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Insight Text GuideRobert Beardwood & Kate Macdonell

William Shakespeare

Macbeth

Copyright Insight Publications 2010

First published in 2007,reprinted 2008, 2010, 2011 byInsight Publications Pty LtdABN 57 005 102 98389 Wellington Street, St Kilda, Victoria 3182Australia

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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:Beardwood, Robert, 1966–. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth: text guide. Bibliography. For secondary and tertiary students. ISBN 978 1 921088 60 5 (pbk.). 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Macbeth – Criticism and interpretation. I. Macdonell, Kate. II. Title.

822.33T6

Printed in Australia by Ligare

c o n t e n t s

Character map iv

Introduction 1

Background & context 2

Genre, structure & style 7

Scene-by-scene analysis 15

Characters & relationships 31

Themes, ideas & values 41

Different interpretations 49

Questions & answers 52

Sample answer 56

References & reading 58

Improve your vocabulary 60

CHARACTER MAP

iv

MacbethAmbitious Scottish nobleman and brave soldier; devoted to his wife but powerfully influenced by her; murders Duncan and becomes a ruthless tyrant.

WitchesThree strange women (the ‘weïrd sisters’); prophesy that Macbeth will become king but Banquo’s descendants will inherit the throne; only seen by Macbeth and Banquo.

BanquoScottish nobleman and friend to Macbeth; murdered by Macbeth but returns as a ghost.

MacduffNobleman who is reluctant to act against Macbeth until his family is murdered.

Ross, LennoxNoblemen who initially remain with Macbeth but then join Malcolm’s forces.

MalcolmDuncan’s elder son; flees to England following Duncan’s death; initially cautious but gains English support and leads forces to overthrow Macbeth.

King DuncanScottish king who is loved and respected; defeats the Norwegian invaders only to be murdered by Macbeth.

Lady MacbethAmbitious and determined to gain power; persuades Macbeth to murder Duncan but becomes guilt-stricken; finally goes mad and commits suicide.

Support

Hates and kills

Fears

Distrusts

Orders the murder of

Believes the prophecies of

Loves & inspires

Loves & respects

Plans the murder of

Admires & rewards, then is

betrayed by

Murders

Plots downfall

of

Names as successor to the throne

Join forces

Macbeth 1

introduction

Macbeth is one of the best-known and most admired plays in the English

language. It continues to be performed and studied around the world;

contemporary film and television adaptations, some using the original

dialogue and others rewriting the script, convey the story to new

generations and audiences.

Set in eleventh-century Scotland, Shakespeare’s account of an

ambitious nobleman spurred on by his wife to grab power by force and

to rule by terror has always resonated with audiences and readers. It is

a play of relentless tension and violence: several characters die onstage,

and countless other deaths are graphically described or nervously hinted

at. Images of blood pervade the play, from Macbeth’s sword that ‘smok’d

with bloody execution’ (1.2.18) to his vision of a dagger with ‘gouts of

blood’ and Malcolm’s despairing summary of Scotland’s state: ‘It weeps,

it bleeds, and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds’ (4.3.40–1).

Blood becomes the very element in which Macbeth lives and breathes.

Threaded through this drama of violent action and ruthless scheming

is an atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion, in which opposites merge

and boundaries dissolve. Witches, appearing as if from nowhere and

then disappearing into thin air, prophesy events that seem improbable,

but eerily become reality. Characters echo one another or uncannily

predict their own fates. Lady Macbeth urges her husband not to reflect on

Duncan’s murder or ‘it will make us mad’ (2.2.37) – and so it does, though

their madness manifests in opposite, yet equally devastating, ways.

Behind Macbeth’s tense action and atmosphere is the discomforting

idea that our lives are not merely our own, but are mapped out by forces

beyond our control and comprehension. Each character resists this notion

in their own way, yet each is caught up in a larger pattern of events over

which they have little control. As much as Macbeth is a play of violent

action, it is also a play of intense introspection: it is an account of a tyrant

that becomes an extended meditation on the nature of power and even

on the meaning of life. Macbeth commits the play’s most heinous acts,

but he also expresses the most complex understanding of his place in the

larger scheme of things and – albeit too late – of his own mortality and

inevitable fate.

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background & context

This section is in three parts:

• the first part discusses Shakespeare’s life and work

• the second part considers elements of Shakespeare’s historical

context relevant to Macbeth

• the third part looks at how Shakespeare adapted the primary sources

for the play.

Shakespeare’s life and work

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was a playwright, actor and poet

who was born and died in Stratford-upon-Avon, but lived and worked

in London throughout the 1590s and early 1600s. His 39 plays (a few of

which were co-written) include some of the most famous and acclaimed

drama written in English, and they continue to be performed and studied

around the world.

Shakespeare’s early plays fall into two broad groups: some are based

on the lives of English kings – the history plays, such as Richard III – and

the others are comedies, such as Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s

Dream, depicting the various difficulties experienced by young lovers

who eventually marry. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, however,

Shakespeare wrote more plays in a third form – the tragedies. In a few

years, around the turn of the seventeenth century, the tragedies Hamlet

(1599), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605) and Macbeth (1606) were written

and performed. At the end of his career as a playwright, Shakespeare

wrote several plays known as ‘romances’: they end more positively than

the tragedies, but also have wistful, melancholy moments.

