Malcolm
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: King Duncan's eldest son, Prince of Cumberland, and the rightful heir to the Scottish throne.
- Key Traits: Cautious, pragmatic, intelligent, and a strategic leader.
- The Core Conflict: Forced into exile after his father's murder, Malcolm must learn to navigate a world of deception and build an army to reclaim his throne from a bloody tyrant.
- Key Actions: Flees to England for safety; tests Macduff's loyalty with a complex lie; commands the English army to use branches from Birnam Wood to camouflage their numbers; restores order as the new King.
- Famous Quote:
"Let's make us medicines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief."
(Act 4, Scene 3) - The Outcome: He successfully defeats Macbeth, restores the natural order, and is crowned the rightful King of Scotland at Scone.
The Pragmatic Heir: A Lesson in Appearance
Malcolm begins the play as a relatively quiet figure, but his father's assassination forces a rapid maturation. Unlike King Duncan, whose fatal flaw was his absolute trust in "the mind's construction in the face," Malcolm quickly realises that appearance can be a deadly illusion. By choosing to flee to England rather than staying to face the unknown assassins, he demonstrates a pragmatic instinct for self-preservation that his father lacked.
Original
To show an unfelt sorrow is an office
Which the false man does easy. I'll to England.
(Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
To look as though you're sad is easy for
A man who is a liar. I'm going to England.
Malcolm understands that the Scottish court is infected with treachery. He embraces the theme of appearance versus reality not for malicious ambition, but as a necessary shield against it. His flight is initially perceived as guilt, but it is actually a calculated retreat that allows him to survive, secure English military support, and eventually return as Scotland's saviour.
Testing Loyalty: The Makings of a True King
The defining moment of Malcolm's character development occurs during his long scene with Macduff in England. Aware that Macbeth has sent spies to assassinate or capture him, Malcolm refuses to take Macduff's loyalty at face value. Instead, he paints a horrific, entirely fabricated portrait of himself as a tyrant far worse than Macbeth, claiming to be endlessly lustful, greedy, and lacking all "king-becoming graces."
Original
...black Macbeth
Will seem as pure as snow, and the poor state
Esteem him as a lamb, being compared
With my confineless harms.
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
...vile Macbeth,
He'll seem as pure as snow, and all poor Scotland
Will think he is a lamb when he's compared
With my unbounded harm.
This elaborate deception proves that Malcolm possesses the political cunning required for true kingship. Only when Macduff breaks down in despair for his country does Malcolm reveal his true, virtuous nature. He shows that a good king must not only be holy and just, but also shrewd enough to survive in a corrupt world. The 1972 Susan Snyder Folger reading, quoted on this page, complicates the moral picture by noting that the fluency with which Malcolm describes monarchical depravity is itself unnerving – the words, once spoken, cannot be entirely unsaid – but the test itself demonstrates the political prudence the post-Duncan world requires.
The Strategic Commander
By A5, the political education that began with the A2S3 flight has converted into military operation. Malcolm has secured the alliance with Edward the Confessor, has gathered Siward's ten thousand English soldiers, and has welcomed the returning Scottish nobles whose defection from Macbeth's regime confirms that the tyrant's authority has collapsed. The Witches' third apparition in A4S1 had assured Macbeth that he would never be vanquished until "Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him" – a prophecy Macbeth had read as impossible, since forests do not, in nature, walk. Malcolm's A5S4 order converts the impossibility into accomplished fact.
Original
Let every soldier hew him down a bough
And bear't before him: thereby shall we shadow
The numbers of our host and make discovery
Err in report of us.
(Act 5, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Have every soldier chop himself a branch down,
And hold it out in front of him, disguising
Our numbers so that their reconnaissance
Is wrong about us.
