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Shakespeare: Macbeth
In this nineteen-part course, Professor John McRae (University of Nottingham) explores Shakespeare’s Macbeth. We begin with a broad introduction to historical, political, and intellectual context of early 17th-century England. After that, we go through the play scene by scene, providing close reading and detailed analysis, with commentary on character, plot, themes and motifs, language, symbolism – and more.
Note: We use the Arden edition of the play. Students using a different version of the play may encounter slight differences in both the text and line numbers.
Introduction
In this module, we provide a broad introduction to the world of Macbeth, focusing in particular on the historical, political and intellectual context of early 17th-century England, especially the concepts of harmony and chaos, the importance of the numbers three and twenty-seven in the structure of the play, and the importance of James I, England’s new Scottish king.
Hello.
00:00:02My name's John McRae, and the subject today
00:00:03is Shakespeare's great tragedy Macbeth.
00:00:06Now, I aim to demolish a few ideas about Macbeth
00:00:11while we're talking about it.
00:00:16But I also want to give you a lot
00:00:18of ideas that really will show you
00:00:20why this play is the way it is.
00:00:23Now, as you know, Shakespeare wrote quite a lot of tragedies
00:00:27and quite a lot of comedies, of course.
00:00:31He wrote 37 plays or so in the course of his career.
00:00:33And this play, generally believed
00:00:37to have been staged about 1606, is quite remarkably different
00:00:39from the other tragedies in the Shakespearean canon.
00:00:45Now, let me explain a little bit about what I mean
00:00:49by that Shakespearean canon.
00:00:53In 1600, he wrote Hamlet.
00:00:56In 1600, the major historical thing
00:00:59that is different from 1606 is that Queen Elizabeth, now known
00:01:03as Queen Elizabeth I, was still queen.
00:01:07We have the advantage over Shakespeare
00:01:11in that we know when she died.
00:01:13She died in 1603, but Shakespeare
00:01:15and all the other writers and the people
00:01:18didn't know when the old queen was going to die.
00:01:21And all through Shakespeare's writing career
00:01:26from the late 1580s, when he started with King Henry VI
00:01:29plays through to 1600 and beyond,
00:01:32with Hamlet and the other great, great plays,
00:01:35one of the main themes was the responsibility
00:01:39of power, kingship, the monarchy,
00:01:44the governance of the state.
00:01:48Now, the reason this was such an important theme
00:01:52was partly because Queen Elizabeth
00:01:56had been such a great queen for so many years.
00:01:59And in 1588, the victory over the Spanish Armada
00:02:03sealed her reputation forever as a great monarch.
00:02:08Of course, she was the daughter of Henry VIII,
00:02:14and he had caused a complete overturning
00:02:17of the way things worked in the 1530s
00:02:22by breaking with the church of Rome.
00:02:26Protestantism, except during the reign of Queen Mary,
00:02:30became the religion of the state.
00:02:34Elizabeth was Protestant.
00:02:36And this is an important development
00:02:39in how the British, the English at this time saw themselves.
00:02:42Humanism, coming from Erasmus of Rotterdam,
00:02:50became a dominant philosophical force.
00:02:55Christianity took something of a sideways step.
00:03:01And it is important in the context of Macbeth
00:03:07to realize that the belief systems of this time
00:03:10also accommodated magic, witchcraft.
00:03:16You could get black magic.
00:03:21You could get white magic.
00:03:23Magic could be good.
00:03:24And many of Shakespeare's plays, especially the later ones,
00:03:27look at the power of magic.
00:03:31Prospero in The Tempest is the great magus of Shakespeare.
00:03:34Now, that's relevant to Macbeth because
00:03:39of the witches, the famous three witches,
00:03:44who are the first characters we see.
00:03:47"When shall we three meet again?
00:03:49In thunder, lightning, or in rain?"
00:03:51And these witches are a new presence in Shakespeare
00:03:55for a very simple reason.
00:04:03Because when Elizabeth died in 1603,
00:04:06the new monarch came down from Scotland.
00:04:10Known in Scotland as King James VI,
00:04:15he became King James I of Scotland and England
00:04:17and Ireland and Wales.
00:04:23The kingdom wasn't properly united officially until 1707
00:04:26with the union of the parliament.
00:04:30But this, in 1603, was called the union of the crowns.
00:04:33So for the first time in London, there was a Scottish king.
00:04:38Macbeth is always known as the Scottish play.
00:04:47There was a real actual King Macbeth before 1066, even,
00:04:51king of far north of Scotland.
00:04:57And he was a good Catholic king.
00:05:00He even went all the way to Rome,
00:05:03which must have been a fair old journey,
00:05:05and paid tribute to the pope.
00:05:07So in effect, his credentials were, if you like,
00:05:10pre-Elizabethan.
00:05:13Shakespeare found the story of Macbeth
00:05:16in the historian he often consulted, Holinshed.
00:05:18And he, as so often, transforms the basic simple story
00:05:22into a completely different interpretation
00:05:28with a completely different function.
00:05:33Now, we have all the plays of Shakespeare in five-act form.
00:05:36That-five act form was not how Shakespeare wrote them.
