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1 Macbeth Revision Guide AQA Lit (B) 2 Social Context (AO4) Macbeth was written

1 Macbeth Revision Guide AQA Lit (B) 2 Social Context (AO4) Macbeth was written in the early years of the reign of James I of England (James VI of Scotland), probably in 1604-5. After nearly fifty years of rule, Queen Elizabeth I had died leaving no direct heirs and the throne was passed to her cousin James. There had been fears of uprising at the queen‟s death – after an earlier heirless death, that of Edward VI in 1553, a faction at Court had sought to secure its own power by placing Lady Jane Grey on the throne instead of Edward‟s sister, Mary. The situation was even more dangerous on Elizabeth‟s death in 1603, for Scotland was a traditional enemy of England and the fear of a popular revolt against the King of Scotland becoming King of England was very real. In the event, however, the transfer of power went off without a hitch. In part this was probably due to the fact that James had a decent record as King in Scotland – he was perceived has having brought decades of religious strife to an end, and had maintained peace at home and abroad. Another factor in play was undoubtedly that he was a man; while England had been (largely) devoted to Elizabeth, there remained a general feeling that being ruled by a queen was somehow not quite right. James, with his statesmanship and his famously rambunctious and masculine Court (actually a thin veil for his bisexuality), was a popular choice, in the event. The roots of Macbeth are inextricably linked to James‟ Scottishness, of course. Scotland was, for his audience, alien enough to allow Shakespeare to portray shocking events such as regicide but close enough to allow him to draw allegorical meanings out: the loyal warrior-hero Macduff, and the moral king-in-waiting Malcolm, are probably meant to reflect the two sides of James which most appealed to his new English subjects. Modern productions of Macbeth are often at a loss as to how to deal with the three witches. For all that it is a play that deals with power and deceit, Macbeth has superstition and the supernatural at its heart. Today‟s cynical audience, increasingly distant from the culture which took Exodus 22:18 so literally, may find it hard to believe in the witches, but the Seventeenth Century audience would have had no such problem. King James himself wrote a treatise on how to deal with witchcraft, and interrogated suspected witches himself. Within half a century of the first performance of Macbeth the eastern counties of England would endure the reign of terror of Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed „Witchfinder General‟. This pre- enlightenment society, where scientists – or natural philosophers, as they termed themselves – were just as likely to be exploring alchemy as physics (see the career of Isaac Newton), took signs and portents very seriously. Belief in God was practically universal, denial of God an heretical crime, and if God existed then so must the full gamut of the forces of evil. Macbeth deals with a debate that was beginning to emerge in the last years of Elizabeth‟s reign, and would come to a head in the reign of James‟ son, Charles I: where does true authority lie – in the person of the King, or with the representatives of the people? Macbeth himself recognises that he has no grounds for killing Duncan and seizing the Crown, apart from „vaulting ambition‟: in all respects Duncan has been a good King and, in killing him, Macbeth is committing a crime not only against the man but against God, for the conventional view was that Kings held their crowns by Divine Right. James was a particularly strong proponent of this view, writing his 3 treatise „Basilikon Doron‟ as a handbook for his son, stressing the relationship between King and God. However, the rising merchant and urban classes – who provided much of the Crown‟s income from 1580-1640 – were beginning to insist on the role of Parliament in effective and just government. By 1649 the concept of Divine Right would have been totally undermined, and the successful general Oliver Cromwell would replace the executed Charles I by Parliamentary will. Macbeth foreshadows these events, with a strong military leader taking power from an inept King (it is hard to feel sympathy for Duncan when he confesses that he had built an „absolute trust‟ on one treacherous Thane of Cawdor – and then he makes precisely the same mistake again). Shakespeare‟s presentation of regicide would have being daring and disturbing for his early 17th Century audience, hence the reason the killing takes place off-stage (actually showing the murder of a king would have been just too controversial) 4 Dramatic Heritage (AO4) By the time Shakespeare was writing Macbeth, English theatre was established as a form. In just fifty years the concept of theatre had moved from the Medieval „Mystery Play‟, presenting Biblical stories to the masses, to a popular entertainment based around particular venues and companies. Shakespeare‟s reputation preceded him – by the time he wrote Macbeth he had already given the public Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Julius Caesar, all plays which share thematic links with Macbeth. More particularly, Shakespeare had established his own style – not least in his use of the soliloquy as a way to explore the inner workings of a character‟s mind. Hamlet is often seen as the play having the most important soliloquies, but there is no doubt that this technique is vital to the success of Macbeth. Following the progress of Macbeth from loyal soldier to treacherous regicide over the course of Act 1, the audience comes to view him as more than just a simple tyrant or pantomime villain: this is a man who has a conscience as well as ambition, and the use of soliloquy allows us to understand this in a way that no other dramatic technique would. As with all theatre in the Early Modern period, Shakespeare had to strike a balance between presenting complex social and moral ideas – suited to the educated courtiers, gentry and merchants in his audience – and providing drama and spectacle on stage to engage the mass of penny-paying groundlings. As is often the case – for example, in Marlowe‟s Dr Faustus – this balance actually helps to structure the play. One moment we have high drama in the conversation between Macbeth and his wife directly after the murder, and the next we have the filthy speech of the Porter. However, this alternation between serious and comic is less pronounced than it is in plays such as Dr Faustus or Romeo and Juliet; instead, Shakespeare tends to combine elements of the two within the same scene – so it is that the banquet scene has the horrific ghost of Banquo (undoubtedly always seen on stage in original productions: the opportunity for lashings of blood and gore would not be passed up) but also Macbeth‟s musings on guilt. Even the scene in which Malcolm tests Macduff‟s loyalty by declaring his supposed moral weaknesses achieves this duality – it is at once a string of ribald innuendo and desire while also being an exploration of how far it is right to follow a corrupt prince for the good of the nation. Hamlet and Othello are clearly tragedies, their eponymous protagonists heroic but for their obligatory tragic flaw. However, it is hard to read Macbeth as a tragic hero. Instead he seems to fulfil the role of the anti-hero, as with Satan in Milton‟s Paradise Lost or Faustus in Marlowe‟s play. If Macbeth has a hero as such it must surely be Macduff, yet in many regards he is only a bit-player in the plot, absent for much of the text. To this extent Macbeth breaks with tradition; perhaps because of the effective use of soliloquies as outlined earlier we frequently find ourselves sympathetic to Macbeth, despite our moral repulsion at his actions. Macbeth is loosely based on an historical king of Scotland; a Macbeth did kill King Duncan (in battle, not in bed) in approximately 1040, and reigned for around ten years – a reign of fairness and the promotion of Christianity, by all accounts. Time is clearly an unfixed quantity in Shakespeare‟s play – one could imagine the events being staged as occurring over a passage of mere weeks, or over many years. Shakespeare is not interested in historical accuracy: his appropriation of Macbeth‟s name is a result of the need to bring a Scots connection in honour of the new king, rather than a desire to add to his collection of History plays. 5 Aspects of the Gothic (AO2, AO3, AO4) Power It is a much later aphorism that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but this seems to define the core of Macbeth nicely. Power is a recurrent theme in Gothic texts. In Paradise Lost Satan resents God‟s power and yearns for his own; Dr Faustus revolves around the idea that knowledge uploads/Finance/ macbeth-revision-guide-aqa-lit-b.pdf