The order works at two levels simultaneously. At the level of military strategy, it is conventional camouflage – moving foliage that prevents Macbeth's scouts from accurately reporting on the assembled force. At the level of prophecy, it is the mechanism by which the Witches' supernatural-impossibility language is functionally fulfilled by ordinary human labour. The argument the order makes is one of the play's most pointed pieces of writing on the relationship between supernatural prediction and human agency. Where Macbeth had trusted the prophecies' surface meaning and built his confidence on their literal terms, Malcolm acts on the available human-rational evidence and inadvertently produces the fulfillment the prophecies had encoded. By A5S6, the leafy screens are thrown down, the army shows itself for what it is, and the assault on Dunsinane begins.
The New King
The A5S8 closing scene is the play's resolution. Macduff has killed Macbeth, carried the severed head onto the stage, and proclaimed Malcolm king. The assembled thanes have confirmed the accession with the cry of "Hail, King of Scotland!" The floor opens for Malcolm's first speech as monarch. The decisions he makes in the next thirty lines define the political register on which his reign will operate.
Original
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 act of elevation is precise. The Scottish thanedoms are aligned with the English title of "earl" – a formal recognition that the restoration has been accomplished with English military and political support, and a piece of structural realignment that the historical Malcolm III Canmore is indeed credited with having introduced. James I, on whose throne the play was first performed, who claimed descent from Malcolm and who had produced the 1603 personal union of the Scottish and English crowns, would have read the moment as the precedent for his own political project. The closing invitation – "So thanks to all at once and to each one, / Whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone" – completes the arc the play has been tracing since A1S2. The Scotland that was disrupted by Macbeth's regicide ends with a public coronation at Scone, witnessed by the surviving thanes, supported by English military power, and grounded in the legitimate succession Duncan had named in A1S4.
"Malcolm takes it all back; but his words once spoken cannot simply be canceled. They continue to color indirectly our sense of the next king of Scotland."
— Susan Snyder, Macbeth: A Modern Perspective (Folger Shakespeare Library)
Key Quotes
Quote 1
This murderous shaft that's shot
Hath not yet lighted, and our safest way
Is to avoid the aim.
(Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Their murderous plan
Is not yet fully formed, and we are safest
To not be here when it is.
Quote Analysis: Spoken immediately after discovering his father's murder, this metaphor reveals Malcolm's sharp political instincts. He accurately deduces that the conspiracy is not over and that he and his brother are the next targets. The line marks the moment Malcolm becomes the kind of political reader his father had never become – capable of identifying threat patterns rather than trusting outward signs.
Quote 2
For even now
I put myself to thy direction, and
Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure
The taints and blames I laid upon myself,
For strangers to my nature.
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
From now,
I'll do as you direct me, and I'll also
Retract my self-lambasting, here rejecting
The evil traits I claimed were part of me,
For they are nothing like me.
Quote Analysis: Malcolm's recantation after the A4S3 testing of Macduff. The passage marks the moment the deception ends and the alliance is sealed. Malcolm "unspeaks" the false self-portrait, but as Snyder's reading observes, the unspeaking is structurally impossible – the words, once delivered, have already entered the audience's perception of who Malcolm is.
Quote 3
Now near enough: your leafy screens throw down.
And show like those you are. You, worthy uncle,
Shall, with my cousin, your right-noble son,
Lead our first battle...
(Act 5, Scene 6)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
We're near enough to ditch our screens of leaves,
And show them who we are. You, Uncle Siward,
Will, with my cousin, your most noble son, lead
Our first wave of attack.
Quote Analysis: The dramatic reveal of the army at Dunsinane. The Birnam Wood prophecy has been functionally fulfilled; the camouflage can now be dropped; the assault on the tyrant's castle begins. The phrase "show like those you are" is the play's quiet inversion of the appearance-versus-reality theme – where Macbeth's reign has been sustained by false appearances, Malcolm's restoration begins with the literal revelation of what was always there.
Key Takeaways
- The Ideal King: Malcolm represents the balance of Duncan's divine goodness with a necessary, worldly pragmatism.
