Macbeth: Grade 9 context analysis

Aiming for a Grade 8-9.... then you need to have a detailed understanding of how contextual factors influence the play. 

Social and historical context 

A Scottish King had just taken the throne....leading to an atmosphere of FEAR and INSECURITY 

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.

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 ("Do not allow a sorceress to live") 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 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 17^th Century audience, hence the reason the killing takes place off-stage (actually showing the murder of a king would have been just too controversial).

Dramatic context

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.

Gothic elements 

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 is power (and yet ironically, once he has access to unlimited knowledge Faustus fails to capitalise on it); Frankenstein and Dracula explore the power of life and death.  Macbeth sits well in this tradition – we have all sorts of power, from the physical power of Macbeth who can slice a man in two on the battlefield through the power of women over men to the power of guilt to drive one to madness.

  

Night-time Action

Macbeth is full of the imagery of darkness.  Early in the play Macbeth pleads that the ‘stars hide [their] fires / Let not light see my black and deep desires’, and from then on most of the key plot points – the killing of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, the arrival of Banquo’s ghost at the banquet, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking – take place in darkness.  Linked to this idea is the theme of sleep.  On killing Duncan, Macbeth fears he ‘shall sleep no more’; his actions leave him unable to reap the benefits of the ‘Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care’.  The message is rather unsubtly put across – that night time is a time to sleep, not to murder. 

Horror and Terror

There are plenty of instances of both horror and terror in the text.  At a crude level the two themes meet the differing needs of the different elements of Shakespeare’s audience: the scenes of horror (Banquo’s ghost, the slaughter of Macduff’s family, the spells of the witches) provide the visceral crowd-pleasing, while Macbeth’s internal terrors (‘O full of scorpions is my mind’ ‘Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind... / Proceeding from the heat-oppresséd brain?’) echo the terrors of regicide, the murder of children, the meddling of supernatural forces in the world of man which the more cerebral members of the audience might feel.  Which leads us neatly to....

The Supernatural

Modern audiences may well see Macbeth’s actions as having psychological roots – he resents putting his life on the line for Duncan’s benefit; his wife challenges his manhood when he retreats from his plan to murder the king; the witches play on his egotistical desire for power, rather than supernaturally engineering an opportunity for his advancement.  However, it is simply not tenable to write off the supernatural elements of Macbeth as mere superstition.  The storms and disturbances that are reported over the night of the murder of Duncan are indicators of disharmony and disorder in the world of man; Shakespeare had already used the same codes, albeit in a very different context, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where the conflict between Titania and Oberon was played out in nature.  Similarly the ghost of Banquo – easily seen today as Macbeth’s guilt personified, and sometimes not even shown on stage in order to emphasise this psychological reading – has established literary roots: Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy both rely on the very real presence of a ghost to drive the plot forward. 

There is a notable absence of any Church figures in the play.  In a society such as Shakespeare’s, where attendance at church was a requirement under the law, this would have been a notable absence.  We see no funeral for Duncan, and by not showing the coronation of Macbeth Shakespeare obviates the need for a token bishop or priest.  It seems that he wants to portray Macbeth’s world as being entire devoid of God – only the forces of darkness are at work in this Scotland.

The most important supernatural element in Macbeth is probably found in the witches (or more properly the Weird Sisters, since they are not termed ‘witches’ in the text).  Despite his audience’s firm belief in witchcraft (see above), Shakespeare is careful to stress the limitations of the witches’ powers: immediately before Macbeth’s first meeting with them (1, iii) one declares, of the sailor she is toying with, that ‘his [ship] cannot be lost’.  At no point do the witches actually control Macbeth’s actions; Shakespeare does not want us to be able to ‘excuse’ his actions as a result of Macbeth being under supernatural control.  They may use their powers to concoct an hallucinogenic potion to allow Macbeth his visions, and they may provide Macbeth with prophecies he desires to hear, but they are not ever the instigators of events.  Macbeth may be a play filled with supernatural elements, but ultimately it is his own unnatural desires which cause his downfall.

Transgressive Females

Macbeth is a text marked by the absence of women as much as by their presence.  Shakespeare crafts a very male world – Duncan’s wife (or, perhaps more pertinently, the mother of Donaldbain and Malcolm) is presumably dead, as is Banquo’s wife / Fleance’s mother.  Macbeth makes no reference to either of his parents, and Lady Macbeth (laying the foundations for hundreds of readings based on the Elektra Complex) only refers to her father.  Shakespeare does provide us with one traditional mother figure, in the character of Lady Macduff; her teasing of her son about Macduff’s desertion of them makes her seem more than a mere stereotype of the dutiful wife, but she is killed at Macbeth’s whim before she can be developed as a character.  We have a generic ‘Gentlewoman’ who is charged with looking after the increasingly fragile Lady Macbeth, but apart from her the other female characters are most definitely transgressive. 

It is almost tempting to lump Lady Macbeth and the witches together; certainly, Lady Macbeth’s shocking speech in which she calls on the forces of darkness to ‘unsex’ her and suckle ‘bitter’st gall’ from her breasts establishes her quickly as the antithesis of the motherly Lady Macduff.  In combination it is the witches and Lady Macbeth who may be read as bringing about Macbeth’s downfall – the former group by planting or nurturing the seed of ambition in his mind, and his wife by mocking and emotionally blackmailing him into action when he has actually decided against the deed.  Lady Macbeth’s declaration that she would have ‘plucked [her] nipple from [her child’s] boneless gums / And dash’d the brains out’ rather than break her word as Macbeth seems about to do is perhaps her most transgressive moment – rhetorical infanticide is used as a spur to actual regicide – although there is an argument to be made that her most transgressive act lies in her death, implied (though never confirmed) as suicide: for a Christian audience, the ultimate sin against God, rejecting His gift of life.

The witches, in contrast, are treated as almost comic figures to begin with – Banquo certainly seems not to fear them, taunting them for having beards (potentially an in-joke for the Shakespearean audience, who would be seeing men play the parts of the women on stage) and then suggesting to Macbeth that the whole episode was merely a product of having eaten wormwood.  However, the sense of threat that is effected by 1, i is not undone by Banquo’s jesting, and as the play progresses so does the role of the witches in interfering with Macbeth’s fate.  The text is clear that these women are external to society – we see them in ‘A desert place’, ‘a heath’, ‘a cavern’.  They are liminal characters, inhabiting a world not entirely human and not entirely supernatural; to this extent it is difficult to classify them as ‘transgressive’ since their very existence is transgressive against the norms of society. 

Blood

There is blood a-plenty in Macbeth.  From the outset we enter a world of blood, seeing the gory aftermath of the battle writ large on the soldier reporting on Macbeth’s glory.  Most notably it is associated with 2, ii – as a symbol of guilt, Duncan’s blood is viewed as easily erased by Lady Macbeth (‘A little water clears us of this deed’) while for Macbeth it is something that will never be removed.  Blood is also crucial in the banquet scene, providing horror for the audience even as Macbeth gives in to his terrors.