Macbeth by William Shakespeare: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Macbeth
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The opening of the play
When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
When the hurlyburly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air. Exeunt.
It opens on a heath, in thunder, with three witches agreeing where and when to meet Macbeth:
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~18,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 1.0 hours
Standalone
Scotland and England in the eleventh century, as Shakespeare imagined them
5 acts and 28 scenes
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0.45 MB (EPUB) · 0.50 MB (AZW3) · 0.49 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #1533 · Standard Ebooks
Macbeth is Shakespeare’s tragedy of a soldier who takes a crown and cannot hold it. Returning from a battle in which he has saved the kingdom, Macbeth meets three witches on a heath who greet him as thane of Cawdor and king hereafter; the first title arrives within the hour, and the second he decides to take himself. He murders Duncan, his king and his guest, under his own roof, blames the grooms, and is crowned at Scone. What follows is not safety but a chain of killings: Banquo dies and his son escapes, Macduff’s wife and children are slaughtered. The play ends at Dunsinane, where a wood appears to walk and a man not born of woman kills him.
Macbeth is short for a tragedy and very fast: five acts, twenty-eight scenes, and the first murder before the middle of the evening. It reached print in the 1623 First Folio, and the byline above records that printing. This page follows the Standard Ebooks text; the Project Gutenberg transcription, numbered 1533, is linked here for comparison rather than used as the base. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #1533 and Standard Ebooks.
Macbeth by William Shakespeare: Summary, Characters & Themes
This is a summary and analysis of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the tragedy of a Scottish general who takes a crown by murder and then cannot stop killing to keep it. It opens on a heath in thunder and lightning, with three witches agreeing to meet a man they do not yet name, and it closes on a field before Dunsinane, where his severed head is carried in and Malcolm is hailed king. Between those two points the play moves faster than anything else of its length: a battle, a prophecy confirmed by a second, a letter, a feast, a murder, a ghost, a cauldron, a walking wood. There are five acts and twenty-eight scenes, and almost no subplot; nearly every line serves the crime or the fear that follows it. It is also one of the shortest and least forgiving of the tragedies: no second plot to rest in, one drunk porter for comedy, and no pause at all between the murder and the sound of knocking.
The engine of the play is prophecy, and the way language can be true and false at once. The witches greet Macbeth with two titles he already has or is about to have and a third he must seize, and Banquo with a promise that costs him nothing and destroys him. Macbeth hesitates, is talked round by his wife, kills the king in his own castle, and then keeps killing — the grooms, Banquo, the family of Macduff — because each murder creates the next fear. The play is also the older matter of kings, the ground Malory covers in Le Morte d’Arthur, stripped down to a single argument: a crown won by blood is held by blood, and the men around a throne count the cost.
William Shakespeare wrote nothing else quite so fast or so compact. His other tragedies are long; this one is short enough to read in an evening and unrelenting enough to make the evening feel longer. Where Hamlet is a prince who thinks and delays, Macbeth is a soldier who decides and acts, and the two are often read as opposite answers to the same question about conscience. Macbeth reached print in the 1623 First Folio, and the byline at the top of this page records that printing rather than offering a biography of its author.
The language is the reason the play survives its own body count. Macbeth’s verse is full of blood, sleep, clothing and seeds, and it turns the same images over until they carry the whole story: the title that hangs loose like a giant’s robe on a dwarfish thief, the hand that would make the green sea red, the life that is a walking shadow. Prose is used sparingly and pointedly — the porter at the gate, Lady Macduff’s son, the doctor and the gentlewoman — and those scenes are what make the murders feel domestic. By the time an actor says the word blood in the last act, the play has taught the audience to hear the whole argument in that single syllable. The play sits with the rest of the classic fiction on this site, but it reads like nothing else there.
The text here is complete and unabridged, with every act, scene, song and stage direction, from the thunder of the first line to the flourish before the last exit. It follows the Standard Ebooks edition, prepared from a transcription made at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and checked against scans from the HathiTrust Digital Library. A separate transcription, numbered 1533, is held at Project Gutenberg and is linked here for comparison. This particular ebook is based on a transcription from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on digital scans from the HathiTrust Digital Library.
