What happens in Macbeth

Three witches meet on a stormy heath and agree to find a Scottish general named Macbeth. He has just won a brutal battle for King Duncan, cutting down the rebel Macdonwald, and Duncan rewards him with a new title, Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth does not know this yet. Crossing the heath with his friend Banquo, he meets the witches first. They hail him as Thane of Glamis, as Thane of Cawdor, and as king hereafter. They tell Banquo something stranger: his children will be kings, though he will not. Then they vanish. Moments later, messengers confirm the second title. The first prophecy has already come true.

Macbeth writes home to his wife. Lady Macbeth reads the letter and fears her husband is too soft to take the crown by murder. When she learns Duncan will sleep under their roof that night, she calls on dark spirits to harden her, then sets to work on Macbeth’s resolve. He wavers, listing every reason not to kill the king who has just honored him. She shames him, questions his manhood, and lays out the plan. That night, after Macbeth sees a phantom dagger floating toward Duncan’s room, he does it. He returns shaking, hands bloody, unable to stop hearing a voice that says he has murdered sleep. Lady Macbeth takes the daggers back herself.

In the morning Macduff discovers the body. Macbeth, covering himself, kills the drugged guards before they can speak. Duncan’s sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, flee the country, which makes them look guilty, and Macbeth is crowned king. But the witches promised the crown to Banquo’s line, not his own, and that gnaws at him. He hires murderers to kill Banquo and his son Fleance. Banquo dies; Fleance escapes into the dark. At a state banquet that night, Banquo’s ghost appears in Macbeth’s chair, visible only to him, and Macbeth falls apart in front of his guests while his wife scrambles to explain him away.

Macbeth goes back to the witches for certainty. They conjure apparitions that tell him to beware Macduff, that no man born of woman can harm him, and that he is safe until Birnam Wood marches to Dunsinane. He hears all this as proof he cannot be touched. Then he learns Macduff has fled to England, and in fury he sends killers to Macduff’s castle, where they murder his wife and his children. In England, Macduff joins Malcolm, who is raising an army, and when the news of his slaughtered family reaches him he turns his grief into a vow of revenge.

The end closes in fast. Lady Macbeth, hollowed out by guilt, walks in her sleep, scrubbing at blood no one else can see and reliving the murders. Macbeth, besieged at Dunsinane, learns she is dead and answers with cold despair, calling life a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Then word comes that Birnam Wood is moving: Malcolm’s soldiers have cut branches to hide their numbers. Macbeth realizes the witches deceived him, but he arms anyway. On the field he kills young Siward, still trusting the prophecy, until Macduff tells him he was not born but cut untimely from his mother’s womb. Stripped of his protection, Macbeth fights and dies. Macduff carries his head to Malcolm, who is hailed as Scotland’s rightful king and promises to set the broken country right.