Macbeth Act 1 Scene 7: A Working Actor's Guide to the "If It Were Done" Soliloquy

Macbeth's Act 1 Scene 7 soliloquy is the speech that the play actually turns on. Forty-four lines, a man talking himself out of a murder, and by the end of the scene he has been talked back into it by his wife. If you are auditioning Macbeth, this is the speech most casting directors are listening for — not the "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech, which is the famous one but also the easier one, because the man delivering it has already lost everything and has nothing left to play but exhaustion. Act 1 Scene 7 is the harder speech. The character still has a choice.

This is the working-actor guide to it: the rhetorical structure that you have to play, the three concrete choices that separate a workable audition from a memorable one, and the traps that show up in nearly every version a casting director hears.

The full Act 1 Scene 7 — Macbeth's soliloquy plus the immediate Lady Macbeth scene that follows — is available in our practice tool at /practice/macbeth-act-1-scene-7. If you are working on the speech, rehearse the soliloquy in isolation first, then run it into the Lady Macbeth confrontation so the speech ends where it actually ends in the play — not in your decision, but in your wife's interruption of it.

The speech, briefly

Macbeth has left a dinner he is hosting for King Duncan and stepped into a side chamber. The plan to murder Duncan is in motion. The soliloquy is Macbeth talking himself through whether he can actually go through with it.

The opening line is one of the most-quoted in Shakespeare:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well / It were done quickly.

That sentence is the entire speech in miniature. If murder ended with the act, the act would be easy. The rest of the soliloquy is Macbeth working out that murder does not end with the act — that consequences in this life and "the life to come" both follow. Then Lady Macbeth enters and the speech is over.

What the speech is *actually* about

The mistake almost every audition makes is playing the speech as if Macbeth is wrestling with conscience. He is not. He is wrestling with risk calculation. Read the lines:

But in these cases / We still have judgment here, that we but teach / Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return / To plague th' inventor.

That is not "I feel guilty." That is "If I do this, someone will do it back to me." Macbeth is not a moral man having a moral crisis. He is a calculating man working out the odds. The conscience does not arrive until the last third of the speech — the angels, the trumpets, the "deep damnation of his taking-off" — and even then it is borrowed conscience, the language of public judgment more than private guilt.

The actor who plays Macbeth as morally tortured plays the wrong man. The character in this speech is a soldier weighing a tactical move. The horror, when it arrives, is the horror of realising he cannot calculate his way out. That is a very different audition from "guilty man considers murder."

The three-act structure inside the speech

The soliloquy has a clear three-act structure that you must play. Most actors run it as one long worry. It is not. It is three movements, each with a different argument.

Movement 1 — The wish. Lines 1–7. Macbeth wishes the deed were self-contained. If it were done when 'tis done. He is not arguing for the murder; he is arguing for a reality in which the murder would be costless. This is the only part of the speech where Macbeth is allowed to want something. Play want.

Movement 2 — The objection from this life. Lines 7–12. Bloody instructions return to plague th' inventor. Macbeth realises that even if he ignored the afterlife, the consequences in this life would catch him. This is the soldier's argument — pragmatic, tactical, alarmed. Play calculation.

Movement 3 — The objection from morality and hospitality. Lines 12–28. Duncan is his kinsman, his subject, his guest. Duncan has been a meek and good king. The angels will pity him; the wind will weep him. This is the longest movement and the most-quoted, and it is where most actors collapse the speech into one register. Do not. The first half of this movement is legal — kinsman, subject, host — and the second half is cosmic — angels, cherubim, the heaven's breath. Two beats inside one movement. Play the shift from legal to cosmic and the speech opens up.

After the cosmic crescendo Macbeth lands on the actual conclusion — I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition — and Lady Macbeth enters and the scene resets.

The audition that plays these three movements as three distinct arguments lands. The audition that plays them as one continuous worry does not.

The three choices that separate workable from memorable

Working actors who have landed Macbeth on the strength of this speech tend to make versions of the same three choices. None of them are obvious. All of them are reproducible.

Choice 1 — Start the speech mid-thought, not at the top. Macbeth has already been thinking about this for the entire banquet. The opening line is not the start of his deliberation; it is the moment he can finally say it out loud. Play it as a resumed conversation with himself, not as a new one. The technical version of this choice: do not breathe before line 1. Pick up the impulse to speak before you walk on. The room registers a man already mid-process, which is a more interesting opening than a man beginning to deliberate.

Choice 2 — Find the soldier under the rhetoric. Macbeth is a battlefield commander before he is a tragic hero. The "bloody instructions return" line is a soldier's line — he is thinking about what happens to commanders who set bad precedents. Play that line as a man who has seen this happen to other commanders, not as a man working out an abstract moral point. The whole second movement opens up when you find the lived experience under it.

Choice 3 — Let the third movement be persuasion, not torture. The cosmic argument — angels, cherubim, the deep damnation — is not Macbeth being haunted. It is Macbeth talking himself out of the murder using the strongest argument he can find. He is constructing the case. Play it as advocacy. The casting director who hears torture has heard it before. The one who hears a man building his own brief against the deed sits forward.