Historical Context
The Scotland of the play is a kingdom of thanes, kinship and hospitality, and the plot turns on rules an audience would have recognised as the ground of order. Duncan is a king who names his heir in public, making Malcolm Prince of Cumberland in the same scene in which he thanks Macbeth. Macbeth is bound to him three times over, as kinsman, as subject and as host, a triple tie he lists himself before he kills, and when the murder is found Macduff calls the body the Lord’s anointed temple. The horror is political as much as moral: the anointed head has been struck off, and a room full of thanes has to decide what a kingdom is now.
Witchcraft in the play is a public fact, not a private delusion. The three witches answer to a mistress in Hecate, they meet in thunder, they claim the winds and the ports they blow, and they raise apparitions on request. The England and Scotland of Shakespeare’s lifetime prosecuted witches and argued over what a spirit could do, and the play builds its plot on that belief rather than decorating it: the prophecy is the engine. Equivocation is the companion idea. The porter jokes at the gate about an equivocator who can swear on both sides of the scale, and at the end Macbeth curses the juggling fiends that keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope. The play never settles whether the witches cause any of it or only say what was always going to happen, and that ambiguity is the whole reason they are on stage.
The play is also an argument about what a king is for. Malcolm, waiting in England, lists the king-becoming graces — justice, verity, temperance, stableness, bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, devotion, patience, courage, fortitude — and the English king Edward, in whose court he waits, is credited with a healing touch for the sick. Against that stands Macbeth, whose rule produces only fear: his thanes obey nothing in love, his title hangs loose on him, and by the last act he has lived long enough and has nothing to look for but curses, mouth-honour and breath. Between those two kings the play measures what a crown is for, and it does not leave the answer to a speech. The play ends with a coronation at Scone, as if the question were still open.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Macbeth: General of the king’s army, thane of Glamis, then of Cawdor, then king. He is brave in the battle the play opens with and quicker than anyone expects to believe a prophecy. His soliloquies are arguments he loses: the dagger, the double trust, the vaulting ambition that overleaps itself. Once crowned he kills to protect the crown, and by the last act he has supped full with horrors and can no longer feel fear.
- Lady Macbeth: His wife, the strongest will in the first half of the play. She reads his letter, calls on the spirits to unsex her, and steers him through the murder when he is ready to stop. Her line that a little water clears them of the deed is answered in the sleepwalking scene, where the spot will not come out. She dies offstage, and her husband hears the news without weeping.
- Banquo: General of the king’s army and Macbeth’s fellow commander. The witches promise that he will father kings though he will never be one, and he half believes them, dreaming of the weird sisters. He suspects Macbeth and says so in a soliloquy, then is murdered on the road to the palace while his son Fleance escapes. His ghost sits in Macbeth’s place at the feast.
- Duncan: King of Scotland, a gracious and trusting ruler whose virtues Macbeth counts against the murder even as he commits it. He rewards Macbeth with Cawdor’s title, names Malcolm his heir, and comes to Inverness as a guest. He is killed in his bed, his blood is described as golden, and his sons flee, which is enough to put the blame on them.
- Macduff: Thane of Fife, the nobleman who finds Duncan’s body and then refuses to attend Macbeth’s feast. He goes to England to raise Malcolm’s army, and while he is away his wife and children are killed. He is the one man who can kill Macbeth, because he was untimely ripped from his mother’s womb, and he carries the tyrant’s head on stage at the end.
- The Witches: Three weird sisters who meet Macbeth on the heath, greet him with titles and vanish into the air. Their promises are true and ruinous, and their mistress Hecate supplies the apparitions that make him feel safe. They speak in rhyme and riddles, brew a cauldron with double, double toil and trouble, and are never caught or punished in the play.
Core Literary Themes
- Ambition and the crown: The play’s most quoted phrase is Macbeth’s own: he has no spur to prick the sides of his intent but only vaulting ambition, which overleaps itself and falls on the other. Ambition here is not a simple appetite; it is a man arguing with himself in front of an audience of his own conscience. The crown is the object, but the drama is in the hesitation, the persuasion, and the moment when a thought becomes a deed. After that the ambition is no longer for more, only for safety, and the play shows how quickly a desire turns into a habit of killing. The crown is not much of a prize even when he has it: it sits badly, it brings no rest, and it makes every friend a suspect.
