Three Witches Told Him He'd Be King — That's the Line That Made Him Destroy Himself

Imagine someone tells you, dead serious, that you're going to be the best in your grade. Would you start scheming about how to make that come true? Would you do things you'd never normally do, just because someone said it out loud?

More than four hundred years ago, Shakespeare wrote a play about exactly that. Thug Notes, a Wisecrack series that runs classic literature through thick street slang, retells the whole story of Macbeth: three witches tell a war hero he'll be king one day, and that single line is where a general fresh off a major victory starts tearing himself apart from the inside.

Fresh From Battle, Three Witches on the Road

Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo have just crushed the enemy in battle. On the road home, they run into three witches, who drop a prophecy: Macbeth will be king one day, and Banquo's descendants will be kings after him. Macbeth is thrilled. His wife, Lady Macbeth, hears about it and decides he's dragging his feet. She tells him flat out to stop stalling and go take the throne.

The First Step

Lady Macbeth talks him into killing King Duncan in his sleep and pinning the blame on two chamberlains too drunk to know what happened. Macbeth panics the second it's done, so his wife plants the bloody knife on the chamberlains herself. When a nobleman named Macduff finds the king's body, Macbeth kills the two chamberlains too, before they can talk. Duncan's sons realize they might be next and flee the country overnight, leaving Macbeth a clear path to the crown.

Quick decode: the first killing is always the hardest one. Every murder after that comes with its own justification: this person knows too much, that person might turn on him someday, better to strike first. Each new killing sounds almost reasonable in the moment. What actually keeps Macbeth going isn't the reasons. It's that he's already gone too far to turn back.

Paranoid and Killing Faster

Since the witches also promised Banquo's bloodline would produce kings, a paranoid Macbeth sends killers after Banquo and his son Fleance. Banquo dies; Fleance gets away. Macbeth goes back to the witches for more answers and gets three new prophecies: an armored head warns him to watch out for Macduff, a bloody child tells him no one born of a woman can touch him, and a crowned child holding a tree tells him he's safe until Great Birnam Wood marches on the castle. Hearing that Macduff has fled to England, Macbeth orders his entire family killed. Wife, children, no one spared.

Blood That Won't Wash Off

Something breaks in Lady Macbeth around this point. She starts washing her hands over and over, convinced they still smell of blood no matter how many times she scrubs. Her hands are clean. What's stained is something else. Not long after, word comes that she's dead, by her own hand. She couldn't carry it anymore.

Quick decode: the line about blood that won't wash off is one of the most famous images in the whole play. It was never about a literal stain. It's about the fact that once you've done certain things, there's no version of you that gets to go back to who you were before. You can scrub away the evidence, you can convince everyone around you it was someone else. What you can't undo is knowing, yourself, exactly what happened.

The Forest Actually Moves

When Malcolm returns with an army, Macbeth barely reacts at first. The witches said he was safe unless the forest itself walked to the castle, and that seemed impossible. Then he notices the soldiers' shields are cut from that same wood and realizes the forest really is on the move. Macduff, who lost his entire family, wants Macbeth one-on-one. On the battlefield, Macbeth taunts him that no one born of a woman can touch him. But Macduff was born by C-section, so the loophole holds, and Macduff cuts him down. Malcolm reclaims the throne. Scotland is rid of a tyrant.

Was It Fate, or Did He Make It True by Believing It?

The witches only ever said one thing: Macbeth would be king. They never said he had to kill anyone to get there. That part, the murders, the framing, the massacre, came from Macbeth and Lady Macbeth deciding to make the prophecy come true themselves.

The later prophecies all come true, too, and every single one comes true through a loophole instead of a lie. Macduff really was the danger to watch. It's true that no one born of a woman can touch Macbeth, except Macduff was delivered by C-section, so the prophecy stays perfectly true right up to the moment it gets Macbeth killed. The forest really does stay put, except soldiers carry cut branches as camouflage, so from a distance it looks like the whole wood is walking toward the castle. Nothing the witches said was false. Macbeth just heard every one of those lines as a guarantee. That's the real trick: the witches never lied to him. They just let him pick the wrong way to read something true.

So who's actually responsible? The video hands out a whole list of accomplices: Lady Macbeth lit the fire under him, the witches fed his ambition, and Scottish society itself shares the blame, since back then a man wasn't considered a real man unless he grabbed every scrap of power he could, no matter who he had to kill for it.

Then the video undercuts its own list. It points out that before any of this, Macbeth was already earning huge praise for slaughtering enemies in the play's opening scene. Nobody called that a crime. They called it heroism. The exact same violence, pointed at a king instead of an enemy soldier, becomes murder. The line was never about the violence itself. It's about who he turned it against.

Other readers let Macbeth off the hook entirely, arguing fate was pulling him around like a puppet the whole time, forcing him into every bad decision. Their evidence is the speech Macbeth gives about life after his wife's death: if he genuinely never had a choice, none of it means anything at all. The video doesn't pick a winner between these two readings. It just sets them side by side.

Shakespeare leaves one more clue running through the whole play: Macbeth's clothes never fit right. Too big, too tight, never quite his size. It's a quiet way of saying the throne he grabbed was always bigger than the man wearing it.

Behind-the-Scenes Trivia

• The episode opens with the line "this week we're getting regicidal with Macbeth," spoiling the entire plot in the first sentence, a rare case of the show turning the spoiler itself into the joke.
• The word "merc" gets recycled for every single killing in the episode: the chamberlains, Banquo, Macduff's whole family. The repetition tracks something real: each new death seems to matter less to Macbeth than the last one did.
• The three new prophecies don't get compressed into one quick line. The armored head, the bloody child, and the crowned child holding a tree all get spelled out in full, one of the few places in eight minutes where the video slows down.
• Instead of the show's usual "stay in school" sign-off, this episode closes with "spread the love and tell your friends," proof the host adjusts the ending depending on what the episode actually needs.