The traps that flatten the speech in audition rooms

Five traps recur in almost every version of this speech that gets heard in casting calls. Three are technical; two are interpretive. All five are avoidable.

Trap 1 — Whispering the whole thing. Macbeth has left the banquet to think. He is alone in a room, not stalking through a corridor of sleeping guards. The default audition is hushed and intense throughout, which is wrong on the text and wrong on the situation. Vary your volume. The soldier-calculating-risk movement can sit at conversational volume; the cosmic-argument movement can lift. The whisper-throughout choice signals that the actor has watched too many Macbeth films and not enough Macbeth stage productions.

Trap 2 — Italicising the famous lines. Every audition emphasises bloody instructions and vaulting ambition because they are the lines people quote. Casting directors hear them italicised forty times a season. Do the opposite. Drop those lines into the speech as ordinary thoughts and let the room notice them anyway. The actor who refuses to italicise the famous lines reads as someone who actually understands the speech instead of performing it.

Trap 3 — Choosing to play guilt instead of calculation. Covered above. Macbeth in this speech is not guilty; he is worried about getting caught. The guilt comes after the murder, not before. Auditions that play the post-murder Macbeth in the pre-murder soliloquy collapse the play's actual arc and signal that the actor is performing the reputation of the part rather than the part itself.

Trap 4 — Letting the speech end on resignation. The final line — but only / Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself / And falls on the other — gets played as a deflated sigh in nine out of ten auditions. The line is not a sigh. It is the moment Macbeth recognises that his motivation is insufficient to overcome the objections, and is therefore deciding not to do it. The speech ends with Macbeth having argued himself out of the murder. Lady Macbeth then walks in and argues him back in. Play the end as a man who has just chosen not to commit murder, and the scene that follows — and your audition with it — opens into something the room has not seen all morning.

Trap 5 — Playing the verse instead of the man. The speech is in iambic pentameter, and it is one of the cleanest examples of Shakespeare's verse-as-thought. But the verse is the chassis, not the engine. Auditions that lean into the rhythm — the regular stresses, the end-of-line lifts — read as Royal Shakespeare Company auditions from 1968. Modern Shakespeare auditions reward verse that sounds like thought. Honour the metre as scaffolding; do not let it become the performance. If you cannot find a Macbeth choice without leaning on the metre to carry you, work the speech in prose first — write it out as prose, deliver it as prose, then return it to verse with the rhythm underneath the thought instead of on top of it.

How long the speech should be in your audition

The full soliloquy is about ninety seconds at a working pace. Most auditions want sixty to ninety. If your casting brief is sixty, the cut is straightforward: open with the famous first sentence, jump to the legal movement (He's here in double trust...), and end on vaulting ambition. You lose the bloody-instructions middle, but the cut still reads as a complete argument — wish, objection, conclusion — and lands inside the time limit. Do not cut the opening. The first line is what the casting director is waiting to hear you handle.

If your casting brief is ninety, run the speech complete. Do not pad. Do not slow down to fill time. A clean eighty-eight-second delivery reads better than a stretched ninety-five-second one.

Rehearsing the speech in isolation versus into the scene

Most monologue rehearsal happens in isolation — the actor delivers the speech alone in a room and never runs the surrounding scene. With Macbeth Act 1 Scene 7, that is a mistake. The speech ends with Lady Macbeth's entrance, and the actor who has rehearsed the speech as a standalone never finds the correct landing because the landing is an interruption, not a conclusion.

Run the speech into the scene at least once a week during prep. Use the Act 1 Scene 7 script in our practice tool — Lady Macbeth's lines are voiced by the AI scene partner, so you can deliver the soliloquy and then go straight into the We will proceed no further in this business exchange that follows. The shape of the speech changes when you know an interruption is coming. The soliloquy reads as deliberation rather than monologue, which is the texture casting directors are listening for.

How this speech fits with the other Macbeth audition pieces

If you are working through the Macbeth audition repertoire, Act 1 Scene 7 is the decisional piece — Macbeth still has a choice. The companion pieces are:

• Macbeth's "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" soliloquy — the post-loss piece, Macbeth as exhausted nihilist. Good for older castings or for actors who can play interiority without action.
• Lady Macbeth's "Unsex me here" invocation — the will piece, opposite in temperament to Act 1 Scene 7. Pairs in callbacks.
• Macbeth Act 5 Scene 1 — Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene — the collapse piece, the most-asked scene for older female actors in classical auditions.

For audition prep across the play, our Macbeth play page collects every monologue and scene we have catalogued, and the Hamlet audition monologues guide covers the equivalent set for the male Shakespearean tragic protagonist if you are deciding between the two for a single classical audition. For broader strategy, our Shakespeare monologues guide covers how casting directors weigh classical pieces inside contemporary auditions.

The audition that lands on this speech is the one where the room hears a soldier think — and recognises, somewhere around the cosmic-argument movement, that they are watching the actor make the decision in the room rather than report a decision already made. That recognition is what you are auditioning for. Every choice on this page is in service of it.