- Prophecy and equivocation: Everything the witches say turns out to be true, and every truth is loaded. Macbeth will be king; Banquo will father kings; Macbeth cannot be harmed by a man born of woman; he is safe until Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane. The play teaches its audience to listen the way Macbeth should have listened, and the porter’s joke about an equivocator who can swear on both sides of the scale names the method. The audience is put in the position of the witches’ best reader, hearing the promises open and watching them close. The final curse on the juggling fiends that keep the word of promise to the ear is the sound of a man discovering what a figure of speech is.
- Blood and guilt: Blood is the play’s ink. It is on Macbeth’s hands and on the daggers, on the grooms’ faces, in the gouts on the dagger of the mind, and it will not wash: the whole ocean cannot clean this hand, which would rather turn the green sea red. Lady Macbeth thinks a little water will do it, then spends her sleep trying to rub out a single spot. Guilt in the play is physical before it is moral: it appears as a ghost, as a smell, as a stain, and as a knocking at the gate that will not stop. By the last act the word has been spoken so often that it has worn a groove in the verse.
- Kingship and tyranny: Duncan’s Scotland is a kingdom of gifts and titles, where loyalty is repaid with thanedoms and the king names an heir in public. Macbeth’s Scotland is the same machinery used for fear: he keeps a servant fee’d in every house, his thanes obey nothing in love, and his title hangs on him like a giant’s robe on a dwarfish thief. The play measures the difference in small details rather than declarations. Malcolm’s list of king-becoming graces and Edward’s healing hands are set against a king who has nothing left to give but commands. The play is careful to show that tyranny is not a different system from kingship but the same one turned to fear.
- The supernatural and the political order: The witches are not an intrusion on the politics; they are its weather. They meet on a heath in thunder, they answer to Hecate, they raise apparitions, and what they show Macbeth is a line of kings with crowns and a glass full of more. The supernatural in this play always does political work: it predicts a succession, it makes a tyrant feel safe, and it gives the audience a picture of the future that the characters cannot read. When the wood moves and the man not born of woman arrives, the prophecy is fulfilled to the letter and the order is put back. Nothing in the play explains the spirits, and nothing needs to; they are as much a part of Scotland as the thanes and the heath.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Macbeth?
The play is short enough to read in one sitting and dense enough to keep you coming back. Everything that matters is here: the heath, the dagger, the knocking, the banquet, the cauldron, the sleepwalking, the walking wood, and the speech about a tale told by an idiot. The text is complete and unabridged, with every scene and stage direction, and it follows the Standard Ebooks edition, while the Project Gutenberg #1533 transcription is linked for comparison and is not the base of these files. Nothing is cut and nothing is paraphrased. If you have read the play before, this is a clean text to read it again in; if you have not, the scene summaries will hold your place while the verse does the work.
The play is short and the edition keeps it short: no editorial scene divisions beyond Shakespeare’s own, no modernised spelling, no gloss pushed into the verse. Speaker names sit at the head of the line, the verse breaks where the verse breaks and the stage directions stay where the text puts them, so the play reads as a script you can hear rather than a novel in disguise. The same file opens on a phone, a Kindle, a Kobo or an old e-ink reader, the type can be enlarged, and there is no account, no sample chapter and no conversion step between you and the first scene.
Read it beside this page rather than instead of it. The act summaries, the character notes and the context are here for before and after, not as a substitute for the verse, and the scene close-ups stop short of quoting the last act. If you know the play, the second reading is the better one, because the pattern — prophecy, action, consequence — is easier to watch for. If you do not know it, read the five acts first and save the summaries for afterwards.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text is based on a transcription from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on digital scans from the HathiTrust Digital Library.
- Drama laid out as drama Five acts and twenty-eight scenes, speakers named at the head of every line, stage directions kept where the text puts them, and the songs and the prose in place: the play reads on an e-reader the way it reads on the page. The bigger scenes are long enough to stand alone, and the running heads let you find them again.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB One download per format, so the play opens on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and older e-ink readers without a conversion step, with navigation that moves by act and scene rather than by page number.
- Free and DRM-free Public domain in the United States, with no account, no sample chapter and no lock on the file; download it once and it is yours to keep, to move between devices and to come back to for the next scene.
