Macduff
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: Thane of Fife, discoverer of King Duncan's body, and the ultimate nemesis of Macbeth.
- Key Traits: Loyal, deeply emotional, patriotic, and a man of righteous action.
- The Core Conflict: Torn between his duty to protect his family and his patriotic duty to save Scotland, he suffers unimaginable loss but channels his grief into a force for justice.
- Key Actions: Discovers Duncan's murder; refuses to attend Macbeth's coronation; flees to England to join Malcolm; slays Macbeth in single combat.
- Famous Quote:
"O horror, horror, horror!
Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!"
(Act 2, Scene 3) - The Outcome: He kills the tyrant, fulfills the final prophecy of The Witches, and presents Macbeth's severed head to Malcolm, restoring the natural order.
The Loyal Patriot
Macduff serves as the ultimate moral and political foil to Macbeth. From his very first appearance, he is associated with the disruption of sleep and the discovery of treason. When he uncovers the murdered body of King Duncan, his reaction is one of visceral, uncalculated horror, contrasting sharply with Macbeth's overly poetic, rehearsed displays of false grief.
Original
Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord's anointed temple, and stole thence
The life o' the building!
(Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
An awful, profane murderer has broke open
The king's own sanctuary, and taken from it
All life within the room!
Macduff is inherently suspicious of the new regime. By pointedly refusing to attend Macbeth's coronation at Scone or the great banquet, he silently signals his dissent. Unlike Banquo, who stays at court despite his suspicions, Macduff prioritises his moral compass over political expediency. However, this unwavering patriotism comes at a terrible price, leading to the defenceless slaughter of Lady Macduff and his children.
The Exile and the Testing
By A4, Macduff has fled Scotland for the English court, where Malcolm is in exile. The decision carries an immediate domestic cost: Lady Macduff, left behind in Fife, accuses him in A4S2 of having "no natural touch" and of leaving his family vulnerable to the very tyrant whose attention his flight has attracted. Her accusation is the play's most exposed piece of evidence that Macduff's political integrity has been purchased at the cost of his domestic obligations. The cost converts into catastrophe within the same scene, when Macbeth's murderers arrive at the Fife household.
In England, Macduff finds himself the principal articulator of Scotland's grief. His framing of the situation to Malcolm in A4S3 personifies the country itself as a wounded body, suffering under tyranny.
Original
Bleed, bleed, poor country!
Great tyranny! Lay thou thy basis sure,
For goodness dare not cheque thee.
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Bleed, bleed, poor country!
You tyrant! You have built a firm foundation
That good folk dare not challenge.
What Macduff does not know, in this moment, is that Malcolm is testing him. The exiled prince pretends to be more vicious than Macbeth – avaricious, lustful, without any of the "king-becoming graces" – to determine whether Macduff has come as a sincere ally or as Macbeth's agent. The testing scene is one of Shakespeare's most carefully constructed pieces of writing on the political prudence the post-Duncan world requires. It is the scene's deception, and Macduff's refusal of it ("Fit to govern! / No, not to live"), that earns him Malcolm's trust. The reconciliation is interrupted within minutes by Ross's arrival from Scotland with the news of the family's slaughter – and the section that began with Lady Macduff's accusation ends with Macduff learning that her accusation has come terribly true.
Redefining Masculinity
Perhaps Macduff's most profound contribution to the play lies in his redefinition of the theme of gender. When he receives the devastating news of his family's slaughter, Malcolm urges him to "dispute it like a man" – implying that true masculinity requires the immediate suppression of grief in favour of violent revenge. Macduff, however, offers a powerful counter-argument.
Original
I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man:
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me.
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I will do so;
But I must also feel it like a man.
I cannot help but think about the things
That were most precious to me.
In this deeply moving moment, Macduff asserts that emotional vulnerability and profound love are fundamental components of true manhood. This stands in stark contrast to the toxic, emotionless violence championed by Lady Macbeth and ultimately adopted by Macbeth. Macduff proves that one can be a fierce warrior while still possessing a deep capacity for human compassion.
"Violent separation from the mother is the mark of the successful male."
— Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 1992
The Avenger and the Restorer
The grief of A4S3 converts, by A5, into the military and personal force that ends Macbeth's tyranny. The English-backed army marches on Dunsinane. Macduff, alongside Malcolm and Siward, leads the assault. In A5S8, Macduff finds Macbeth on the battlefield. Macbeth – aware of his guilt for the slaughter of Macduff's family – initially refuses the combat. Macduff's insistence produces the fight that follows, and within twenty lines, Macbeth has invoked the Witches' prophecy ("I bear a charmed life, which must not yield / To one of woman born") and Macduff has delivered the answer.
Original
Despair thy charm;
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb
Untimely ripped.
(Act 5, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Trash the spell,
And let those witches whom you're serving still
Tell you, Macduff was, from his mother's womb,
Ripped prematurely.
The revelation is the play's principal equivocation device – language whose surface meaning ("none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth") is technically true but functionally misleading. Macduff, delivered by Caesarean section in the period's understanding, was not "born" in the prophecy's literal sense. The loophole voids Macbeth's invulnerability, and the combat proceeds to Macbeth's death within minutes. In A5S8, Macduff carries Macbeth's severed head onto the stage and proclaims Malcolm the legitimate king. The Scottish political order, dismantled by the regicide of A2S2, is publicly reconstituted on the foundation Duncan had named in A1S4. Macduff is the instrument by which the restoration is made dramatically and politically complete.
Key Quotes
Quote 1
But, gentle heavens,
Cut short all intermission; front to front
Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself;
Within my sword's length set him; if he 'scape,
Heaven forgive him too!
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But now then, heaven,
Without delay, and standing face-to-face,
Put me and Scotland's tyrant both together;
Have him a sword-length off; if he escapes,
Heaven forgive him too!
Quote Analysis: Macduff's vengeance prayer, delivered minutes after learning of his family's slaughter. The passage marks the conversion of grief into focused resolve. Macduff is not asking heaven for vague justice but for a specific arrangement: Macbeth and himself, sword's length apart, with no intermediary. The phrase "if he 'scape, / Heaven forgive him too" places the burden of any remaining mercy on God rather than on Macduff. From this point in the play, the trajectory toward A5S8 is established.
Quote 2
He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Macbeth does not have children. All my sweet ones?
Did you say all? Oh, vulture! All?
Quote Analysis: This fragmented, disbelieving speech captures the sheer, paralysing shock of profound trauma. The phrase "He has no children" suggests that because Macbeth is childless, he can never truly comprehend the magnitude of the pain he has inflicted, nor can Macduff exact a truly equal revenge.
Quote 3
Hail, king! for so thou art: behold, where stands
The usurper's cursed head: the time is free.
(Act 5, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Hail, king! For king you are now. Look what's here,
The tyrant's bloody head. We all are free now.
Quote Analysis: The play's formal announcement of the regime's end. Where Macbeth's accession had occurred offstage at Scone, confirmed only by the assembled nobles' acquiescence, Malcolm's accession is proclaimed publicly with the physical evidence of the tyrant's death held aloft. Macduff, having killed the usurper and now naming the legitimate king, completes the trajectory the play's opening scenes had set in motion.
Key Takeaways
- The Avenging Hero: He serves as the primary instrument of justice, restoring true kingship to Scotland.
- Healthy Masculinity: He actively rejects the toxic, violent masculinity of the play by openly weeping for his family, proving that grief and strength are not mutually exclusive.
- Agent of Prophecy: He embodies the complex reality of fate, serving as the biological exception that unravels the deceptive promises made by the supernatural.
- The Tragic Patriot: His nobility is tinged with tragedy; to save his nation, he inadvertently sacrificed his own family, carrying an unimaginable burden of guilt.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why is Macduff the one to discover King Duncan's body?
The A2S3 discovery of Duncan's body is one of Shakespeare's most carefully constructed pieces of dramatic positioning. The decision to give the discovery to Macduff rather than to any other named noble carries substantial weight.