In addition to the plays, Shakespeare also wrote narrative poetry

(such as Venus and Adonis, 1593) and 154 sonnets. Indeed, his plays

are as highly regarded for the quality of their poetry as for their theatrical

qualities.

Publication of the plays

Around half of Shakespeare’s plays were not published during his lifetime.

They were written for the company for which Shakespeare worked and

of which he was a shareholder (the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, known

as the King’s Men from 1603). For commercial reasons, the plays were

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Macbeth 3�

not made available to rival companies. Those that were published, the

‘quartos’, are largely unreliable since they were unauthorised, and

perhaps used the dialogue as recalled by one of the actors who required

some extra income.

It was not until 1623 – seven years after Shakespeare’s death – that

two of his fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, put together

a collected edition of the plays, known as the First Folio. Heminges and

Condell aimed to produce the best possible versions of the texts. Perhaps

most importantly, they made possible the preservation of many plays that

otherwise would have disappeared forever. Macbeth is one of the plays

whose text was preserved only in the First Folio.

Despite the care taken by Heminges and Condell, the Folio texts

contain errors and inconsistencies which modern editors of the plays

must correct (or decide to leave unchanged). For this reason, every edition

varies in small but often significant ways, such as scene and line numbers,

punctuation, spelling (which was not standardised in Shakespeare’s time)

and some words that seem not to make sense in the Folio text. The best

editions include detailed notes by the editor explaining the reasons for

their choices.

England under Elizabeth and James

The long and relatively stable reign of Elizabeth I coincided with the

English Renaissance, a time in which poetry, drama and music all

flourished in England. Shakespeare was not the only great English poet

of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Edmund Spenser’s

epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596) and John Donne’s many

songs and sonnets are high points in the English literary tradition. London

had a thriving theatre scene well into the Jacobean period, leading to the

writing and performance of many new plays.

James I

Although Shakespeare is generally known as an Elizabethan playwright

– meaning he wrote during the reign of Elizabeth I (from 1558 until

her death in 1603) – many of his most famous plays were written and

performed when James I was king (known as the Jacobean period).

Macbeth was clearly intended to be seen by James I, who was also

James VI of Scotland and a descendant of Banquo (or his real historical


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counterpart). The vision of eight kings descended from Banquo that so

appals Macbeth in Act 4 Scene 1 would have been obviously relevant

to James, and the ‘many more’ that Macbeth sees in a glass would have

been a sign of confidence in the continued success of the line.

Witches and the curse on Macbeth

Macbeth’s depiction of witches would also have been interesting to

James I, who wrote a book on the subject of witchcraft, titled Demonologie.

However, he was not sympathetic to witches: there were witch-hunts and

trials under James rule in both Scotland and England, with those found

guilty being put to death (usually by hanging). Shakespeare’s witches do

seem to have access to ‘more … than mortal knowledge’ (1.5.2–3), but

the destruction and havoc caused by their use of this knowledge casts

them in a very negative light.

There is a curious feature of Macbeth’s performance history that

derives from Shakespeare’s depiction of the witches. The spells and rituals

in some scenes – in particular, at the start of Act 4 – are said to be ‘real’

ones used by witches in the early seventeenth century, some of whom

were so annoyed at having their secrets publicly revealed that they placed

a curse on the play. To this day it is said to be bad luck to say ‘Macbeth’

inside a theatre (except as part of a performance), and the play is often

referred to as ‘the Scottish Play’ for this reason. Performances of the play

– and those acting in them – seem to have been unusually affected by bad

luck: see the websites home.flash.net/~manniac/macb.htm or pretallez.

com/onstage/theatre/broadway/macbeth/macbeth_curse.htm for a survey

of these misfortunes.

The Gunpowder Plot

Shakespeare’s play about the dangerous consequences of usurping a

rightful king from his throne was written around the time of a serious

attempt on the government of James I. In 1605, a group of Catholics

planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament at the time of its State

Opening, in order to overthrow Protestant rule and make England

a Catholic state once more. The plot was discovered and the man

responsible for its execution, Guy Fawkes, was tortured until he revealed

the names of the co-conspirators.

As most editions of the play explain, there appears to be a reference

to a minor figure in the Gunpowder Plot in the Porter’s speech, when


Macbeth 5�

he alludes to an ‘equivocator’ who ‘could swear in both the scales

against either scale, who committed treason for God’s sake, yet could not

equivocate to heaven’ (2.3.8–11).

The ‘equivocator’ is usually taken to mean the Jesuit priest, Father

Henry Garnet, who learned of the plot through confession and therefore

felt unable to reveal it to the authorities. Nevertheless, his knowledge

was discovered and Garnet was found guilty of treason, leading to his

execution by hanging. During the trial, Garnet made numerous false

statements in an attempt to mislead the court – hence the Porter’s

reference to an ‘equivocator’.

Garnet was hanged on 3 May 1606, which gives – on this interpre-

tation of the Porter’s words – the earliest date for the completion of the

Macbeth.