- Master of Deception for Good: While Macbeth and Lady Macbeth use deception to destroy the state, Malcolm uses it to protect himself and test the loyalty of his allies.
- Restorer of Order: His coronation at the end of the play signifies the defeat of the supernatural chaos and the restoration of natural law and divine kingship.
- Agent of Free Will: He defeats Macbeth not through magic, but through sound military strategy and political alliance, demonstrating the power of human agency over fate.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why does Malcolm flee to England after King Duncan's murder?
The A2S3 decision is one of Shakespeare's most carefully constructed pieces of strategic thinking. The reasons behind it work at several registers.
The immediate context is exact. Duncan's body has just been discovered. Macduff has named the regicide. Macbeth has murdered the chamberlains who would have been the only available witnesses. The assembled thanes are reconvening to "question this most bloody piece of work."
Malcolm and Donalbain – Duncan's two sons, and therefore the two figures with the strongest claims on the throne – are standing in a hall in which they cannot identify the murderer, cannot assess which of the assembled thanes might be complicit, and cannot count on the protection their status as heirs should ordinarily provide.
The brothers' brief exchange in A2S3 names the calculation. Donalbain's line articulates the argument that proximity to the throne is itself a danger in a court where the king has been murdered without the murderer being publicly identified:
There's daggers in men's smiles: the near in blood,
The nearer bloody.
(Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The smiling men have daggers. Nearer the dead king,
The nearer we are to death.
Malcolm's reply – "This murderous shaft that's shot / Hath not yet lighted, and our safest way / Is to avoid the aim" – extends the argument. The conspiracy that produced Duncan's death is, on the available evidence, ongoing, and the heirs are its next probable targets.
The decision to split their flight – Malcolm to England, Donalbain to Ireland – is the play's clearest piece of evidence of their strategic thinking. Separation across two kingdoms means that an assassination plot against one brother cannot simultaneously be directed against the other. The two destinations chosen (the English court of Edward the Confessor and the Irish court) are both kingdoms with diplomatic standing capable of hosting royal exiles.
The political cost is immediate and substantial. By A2S4, Macduff is reporting that "Malcolm and Donalbain, the king's two sons, / Are stol'n away and fled, which puts upon them / Suspicion of the deed." The flight is being interpreted as evidence of guilt, and Macbeth's accession to the throne is being smoothed by the absence of the legitimate heirs.
The decision the brothers face is therefore exact. They can either remain at court and risk assassination by an unidentified conspiracy, or they can flee and accept the political damage of appearing guilty. They choose the second. The play's subsequent action depends on the choice. Malcolm's flight to England gives him access to the military and political resources that will eventually return him to Scotland at the head of an army. The alternative, on the available A2S3 evidence, would have been death at the hands of figures he could not identify in time to defend himself against them.
How does Malcolm's testing of Macduff show his fitness to be king?
The A4S3 testing scene is one of the longest and most complex single sequences in the play. The question of what it reveals about Malcolm's fitness works at several registers.
The arrangement is exact. Macduff has arrived in England to recruit Malcolm to lead a restoration army. Malcolm, having spent the intervening time at Edward the Confessor's court, has reason to suspect Macduff may be one of Macbeth's agents sent to lure him back to Scotland. The scene is the audition by which Malcolm establishes whether Macduff is, in fact, what he appears to be.
The mechanism is one of inverted self-presentation. Malcolm fabricates a portrait of himself as a tyrant whose vices exceed Macbeth's. He claims first to be voluptuous beyond limit. Second to be "avaricious" without bound. Third to lack entirely the "king-becoming graces" – "justice, verity, temperance, stableness, / Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, / Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude."
Macduff's response to each claim is itself a piece of evidence. To the first vice (lust), Macduff attempts accommodation: "Boundless intemperance / In nature is a tyranny... yet there have been / Many that have been so beguiled." To the second (avarice), he attempts further accommodation: "Sticks deeper... yet do not fear; / Scotland hath foisons to fill up your will." To the third (the comprehensive lack of virtue), he breaks:
O Scotland, Scotland!
