What happens in Act II of Macbeth?
Act II begins in the stillness of night at Macbeth's castle. Banquo and his son Fleance make their way across the courtyard, and Banquo shares that troubling thoughts are keeping him awake. Meanwhile, Macbeth, alone and anxious, is struck by a vision—a dagger hovering in the air, its tip directed at Duncan's room. Compelled by the vision, he follows it. In the courtyard, Lady Macbeth waits, having sedated the king's attendants; she has prepared the daggers. When Macbeth returns, he is visibly shaken, with blood on his hands and the murder weapons he was meant to leave behind. He struggles to face the scene again. Lady Macbeth takes the daggers from him, smearing the sleeping grooms with Duncan's blood. A knock at the south entry startles them; Lady Macbeth urges Macbeth to clean up and change his clothes. The Porter, somewhat inebriated, opens the gate with a humorous take on hell's gatekeeper, letting in Macduff and Lennox. Macduff soon finds Duncan's body and raises the alarm. In a panic, Macbeth kills the grooms, claiming it's out of grief. Malcolm and Donalbain, fearing for their lives, decide to flee—Malcolm heading to England and Donalbain to Ireland. The act concludes with Ross and an Old Man discussing ominous signs: owls preying on falcons, horses devouring one another—nature itself turned upside down by the crime.
Analysis
Act II is where Shakespeare condenses the entire moral framework of the play into a single night. The dagger soliloquy marks the act's first significant moment of craftsmanship: Macbeth speaks to the vision in the second person ("Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling as to sight?"), externalizing his guilt before committing the act and establishing a pattern—hallucination as a reflection of moral turmoil—that will influence the play's psychological landscape through Banquo's ghost and beyond. Shakespeare then introduces the Porter scene as a tonal shift, the only extended moment of comedy in this tragedy. Rather than simply providing relief, the Porter's hell-gate riff makes concrete what the audience already understands: Inverness has transformed into a hellish threshold. The knocking that frames both the murder and the Porter's entrance serves as a rhythmic motif, with each knock emphasizing the gap between the world of the act and the world that remains unaware of it. Lady Macbeth's practicality ("A little water clears us of this deed") stands in stark contrast to Macbeth's paralysis, but Shakespeare subtly foreshadows her eventual downfall—her inability to kill Duncan because he resembles her father reveals a crack in her façade. The departure of Malcolm and Donalbain, expressed in sharp, conspiratorial couplets, alters the play's political direction and introduces the theme of a threatened legitimate succession. Ross and the Old Man conclude the act with a tone of prophecy and lament, their choric exchange grounding the supernatural chaos in the natural world.
Key quotes from Act II
“Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.”
Macbeth, alone before Duncan's chamber, addresses the floating dagger that may be vision or guilt made visible.
“Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red.”
Macbeth returns from the murder, staring at his bloodied hands, already sensing that the stain is metaphysical rather than physical.
“A little water clears us of this deed. / How easy is it then!”
Lady Macbeth, steering her husband back to their chamber, dismisses his horror with a pragmatism that her own sleepwalking scene will catastrophically reverse.