But the word also refers, ironically, to the heavenly 'hereafter,' which Macbeth seems intent on denying for himself. The word 'hereafter' recalls the 'hereafter' of the Witches' first prophecy their 'hereafter' was the future that Macbeth was to inherit as king. The report of Lady Macbeth's death perhaps comes as no surprise, either to Macbeth or to Shakespeare's audience. But in a phrase that calls to mind the banquet scene (Act III, Scene 4), Macbeth admits that he has 'supp'd full with horrors' and that his familiarity with slaughter means that such sounds can no longer amaze him. The audience recalls other noises: the owl-shriek that Lady Macbeth heard during Duncan's murder the voice that Macbeth heard crying 'Macbeth shall sleep no more!' and the fateful knocking at the door, all in Act II, Scene 2.

While a servant is dispatched to find the cause, Macbeth confesses in a brief soliloquy that such noises no longer have the power to frighten him. Power-seeking tyrants tend toward self-destruction if this curse falls on anyone, it's likely to be the curser.Īt this point, Macbeth hears a heart-stopping scream. But the curse is empty rhetoric: In his play Troilus and Cressida, written two or three years earlier, Shakespeare had written that man's ambitious appetite for power, once it has preyed on everything in its path, can eat up only itself. This scene, like Scene 3, starts with a bold imperative: 'Hang out our banners on the outward walls.' Macbeth's speech is warlike and defiant, his strength mirrored in that of the castle and men who surround him his curse on the enemy vivid and graphic in its use of metaphor: 'Here let them lie / Till famine and the ague (disease) eat them up. Again Macbeth recalls the prophecies of Act IV, sure of, but still wishing to deny, their powerful truth. The queen is dead - whether by her own hand is not made clear - and Macbeth is left to contemplate a lonely future of endless tomorrows 'signifying nothing.' Yet another blow comes with the announcement that Birnam Wood appears to have uprooted itself and is even now advancing towards Dunsinane.

Now fully armed, Macbeth confidently turns all his scorn on the advancing armies, only to find his brave rhetoric interrupted by an offstage shriek.

Two motifs present in shadow of a doubt