At the level of plot, Macduff's arrival at the castle is presented as a piece of routine duty. He has come, by Duncan's prior instruction, to "call timely on him." The decision is to make the routine encounter the moment at which the murder enters public knowledge, and to give the encounter to a figure who has, by that point in the play, been only minimally established (his speaking part begins in A2S3).
Shakespeare's choice to introduce Macduff as the discoverer of the body works as a piece of immediate character-establishment. The figure who finds the murdered king becomes, by the fact of his finding, the figure who carries the first emotional register of public outrage.
The act of discovery is also the act of rousing the kingdom. Within seconds of his "O horror, horror, horror!" cry, Macduff turns from the body to the rest of the household and converts the private discovery into public alarm:
Awake, awake!
Ring the alarum-bell. Murder and treason!
Banquo and Donalbain! Malcolm! Awake!
Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit,
And look on death itself!
(Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Wake up, wake up!
Ring the alarm-bell! Murder and treason!
Banquo and Donalbain! Malcolm! Wake up!
Shake off your sleepiness, a fake of death,
And look at death itself!
The speech places Macduff in the active position of the rouser-of-Scotland. His cry is uncalculated and immediate, contrasting sharply with Macbeth's poetically elaborate response a few lines later ("Had I but died an hour before this chance, / I had liv'd a blessed time"). The contrast is structural rather than incidental. Macduff's grief works in the register of unprepared shock. Macbeth's grief works in the register of carefully composed performance. The audience, having watched Macbeth and Lady Macbeth plan the murder, can read both responses with full knowledge of which is genuine.
The further function is theological. Macduff's framing of the murder – as a violation of "the Lord's anointed temple" – explicitly places the regicide within the Christian-Jacobean framework of the divinely-anointed king. Duncan's body is, by his framing, a sacred vessel. The murder is therefore not merely political but sacrilegious.
The framing aligns Macduff with the Jacobean political theology James I had articulated in his own writings. It positions him as the play's principal articulator of the legitimate-kingship register that Macbeth has violated. From this scene onward, Macduff is the play's most direct embodiment of the political and theological order Macbeth has destroyed. The trajectory toward the A5S8 single combat is, in retrospect, established by the decision of A2S3.
Why does Macduff refuse to attend Macbeth's coronation?
The A2S4 conversation between Macduff and Ross is the play's clearest piece of evidence on the question. The implications of Macduff's decision work at several levels.
Ross asks Macduff where he is going. Macduff replies, "To Fife." Ross asks if Macduff will attend the coronation at Scone. Macduff replies, "No, cousin, I'll to Fife." The bluntness of the refusal is exact. Macduff is not offering an excuse or a diplomatic delay. He is naming an alternative destination that places him at the maximum possible distance from Macbeth's coronation ceremony.
The Jacobean political context makes the refusal substantively significant. A coronation was, in the period the play depicts, a ceremonial occasion at which the kingdom's principal nobles were expected to attend in person and publicly demonstrate their acceptance of the new king's legitimate authority. Refusal to attend was a formal political act – a public signal that the absent noble did not, in fact, recognise the coronation's legitimacy.
Macduff's refusal therefore works as the play's earliest piece of evidence of organised political opposition to Macbeth. Its public character (Ross sees and reports it) means that Macbeth himself will, by his own intelligence network, become aware of Macduff's absence.
The contrast with Banquo is exact. Banquo, who has equal or greater grounds for suspicion (he heard the prophecies; he reflects in A3S1 that Macbeth "play'dst most foully for't"), attends the coronation, attends the banquet, and acquiesces in the official theory that Duncan's sons orchestrated the murder. Macduff refuses to acquiesce. The play uses the contrast to establish two different responses to the regicide – Banquo's silent self-interested calculation and Macduff's open political dissent.
The cost of Macduff's position is exact. By A3S6, Lennox and the Lord are discussing Macduff's flight to England. By A4S1, the Witches' second apparition warns Macbeth to "beware Macduff." By A4S2, Macbeth has dispatched the murderers who will slaughter Lady Macduff and her children.
The arrangement is one of Shakespeare's most pointed pieces of writing on the costs of principled political opposition. Macduff's refusal to attend the coronation is the act that marks him for destruction. The destruction of his family is the price the play extracts from him for the integrity his refusal represents.
