Ambition vs. Fate: The Competing Forces in Macbeth

Introduction

Shakespeare's Macbeth (c. 1606) is a tragedy structured around the collision of two rival forces: the autonomous human will to seize power and the seemingly predetermined fate that shapes — or appears to shape — the hero's destruction. These forces do not operate in isolation; they produce guilt, corrupt ambition, and a crisis of moral agency that critics and audiences have debated for four centuries. At the heart of the play is an arguable thesis: although Macbeth stages ambition and fate as equally potent, a close reading of Shakespeare's dramatic choices reveals that ambition functions as the play's primary engine, while fate serves as its rhetorical cover — a story Macbeth tells himself to avoid accountability. The guilt that follows every murder confirms this hierarchy: fate does not feel guilty, but ambition does.

Ambition as the Engine of Destruction

Ambition in Macbeth is not a background motive but a force that Shakespeare renders viscerally and deliberately. Before the witches ever speak, Macbeth has already imagined murdering Duncan — the "horrible imaginings" of Act I, Scene 3 arrive as an involuntary reaction to prophecy, suggesting the desire pre-existed the prediction. When Lady Macbeth reads her husband's letter in Act I, Scene 5, she fears not that he lacks ambition but that he lacks the "illness" ambition requires — the cold ruthlessness to act on it. Her famous invocation, calling on spirits to "unsex me here," confirms that the murder of Duncan is a choice, a project requiring psychological preparation, not a fate simply unfolding.

The play's famous "vaulting ambition" soliloquy (I.7) is Shakespeare's most concentrated statement on the theme. Macbeth rehearses every rational argument against the murder — Duncan is his king, his guest, his kinsman — and arrives at one motive left standing: "I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself / And falls on the other." He knows the danger. He proceeds anyway. This is not the behavior of a man controlled by fate; it is the behavior of a man who has chosen desire over reason and will spend the rest of the play paying for that choice through compounding guilt.

Viewed through Greenblatt's new historicism, which reads Renaissance texts within the power structures of their historical moment, the political urgency of ambition in Macbeth becomes sharper. The play was written shortly after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 — a context in which unauthorized seizure of power was the most alarming cultural threat imaginable. Shakespeare's depiction of ambition as an appetite that destabilizes the natural order resonated powerfully with an audience for whom political overreach was a live and terrifying danger.

Fate and the Witches: Prophecy or Pretext?

The case for fate as the play's dominant force rests on the three Weird Sisters. Their prophecies in Act I are structurally positioned before Macbeth's choices, which could imply that those choices are predetermined. If the witches know Macbeth will be king, and they do know it, then perhaps agency is illusory. This reading gains traction in Act IV, when the apparitions — the armored head, the bloody child, the crowned child — seem to carve out an ironclad destiny: Macbeth cannot be killed by any man of woman born, and will not be defeated until Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane Hill.

Yet Shakespeare systematically undermines the fatalist reading even while he stages its appeal. The witches never tell Macbeth to kill Duncan. They predict his kingship, not his method. It is Macbeth — and above all Lady Macbeth — who leaps from "you will be king" to "therefore murder Duncan tonight." The gap between prophecy and the act of murder is precisely where human agency lives. Hecate's scene (III.5), whatever its authorship questions, makes the manipulation explicit: the witches deal in "security," she says — they give Macbeth false confidence, not real fate. He is undone not by destiny but by his own misreading of what the prophecies mean.

The apparitions of Act IV illustrate this further. Each prophecy is technically true but deliberately misleading. "No man of woman born shall harm Macbeth" sounds like an absolute guarantee, yet Macduff, born by caesarean section, defeats him. Birnam Wood does not supernaturally march; Malcolm's soldiers carry its branches as camouflage. The "fate" on offer in Macbeth is a confidence trick — and Macbeth's fatal error is choosing to believe in it when it is convenient and disbelieving his conscience when it is inconvenient. Frye's archetypal framework, which identifies recurring narrative patterns of the fall and tragic recognition, helps illuminate this structure: Macbeth follows the classic arc of hubris and nemesis in which a protagonist misreads his own special exemption from moral law.

