Macbeth’s Misfortune
As imperfect humans, we frequently search for people’s advice whenever we encounter a problem. Various individuals rely on seers, witchcraft and fortune tellers. Yet, some of their guesses can encourage us to either change our fate or be overconfident about it. This relates to Macbeth when he became assured about the prophecies. In Shakespeare’s tragic play Macbeth, the witches succeeded on their plan to make him ambitious by giving him double-meaning predictions. He misinterpreted each of the three prophecies from his second visit, which led to his overconfidence and eventually death. The purpose of this essay is to prove that the witches made Macbeth overconfident with their last three equivocal prophecies to prevent him…show more content… The third apparition dictated that the king will not be conquered until the forest of Birnam Wood hikes to fight against Dunsinane Hill. Macbeth became overconfident when he thought about the surface significance which was that he will never be defeated as trees could not move. This was proved when Macbeth said, “That will never be. / Who can impress the forest, bid the tree / Unfix his earth-bound root?” (Shakespeare, 1997, p.78) Once more, Macbeth, in his gullible confidence, failed to recognize the deeper implication of the apparition. Conversely, while marching, Malcolm strategically commanded the troops to take a branch from Birnam Woods to camouflage and shadow their numbers on their way to Dunsinane. Shakespeare showed this to the audience when Malcolm stated to the soldiers, “Let every soldier hew him down a bough,/ And bear it before him. Thereby shall we shadow/ The number of our host and make this / Err in report of us” (Shakespeare, 1997, p101) Because of Macbeth’s overconfidence about the superficial sense of the apparition, he never thought of moving trees as a