Fate vs Free Will
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: Whether the Witches' prophecies cause the events of the play or merely predict them – and whether Macbeth chooses his crimes or is driven to them by fate.
- Key Characters: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Banquo, The Witches, King Duncan.
- The Core Tension: The Witches tell the truth, but the murders are Macbeth's own. The prophecies are real; the interpretations are his.
- Key Manifestations: The greeting on the heath in Act 1; Macbeth's musing on chance; the second set of prophecies in Act 4; the equivocation of "none of woman born"; the moving of Birnam Wood.
- Famous Quote:
If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir.
(Act 1, Scene 3) - The Outcome: Every prophecy comes true, exactly as spoken and nothing like Macbeth expected. He dies having chosen each step that the Witches only ever foretold.
The Greeting on the Heath
The theme begins with three lines of greeting. Macbeth and Banquo meet the Witches returning from battle, and the Witches name Macbeth three times – as he already is, as he is about to become, and as he will be. The third title is the one that detonates.
Original
All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, thane of Glamis!
All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, thane of Cawdor!
All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
All hail, Macbeth! Hail to you, Thane of Glamis!
All hail, Macbeth! Hail to you, thane of Cawdor!
All hail, Macbeth! You'll be the king in future!
What the Witches actually say is worth weighing. They make no command. They issue no instruction. They do not tell Macbeth to kill Duncan, or to do anything at all. They announce three facts and vanish. The first is already true. The second becomes true within minutes, when the king's messengers arrive to name Macbeth Thane of Cawdor. The third hangs in the air, unexplained.
The play's whole argument about fate and free will turns on the gap between the second prophecy and the third. The thaneship of Cawdor arrives without Macbeth lifting a finger – it is delivered to him as news. If kingship works the same way, then Macbeth need do nothing. But the Witches never say how the crown will come, and into that silence Macbeth pours his own imagination. The prophecy is a fact. The murder is an interpretation – and the interpretation is his.
The Two Readings of a Prophecy
Macbeth's first long reflection on the prophecy stages both readings of fate at once. He stands apart, half-hearing the congratulations around him, and tries to work out what the Witches' words actually oblige him to do.
Original
Two truths are told,
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme. – I thank you, gentlemen.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The witches told two truths,
But they're just warm-ups to the main event
Whereby I will be king. I thank you, gentlemen.
Two of the three prophecies have already proved true, and Macbeth reads them as a "prologue" – a beginning that guarantees what follows. The metaphor is theatrical: the swelling act, the imperial theme, the sense of a play already written and now merely being performed. If the script is fixed, Macbeth is an actor, not an author. He is being carried toward the crown by a story he did not write.
But the same speech contains the seed of the opposite reading. A few lines later, Macbeth's "horrible imaginings" turn to murder, and he recognises that the thought is his own. The Witches said nothing about killing. The "supernatural soliciting" cannot, he admits, be straightforwardly good or ill. If the crown were truly fated, no action would be required – and yet his mind has already leapt to the dagger. Fate has handed him a fact; he is the one converting it into a plan.
The Argument for Doing Nothing
The clearest statement of the case for free will in the whole play is, paradoxically, an argument for inaction. Alone, weighing the murder, Macbeth reaches the logical conclusion of his own theatrical metaphor. If fate wants him crowned, fate can manage it.
Original
If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If fate will make me king, then fate might crown me
Without my intervention.
This is the road not taken. Macbeth sees it clearly. If the prophecy is genuine fate, then it needs no help from him – the crown will arrive as surely as the thaneship of Cawdor did, delivered by events he does not control. The honest implication of believing in fate is to wait. To trust the prophecy is to do nothing and let it unfold.
A few lines later Macbeth says it again, resolving to leave the outcome to time.
Original
Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
What happens now,
The worst will pass, for time rolls anyhow.
The tragedy is that Macbeth does not take this road. He chooses, with prompting from Lady Macbeth, to "stir" – to murder Duncan and seize what the Witches said would come to him anyway. The play's sharpest irony is that the prophecy would have been fulfilled regardless. By acting to secure his fate, Macbeth commits the crime that destroys him. He cannot let fate be fate; he has to become its instrument, and the instrument is a knife.
