Background
The tragedy connects personal ambition with the instability of a kingdom. Prophecy, unnatural imagery, and repeated references to sleep turn private guilt into a disturbance that seems to reach beyond the individual characters.
Reading notes
- Distinguish the witches’ predictions from the choices Macbeth makes in response.
- Notice how Macbeth and Lady Macbeth change in their use of language and silence.
- Track the play’s images of sleep, darkness, and disorder as the consequences grow.
Version note
Text source: the Standard Ebooks EPUB edition identified on this page. This site extracted the English text and retained the source edition’s chapter order. Public-domain status must be checked for the territory where the text will be distributed.