Shakespeare's Macbeth is believed to have been first performed around 1606, during the reign of James I, who had a keen interest in witchcraft and Scottish history. The play uses the Scottish castle — Inverness, Dunsinane, the unnamed royal seat at Forres — as the architectural embodiment of moral and political order, violated by Macbeth's regicide and restored only when a walking wood besieges the final fortress. Duncan's arrival at Macbeth's castle, welcomed by the image of the martin's nest in its ramparts, contrasts ironically with the murder planned within.

Macbeth fundamentally shaped the literary and theatrical use of the castle as a moral space, where architecture reflects the inner state of its inhabitants. The castle in Macbeth is simultaneously home, prison, and stage for guilt and ambition. Shakespeare's use of the Scottish castle influenced Romantic and Gothic treatments of the fortress, from Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Walter Scott's historical dramas. The castle-as-conscience became a persistent literary trope in English and Scottish writing.