... Fit to govern!
No, not to live.
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh Scotland, Scotland!
... Fit to rule!
You are unfit to live.
The argument the test produces is exact. Macduff is willing to tolerate a flawed king if Scotland's freedom from Macbeth is at stake. His accommodation of the first two vices is not moral approval but political pragmatism. But Macduff is not willing to accept a comprehensively corrupt king, and his breakdown at the third claim demonstrates that his loyalty is to the kingdom rather than to any heir who promises restoration.
The test reveals what Malcolm needs to know. Macduff is loyal to the concept of Scotland rather than to Malcolm personally. Malcolm's response – "Macduff, this noble passion, / Child of integrity, hath from my soul / Wiped the black scruples, reconciled my thoughts / To thy good truth and honour" – is the formal acknowledgment that the test has been passed. His self-description that follows ("I am yet / Unknown to woman, never was forsworn, / Scarcely have coveted what was mine own") establishes the actual moral profile the fabricated tyrant had concealed.
The deeper critical reading complicates the page's "fitness to be king" framing. Susan Snyder's Folger essay, quoted on this page, observes that "Malcolm takes it all back; but his words once spoken cannot simply be canceled." The audience has, in the course of the test, watched Malcolm describe with unnerving fluency a portrait of monarchical depravity, and that fluency leaves a residue in our perception of him.
The question the scene raises is therefore both about Malcolm's political wisdom (demonstrated) and about the moral cost of the wisdom. A king who can describe vice so effortlessly may be, on Snyder's reading, a king whose later actions we will read with a slightly less innocent eye than we might have done before he spoke.
How does Malcolm contrast with Macbeth in terms of leadership?
The contrast between Malcolm's emerging leadership and Macbeth's actual rule works at every level of the play's political architecture. The differences are exact at each register.
At the level of authority's source, Macbeth's kingship rests on the violence by which he acquired it. Malcolm's rests on the legitimate succession Duncan named in A1S4 ("We will establish our estate upon / Our eldest, Malcolm, whom we name hereafter / The Prince of Cumberland").
At the level of advisory relations, Macbeth seeks counsel from the Witches (his return visit to them in A4S1 is unsolicited by them). Malcolm seeks counsel from the legitimate sources – Macduff in A4S3, Siward and the English court throughout.
At the level of dissent management, Macbeth murders Banquo for his suspicions, attempts to murder Fleance, slaughters Lady Macduff and her children, and by the late play has reduced his thanes to fearful silence. Malcolm tests Macduff with the elaborate A4S3 audition rather than acting on suspicion alone.
At the level of supernatural intervention, Macbeth's reliance on the prophecies of invulnerability ("none of woman born") leads to his catastrophic overconfidence. Malcolm's reliance on natural strategy (the Birnam Wood camouflage) defeats the prophecies' apparent invulnerability through human ingenuity.
At the level of foreign relations, Macbeth has no foreign allies and is, by A5S2, surrounded by Scottish lords who have defected to the English-backed army. Malcolm has secured the support of Edward the Confessor, has gathered Siward and his ten thousand English soldiers, and has welcomed the returning Scottish nobles.
At the level of reward and recognition, Macbeth's rule works by fear and the suppression of his subjects' agency. Malcolm's closing speech immediately rewards the surviving thanes by elevating them to the new English title of "earl" and by inviting them to witness his coronation at Scone.
The argument is one of Shakespeare's clearest pieces of writing on the difference between legitimate and illegitimate political authority. Macbeth's rule is sustained only by the violence that produced it, and it collapses the moment the violence becomes insufficient to maintain the silence on which it depends. Malcolm's authority works on a different foundation. It is sustained by the consensus of those who recognise his legitimate claim, by the alliance with foreign powers who recognise the moral standing his cause carries, and by the reciprocity between the king and the kingdom that Macbeth's rule had violated.
