At their party, a witch shows her friends the chopped-off thumb of a ship's pilot wrecked on his way home.
Lady Macbeth, soliloquizing, prays to devils to possess her mind, turn the milk in her breasts into bile (!), and give her a man's ability to do evil.
Lady Macbeth b-tches at her husband and ridicules his masculinity in order to make him commit murder. She talks about a smiling baby she once nursed and what it would have been like to smash its brains out -- she would prefer this to having a husband who is unwilling to kill in cold blood. Read the passage again and think about exactly what Lady Macbeth is saying.
Lady Macbeth keeps a strong sedative in the house. She doesn't mention this to her husband even when they are planning a murder. She just uses it. Attentive readers will suspect she has had to use on Macbeth in the past.
The Macbeths murder a sleeping man, their benefactor and guest, in cold blood, then launder their bloody clothes. They smear blood on the drugged guards, then slaughter them to complete the frame-up.
Horses go insane and devour each others' meat while they are still alive.
Everybody knows Macbeth murdered Duncan, but they make him king anyway. Virtuous-talking Banquo ("Let's have a thorough investigation sometime") acquiesces to murder, confirming what every teen knows about adult hypocrisy. (In Holinshed, Banquo is Macbeth's accomplice. Since Banquo was supposed to be the ancestor of Shakespeare's own king James I, this wouldn't really do.) Lennox plays both sides, and probably others do as well. Ross may have left Macduff's castle to "maintain plausible deniability" just before the arrival of assassins who he may have brought.
Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost with twenty skull injuries, any one of which could be fatal. He goes psychiatric and screams "You can't prove I did it." He goes on about how he used to think that once somebody's brains were out, he'd stay dead. But now he'll need to keep people unburied until the crows eat the corpse like roadkill, etc., etc.
Witches deliver incantations ("Double, double, toil and trouble... bubble etc.") that can stand alongside any meaningless-inferential heavy-metal rock lyrics.
Among the ingredients of a witches' brew are cut-off human lips and a baby's finger. It's not just any baby -- it was a child delivered by a prostitute in a ditch, and which she strangled right afterwards.
I'm an autopsy pathologist. I am very familiar with how human bodies decompose. To show Macbeth his future, the witches add to the brew "grease that's sweated from the murderer's gibbet." Would you like to know what that means? The bodies of murderers were left hanging on the gallows (gibbet) until they were skeletonized, which takes weeks. At about ten days in suitable weather, there are enough weak points in the skin that the bodyfat, which has liquified, can start dripping through. There will be a puddle of oil underneath the body. This is for real.
Macduff's precocious little son jokes with his mother about how there are more bad than good people in the world, and adds some wisecracks at the expense of her own possible morals. Moments later, the bad guys break in and stab him to death on stage.
"Who would have thought the old man would have so much blood in him?" Lady Macbeth goes psychiatric (definitely) and commits suicide (maybe). Hearing of this, Macbeth just says "She should have died hereafter", meaning "She should have picked a different time to die." He then launches into English literature's most famous statement of the meaninglessness of life. He considers suicide, which the Romans considered the dignified thing to do under such circumstances. But he decides it would be more satisfying to take as many people as possible with him.
Macduff recounts how he was cut out of his mother's uterus at the moment of her death.
Macbeth's head ends up on a stick. All teens know that severed heads were probably the first soccer balls. If you are directing the play, this is a nice touch.
