MACBETH
William
Shakespeare
Context
The most influential
writer in all of English literature, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a
successful middle-class glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no
further. In 1582 he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three
children with her. Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London
to work as an actor and playwright. Public and critical acclaim quickly
followed, and Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in
England and part-owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of
Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603) and James I (ruled 1603–1625), and he was a
favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare’s company the
greatest possible compliment by bestowing upon its members the title of King’s
Men. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford and died in 1616 at
the age of fifty-two. At the time of Shakespeare’s death, literary luminaries
such as Ben Jonson hailed his works as timeless.
Shakespeare’s works
were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his
death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet
ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration
garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but
the dearth of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s
personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact
and from Shakespeare’s modest education that Shakespeare’s plays were actually
written by someone else—Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most
popular candidates—but the support for this claim is overwhelmingly
circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.
In the absence of
credible evidence to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of
the thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this
body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have
transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to
affect profoundly the course of Western literature and culture ever after.
Shakespeare’s shortest
and bloodiest tragedy, Macbeth tells the story of a brave
Scottish general (Macbeth) who receives a prophecy from a trio of sinister
witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed with ambitious
thoughts and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and
seizes the throne for himself. He begins his reign racked with guilt and fear
and soon becomes a tyrannical ruler, as he is forced to commit more and more
murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion. The bloodbath swiftly
propels Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to arrogance, madness, and death.
Macbeth was most likely
written in 1606, early in the reign of James I, who had been James VI of
Scotland before he succeeded to the English throne in 1603. James was a patron
of Shakespeare’s acting company, and of all the plays Shakespeare wrote under
James’s reign, Macbeth most clearly reflects the playwright’s
close relationship with the sovereign. In focusing on Macbeth, a figure from
Scottish history, Shakespeare paid homage to his king’s Scottish lineage.
Additionally, the witches’ prophecy that Banquo will found a line of kings is a
clear nod to James’s family’s claim to have descended from the historical
Banquo. In a larger sense, the theme of bad versus good kingship, embodied by
Macbeth and Duncan, respectively, would have resonated at the royal court,
where James was busy developing his English version of the theory of divine
right.
Macbeth is not
Shakespeare’s most complex play, but it is certainly one of his most powerful
and emotionally intense. Whereas Shakespeare’s other major tragedies, such as Hamlet and Othello, fastidiously
explore the intellectual predicaments faced by their subjects and the fine
nuances of their subjects’ characters, Macbeth tumbles madly from
its opening to its conclusion. It is a sharp, jagged sketch of theme and
character; as such, it has shocked and fascinated audiences for nearly four
hundred years.