The contrast is one of the play's most direct pieces of Jacobean political writing – the kind of analysis of legitimate kingship that James I, on whose throne the play was performed, would have read as both flattery and political theory.
What is the significance of Malcolm ordering the soldiers to cut down branches from Birnam Wood?
The A5S4 order is one of the most important single instructions in the play. Its significance works at several distinct levels.
At the level of military strategy, the order is conventional camouflage. By approaching Dunsinane behind moving foliage, the English-Scottish army can disguise its true numbers and prevent Macbeth's scouts from accurately reporting on the force assembling against him.
At the level of prophecy fulfillment, the order is the mechanism by which the third of the Witches' apparitions in A4S1 is converted from an impossibility into accomplished fact:
Macbeth shall never vanquished be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Macbeth will not be trounced and overthrown till
Great Birnam wood has come to Dunsinane hill
To fight against him.
The decision Shakespeare makes is to give the fulfillment a human-rational mechanism rather than a supernatural one. The Birnam Wood prophecy is not fulfilled by the trees themselves marching toward Dunsinane in some miraculous procession. It is fulfilled by Malcolm's strategic intelligence, by the soldiers' physical labour of cutting and carrying boughs, and by Macbeth's failure to anticipate that a prophecy phrased in supernatural-impossibility terms might be functionally fulfilled by ordinary military tactics.
The argument is one of the play's most pointed pieces of writing on the relationship between prophecy and human agency. The Witches' prophecies, on the play's evidence, do not work by determining the future but by phrasing it in language whose literal meaning conceals its functional meaning. Macbeth's downfall is therefore engineered not by supernatural forces overriding his free will but by his own misreading of language that was, in retrospect, telling him exactly what would happen.
The same mechanism works with the parallel prophecy that "none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth." The literal statement is true (every man, in the natural course of things, is born of a woman) but the functional meaning is misleading (Macduff's Caesarean delivery exempts him from the literal phrasing).
The Jacobean political context makes the equivocation theme contemporary and charged. The play was written and performed in the years immediately following the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, when the Jesuit doctrine of mental reservation – the theological justification for swearing oaths whose literal truth concealed their functional dishonesty – had been a substantive issue in the 1606 trial of Father Henry Garnet. The play's running theme of equivocation, of which the Birnam Wood prophecy and the "not of woman born" prophecy are the principal pieces of evidence, engages directly with the contemporary political-theological debate.
Malcolm's order is therefore not merely a piece of competent military strategy but an inversion of Macbeth's relationship to the prophecies. Where Macbeth trusts the prophecies' surface meaning and is destroyed by their hidden meaning, Malcolm acts on the available human-rational evidence and inadvertently produces the fulfillment that Macbeth had thought impossible. The contrast captures the play's deeper argument about how the human mind should relate to ambiguous information: with active strategic engagement rather than passive trust in language whose ambiguity is itself the danger.
How does Malcolm handle the news of the murder of Macduff's family?
The A4S3 sequence following Ross's arrival is one of the most carefully constructed pieces of dramatic contrast in the play. Malcolm's responses work as a sustained piece of evidence on his political character.
The set-up is exact. Ross has arrived from Scotland with news of the slaughter of Macduff's family. He prevaricates initially, telling Macduff that his wife and children are "well at peace" (a piece of equivocation that turns out to be literally true only in the most darkly ironic sense). Macduff presses. Ross eventually reveals that "your castle is surprised; your wife and babes / Savagely slaughtered."
The response works from two distinct registers – Macduff's and Malcolm's – and the decision is to give the two responses different functions.
Macduff's response is given the play's most extended piece of emotional registration: the "He has no children" line, the disbelieving "All my pretty ones? / Did you say all?", the demand that he "must also feel it as a man" before he can dispute it.
