Much of the play can be seen as the conflict between two theatres: (1) the Macbeths’ theatre of concealment and aggrandizement; and (2) the other character's forensic theatre, the theatre of exposure and trial. Of course, the more the Macbeths struggle to seize the management of the stage, the more strongly do secret counterpressures compel the opposite result.

Lady Macbeth has an extraordinarily sophisticated technique for assuming control of the action: she presents herself explicitly as a scenarist and a stage director, instead of a conspirator in murder. She has an aesthetic eye, and continually tries to demote terror into harmless images, tableaux morts—as if the whole crime consisted of the manipulation of prop daggers and fake blood. When Macbeth shrinks from incriminating the grooms in the murder of Duncan, Lady Macbeth impatiently exclaims,

Guilt is simply a matter of gilding: for Lady Macbeth, the drama of sin, remorse, damnation, is simply a stage spectacle of painted devils and clever puns—as if she understood that Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare, instead of a historical event. She aspires toward a condition of perfect detachment, as if by such aesthetic operations as framing and composing she could desensitize herself to gore, turn blood into paint, in order to make spots of bright red that would enhance the picturesqueness of the scene. She approaches assassination in the spirit of an interior decorator. This is the reverse of the automatizing theme: sometimes the Macbeths strive to blind themselves, lose all self-consciousness, but here we see Lady Macbeth trying to cultivate her eye into such a rigorous instrument of aesthetic judgment that moral judgment will vanish entirely.