The Equivocation of the Fiends
In Act 4, Macbeth returns to the Witches, and now he is the one seeking them out. They give him a second set of prophecies, and these are the ones that seal his confidence – and his doom. The most important is an apparent guarantee of invulnerability.
Original
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Of powerful men, for none born by a woman
Will harm Macbeth.
Macbeth hears a promise of safety. What he is actually given is a riddle. "None of woman born" sounds like "no man," and Macbeth treats it as such – it is why he laughs at Macduff on the battlefield, certain he cannot be touched. The prophecy is true to the letter and false to the meaning he assigns it. Macduff was "from his mother's womb / Untimely ripped" – born by caesarean section, and therefore, in the prophecy's grim wordplay, not "of woman born."
This is the trap the Witches set throughout the play: they tell the exact truth in language built to be misread. The prophecies do not lie. Macbeth's interpretations do the lying for them. He hears guarantees where the Witches have planted conditions, and he builds his whole strategy on a reading he wanted to be true. The same pattern governs the prophecy that he is safe until Birnam Wood marches on Dunsinane – an impossibility, until Malcolm's soldiers cut branches for camouflage and the wood appears to move. Fate keeps every promise. It is Macbeth who misunderstands the terms.
"Speaking strictly we must affirm that he was tempted only by himself. He speaks indeed of their 'supernatural soliciting'; but in fact they did not solicit. They merely announced events."
— A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904
Key Quotes on Fate vs Free Will
Quote 1
All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
All hail, Macbeth! You'll be the king in future!
Quote Analysis: This is the line that starts everything, and its grammar matters. The Witches say "shalt be" – not "should be," not "must make yourself." It is a flat prediction, with no instruction attached. They do not tell Macbeth to act; they simply state a future fact. The whole tragedy grows from what Macbeth decides this sentence requires of him. A patient man would hear a promise and wait. Macbeth hears a promise and reaches for a knife. The prophecy is identical in both cases; the response is entirely his.
If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If fate will make me king, then fate might crown me
Without my intervention.
Quote Analysis: Here Macbeth states the case against his own crime before he commits it. The logic is impeccable: if fate has decreed the crown, fate does not need his help. The thaneship of Cawdor proved exactly this – it arrived unbidden, delivered by the king's messengers. To believe the prophecy is genuine is to be able to wait. The line is the play's quiet alternative to everything that follows. Macbeth knows the patient road exists. He sees it, names it, and walks past it.
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Of powerful men, for none born by a woman
Will harm Macbeth.
Quote Analysis: The second-act prophecies work like locks built to be picked by the wrong key. "None of woman born" is true and treacherous at once. Macbeth hears "no man can kill me" and becomes reckless; the words actually leave a precise gap – the man not born in the ordinary way. Fate is not deceiving Macbeth here. It is letting him deceive himself. The prophecy keeps its word to the letter while quietly reserving the one exception that will destroy him.
And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense;
(Act 5, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And I do not believe those witches now
As they prevaricate with double meanings
Quote Analysis: At the very end, with Macduff before him, Macbeth finally understands the game. The Witches "palter" – they equivocate, telling the truth in a "double sense" so that every promise hides its own reversal. The bitter recognition is that he was never lied to. He was given true words and trusted his own reading of them. The "juggling fiends" kept their word; Macbeth kept faith with an interpretation. By the time he sees the trick, the trap has already closed.
Key Takeaways
- The Witches Predict, They Do Not Command: The prophecies are statements of fact, not instructions. Nothing the Witches say tells Macbeth to murder anyone. The murder is his idea.
- Macbeth Names the Patient Road and Refuses It: "If chance will have me king... without my stir" is Macbeth admitting that, if fate is real, he need do nothing. He acts anyway, and the action is the crime.