Malcolm's response works differently. His first line – "Merciful heaven!" – registers the appropriate horror, but his subsequent interventions immediately convert the news from a private grief into a political resource. "What, man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows; / Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak / Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break." The advice is psychologically acute (suppressed grief is more destructive than articulated grief) but its political function is clear. Malcolm is encouraging Macduff to externalise his pain so that it can be directed toward political action.
The instruction that follows makes the political function explicit:
Be this the whetstone of your sword: let grief
Convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it.
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Sharpen your sword upon this stone; let grief
Convert to wrath. Your heart must rage, not break.
The metaphor is exact. Macduff's grief is to be sharpened, not absorbed. It is to become the cutting edge of the vengeance that will, in the play's broader arc, kill Macbeth. Malcolm's later line – "Dispute it like a man" – completes the argument. The proper response to catastrophic loss, in the political register Malcolm is constructing, is the immediate conversion of grief into military energy.
The question the scene raises is whether Malcolm's response is politically wise or emotionally cold. The page-level reading is the more sympathetic. Malcolm is doing the necessary work of converting a personal tragedy into the engine of legitimate political restoration, and the response demonstrates his fitness for the kingship that depends on exactly this capacity to organise others' losses into collective political action.
The complicating reading is more pointed. Malcolm's instinct is to instrumentalise grief before Macduff has had the space to feel it, and Macduff's gentle correction – "I shall do so; / But I must also feel it as a man" – is the play's quiet evidence that Malcolm's political register is, at this moment, insufficient on its own.
The scene works as the test by which Malcolm learns that the king-becoming graces include patience and emotional acknowledgement as well as the strategic conversion of feeling into action. By the play's end, Malcolm has, on the evidence of his closing speech, absorbed the lesson Macduff has taught him. The legitimate king must be capable of both registers, and the closing invitation to Scone is delivered with the formal courtesy that earlier A4S3 lines had not yet learned to produce.
What role does the English King Edward the Confessor play in Malcolm's story?
Edward the Confessor's offstage presence in the play is one of Shakespeare's most carefully constructed pieces of foil-building. The role he serves works at several distinct registers.
The biographical basis is exact. Edward the Confessor (c.1003-1066) was the king of England at the time the historical Malcolm sought refuge from Macbeth's rule. His court served, in the Holinshed source, as the location from which Malcolm's eventual restoration was organised. Shakespeare's decision to keep Edward offstage – he is described but never appears – is itself an argument. Edward works in the play not as a dramatic character but as the embodiment of an ideal of legitimate kingship that Macbeth's tyranny has displaced.
The A4S3 description Malcolm offers is the play's most direct piece of evidence on Edward's symbolic function:
A most miraculous work in this good king;
Which often, since my here-remain in England,
I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven,
Himself best knows: but strangely-visited people,
All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,
The mere despair of surgery, he cures,
Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,
Put on with holy prayers...
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
This good king can perform some miracles,
And many times, since I've been here in England,
I've seen him do it. How he uses heaven,
Only he knows. But folk with strange conditions,
All swollen, ulcerous, awful to look at,
Which surgeons do despair at, he can cure,
By hanging, round their necks, a golden coin,
That he puts on with prayers.
The reference is to the "king's touch" – the medieval practice by which the English (and French) monarchs were believed to cure scrofula ("the king's Evil") by laying hands on the afflicted.
The contrast with Macbeth is exact. Where Macbeth's tyranny has produced a kingdom characterised by physical disease (the Scotland Macduff describes in A4S3 as "weep[ing], bleed[ing], and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds"), Edward's reign is characterised by the king's literal capacity to heal disease. The argument is direct. Macbeth's illegitimate authority brings disease. Edward's legitimate authority brings healing. The contrast establishes the moral universe within which Malcolm's restoration will work.
