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

1606

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

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

Scotland

提示It is where the play is set.

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

Daemonologie

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

为什么James 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

提示Remembered every fifth of November.

为什么The 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

提示Three key words: one means godly, one means an entitlement, one means monarchs.

为什么James 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

提示The witches promise that his children will be kings.

为什么This 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

提示Think of “Double, double…”.

为什么Their 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

提示Her lines are broken and do not keep a beat.

为什么In 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

提示The speaker has just read a letter.

为什么Macbeth 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

提示The audience knows more than the character does.

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

Hell

提示Think about what Macbeth's castle has just become.

为什么He 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

提示The term begins with a root meaning “alone”.

为什么Soliloquies 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.