Tear Jerker / Macbeth

• Lady Macbeth has killed herself, Macbeth's people have abandoned him, he is considered a tyrant, and he is forced to kill many soldiers during a battle, and through these actions, he realizes how pointless it was. He becomes disillusioned with the idea of working so hard and betraying so many to become a king that no one respects, only to die someday, rendering all his efforts meaningless and going to his grave unwept and unsung.
  Macbeth: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow... creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time...
  • Suddenly, "Life is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" has an even stronger impact.
  • Also consider that Macbeth and his wife are shown to have a loving relationship during the play. At this point, however, Macbeth is so hopeless that he's even unable to express grief for Lady Macbeth's death. As evil as they were, the scene is still utterly saddening.
    • In the 1999 RSC production with Antony Sher and Harriet Walter, the Macbeths are shown to have a particularly close relationship. The news that his wife has died absolutely breaks Macbeth: he delivers the first half of the speech in a grief-struck tone, but then the sorrow goes out of him, he straightens up, and delivers the "Life’s but a walking shadow" part directly to the camera, full of bitterness and disgust, and then walks off the set.
  • A 2019 production at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater had a small cast, requiring all the actors to double up, including Lady Macbeth, who also played Seyton — the servant who tells Macbeth his wife has killed herself. So Macbeth was delivering this utterly heartbreaking Despair Speech while looking into the face of his dead wife.
• Macduff, when he learns that his family has been killed. The worst part is when he keeps asking, bewildered and lost, 'My children too? My wife too? All of them?'
  • All my pretty ones? Did you say all?
  • One production had Macduff staring in sheer disbelief and shock, then laughing when Malcolm says they'll get revenge, spitting back "He has no children." Then all at once he fell to his hands and knees and screamed, again and again.
  • In the 2006 version, we get the lovely imagery of the killers shooting Macduff's eight-year-old son multiple times while one of them holds back his distraught wife and forces her to watch. Then, she gets strangled to death with Razor Wire. And then, Lady Macbeth finds out and realizes the full scale of what she's done...
• Macbeth showing that he can still feel remorse before his duel with Macduff, when he tells the latter to stand back because: "my soul is too much charged / With blood of thine already." Despite all the horrors he's perpetrated, he's not completely evil.
• Kurzel's Macbeth (2015) opens with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth having a funeral for their dead child. Who looks only to be three-years-old.