- The Prophecies Are True and Misread: Every prediction comes true exactly as spoken. Macbeth's confidence rests on interpretations he wanted to believe – "no man," not "none of woman born."
- Fate and Free Will Are Not Opposites Here: The play holds both at once. The future is foretold, but Macbeth chooses the road to it. He is the instrument of a fate that never needed him.
Study Questions and Analysis
Do the Witches cause Macbeth's actions or merely predict them?
This is the central question of the theme, and the play is carefully built to keep it open. The textual evidence cuts in two directions at once.
On one side, the Witches never command anything. When they greet Macbeth on the heath, they state three facts and disappear. No instruction to kill is given, hinted, or implied.
All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
All hail, Macbeth! You'll be the king in future!
A. C. Bradley, in his 1904 Shakespearean Tragedy, made the definitive case for this reading. Bradley argued that the Witches "did not solicit" – they "merely announced events" – and that the idea of fulfilling the prophecy by murder "was entirely his own." On Bradley's account, the temptation was already inside Macbeth; the Witches kindled an ambition that was waiting to be lit. The murder is a choice, and the responsibility is Macbeth's.
The counter-reading takes the supernatural more seriously. The Witches are demonstrably real – the Cawdor prophecy comes true within minutes, on stage, before Macbeth has done anything. They know the future. If they can see it, the future is fixed, and Macbeth is walking a path already laid. On this view, the prophecies do not cause events so much as confirm that events are already settled.
Marjorie Garber, in her 2004 Shakespeare After All, reframes the question through the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy. The prediction does not need supernatural force to come true; it works by changing the behaviour of the person who hears it. Macbeth is told he will be king, and that telling is exactly what drives him to make it happen. The prophecy is true because it was spoken – it manufactures its own fulfilment.
The play declines to settle the matter. It gives the Witches genuine foreknowledge and gives Macbeth a genuine choice, and it lets the two facts sit together without resolving the contradiction. The audience is asked to feel the pull of both readings rather than to pick one.
Does Macbeth choose his crimes, or is he fated to commit them?
The play's strongest evidence for choice is that Macbeth himself names the alternative. Before he murders Duncan, he reasons through the logic of fate and reaches the conclusion that, if the prophecy is genuine, he need do nothing at all.
If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If fate will make me king, then fate might crown me
Without my intervention.
This is decisive. A truly fated man would not need to weigh the option of waiting, because there would be no option. The fact that Macbeth can imagine doing nothing – and can see that fate would still deliver the crown – proves that the action he eventually takes is a choice, not a compulsion. He murders Duncan despite knowing he does not have to.
A. C. Bradley's 1904 reading rests on exactly this point. For Bradley, the prophecies do not compel; they kindle a pre-existing ambition. The Witches put nothing into Macbeth that was not already there, and at every stage he remains free to accept or resist. The slaughter of Macduff's wife and children, Bradley noted, is an act for which the Witches "gave him not a hint" – the clearest proof that the responsibility for the killing is Macbeth's alone.
There is, however, a darker reading available, and G. Wilson Knight's 1930 The Wheel of Fire gestures towards it. Knight reads Macbeth as a play saturated with evil as an almost physical atmosphere – a "nightmare" world in which the protagonist is engulfed by forces larger than his individual will. On this account, the Witches are less tempters than embodiments of a cosmic disorder that closes around Macbeth and carries him. The choice is real, but it is made inside a moral universe already tilted towards the abyss.
The richest reading holds both. Macbeth chooses every crime, and the play never lets him off that hook. But the choices are made under a pressure – the prophecy, Lady Macbeth's goading, the atmosphere of the heath – that the play presents as genuinely supernatural. The freedom is real and the pressure is real, and the tragedy lives in the space between them.
How does equivocation connect the prophecies to free will?
Equivocation – saying something true in a way designed to mislead – is the mechanism by which the Witches keep their promises while destroying Macbeth. It is also the device that quietly proves the murders are his responsibility, because the misreadings that doom him are all his own.
The Act 4 prophecies are the clearest case. Macbeth hears a guarantee of safety where the Witches have planted a riddle.
