The third scene shows the reintroduction of the witches as well as the introduction of Macbeth. Strangely enough, the first phrase Macbeth uses is ‘so foul and fair…’ which are also one of the first words which the witches use. This echo of words shows Macbeth as having the potential of being evil but not ready to employ it. This scene also plays with Macbeth’s mind a lot. It seems like the witches could be the figment of Macbeth’s mind. His mind shows confusion and weariness in this scene. He’s unclear about true fate. This is exaggerated when he meets the witches and realises what his life as in store for him. The confusion transpired when he found out he had been made Thane of Cawdor immediately after the witches’ premonition. He was confused because he associated witches with evil yet all they predicted were positive remarks. This is described in his phrase ‘cannot be ill, cannot be good’. They also used a lot of equivocation which further confused him like the fact that he won’t be having kids, which was seen as a curse. Macbeth’s confusion was rendered symbolically by the fog on the heath, which is seen as the prime of evil. Another case of equivocation was when the phrase ‘sounds so fair’. The word ‘sounds’ makes it unclear and extremely bewildering. Another example of unnatural work alongside the witches with beards and the phrase ‘foul is fair and fair is foul’ is the role of women. In this book, women are the powerful gender controlling and dictating the men especially in the case of Lady Macbeth dominating Macbeth. This intensifies the unnaturalness of the Macbeth family. The division between evil and good began to evolve. We can begin to see Macbeth beginning to be influenced by the witches and slowly taking the path towards evil along with Lady Macbeth whom learns to exercise her evilness. We can obviously see Banquo and King Duncan not being influenced and always remaining on the good side. This is ironic, as it’s them two who get killed first. This goodness is expressed by Banquo’s imagery of him imagining seeds, grain and growing. Macbeth also starts to use asides, which shows him as being devious and secretive. He’s learning to exercise his evil roots. This scene triggers Macbeth’s evilness in the terms of the witches persuading him. Macbeth however has still not been completely influenced as we see in his second aside. He still has a conscience and some sort of goodness in him. This proves that evil is still growing.
This scene has another trigger to the magnet of evilness. This trigger is when the king announces his son to be the next king rather than Macbeth. This outrages him as it was against what the witches had predicted. Usually, he was used to having things fall his way rather than him having to chase it, but this announcement changes his whole prospect of his future. It means he will have to fight for it against essentially goodness. Symbolically, evilness grows very fast in this with references to the final aside of Macbeth’s speech shows it building up quickly like weeds. Another example of growing evil is when Banquo is interrupted during his speech on stars and shining by Macbeth saying ‘hide your fires’ and talking about his wife, which is a prime leader of evil.
This scene introduces Lady Macbeth as the catalyst of Macbeth’s evil. She herself is still ‘weak’ and asks for assistance from the evil spirits. We know she has the potential of doing evil as we see in the words she uses. She echoes the words of the witches many a time with phrases like ‘shalt be’ and ‘all hail’. He power of domination is also greatly exercised in this scene. The fact that Macbeth has to write to his wife or that she sees the victories and honours as her achievement or that she uses phrases like ‘leave the rest to me’. Her power is also shown when she manages to persuade Macbeth into things she wants. She ‘infects’ him by challenging his manhood by calling him weak and scare. She criticises his goodness in other words. She invokes the demons into helping her infect Macbeth into what she want to provide her with the things she’s obsessed with like becoming queen. She manages to ‘transform’ Macbeth’s hesitation to determination just to satisfy herself. Other symbolic ‘coincidences’ are like the raven appearing in the scene as they represent darkness and evilness. The soliloquies and asides appear a lot more in this scene but their worry isn’t moral, the fact that they’re killing someone but instead, it’s whether they’ll be caught or not. They’re still not fully bad as they still show some indecisive thoughts as we see from the phrase ‘we will speak later’. This shows evil is still growing. Finally, this evil scene is long showing evilness growing against goodness.
This scene shows the couple as being extremely artificial making the comment’s that King Duncan makes very ironic. Phrases including words like warm and welcoming is ironic, as it’s the final place he’ll be seeing as he meets his death. Phrases from Duncan using the title ‘Thane of Cawdor’ as a compliment agitates Macbeth (who wanted to be the next king) which only increases the use of his evil potential. This again is evil growing.
In this final scene of this act, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth plan out how they are going to kill Duncan. By now Lady Macbeth is fully evil but Macbeth is still indecisive. Again she challenges his manhood by saying he has no guts and she uses her maternal instincts to corrupt him especially with the fact that she has a boy from another man. He then questions her by saying ‘if we fail’ but she replies it’s impossible again showing her dominance. We can see the final transformation to complete evil during Macbeth’s soliloquy when he goes from if to when and when he says to his wife that you may only have boys showing his dominance building.
That’s when they have both become fully evil being triggered by the witches and that Lady Macbeth was the catalyst in persuading Macbeth.