Every card in Shakespeare, Year 10: King James, witches, language and stagecraft (Macbeth option)
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- In about which year was Macbeth first performed? (year, four digits)
1606
HintThree years after a Scottish king came to the English throne, and the year after a famous plot against him.
WhyThe exact date is not known; 1606 is the usual estimate. The play was first printed in 1623, after Shakespeare's death.
- James I became King of England in 1603. Which country had he already ruled for many years?
Scotland
HintIt is where the play is set.
WhyThere he was James VI. A play about Scottish history, with a wise and holy English king in the background, suited the new reign.
- The book about witchcraft that King James wrote and published in 1597
Daemonologie
HintIts title is built on an old spelling of the word for evil spirits.
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.
- Which 1605 conspiracy to kill King James, uncovered the year before Macbeth was probably first performed, made the murder of a king a very live subject?
The Gunpowder Plot
HintRemembered every fifth of November.
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 belief that a monarch is chosen by God and answers to God alone
The divine right of kings
HintThree key words: one means godly, one means an entitlement, one means monarchs.
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.
- King James's family, the Stuarts, claimed descent from one of the characters in Macbeth. Which one?
Banquo
HintThe witches promise that his children will be kings.
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.
- Most of the noble characters in Macbeth speak in unrhymed ten-syllable lines. How do the witches' chants sound different?
They are in shorter lines that rhyme, with a heavy, sing-song beat
HintThink of “Double, double…”.
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.
- In the sleepwalking scene (Act 5 Scene 1), does Lady Macbeth speak in verse or in prose?
Prose
HintHer lines are broken and do not keep a beat.
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.
- “Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell”. Who calls for darkness in Act 1 Scene 5?
Lady Macbeth
HintThe speaker has just read a letter.
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.
- “This castle hath a pleasant seat”, says Duncan as he arrives in Act 1 Scene 6. The audience already knows he is to be murdered there. What is this technique called?
Dramatic irony
HintThe audience knows more than the character does.
WhyThe gap between what Duncan says and what we know makes his trust painful to watch.
- After the murder there is knocking at the castle gate. The drunken Porter who answers pretends to be the gatekeeper of which place?
Hell
HintThink about what Macbeth's castle has just become.
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.
- Macbeth's speech beginning “If it were done when 'tis done” in Act 1 Scene 7 is spoken alone on stage. What is a speech of this kind called?
A soliloquy
HintThe term begins with a root meaning “alone”.
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.
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