Shakespeare, Year 10: King James, witches, language and stagecraft (Macbeth option)

1606

HintThree years after a Scottish king came to the English throne, and the year after a famous plot against him.

The whyThe exact date is not known; 1606 is the usual estimate. The play was first printed in 1623, after Shakespeare's death.

Scotland

HintIt is where the play is set.

The whyThere he was James VI. A play about Scottish history, with a wise and holy English king in the background, suited the new reign.

Daemonologie

HintIts title is built on an old spelling of the word for evil spirits.

The whyJames believed witches were real and dangerous, and had taken part in witch trials in Scotland. An audience under James would have taken the witches seriously, not as a joke.

The Gunpowder Plot

HintRemembered every fifth of November.

The whyThe plotters meant to blow up the king and Parliament. A play that shows a king-killer destroyed by his own crime fitted the mood that followed.

The divine right of kings

HintThree key words: one means godly, one means an entitlement, one means monarchs.

The whyJames argued for it in his own writing. If a king is God's choice, killing him is a crime against God as well as the state, which is why nature itself reacts in the play.

Banquo

HintThe witches promise that his children will be kings.

The whyThis may be why Shakespeare's Banquo is honourable, although in the chronicle Shakespeare used he helps Macbeth kill the king. The show of eight kings in Act 4 points forward to James himself.

They are in shorter lines that rhyme, with a heavy, sing-song beat

HintThink of “Double, double…”.

The whyTheir lines usually have about seven or eight syllables and start on a stressed beat. The change of sound marks them off as not belonging to the human world.

Prose

HintHer lines are broken and do not keep a beat.

The whyIn Act 1 she spoke commanding verse. One reading is that the switch to prose shows she has lost control of her mind and of her words.

Lady Macbeth

HintThe speaker has just read a letter.

The whyMacbeth asks the stars to hide their fires one scene earlier. Both want darkness to cover what they plan, and much of the play then happens at night.

Dramatic irony

HintThe audience knows more than the character does.

The whyThe gap between what Duncan says and what we know makes his trust painful to watch.

Hell

HintThink about what Macbeth's castle has just become.

The whyHe calls himself “porter of hell-gate” (Act 2 Scene 3). The scene is comic, but the joke is close to the truth, and the knocking keeps the tension going.

A soliloquy

HintThe term begins with a root meaning “alone”.

The whySoliloquies let the audience hear his doubts directly, so we follow the murderer's thinking from the inside. That is a large part of why he keeps some of our sympathy.