The sense of aesthetic and ethical complexity that critics and audiences have admired in Macbeth is, then, an effect of the play's dramatic structure: the double movement of the witches’ prophecies and Macbeth's efforts to turn them to his own advantage. The narrative moves from the fulfilment of one prophecy with Duncan's murder, through Macbeth's attempt to thwart the second prophecy by killing Banquo. The terrifying appearance of Banquo's ghost, however, dramatizes Macbeth's insecurity and he seeks ‘to know/By the worst means the worst’ (3.4.134). His final encounter with the witches, however, confirms his suspicions about Macduff and the supernatural assurances of the witches’ new prophecies move the narrative from king-killing to revenge.

All of this narrative and dramatic complexity is achieved with the resources of language and the simplest of physical effects available on the early modern stage. Subsequent commentary and theatre productions have filled in the gaps that this simplicity leaves in the narrative and interpretation of the play, but by reading the text alone, it is possible to see how those gaps are made and how they leave open the spaces into which interpretation has entered the reading of the play.

One of the most important effects of the Folio text is the way it manages the relationship between what is shown on stage and the way it creates a world beyond the stage that presses both upon the action and on the imagination of the principal actors. In the early part of the play, the off-stage world is presented in familiar and conventional ways. In Act 1, Scene 2, the bloody sergeant who brings the news of battle presents a version of the ‘messenger speech’ that Shakespeare and others had learned from Senecan drama. The figure that delivers it never appears again and his report, for all its rhetorical elaboration, has scant purchase on the subsequent action. In contrast, as we have seen, the witches’ brief invocation of their earlier meetings and ambiguous prophecies are central to the unfolding story, even though they are off-stage for most of the play.