Guilt as the Adjudicator Between Ambition and Fate

Guilt is the theme that most decisively settles the ambition-versus-fate debate, because guilt is incompatible with the logic of pure fate. If Macbeth were fated to murder Duncan, he could not rationally feel guilty about it — no one feels guilty for what they could not have avoided. Yet the entire middle arc of the play is a clinical study in guilt's psychological devastation. The dagger hallucination before Duncan's murder (II.1), the vision of Banquo's ghost at the feast (III.4), and Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking compulsion ("Out, damned spot," V.1) are all symptoms of a conscience that knows it made a choice and cannot un-make it.

Synthesis: What Each Force Gets Right

The banquet scene is Shakespeare's most theatrically powerful staging of guilt. Macbeth, surrounded by his lords, sees Banquo's ghost in his seat — a vision invisible to everyone else. The hallucination is internal, a projection of conscience, and it destroys the performance of normality that political power requires. Ross, Lennox, and the assembled lords see a king behaving inexplicably; the audience sees a man whose guilt has become ungovernable. Lady Macbeth, who earlier had seemed immune to conscience, deteriorates more slowly but more completely: her sleepwalking is Shakespeare's image of guilt colonizing the unconscious, where willed suppression cannot reach.

Crucially, guilt operates differently in characters defined by fate versus those defined by choice. The witches feel no guilt; they are agents of fate, and fate is morally neutral. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth feel guilt precisely because they are agents of choice. Shakespeare reinforces this distinction by giving Macbeth his most searching introspective moments — "To be thus is nothing / But to be safely thus" (III.1) — only after he has committed the murders. A fated character does not recalculate; a guilty one does. The recalculation is the mark of free will.

A reading that dismisses fate entirely misses something real about Macbeth's design. The witches are not merely decorative. They represent the play's sustained engagement with the question of whether dark supernatural forces can make human resistance genuinely difficult — whether the environment of temptation is morally relevant. When the apparitions in Act IV are unnervingly accurate, Shakespeare is acknowledging that prophecy exerts pressure on the will. The moral environment matters. A man told repeatedly that he is destined for greatness operates under conditions that a man told nothing does not. This is what the fate-centric reading captures: that context, suggestion, and apparently confirmed destiny can narrow the space in which free choice feels available.

But ambition captures what fate cannot: the interior life of the play. The soliloquies — and Macbeth is saturated with them — are the instrument Shakespeare uses to show us a mind deliberating, fearing, and choosing. Hamlet famously deliberates without acting; Macbeth deliberates and acts, which is the tragedy. A fated protagonist has no need to deliberate, and Shakespeare denies Macbeth the comfort of inevitability precisely by showing us every step of the reasoning. "If it were done when 'tis done" (I.7) is not a man being carried by fate — it is a man trying to make himself ready to do something he knows he should not do.

The synthesis position, then, is this: fate in Macbeth sets the stage and narrows the psychological space; ambition makes the choices within that space. The witches create conditions; Macbeth acts. The guilt that follows is the play's moral verdict on who bears responsibility. Neither force alone accounts for the tragedy. But if we must assign primacy — and the play's unrelenting focus on interiority, deliberation, and guilt insists that we must — ambition is the more honest explanation. Fate is what Macbeth reaches for when he wants permission; ambition is what he actually has.

It is worth noting that the two forces map imperfectly onto our contemporary categories of nature and nurture, or structure and agency — but the mapping is suggestive. As Greenblatt's new historicist approach and Frye's archetypal framework both imply, great tragedies are structured precisely to refuse easy resolution: the audience is left uncertain, as Macbeth is left uncertain, about how much room any individual has to resist the forces that converge on him. Shakespeare's genius is to make that uncertainty feel morally urgent rather than merely philosophical.

Conclusion

In Macbeth, Shakespeare's major themes — ambition, fate, guilt, and power — are not parallel but hierarchical. Ambition initiates the tragedy; fate rationalizes it; guilt adjudicates between them. On the question of agency, ambition wins: the witches offer predictions, not commands, and the gap between prophecy and murder is the space where Macbeth freely chooses. On the question of atmosphere and dramatic texture, fate wins: the supernatural machinery creates a world in which temptation is intensified and ordinary moral resistance is harder than it would otherwise be. The play is richer for holding both forces in tension rather than resolving them cleanly.