Macbeth Act 1 Scene 7: The Decision Scene, Speech by Speech

Macbeth Act 1 Scene 7 is the most-studied scene in the play and the scene most actors mis-rehearse. The reason is simple. The scene is taught in schools as "Macbeth's soliloquy and then his wife talks him into it," which suggests two separate set-pieces stitched together. The text is doing something different — it is one continuous decision, made by two people, in a kitchen, while a party goes on in the next room. The audition that books either half of this scene is the one that understands the scene as a single mechanism rather than two speeches.

This is the walkthrough — the soliloquy, the persuasion, the line-by-line shift in power, and how to cut either speech for the audition room.

Where we are in the play

It is the evening of Duncan's visit to Inverness. Lady Macbeth has already called the spirits to unsex her in the Act 1 Scene 5 invocation — the famous "Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts" speech that opens with "The raven himself is hoarse." That speech sits inside Act 1 Scene 5, two scenes before this one, and is sometimes confused with the Scene 7 material because it is also Lady Macbeth and also about the murder. It is not the same scene.

Act 1 Scene 7 happens after dinner. Duncan is upstairs. Macbeth has slipped out of the banquet hall to think. He has just promised his wife he will kill the king. He is now alone with the consequences of that promise.

Macbeth's soliloquy: "If it were done when 'tis done"

The speech opens with the most-famous opening line in the canon after "to be or not to be" — If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well / It were done quickly. The structure of the soliloquy is a man trying to talk himself out of a murder he has already agreed to, and discovering, line by line, that he cannot.

The argument has three movements.

Movement one — the practical objection. Macbeth opens with the wish that the murder could be self-contained: if the assassination / Could trammel up the consequence, and catch / With his surcease, success. He is asking whether one killing can end with itself, without consequence. He admits, by the end of the sentence, that it cannot. The "but here" pivot at the start of the next sentence — But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, / We'd jump the life to come — is the moment the practical argument collapses. There are consequences. There is judgment.

Movement two — the moral objection. The middle of the speech is the argument that Duncan does not deserve to die. Macbeth catalogues the reasons: Duncan is his king, his kinsman, his guest; Duncan has been a good ruler whose virtues will "plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against / The deep damnation of his taking-off." This is the section actors most often skip past, because it is structurally a list. The list is the speech. Macbeth is trying to find a reason not to do this, and the longer the list runs, the more conclusively he proves to himself that murder is unjustifiable.

Movement three — the self-knowledge. The closing of the soliloquy is one of the most-honest moments in Shakespeare. Macbeth admits he has no motive for the killing except vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself / And falls on the other. He knows the murder is wrong. He knows he cannot justify it. The decision he is about to walk back to Lady Macbeth with is I have no horse to ride — We will proceed no further in this business.

The full speech runs about 90 seconds at audition pace and is the canonical Macbeth audition piece. For the deep-dive on this soliloquy specifically — verse handling, the famous metaphors, the rehearsal discipline — the Macbeth "If it were done" guide covers the speech in audition detail.

The interrupt

Lady Macbeth enters. Macbeth tells her, plainly, that they will not go forward.

What happens next is the single most-studied persuasion in English-language drama, and the section of the scene the audition often gets wrong. The standard reading is that Lady Macbeth bullies Macbeth into the murder. The text is doing something more interesting. She re-frames the situation, twice, and on the second reframe Macbeth breaks.

Lady Macbeth's persuasion, attack by attack

She has three weapons. She uses them in this order.

Attack one — pride. Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since? And wakes it now, to look so green and pale at what it did so freely? The frame is sobriety. Macbeth promised the murder when his ambition was bold; now he is recanting in the morning-after register of a man who said too much. The accusation is you are a man who cannot keep his own commitments. It is precise, it is cutting, and it is wholly the version of him she knows he most fears being.

Attack two — masculinity. When you durst do it, then you were a man; / And, to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the man. The frame is now gendered. The murder, in this version, is the act that makes Macbeth a man. To refuse it is to remain less than a man. This is the attack the actor playing Lady Macbeth has to handle most carefully, because the contemporary audience hears the word "man" differently than Shakespeare's audience did. The speech is not about gender essentialism; it is about Macbeth's self-image as a warrior. Lady Macbeth is telling him that the man he believes himself to be on the battlefield is not the same man he is becoming in this room. That accusation is exact, and it lands.

Attack three — the dead child. I have given suck, and know / How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you / Have sworn to this. The image is the most-shocking in the play, and most productions soften it. The text does not soften it. Lady Macbeth is saying: I have done the most-tender thing a human can do — nurse a child — and I would have ended the life of that child rather than break a vow I had made. You cannot break this vow either. The attack is no longer pride or masculinity. The attack is the comparison of who can endure more for the sake of a promise. By the end of this speech, Macbeth has lost the argument.

He answers, weakly, If we should fail? — and Lady Macbeth replies, We fail? / But screw your courage to the sticking-place, / And we'll not fail. The metaphor is from crossbow craft: you screw the bowstring to its locked position. It is a mechanical image — you fix the resolve in place and the resolve does the work. Macbeth agrees. The scene ends on his closing line: False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

The audition cut: Macbeth's soliloquy as a standalone monologue

The full "If it were done" soliloquy is 30–32 lines and runs about 90 seconds at audition pace. It is one of the cleanest male audition pieces in the rep — the architecture is visible, the verse is propulsive, and the speech ends on its own conclusion rather than fading out.

The casting filter is men 30–45 with strong verse-handling and the ability to play thought as event. Macbeth in this speech is not emoting; he is reasoning. The audition that plays the speech as agony — voice cracking, hand to forehead, weight of the world — has skipped the play. The audition that plays the legal-brain register, a man building a case in his head, finds the speech.