Was Macduff wrong to leave his family unprotected?
The question is one of the play's most carefully constructed moral ambiguities. The play's evidence supports multiple legitimate readings.
The case against Macduff is articulated most directly by Lady Macduff herself in A4S2. When Ross brings the news that Macduff has fled to England, she responds with bitter scepticism:
He had none [no love]:
He loves us not;
He wants the natural touch... His flight was madness:
when our actions do not,
Our fears do make us traitors.
(Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
He had none:
He doesn't love us;
He's lacking basic instinct... It's mad to run, for even when we're guiltless,
Our fear makes us look guilty.
The argument is exact. Macduff has, by fleeing, left his wife and children vulnerable to the very tyrant whose attention his flight has attracted. The absence of "the natural touch" – the basic paternal protectiveness her husband should display – is, in her reading, evidence of a moral failure that no political justification can excuse.
The case for Macduff works on different grounds. He has fled to join Malcolm in England because the situation in Scotland has, by A4S1, become untenable. The kingdom is being destroyed by Macbeth's tyranny, and only the assembly of an English-backed army can produce the legitimate restoration the country needs.
Macduff's flight is therefore not an abandonment but a strategic necessity, undertaken in service of a duty larger than the protection of his own family. Ross's defence in A4S2 ("things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward / To what they were before") names the calculation. Macduff has judged that Macbeth would not stoop to the slaughter of women and children, and the calculation has, by Macbeth's actions, been catastrophically wrong.
The A4S3 testing scene with Malcolm makes the moral cost explicit. Malcolm needles Macduff with the question – "Why in that rawness left you wife and child, / Those precious motives, those strong knots of love, / Without leave-taking?" – and Macduff's response carries the full weight of the moral confusion: "Not for their own demerits, but for mine, / Fell slaughter on their souls: heaven rest them now!"
Macduff is acknowledging the burden the question implies. His political action has produced the deaths of those he was bound by every domestic obligation to protect.
The play does not, finally, adjudicate the question. What it commits to is one fact. The choice between political and domestic duty in a tyrannical regime is not a choice that can be made cleanly. Macduff carries the burden of the answer he chose for the remainder of the play.
What does Macduff mean by "I must also feel it as a man"?
The A4S3 exchange between Macduff and Malcolm is one of the most-discussed single moments in the play. The question Macduff's line answers works at the intersection of the play's gender politics and its grief politics.
Malcolm, on receiving the news of the slaughter of Macduff's family alongside him, urges Macduff to "Dispute it like a man." The implication is that the proper masculine response to catastrophic loss is the immediate mobilisation of revenge. Macduff's response – "I shall do so; / But I must also feel it as a man" – converts the question without rejecting it.
The argument is exact. Macduff is naming a definition of manhood that includes both the violent action Malcolm's "dispute it like a man" demands and the emotional acknowledgement that the loss requires before the action can be morally legible. The two registers – feeling and disputing, grief and revenge – are, in Macduff's articulation, both essential to what manhood requires.
The contrast with the play's other articulations of manhood is pointed. Lady Macbeth's A1S7 manipulation of Macbeth worked through the equation of manhood with violent action alone: "When you durst do it, then you were a man." Macbeth's own descent through the play has, by A5S5, produced a man who can no longer feel – his response to Lady Macbeth's death is the philosophical detachment of a figure for whom emotional registers have collapsed.
Macduff's "feel it as a man" speech is therefore the play's clearest piece of evidence for an alternative model: manhood that includes vulnerability, manhood that admits grief, manhood that does not require the suppression of emotional capacity as the price of moral agency.
The deeper feminist-psychoanalytic reading complicates this. Janet Adelman's 1992 Suffocating Mothers argues that even Macduff's redefinition works within the play's broader misogynist economy. Macduff's emotional capacity is, on her reading, ultimately enlisted in the project of male self-creation through violent separation from the maternal. The figure who emerges from the A4S3 speech is the same Macduff whose Caesarean birth makes him the play's embodiment of "violent separation from the mother."
