair at a feast, pricking his conscience by mutely reminding
him that he murdered his former friend. The seemingly hardheaded
Lady Macbeth also eventually gives way to visions, as she sleepwalks
and believes that her hands are stained with blood that cannot be
washed away by any amount of water. In each case, it is ambiguous
whether the vision is real or purely hallucinatory; but, in both
cases, the Macbeths read them uniformly as supernatural signs of
their guilt.
Violence
Macbeth is a famously violent play. Interestingly,
most of the killings take place offstage, but throughout the play
the characters provide the audience with gory descriptions of the
carnage, from the opening scene where the captain describes Macbeth
and Banquo wading in blood on the battlefield, to the endless references
to the bloodstained hands of Macbeth and his wife. The action is
bookended by a pair of bloody battles: in the first, Macbeth defeats
the invaders; in the second, he is slain and beheaded by Macduff.
In between is a series of murders: Duncan, Duncan’s chamberlains, Banquo,
Lady Macduff, and Macduff’s son all come to bloody ends. By the
end of the action, blood seems to be everywhere.
Prophecy
Prophecy sets Macbeth’s plot in motion—namely,
the witches’ prophecy that Macbeth will become first thane of Cawdor
and then king. The weird sisters make a number of other prophecies:
they tell us that Banquo’s heirs will be kings, that Macbeth should
beware Macduff, that Macbeth is safe till Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane,
and that no man born of woman can harm Macbeth. Save for the prophecy
about Banquo’s heirs, all of these predictions are fulfilled within
the course of the play. Still, it is left deliberately ambiguous
whether some of them are self-fulfilling—for example, whether Macbeth
wills himself to be king or is fated to be king. Additionally, as
the Birnam Wood and “born of woman” prophecies make clear, the prophecies
must be interpreted as riddles, since they do not always mean what
they seem to mean.
