Macbeth: a study of illegitimate power
The play Macbeth opens with a brave and successful soldier who hears a prophecy that he will become king. Tempted by this promise, and urged on by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the throne. What follows is not glory but fear, suspicion, and growing violence. This swift movement from hero to tyrant is enough to reveal the play’s political core.
The play exposes what happens when power is taken unlawfully and sustained by fear. Shakespeare is not simply telling a story about ambition. He is examining power seized without moral or lawful right. Macbeth does not become king through consent, inheritance, or justice. He becomes king through murder. From that moment, his rule is unstable because it rests on a crime.
Once power is gained illegitimately, it cannot remain at peace. Macbeth understands this instinctively. When he kills Duncan, he does not remove danger; he creates it. Before the murder, the problem is simple, Duncan is alive. After the murder, the problem multiplies. Anyone alive can become a witness, a rival, or an avenger. The crime has no natural stopping point.
Killing once destroys Macbeth’s sense of safety because it destroys legitimacy. A lawful king can sleep because his position is protected by custom, consent, and order. An unlawful king has none of these protections. He knows, even if he never admits it openly, that others now have as much right to remove him as he had to remove Duncan. His thinking shifts from ruling to surviving.
Because Banquo is alive, knows the prophecy, and has a son, he becomes a threat to Macbeth’s insecure rule. With Fleance’s escape, the future itself turns threatening, and when Macduff refuses to attend the coronation, he too is marked for destruction. This is not madness but the cold logic of illegitimate power.
Shakespeare makes a grim political point here. Once authority is gained through violence, peace becomes impossible without more violence. The ruler cannot stop killing because stopping would require trust, and trust is exactly what illegitimacy destroys. That is why Macbeth admits, “I am in blood stepped in so far,” a confession of entrapment, where moving forward is terrible and turning back is impossible.
The play also shows how fear replaces trust under such rule. Macbeth governs Scotland through terror, not loyalty. People obey him, but they do not respect him. Nobles speak cautiously, conceal their thoughts, and wait for a chance to escape. A ruler without legitimacy must watch everyone, because he knows he deserves to be overthrown.
Language plays a crucial political role in this decay. Macbeth speaks of honour and duty even as he commits crimes. He performs the role of a good king while acting like a tyrant. Shakespeare suggests that when power is corrupt, language becomes dishonest. Words are used to hide reality rather than reveal it, and the gap between speech and action becomes a clear sign of political collapse.
Through Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare presents power that rejects moral limits. She believes hesitation is weakness and morality an obstacle. Yet her breakdown shows that such thinking destroys not only society but the individual. Illegitimate power demands emotional numbness, and human beings cannot survive in that condition for long.
The end of the play does not celebrate violence. Macbeth’s death restores order, but at a heavy cost. Scotland is left wounded, and conscience cannot be instantly repaired. Shakespeare makes it clear that while tyranny can be ended, the damage it causes does not disappear easily.
This is why Macbeth remains politically important today. The play is not about medieval Scotland alone. It speaks to any system where power is seized unlawfully and maintained through fear: once legitimacy is lost, fear replaces trust and violence becomes habitual.