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.
Macbeth hears this as an absolute guarantee – woods do not walk, so he is safe forever. The words say something more precise: he is safe until a specific, apparently impossible condition is met. When Malcolm's army cuts branches from Birnam Wood for camouflage, the impossible happens, and the prophecy is fulfilled to the letter. The Witches never lied. They told the exact truth in language built to be misheard.
Marjorie Garber's 2004 Shakespeare After All places equivocation at the heart of the play's design. Garber connects it to the contemporary doctrine of equivocation associated with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 – the idea that one could speak technically true words while deliberately deceiving a listener. The Witches are master equivocators, and Macbeth is their perfect victim because he supplies the false meaning himself. They keep "the word of promise to our ear," as Macbeth realises too late, and "break it to our hope."
This is where equivocation meets free will. The prophecies are fixed and true; the interpretations are Macbeth's, and the interpretations are free. He chooses to hear "none of woman born" as "no man." He chooses to treat a walking wood as an impossibility rather than a warning. At every turn he reads the prophecy in the way that flatters his ambition, and those readings – not the prophecies themselves – are what kill him. Fate writes true sentences. Macbeth writes the fatal meanings.
What does "none of woman born" reveal about fate in the play?
The "none of woman born" prophecy is the play's most concentrated study of how a true prediction can become a fatal trap. It reveals that fate, in Macbeth, is not a force that controls events but a set of true statements whose meaning is left dangerously open.
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Of powerful men, for none born by a woman
Will harm Macbeth.
On its surface the line is an invincibility charm. Everyone is born of woman, so no one can harm Macbeth. He believes it completely, and it is why he faces Macduff on the battlefield with contempt rather than fear. The prophecy makes him reckless precisely because he trusts it.
The reversal turns on a technicality of birth. Macduff reveals that he was "from his mother's womb / Untimely ripped" – delivered by caesarean rather than natural birth. In the prophecy's pitiless logic, that means he is not "of woman born," and the one exception the words quietly reserved is standing in front of Macbeth with a sword. The prophecy was true the entire time. It simply did not mean what Macbeth needed it to mean.
Stephen Greenblatt's 1993 essay 'Shakespeare Bewitched' situates this kind of supernatural prediction within the cultural anxiety of Shakespeare's England around witchcraft and human agency. The Jacobean audience lived with a genuine, legally enforced fear of witches – King James himself had written a treatise on demonology – and the play exploits that anxiety. The prophecies feel powerful because the period believed such things had real power. Yet Greenblatt's wider argument, developed in his 1988 Shakespearean Negotiations, is that the theatre channels these social energies rather than simply endorsing them: the play stages the dread of supernatural control while quietly locating the agency in Macbeth's own reading of the signs.
The deeper revelation is about the nature of fate itself. The prophecy does not make Macduff kill Macbeth. It does not reach into events and arrange them. It simply states a truth that was always going to hold, and lets Macbeth walk into it through his own confident misreading. Fate here is not a puppeteer. It is an oracle that never lies and never explains, and the freedom – and the doom – lies in what the hearer does with its words.
Is Macbeth a victim of fate or the author of his own downfall?
The play is constructed to make both verdicts defensible, and the most honest answer is that Macbeth is both at once – which is the particular shape of his tragedy.
The case for victim is the supernatural's evident reality. The Witches genuinely know the future; the Cawdor prophecy proves it on stage within minutes. Macbeth is targeted by powers he did not summon and cannot understand, working on him through prophecy, atmosphere, and the equivocations that lead him to his death. He does not invent the Witches. They come to him.
The case for author is stronger, and the play weights it deliberately. Macbeth reasons his way to the conclusion that he need not act, and acts anyway. He returns to the Witches a second time, seeking them out rather than being ambushed. And, as A. C. Bradley observed in 1904, his cruellest act – the murder of Lady Macduff and her children – is one the Witches never mentioned at all. By that point Macbeth is generating his own atrocities, with no prophecy to point to. The final recognition is his own bitter admission that he was undone by his own credulity.