The Jacobean political context makes the reference contemporary and charged. James I, on whose throne the play was performed, had inherited the king's touch ceremony from his English predecessors and was, at the time of the play's composition, ambivalently engaging with the practice. The reference to Edward's "heavenly gift of prophecy" – Malcolm's continued description of Edward's "sundry blessings" – extends the contrast. Edward is a king whose authority derives from divine grace rather than from violent seizure, and his court is the location at which Malcolm acquires the moral standing that his subsequent military campaign will deploy.
The deeper function is that Edward works as the play's invisible counterweight to Macbeth. The play depicts only Scotland's deterioration. It does not depict England's flourishing. But the descriptions Malcolm offers establish that the alternative model exists, that legitimate kingship is functionally possible, and that the restoration Malcolm leads is not a utopian fantasy but a return to a political register the play has, through its descriptions of Edward's court, already shown to be real and proximate.
Edward's role is therefore that of the moral and political guarantor whose existence makes Malcolm's restoration intellectually credible. Without Edward, the play's resolution would be merely the substitution of one Scottish king for another. With Edward, the resolution is the realignment of Scottish politics with the broader Christian-monarchical order that Macbeth's tyranny had ruptured.
What does Malcolm's final speech signify for the future of Scotland?
The A5S8 closing speech is one of the most important single passages in the play. Malcolm's articulation of the new political order works at several distinct registers.
The arrangement is exact. Macduff has just entered with Macbeth's severed head and proclaimed Malcolm king ("Hail, king! For so thou art: behold, where stands / The usurper's cursed head: the time is free"). The assembled thanes have, by their cry of "Hail, King of Scotland!," confirmed the accession. The floor is open for Malcolm's first speech as monarch.
The first decision Malcolm makes is to reward the loyal nobles – elevating the Scottish thanedoms to the new English title of "earl," a structural realignment with the English political vocabulary and a piece of formal recognition that the restoration has been accomplished with English support. The historical fact (the title "earl" was indeed introduced into Scottish usage by Malcolm III Canmore, the play's historical model) gives the moment a specific Jacobean register.
The second decision is the recall of the exiled friends. "What's more to do, / Which would be planted newly with the time, / As calling home our exiled friends abroad, / That fled the snares of watchful tyranny." The "watchful tyranny" is exact. Macbeth's rule had operated through a network of spies and informers; Malcolm's reign will be characterised by the reversal – the exiles return, the watchers are dismissed, the court becomes safe again.
The third decision is the public commitment to justice, in which Malcolm names Macbeth and Lady Macbeth with the formal denunciations that establish the moral framework within which the previous reign will be remembered:
Producing forth the cruel ministers
Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen,
Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands
Took off her life...
(Act 5, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And seeking justice for the cruel agents
Of this dead butcher and his wretched queen,
Who, it's assumed, by her own violent hand
Took her own life...
The phrases "dead butcher" and "fiend-like queen" are the formal historical record being established in real time. The previous reign is being named as illegitimate, criminal, and over. Lady Macbeth's death is being attributed to "self and violent hands" – the official version of events the new regime is committing to.
The closing invitation – "So thanks to all at once and to each one, / Whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone" – completes the arc the play has been tracing since A1S2. The Scotland that began with a coronation at Scone (Duncan's, implicit in the political background of the play's opening) and that was disrupted by Macbeth's offstage coronation will end with a new coronation at Scone, publicly announced, witnessed by the surviving thanes, supported by English military power, and grounded in the legitimate succession Duncan named in A1S4. The political order is being reconstituted on the foundation that Macbeth's regicide had violated.
The deeper critical question, which Susan Snyder's Folger reading raises, is whether the restoration is morally as well as politically complete. Malcolm's A4S3 self-accusations – the fluent description of monarchical depravity he produced in order to test Macduff – leave a residue in our perception of him that the closing speech's formal courtesy does not entirely dispel. The page's "ideal king" reading is the more sympathetic. The Snyder-style reading is the more pointed. The play permits both, and the closing speech's completeness works against the audience's accumulated knowledge of the political register in which the new king has demonstrated himself to be uncommonly fluent.
