This is an excellent question as this play presents us
with a man that is essentially tortured by visions of the future that deliberately
mislead him and give him false security. The witches' predictions come to plague Macbeth
as a character. You might find it worthwhile to analyse one prophecy in particular from
Act IV scene 1, when Macbeth goes out to find the witches and demands the "truth",
whatever the destruction that may befall the
world.
However, it is important to note how the truth that
is revealed here, as in other places in the play, plays with his insecurities and leads
him on into ever greater acts of darkness and evil. When the third apparition comes,
described as "Third Apparition, a child crowned, with a tree in his hand" in the stage
directions, Macbeth responds:
What is this,
That
rises like the issue of a king;
And wears upon his baby
brown the round
And top of
sovereignty?
It is important
to note that the crown not only completes and rounds, as with the perfection of a
circle, the claim to sovereignty, but it is figuratively the summit of his ambitious
hopes. Macbeth can thus interpret this sign in terms of his own success in keeping the
crown and producing an heir, though the significance of the tree is explained by the
third apparition itself:
Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no
care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers
are:
Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be,
until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane
hill
Shall come against
him.
Therefore the tree
represents the danger in the future prophecy of Dunsinane wood moving against Macbeth
and attacking him - the prophecy that becomes terrifyingly true in Act V. Note how this
prophecy gives Macbeth false hope and confidence - it is as if the witches are
deliberately playing with Macbeth's mind, giving him faith and hope, yet knowing that he
will be deposed and the future that Macbeth is clinging on to will come to naught. Thus
the confidence and faith Macbeth has in the prophecies is a major part of his
downfall.
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