In his study of Macbeth in performance, The Masks of Macbeth, Marvin Rosenberg concludes the discussion of the play with an interpretation of the final image offered to the audience. According to him, it constitutes a fixed contrast:

This uncharacteristically single reading of the performative potential of the tragedy's finale offers a good point to access to the central interest of this paper. Here I will consider the presentation of Malcolm in Rupert Goold's 2010 television version of the play, a character essential to the kind of ending which is offered to the audience. In spite of Rosenberg's suggestion, performance, especially in the years after the appearance of his book, has produced very different endings, with differently inflected characters of Macbeth and Malcolm. For example, in Roman Polanski's 1971 film Macbeth, the central character is much reduced in stature and his bloody head, stuck on a pole above the battlements, looks like a hideous piece of theatrical property, alienated from the theatre of action (Kliman 2004: 199).