How does Shakespeare present Macbeth's ambition in the play?
Key techniques
Shakespeare presents Macbeth's ambition not as a noble drive but as a contagious moral disease that infects, isolates and finally consumes him. Written in 1606 for the Jacobean court of King James I - a monarch who survived the Gunpowder Plot only a year earlier - the play stages ambition as the very impulse that destroys the Great Chain of Being. Through soliloquy, equivocal imagery and the collapsing pentameter of Macbeth's later speeches, Shakespeare warns an audience steeped in the doctrine of divine right that ambition, untethered from loyalty, is a self-cannibalising force.
From the moment the witches hail him as the one 'that shalt be king hereafter', ambition is presented as something planted from outside but eagerly cultivated within. Macbeth's aside that the thought 'doth unfix my hair' uses visceral somatic imagery: ambition is felt physically before it is reasoned morally. The verb 'unfix' is telling - it suggests dislocation, a mind being prised loose from its natural order. For a Jacobean audience who believed kings were ordained by God, Macbeth's bodily reaction dramatises the cosmic wrongness of even contemplating regicide. Shakespeare therefore shows ambition entering Macbeth not as choice but as temptation, complicating any simple reading of him as villain.
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