Both readings the text supports. The page-level reading is the more sympathetic. Macduff's "feel it as a man" speech is one of the play's most moving moments and one of Shakespeare's most direct pieces of writing on the costs of emotional suppression. The Adelman reading is the more sophisticated. Even the most sympathetic redefinition of manhood the play offers cannot escape the broader fantasy the play is enacting.
How does Macduff fulfill the Witches' prophecy?
The A5S8 revelation is one of the play's most carefully constructed pieces of reversal. Its significance works at several levels.
The mechanism begins with the Witches' second apparition in A4S1. Macbeth, having returned to the cauldron to demand certainty about his future, is given an assurance that he reads as comprehensive:
Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Be violent, bold and strong; laugh in the face
Of powerful men, for none born by a woman
Will harm Macbeth.
Macbeth's response ("Then live, Macduff: what need I fear of thee?") establishes his reading of the assurance as universal. Every man, after all, is born of a woman. The apparition's prophecy, on Macbeth's interpretation, makes him invulnerable.
The A5S8 revelation – "Macduff was from his mother's womb / Untimely ripped" – establishes that the prophecy was technically true but functionally misleading. Macduff was delivered by Caesarean section (the period's understanding of which was that the child was extracted surgically rather than born through the normal birth canal), and he therefore was not, on the prophecy's literal terms, "of woman born."
The mechanism is the play's principal device for the theme of equivocation – the deliberate use of language whose surface meaning is true but whose intended meaning is misleading.
The Jacobean political context makes the equivocation theme contemporary and charged. The play was written and performed in the immediate aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. The Jesuit doctrine of mental reservation – the theological justification used by Catholic conspirators to swear oaths of loyalty while privately reserving the truth – had been a substantive issue at the 1606 trial of Father Henry Garnet. The play's running theme of equivocation, of which the Macduff-prophecy mechanism is the principal piece of evidence, engages directly with the contemporary political-theological debate.
The deeper psychoanalytic reading complicates the mechanism. Janet Adelman's 1992 reading argues that the Caesarean birth is not merely a piece of equivocal language but the play's most exposed piece of evidence for its investment in the male fantasy of escape from the maternal. Macduff is, on her reading, the figure who completes the project Macbeth's "unsex me" plot had begun – the production of a male agent whose violent separation from female origin makes him the play's "successful male."
The irony is therefore double. At the literal level, Macduff's birth is the loophole that disrupts the prophecy and produces the play's resolution. At the deeper level, the loophole works by enacting the same fantasy of male self-creation that the play has been criticising in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth throughout. The play's quiet position is that the prophecy's mechanism – like the play's broader arrangement – can be read at both levels simultaneously, and that the resolution it produces is therefore both a piece of straightforward dramatic satisfaction and a piece of deeper irony.
Why does Macbeth initially refuse to fight Macduff?
The A5S8 opening of the single combat is one of the most-discussed single moments in late Macbeth. The question of what Macbeth's refusal reveals works at several distinct registers.
The line itself is exact:
Of all men else I have avoided thee:
But get thee back: my soul is too much charged
With blood of thine already.
(Act 5, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Of all men, I've avoided you the most:
But, go away; my soul is overburdened
With blood of yours already.
Macbeth is, in this moment, naming a specific moral debt – the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her children, ordered by Macbeth in A4S2 – and acknowledging that he does not wish to add Macduff's own death to the burden the murder has placed on him.
The significance of the moment is one of Shakespeare's most pointed pieces of writing on the limits of moral suppression. Macbeth has, by A5S8, spent four acts demonstrating his progressive desensitisation to violence. The A4S3 slaughter of Lady Macduff and her children is, on its face, an act of pure nihilistic cruelty – a piece of state terror directed against women and children who pose no military threat to the regime. Macbeth's earlier registers of conscience (the dagger soliloquy, the post-murder collapse, the banquet scene) have, by A5S5, given way to the philosophical detachment of the "tomorrow" speech. The audience has no reason to expect, by A5S8, that Macbeth retains any moral capacity at all.