And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense;
(Act 5, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And I do not believe those witches now
As they prevaricate with double meanings
The word Macbeth reaches for is "believed." He was not forced; he believed. The fiends "palter" – they equivocate – but paltering only works on someone who chooses to trust. Macbeth's tragedy is not that he was made to kill, but that he believed a set of true words in the most self-serving way available, and built a reign of murder on that belief.
G. Wilson Knight's 1930 The Wheel of Fire offers the counterweight. Knight reads the play as a descent into a world where evil operates as an enveloping force, and on his account Macbeth is less a free agent than a man swallowed by a darkness larger than himself. The play, for Knight, dramatises evil as atmosphere as much as choice. Held against Bradley, this produces the play's enduring tension: a man fully responsible for choices made inside a universe that seems designed to damn him. Both readings are true, and the play refuses to dissolve either into the other.
How does Banquo's response to the prophecy contrast with Macbeth's?
Banquo is the play's controlled experiment in free will. He hears the same Witches, on the same heath, in the same moment, and receives a prophecy just as extraordinary as Macbeth's – his descendants will be kings. His response is the road Macbeth chose not to take, and the contrast is the play's clearest argument that the prophecy compels nothing.
Where Macbeth is immediately "rapt" and turns to "horrible imaginings," Banquo is wary from the first. He warns Macbeth on the spot that the powers of darkness often tell small truths to lure men into great ruin – that the Witches may "win us with honest trifles, to betray's / In deepest consequence." He suspects equivocation before Macbeth has even begun to interpret. The same words, heard by two men, produce caution in one and murder in the other. The difference cannot be in the prophecy, because the prophecy is identical. It can only be in the men.
Banquo is given the same temptation and never acts on it. His prophecy is, if anything, more passive – he does nothing to make his descendants kings, and the play implies they will reign regardless. He becomes, in effect, the living proof of "if chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me, without my stir." He leaves fate to fate, and the play treats his restraint as the morally intact response. He is murdered not for anything he does, but for what the prophecy says about his line – a victim of Macbeth's choices, not of his own.
The contrast sharpens the theme to a point. Two men, one prophecy, two responses. If the Witches' words determined behaviour, Banquo and Macbeth would behave alike. They do not. The prophecy supplies the temptation; the character supplies the choice. Banquo's caution is the measure of how free Macbeth's crimes really were.
Why is the moving of Birnam Wood the perfect ending for this theme?
The march of Birnam Wood on Dunsinane is the theme's resolution staged as a single image: a prophecy that seemed impossible coming true through ordinary human action, fulfilling fate to the letter while exposing Macbeth's misreading of it.
Macbeth had taken the prophecy as a guarantee of permanence. Forests do not walk; therefore he is safe forever. The confidence is total, and it is built entirely on his own interpretation of the words.
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 fulfilment is almost mundane. Malcolm orders each soldier to cut a branch and carry it as camouflage, and the advancing army looks, from Dunsinane's walls, like a moving wood. There is nothing supernatural in the mechanism at all – no magic makes the trees walk. Human soldiers, making a tactical decision, accomplish what Macbeth thought impossible. The prophecy comes true through free human action, not through any force of fate reaching into the world.
This is why it perfectly closes the theme. Throughout the play the question has been whether the prophecies cause events or merely describe them, and the wood gives the answer: they describe. The prediction did not animate the forest. It stated a true outcome and waited for human beings to bring it about – Malcolm's strategy, Macduff's birth, Macbeth's own crimes. Fate, in Macbeth, never lifts a finger. It speaks truly and lets free agents do the rest.
The final irony belongs to Macbeth, who grasps it only as the trap closes. The prophecies were "juggling fiends" that "palter with us in a double sense" – true to the ear, ruinous to the hope. He was never the victim of a lie. He was the victim of his own confident reading of the truth, and the moving wood is the moment the universe collects on the difference. Every prophecy is kept. Macbeth dies because he mistook what keeping them would mean.