Sources for Macbeth

For the central characters and overall plot of Macbeth, Shakespeare drew

on Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland,

published first in 1577 and again in 1587. Many editions of Macbeth

include excerpts from Holinshed’s version of Macbeth’s life and reign in

the eleventh century. Another of Holinshed’s Scottish narratives concerns

the murder of King Duff by Donwald, which clearly provided Shakespeare

with material for Macbeth’s murder of Duncan – like Macbeth, Donwald

killed the king’s chamberlains on the following morning; the country

was plunged into darkness; and horses ate each other (see the dialogue

between Ross and the Old Man in Act 2 Scene 4 for these last two

elements).

Differences between Holinshed and Macbeth

There are many interesting differences between Holinshed’s account of

Macbeth and Shakespeare’s play, and these allow us to identify some of

the effects Shakespeare sought to create. In particular, he condenses the

action so that it seems to take place not over the many years covered by

Holinshed, but in a period of perhaps several months at the most. He also

brings to life the inner emotional states of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth,

which Holinshed hints at but does not portray. In this way, the story of

Macbeth is transformed from a ‘chronicle’ of historical events into an

intense psychological study.


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Shakespeare altered the roles of several characters in ways that impact

strongly on the overall meaning of the play. Some of these key differences

are considered below. Quotations from Holinshed are taken from Sylvan

Barnet’s modernised version which appears in the Signet Classics edition

of Macbeth.

The role of Duncan

In Holinshed, Duncan is a weak and ineffectual king: ‘after it was

perceived how negligent he was in punishing offenders, many misruled

persons took occasion thereof to trouble the peace’ (Barnet 1963, p.141).

In contrast, Shakespeare depicts Duncan as a widely loved and admired

king, and thus emphasises the evil nature of his murder.

The role of Banquo

Holinshed represents Banquo as complicit (involved) in the murder of

Duncan, since he was ‘the chiefest’ of a group of ‘trusted friends’ Macbeth

confided in. Macbeth then murdered Duncan only ‘upon confidence

of their promised aid’ (Barnet, p.144). Shakespeare, though, maintains

Banquo’s innocence – no doubt partly to avoid embarrassing King James

I, of whom Banquo was said to be the ancestor.

In fact, unlike Macbeth, there was no ‘historical’ Banquo; Sylvan

Barnet points out that Banquo ‘was a convenient invention of a Scottish

historian who in the early sixteenth century needed to give the Stuart line

a proper beginning’ (Barnet, p.xxiii).

The role of Lady Macbeth

The role of Lady Macbeth is almost entirely Shakespeare’s creation, since

Holinshed says only that ‘his [Macbeth’s] wife lay sore upon him to

attempt the [murder of Duncan], as she that was very ambitious, burning

in unquenchable desire to bear the name of a queen’ (Barnet, p.144).

Although Shakespeare remains true to the spirit of this original, the

richness of Lady Macbeth’s language, her increasingly fragile emotional

state and the pathos (sadness) of her sleepwalking scene give her much

more complexity.

The role of Macbeth

Just as Shakespeare makes Duncan a more admirable figure than Holinshed

does, he also emphasises the tyranny of Macbeth’s rule. Whereas the

original story describes the first ten years of Macbeth’s rule as peaceful


Macbeth 7�

and productive – ‘he set his whole intention to maintain justice, and to

punish all enormities and abuses’ (Barnet, p.145) – Shakespeare hastens

to the murder of Banquo and Scotland’s rapid descent into terror and

violence. There is no suggestion in the play that Macbeth is a capable

leader of a nation or that he wishes to become king in order to create a

more just society.

genre, structure & style

Tragedy

Macbeth belongs to the genre of plays known as tragedy, a form

developed by Greek playwrights in the sixth and fifth centuries BC,

notably Sophocles (King Oedipus) and Euripides (Medea). It was revived

and reworked by the Elizabethan dramatists, who omitted the Chorus

(a group commentating in unison on the hero’s situation) but otherwise

retained the main features of the classical model:

• the play tells the story of a tragic hero, usually a nobleman or in

some other way a leader of society, who possesses extraordinary

qualities and initially is widely admired

• the hero has a flaw (hamartia) or commits a terrible error of

judgement; this causes a reversal of their fortune

• the hero suffers from excessive pride (hubris), leading them to ignore

warnings or their own better judgement

• the audience shares in the hero’s emotions; their actions and

experiences elicit pity and fear in the audience

• the play’s conclusion resolves the conflict and generates a release of

tension (catharsis) – the audience is purged of the earlier emotions of

pity and fear.

Macbeth as tragedy

Macbeth’s tragic flaw is usually taken to be his ambition, which he himself

identifies (1.7.27). His hubris is apparent in his resolve not merely to

attain the throne by an act of regicide (murder of a monarch), but to

challenge fate by ordering the murders of Banquo and Fleance. He fails

to achieve the outcome he desires, as Fleance escapes and Banquo’s

ghost haunts him at the banquet. Macbeth now commits himself to a path

of violence, seeing himself as being at a point of no return (‘Returning


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