The trap is the famous metaphors. "Bank and shoal of time", "vaulting ambition", "angels trumpet-tongued" — these are the lines that get quoted on coffee mugs, and the audition that lands on them as quotations dies. Treat the metaphors as Macbeth's own thinking, as the images that occur to him in the moment. They are not poetry he is reciting; they are how his mind happens to work. Play the thinking, the metaphors carry themselves.

For the verse-handling discipline at the level Macbeth demands — scansion, the pentameter line, the placement of caesura — the Hamlet audition monologues guide covers the rehearsal craft in audition detail.

The audition cut: Lady Macbeth's "I have given suck" speech as a standalone monologue

The persuasion sequence cuts cleanly into an 80–90 second monologue. The standard cut begins with Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself? and ends with And we'll not fail. That is the whole arc — pride attack, masculinity attack, dead-child attack, the locked-resolve close.

The casting filter is women 28–45 who can carry the violence of the imagery without being seduced by it. The audition that enjoys the cruelty of the speech, that plays Lady Macbeth as relishing the moment, has missed the scene. Lady Macbeth is working — she is solving a problem in real time and the problem is her husband's vacillation. The cruelty is the tool, not the goal. The audition that plays the tool-use rather than the cruelty finds the speech and lands the room.

The trap is the "I have given suck" image itself. The standard audition lingers on it — slow, deliberate, designed to shock. The text is doing the opposite. Lady Macbeth says the line as evidence, fast, the way a lawyer reads a precedent into the record. The shock is in the audience's reception, not in her delivery. Drop the pace, drop the emphasis, and let the room do the work.

For the full Lady Macbeth casting map across her four major speeches, the Lady Macbeth audition monologues guide covers the pieces individually.

The audition cut: the scene as a two-hander

The scene runs about four minutes uncut and three minutes in the standard audition cut, beginning at Lady Macbeth's Was the hope drunk entrance and ending at False face must hide what the false heart doth know. It is one of the strongest two-hander audition pieces in the canon and one of the few Shakespeare scenes that reads as contemporary in temperature without translation. Two intimate partners, in a kitchen, deciding to kill someone. The casting filter for both actors is can you play marriage as the engine of the scene rather than ambition?

For drilling the two-hander against an AI scene partner, paste the cut into our practice tool — one actor's lines prefixed with their character name, the other's lines voiced by the AI. Running the scene three or four times at performance speed is the single fastest way to find the temperature of the marriage between the two characters, which is the thing every classroom analysis of the scene misses.

What most analyses get wrong

The school-textbook reading of Macbeth Act 1 Scene 7 is that Lady Macbeth is the villain of the scene and Macbeth is the reluctant good man. The text does not support this reading. Macbeth has already committed to the murder before the scene starts — he agreed to it in Act 1 Scene 5 when his wife laid out the plan. The soliloquy that opens Scene 7 is not the speech of a good man weighing evil; it is the speech of a man trying to back out of a deal he already signed. Lady Macbeth's persuasion does not corrupt an innocent. It holds him to a vow he has already made and is now trying to break.

This matters for the audition. The Macbeth that books Act 1 Scene 7 is the one who plays the cost of breaking the promise to his wife as the operating dramatic stake, not the cost of killing the king. The Lady Macbeth that books the scene is the one who plays the loyalty test — she is asking whether her husband is the man she married — not the lust for power. Both reads make the scene larger, more human, more contemporary. Both are the version casting writes down.

The other common failure is treating the scene as static — two speeches delivered at the same temperature. The scene is structurally a fall. Macbeth begins the scene with full agency over his own decision and ends it with no agency at all. Lady Macbeth begins the scene as the wife asking why her husband has left the table and ends it as the architect of the murder. Both arcs happen in 80 lines. The audition that plays the arc — the fall, on Macbeth's side; the steady climb, on Lady Macbeth's side — finds the scene. The audition that plays the temperature flat misses what the scene is structurally doing.

How to rehearse the scene

Three rules.

1. Rehearse the speeches against the scene, not alone. Both Macbeth's soliloquy and Lady Macbeth's persuasion exist in dialogue with each other. Run the full scene against the AI scene partner once — even at a desk, even badly — before drilling either monologue. The body remembers the temperature of the room. Paste the scene into the practice tool with you on either side and the AI voicing the other character.

2. Find the marriage. Both speeches are about who these two people are to each other. The audition that plays only the violence, only the ambition, only the conscience misses the operating fact: this is a marriage. Two people who know each other's weak places, who finish each other's sentences, who are deciding together to commit murder. Play the marriage. The horror of the scene lands by itself.

3. Drop the famous-line emphasis. Every line in Act 1 Scene 7 has been quoted in a hundred textbooks. The audition that recognises the famous lines as famous lines — voice landing differently on "bank and shoal of time" or "I have given suck" — reads as performance. Treat the famous lines exactly the way you treat every other line. They are not famous to the character. They are how he, or she, happens to be thinking in that moment.

For drilling either monologue against our practice tool, paste the lines with one "YOU:" prefix per line for solo rehearsal, or open the scene as a two-hander with the AI voicing the partner. For broader Shakespeare audition strategy, the Shakespeare monologues guide covers the cross-play picture, and the best Shakespeare monologues for beginners guide covers the easier entry points.

Act 1 Scene 7 is the scene that decides the rest of the play. It rewards rehearsal at the level the play deserves — which is to say, at the level of the marriage inside it, not at the level of the famous lines on top of it. Find the marriage. The scene plays itself.