- Hamlet — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Le Morte d’Arthur — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
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Chapter summaries
Macbeth has no chapters, only acts and scenes. The eight entries below follow the play in order: one for each act, plus close-ups of three scenes that carry more weight than their length suggests — the porter at the gate, the banquet, and the sleepwalking. The close-ups repeat ground covered by the act entries; they are there to be read as single scenes, not as extra plot.
- Act I, scenes 1–7: Three witches meet in thunder and agree to meet Macbeth on the heath. A bleeding sergeant reports how Macbeth and Banquo beat the rebel Macdonwald and then the Norwegian host, and Duncan gives Macbeth the traitor Cawdor’s title. The witches hail Macbeth as Glamis, Cawdor and king hereafter, and Banquo as the father of kings; the second title arrives within minutes. At Inverness Lady Macbeth reads the letter and talks her husband into murder. By the end of the act the killing is agreed and the castle is waiting for its guest.
- Act II, scenes 1–4: Banquo and Fleance cross the courtyard at midnight; Macbeth sees a dagger in the air and follows a bell to Duncan’s chamber. Lady Macbeth waits, takes the daggers back and smears the sleeping grooms. A knocking starts. Macduff finds the king dead, Macbeth kills the grooms in supposed fury, and Duncan’s sons run, Malcolm to England and Donalbain to Ireland. Ross and an old man trade reports of an unnatural night, and Macbeth is named king. The act ends with the crown in his hands and the natural world in disorder.
- The porter scene, Act II, scene 3: The knocking that terrifies Macbeth is answered by a drunken porter who imagines himself at the gate of hell and lets in a farmer, an equivocator and an English tailor. His banter with Macduff about drink — it provokes nose-painting, sleep and urine — is the play’s only low comedy, and it lands between the murder and its discovery. The delay is the point: the audience waits with the killers while a comic servant shuffles to the door. It is usually played for laughs and always leaves a taste of hell behind it.
- Act III, scenes 1–6: Banquo suspects how the crown was won. Macbeth hires two murderers and sends them after Banquo and Fleance on the road; Banquo is killed and Fleance escapes. At the feast the ghost of Banquo takes Macbeth’s seat and only Macbeth can see it. He resolves to visit the witches again. Hecate rebukes the witches for meddling without her, and Lennox and a lord report that Macduff has gone to England to raise an army. The act closes with the kingdom quietly arming against its king.
- The banquet scene, Act III, scene 4: At the feast Macbeth plays host until the first murderer appears at the door with blood on his face and news that Fleance lives. Then the ghost sits in his place. Lady Macbeth tells the guests her husband has been like this since youth and asks him whether he is a man; the ghost returns after a toast, Macbeth shouts at an empty stool, and the evening breaks up. Alone, he says he is in blood stepped in so far that going back is as hard as going on. It is the last time he appears in public before the war.
- Act IV, scenes 1–3: The witches brew a cauldron and raise three apparitions: an armed head warning of Macduff, a bloody child promising that no man born of woman will harm him, and a crowned child saying he is safe until Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane. A show of eight kings follows. Macbeth seizes Fife and has Macduff’s wife and son killed. In England Malcolm tests Macduff with a catalogue of imaginary vices, then raises an army; Ross brings news of the murders. By the end of the act the invasion is arranged and the tyrant has three promises to trust.
- Act V, scenes 1–8: A doctor and a gentlewoman watch Lady Macbeth sleepwalk and try to wash a spot from her hands. The thanes gather near Birnam, Macbeth fortifies Dunsinane, and Malcolm’s soldiers cut boughs to hide their numbers. The queen dies, and Macbeth answers the news with the speech about tomorrow. Birnam wood appears to move, Young Siward is killed, Macduff reveals he was ripped from his mother’s womb before his time, and Macbeth dies. Malcolm is hailed king at Scone. The play ends with the crown on a different head and the thanes renamed earls.
- The sleepwalking scene, Act V, scene 1: A doctor and a waiting gentlewoman watch Lady Macbeth walk in her sleep with a taper, set down paper, write, seal it and rub her hands for a quarter of an hour. Out, damned spot, she says, and all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. She relives the murder and the burial of Banquo, and the doctor concludes that she needs the divine rather than the physician. It is her last appearance; her death is reported later in the act, offstage. It is the quietest scene in the play and the one audiences remember longest.
Macbeth: Frequently Asked Questions
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Part of: Classic Fiction · William Shakespeare
