Grade 9 Essay: Macbeth – Theme of Good and Evil
Sarah O'Rourke - Mar 10, 2026
Read the real student essay that scored 30/30 for IGCSE English Literature (Edexcel 4ET1).
Video lesson
How is the theme of good and evil presented in Macbeth?
Written by Rachel C – shared with permission.
Throughout Macbeth, a tragedy written by William Shakespeare, good and evil are presented not as diametric opposites but as coexistent and even overlapping forces, suggesting that the potential for evil exists in everyone and may even be disguised by the appearance of righteousness. The Witches, Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth can all be seen as fusions of good and evil, and even Macduff, their unambiguously good counterpart, has the capacity to do harm.
The Witches and their prophecies exemplify this confusion of morality, foretelling that “fair is foul, and foul is fair”. This is an obvious paradox, representing a microcosm of the entire play: Macbeth is initially “fair” but turns out to be “foul”. The Witches themselves are “foul”, emissaries of the literal Hecate, but the prophecies they deliver are good, turning out to be accurate and so “fair”. Additionally, the phrase is structured symmetrically, reflecting how “fair” and “foul” – good and evil – are closely related and two sides of the same coin. Witches as a concept are unambiguously evil, with the commonly held belief in Jacobean times being that they were sent by the Devil to do harm unto the mortal world. King James I himself, the ruling monarch at the time of writing, was highly afraid of witches, even writing an explanatory text called Daemonologie warning against them and other supernatural occurrences. Thus, the Witches represent how good can come from evil places, and how something as sacred as kingship can be granted by witches.
The opposite side of this, “fair is foul”, can be seen in Macbeth. When first describing him in Act 1 Scene 2, Duncan calls him a “valiant cousin” in praise. The word choice of “cousin” indicates how he feels a familial closeness and trust in his Thane, while the adjective “valiant” shows that he has absolute faith in Macbeth’s moral goodness and incorruptibility. This is contrasted with what Macbeth gains this praise for: “[unseaming]” an opponent “from the nave to the chops”. Perhaps hypocritically, murder in most contexts is viewed as evil except when performed in service of king and country. The verb “unseam’d” is dehumanizing, likening humans to dolls or fabric with seams that can come undone rather than flesh and blood, as well as reducing the horror of the deed by making it sound mundane rather than gory. This demonstrates how Macbeth’s “[valour]” in the opening act is borne of and tied to his proclivity for violence and evil. Although vanquishing enemies on the battlefield is fundamentally no different from killing in cold blood, it is on one hand lauded and on the other demeaned; Shakespeare shows that perhaps the traditional perception of masculine and honourable violence as acceptable is unreasonable.
Another character within whom there exists a dichotomy of good and evil is Lady Macbeth. She transgresses myriad conventions of the time, asking the spirits to “unsex” her. She, as a relatively masculine woman who held power in her marriage, would have been seen as highly unconventional for the time or possibly even evil. To lack “[sex]” would have been to step beyond norms of gender and sex thought to be dictated by God; it also associates her with the androgyny and genderfluidity of the Witches, who “should be women” and yet have “beards”. While the Witches wear these evil attributes on the outside, Lady Macbeth’s are internal, both literally because she has been unsexed and her “milk” taken for “gall”, and figuratively in that she does so in order to commit regicide. It may be seen as a leap of logic to associate Lady Macbeth so heavily with the Witches, but during the Renaissance period witch hunts, all a woman had to do to be accused of witchcraft was to be unmarried, childless, or even simply ugly, making the jump from human to supernatural evil simple.
However, in equal measure, Lady Macbeth can also be seen as a “fair” character. She is a loving wife who supports her husband’s ambitions and simply acts as a “spur” rather than an instigator for anything truly evil, only wishing to help Macbeth “catch the nearest way” as his “dearest partner of greatness”. This would have been seen as the ultimate duty for the traditional Jacobean wife – helping her husband advance in whatever way possible and serving as a vehicle for his desires and dreams rather than possessing any of her own. Even her powerful statement that she would have “dash’d the brains out” of her baby had she “so sworn [to Macbeth]” is more reflective of her devotion to him than any intrinsic ambition or desire to do violence. Her willingness to break certain social conventions, like the expectation that women should be meek and nurturing, is only in service to Macbeth – she “[catches] the nearest way” to his immoral desire for kingship and does not possess any ulterior motive beyond helping her beloved husband. Thus, it is unclear whether the character of Lady Macbeth is good or evil, traditional or transgressive, wife or witch. In being the traditional wife, she becomes complicit in a murder; in being good, she becomes evil.
One of the only unambiguously good characters is Macduff, who refuses to “contradict thyself” even when asked to. The usage of “contradict” suggests not only that he is unwilling to lie and deceive as the Macbeths do readily, but that deception goes against his very nature and he is unable to do so. However, despite his goodness and loyalty, Macduff ends the play by beheading the “butcher” Macbeth, just as Macbeth starts the play by beheading the previously traitorous Thane of Cawdor. These events mirror each other and hold significance as the beginning and end of the play – might Macduff, the Thane of Fife, also grow ambitious and redirect his violence towards less honourable ends? Although he is good now, Macduff easily has the capacity to do evil just as Macbeth did, inviting the question of whether Macduff is truly “fair” and what that could mean when “valour” can still lead to evil. Additionally, even Duncan, whose “virtues” are compared to “angels”, ordered a war against the traitor and caused copious bloodshed, though he did not carry it out himself.
In conclusion, Shakespeare presents good and evil as non-absolutes which may emerge from and stimulate each other. The notion of absolute morality is obscured – all characters possess good and evil from certain points of view, though one interpretation would doubtless have been dominant for the pious Jacobean audience. Ultimately, it is not any objective paradigm but the audience’s moral indictment that determines how the characters are judged.
