Macbeth symbole

Symbols

Blood

Blood is everywhere in Macbeth, beginning with the opening battle between the Scots and the Norwegian invaders, which is described in harrowing terms by the wounded captain in Act 1, scene 2. Once Macbeth and Lady Macbeth embark upon their murderous journey, blood comes to symbolize their guilt, and they begin to feel that their crimes have stained them in a way that cannot be washed clean. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” Macbeth cries after he has killed Duncan, even as his wife scolds him and says that a little water will do the job (2.2.58–59). Later, though, she comes to share his horrified sense of being stained: “Out, damned spot; out, I say . . . who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” she asks as she wanders through the halls of their castle near the close of the play (5.1.30–34). Blood symbolizes the guilt that sits like a permanent stain on the consciences of both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, one that hounds them to their graves.

The Weather

As in other Shakespearean tragedies, Macbeth’s grotesque murder spree is accompanied by a number of unnatural occurrences in the natural realm. From the thunder and lightning that accompany the witches’ appearances to the terrible storms that rage on the night of Duncan’s murder, these violations of the natural order reflect corruption in the moral and political orders.

Visions and Hallucinations

A number of times in Macbeth, Macbeth sees or hears strange things: the floating dagger, the voice that says he's murdering sleep, and Banquo's ghost. As Macbeth himself wonders about the dagger, are these sights and sounds supernatural visions or figments of his guilty imagination? The play contains no definitive answer, which is itself a kind of answer: they're both. Macbeth is a man at war with himself, his innate honor battling his ambition. Just as nature goes haywire when the normal natural order is ruptured, Macbeth's own mind does the same when it is forced to fight against itself.

Sleep

When he murders Duncan, Macbeth thinks he hears a voice say "Macbeth does murder sleep" (2.2.34). Sleep symbolizes innocence, purity, and peace of mind, and in killing Duncan Macbeth actually does murder sleep: Lady Macbeth begins to sleepwalk, and Macbeth is haunted by his nightmares.

Nature

Throughout Shakespeare's Macbeth, the weather plays an important role. The rebelling nature of wind and lightning indicates the disruption within the natural order of society. It makes it seem as if the weather is upset with Macbeth's actions. In many Shakespearean plays — including this one — rebelling nature shows a departure from accepted political and moral order.

Clothing

The way these characters keep talking about clothes, you'd think there was a 30% off sale at Old Navy. But clothes aren't just keeping the nobles warm in their drafty candles; they're also functioning symbolically to represent these people's stations in life—earned, or stolen.
When Macbeth first hears that he's been named the Thane of Cawdor, he asks Angus why he is being dressed in "borrowed" robes (1.3.7). Macbeth doesn't literally mean that he's going to wear the old thane's hand-me-down clothing. Here, "robes" is a metaphor for the title (Thane of Cawdor) that Macbeth doesn't think belongs to him. And later, Angus says that Macbeth's kingly "title" is ill-fitting and hangs on him rather loosely, "like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief" (5.2.2).
Angus isn't accusing Macbeth of stealing and wearing the old king's favorite jacket, he's accusing Macbeth of stealing the king's power (by killing him) and then parading around with the king's title, which doesn't seem to suit him at all. Famous literary critic Cleanth Brooks has something to say about that image:
The crucial point of the comparison, it seems to me, lies not in the smallness of the man and the largeness of the robes, but rather in the fact that—whether the man be large or small—these are not his garments; in Macbeth's case they are actually stolen garments. Macbeth is uncomfortable in them because he is continually conscious of the fact that they do not belong to him. There is a further point, and it is one of the utmost importance; the oldest symbol for the hypocrite is that of a man who cloaks his true nature under a disguise. (source, 48)
Keep an eye out in the play for other times when clothing shows up—or even cloth in general. Like those banners Macbeth hangs right before battle; does he actually believe they're going to help?

Dead Children

This play, unfortunately, is full of dead babies and slain children. And it's hard to make jokes about that, even if they are fictional and several hundred years old. The witches throw into their cauldron a "finger of birth-strangled babe" and then conjure an apparition of a bloody child that says Macbeth will not be harmed by any man "of woman born" (4.1.2); Fleance witnesses his father's murder before nearly being killed himself; Macbeth kills Young Siward; and Macduff's young son, his "pretty chicken," is called an "egg" before he's murdered.
So, what's the deal?
The play is fixated on what happens when family lines are extinguished, which is exactly what Macbeth has in mind when he orders the murders of his enemies' children. (His willingness to kill kids, by the way, is a clear sign that he's passed the point of no return.) We can trace all of this back to Macbeth's anger that Banquo's "children shall be kings" (1.3.5), but not Macbeth's: he laments that, when the witches predicted he would be king, they placed a "fruitless crown" upon his head and a "barren scepter" in his hands (3.1.8).
There's also a sense of major political and lineal disorder here. When Macbeth kills Duncan and takes the crown, Malcolm (King Duncan's heir) is denied "the due of birth" (3.6.1). By the play's end, order is restored with the promise of Malcolm being crowned as rightful king. And, we also know that Banquo's line will rule for generations to come. It's fitting that, in the end, Macbeth is killed by a man who was "untimely ripped" from his mother's womb.

Eight Kings

When Macbeth visits the weird sisters and demands to know whether or not Banquo's heirs will become kings, the witches conjure a vision of eight kings, the last of which holds a mirror that reflects many more such kings. Cool vision, right?
Not to Macbeth. See, these are Banquo's heirs, which means that Macbeth's sons aren't going to become king which means Macbeth had better watch his back.
But it would have been pretty cool to Shakespeare's audience, because, as the stage directions tell us, the last king is carrying "two-fold balls and treble scepters" (4.3). These two balls (or orbs) are a symbolic representation of King James I of England (VI of Scotland), who traced his lineage back to Banquo. At James's coronation ceremony in England (1603), James held two orbs (one representing England and one representing Scotland). It looks like Shakespeare has just paid a nice little compliment to his patron.

Light and Darkness

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

Pretty standard stuff here. Darkness indicates something bad is about to happen; light is associated with life and God. Here's a look at some specifics:
From the first, the cover of night is invoked whenever anything terrible is going to happen. Lady Macbeth, for example, asks "thick night" to come with the "smoke of hell," so her knife won't see the wound it makes in the peacefully sleeping King (1.5.3). The literal darkness corresponds to the evil or "dark" act she plans to commit.
And then, when she calls for the murderous spirits to prevent "heaven" from "peep[ing] through the blanket of the dark to cry 'Hold, Hold!'" she implies that light (here associated with God, heaven, and goodness) offers protection from evil and is the only thing that could stop her from murdering Duncan (1.5.3). So, it's no surprise to us that, when Lady Macbeth starts going crazy, she insists on always having a candle or, "light" about her (5.1.4). We get the impression that she thinks the light is going to protect her against the evil forces she summoned… but no such luck.

Light/ Life

Macbeth responds to the news of Lady Macbeth's suicide by proclaiming "out, out brief candle" (5.5.3), turning the candle's flame has become a metaphor for her short life and sudden death. Similarly, Banquo's torchlight (the one that illuminates him just enough so his murderers can see what they're doing) is also snuffed out the moment he's killed (3.3.5). And both of these incidents recall an event from the evening King Duncan is murdered —Lennox reports that the fire in his chimney was mysteriously "blown" out (2.3.3).
Straightforward, right? The one thing we're stuck on is that this whole play is about inversion: fair being foul, and foul being fair; men being women, women being men; and the whole regicide business. Are there any moments that make this dark/ light dichotomy more complex? Or is this one area where light is just light, and dark is just dark?