Let your highness
Command upon me, to the which my duties
Are with a most indissoluble tie
Forever knit. (Banquo, Act III, Scene 7)
Banquo did come back to haunt Macbeth in the end in a last effort to stop him from carrying out more murders.
Thou canst not say I did it; never shake
Thy gory locks at me! (Macbeth, Act III Scene 4)
Lady Macbeth craves and lusts after power. She has ambition in plenty. At the beginning she had to keep reassuring him that everything would be alright. She kept pushing Macbeth to do things he was afraid and apprehensive of. Macbeth says to her in relation to the killing of the King,
We will proceed no further in this business.
He hath honoured me of late, and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people…(Macbeth, Act I, Scene 7)
Macbeth is becoming scared and is trying to back out of the entire business. They talk a little more and soon Lady Macbeth shames him into doing it.
When you durst do it, then you were a man.
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man…I have given suck and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipples from his boneless gums
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this. (Lady Macbeth, Act I, Scene 7)
Lady Macbeth in spite of her seemingly endless thirst for power turns mad in the end from remorse.
…Infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.
More she needs the divine than the physician…
(Doctor of Lady Macbeth, Act V, Scene 1.)
The weird sisters make things worse by prophesying what was going to happen to him. This aggravated the situation and made him go further in his quest for power.
Once Macbeth had found out that he had been made the Thane of Cawdor as the witches had prophesised he immediately begins to think what he can do to assist the last and greatest prophecy.
Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor:
The greatest is behind…
If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me
Without my stir. (Macbeth, Act I Scene 3)
Macduff is partly to blame as, even though he did fight and kill Macbeth he did not act quickly enough and as a result of this his wife and son were killed.
The King’s sons are also partially to blame as they fled Scotland and if they stayed Macbeth would have had a harder job ascending the throne as the King’s sons would be next in line to the throne. If they had stayed it would be doubtful if Macbeth would have succeeded in his quest for power.
…I’ll to England. (Malcolm)
To Ireland I. Our separated fortune
Shall keep us both the safer…(Donaldbain, Act II, Scene 3)
Although without the others’ assistance notably that of the witches’ prophecies, the tragedy may have never happened. Macbeth himself was the one most at blame.