The A5S8 hesitation is therefore the play's most direct piece of evidence that some vestigial moral capacity has survived even the catastrophic moral journey of the late play. Bradley's 1904 reading captured this. Macbeth's conscience, though diminished, is never wholly extinguished, and the moments when it surfaces – even briefly – are part of what gives the character the tragic register he carries throughout.
The deeper argument works through the comparison with the play's opening. Macbeth in A1S7 had refused the Duncan murder out of moral hesitation, and only the manipulation of Lady Macbeth had produced his eventual capitulation. Macbeth in A5S8 refuses the combat with Macduff out of a recognition of moral debt, and only Macduff's own insistence ("I have no words: / My voice is in my sword") produces the combat that follows.
The arrangement places the play's opening hesitation and the play's closing hesitation in formal counterpoise. The comparison illuminates the trajectory between them. Macbeth has, in the journey from A1S7 to A5S8, lost almost everything – his marriage, his thanes, his peace, his sleep, his moral order – but he has not, finally, lost the capacity to recognise that the slaughter of innocent children carries a moral weight that the soldier's combat does not.
The recognition does not save him. Macduff's revelation of the Caesarean birth follows within twenty lines, and the combat proceeds to Macbeth's death. What the recognition produces is the play's quiet evidence that the tragic register has not, finally, been replaced by the merely villainous one. Macbeth dies a tyrant, but the tyrant retains the trace of the noble warrior he had been at the play's opening.
What is Macduff's role in the restoration of Scotland?
The A5S8 closing scene is the play's most carefully constructed piece of resolution. Macduff's role within it works as the dramatic instrument by which the legitimate political order is restored.
At the level of plot, Macduff has killed Macbeth in A5S8 and carries Macbeth's severed head onto the stage. His proclamation ("Hail, king! for so thou art... the time is free") is the play's formal announcement of the regime's end and the legitimate succession's beginning. The arrangement is exact. Where Macbeth's accession had occurred offstage at Scone and had been confirmed only by the assembled nobles' acquiescence, Malcolm's accession occurs onstage in the presence of the surviving thanes, with the physical evidence of the tyrant's death held aloft. The Scottish political order is, by this arrangement, being publicly reconstituted on the foundation of the legitimate succession Duncan had named in A1S4.
Macduff's role is therefore both military (he is the man who killed Macbeth) and political (he is the man who proclaims Malcolm).
The Jacobean political theology makes the role substantively significant. Macduff has, by his actions across the play, embodied the legitimate political order. He discovered the regicide (A2S3), refused the usurper's coronation (A2S4), joined the legitimate heir (A4S3), and killed the tyrant (A5S8). His proclamation of Malcolm is the completion of this trajectory – the man who has carried the legitimate political register throughout the play is the man who formally restores it at the play's end.
Malcolm's response establishes the political reconstitution at the highest possible register:
My thanes and kinsmen,
Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland
In such an honour named.
(Act 5, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My thanes and kinsmen,
From now on you'll be earls, the first in Scotland
To hold these honoured titles.
The renaming is precise. The Scottish nobility, who had carried the title "thane" under Duncan's reign, are elevated to the English title "earl" under Malcolm's. The change marks both the English influence on the restored Scottish court (Malcolm has come from the English exile court of Edward the Confessor) and the formal-political reconstitution of the Scottish state at a level above what it had reached under Duncan.
The deeper question is whether the restoration is complete. The play has, by its closing scene, established that the legitimate king has returned, the tyrant has been killed, the surviving thanes have been restored, and the kingdom has been reordered. What it has also established is the cost. Duncan is dead. Banquo is dead. Lady Macduff and her children are dead. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are dead.
The Scotland that emerges from A5S8 is not the Scotland of A1S4. It has been emptied of the principal voices that had inhabited it. Adelman's reading observes that the play's closing scene works as "an all-male world" in which the female register has been systematically excised.
The restoration is therefore both real and partial. Malcolm is the legitimate king. Macduff is the king-maker. The order has been reconstituted. What is not, finally, recovered is the female-and-domestic register that the play has spent five acts dismantling. The closing scene's completeness works against the absence of the figures whose deaths have made it possible.