00:05:43He wrote all his plays experimentally,
00:05:47I would say, slightly differently
00:05:50each from the other.
00:05:53He was always pushing the envelope.
00:05:54He was always experimenting with the shape
00:05:55and the form of his plays, especially in his tragedies.
00:05:58Now, the difference between a tragedy and a comedy
00:06:03in Shakespearean terms goes back to ancient Greek dramaturgy,
00:06:08and Aristotle and Plato.
00:06:15It depends on the harmony of the spheres, the harmony
00:06:19of the universe, because this was
00:06:24the period in which astronomers like Galileo
00:06:27were exploring the further reaches of the universe,
00:06:30and when explorers like Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter
00:06:35Riley were exploring the geography of the world,
00:06:39finding that the world was round, just for example,
00:06:43finding the Americas, finding the furthest
00:06:47regions of the universe.
00:06:51The whole world was taking on a different shape.
00:06:53And so in order to give some philosophical meaning
00:06:57to this radical change in the way the world was being seen,
00:07:02recourse was taken to platonic and neoplatonic,
00:07:08as it was called, philosophy.
00:07:11The harmony of all the spheres is the perfect ideal harmony
00:07:14of the universe, the platonic ideal.
00:07:20And in Shakespeare's works, in a comedy,
00:07:25that harmony is jolted, shaken a bit, disturbed.
00:07:29But by the end of the fifth act of the comedy,
00:07:37harmony is restored.
00:07:42In a tragedy, however, the harmony of the universe
00:07:46is overthrown.
00:07:48And Othello tells us the opposite of that harmony,
00:07:51that opposite is chaos.
00:07:54Chaos has come again, and the tragedies bring the world
00:07:58to the edge of chaos.
00:08:03Usually at the end of a tragedy, something
00:08:06is saved, a new king comes in or something, as happens
00:08:10at the end of Hamlet, as happens at the end of Macbeth.
00:08:16It doesn't happen at the end of Othello or, indeed, King Lear,
00:08:20because Shakespeare goes closer and closer and closer
00:08:25to the edge of the abyss and looks at the possibility
00:08:28of eternal darkness and chaos.
00:08:33And Macbeth is very much a play that moves
00:08:39in a trajectory towards chaos.
00:08:42Strangely, the audience sympathizes.
00:08:49And as I was saying about the structure of the play,
00:08:54we have it in five acts, and we shall
00:08:57comment on it act by act, scene by scene.
00:08:59But that five-act structure was imposed
00:09:03upon the text in the 1720s, and it
00:09:06became the standard way of reading
00:09:10all of Shakespeare's texts.
00:09:12Shakespeare wrote it continuously, but in scenes.
00:09:15And the key to this one lies in the number three.
00:09:22Now, too much can be made of this, and
00:09:28I don't want to make too much of it.
00:09:31But in late Elizabethan neoplatonic philosophy,
00:09:33the fact that the universe is governed by numbers,
00:09:38and that numbers are constant, and numbers are fixed
00:09:40became important.
00:09:44It works in architecture.
00:09:46Architects like Palladio designed their buildings
00:09:47to be perfect in numerical geometric terms.
00:09:52But fascinatingly, in the Teatro Olympicone in Vicenza,
00:09:59which is one of the great buildings,
00:10:05one or two bricks are out of order because you cannot come
00:10:08to near perfection.
00:10:13That would be the sphere of the gods.
00:10:16So we are not looking for the number three
00:10:19to take us to perfection.
00:10:22And one of the magic things about this play
00:10:25is that in most interpretations of Elizabethan
00:10:29numerological thinking, the number 27
00:10:32is the number of witchcraft.
00:10:38Three times three is nine.
00:10:41Three times nine is 27.
00:10:45Now, 27 being the number of witchcraft
00:10:49would mean it would be fabulous if there
00:10:52were 27 scenes in Macbeth.
00:10:55Sorry, there aren't.
00:10:59So we can't overplay that numerological thing.
00:11:02But there are 30 scenes in Macbeth, three threes and nine,
00:11:06and then you start again at zero.
00:11:18Three threes and nine, you start again
00:11:19at zero, three threes and nine, and you reach 30.
00:11:21And the scenes that are zero in that list are amazingly
00:11:25structurally just perfect moments
00:11:33of hold it, hold it, rehold it.
00:11:37So we'll make a little bit of reference to the number three.
00:11:44It's not as pungently important as the number seven in Hamlet,
00:11:48but it is there.
00:11:53And, of course, we start with our three witches.
00:11:55This was a special gift for the new king from his most famous
00:12:00playwright, because--
00:12:07I hope you know this--
00:12:10in 1597, King James VI of Scotland,
00:12:12well known as a writer and poet, as many of his family
00:12:17were, son of Mary Queen of Scots, who
00:12:20had been the arch enemy and cousin of Elizabeth,
00:12:24published a book called Demonologie.
00:12:29That is fundamental to everything
00:12:34we have to say about Macbeth, because Demonologie
00:12:37is a philosophical exploration of how black magic, witches,
00:12:41devils, fiends are important in the philosophical background
00:12:50and belief systems of the time.
00:12:56Did he believe in witches?
00:13:00Well, in Midsummer Night's Dream,
00:13:03do you believe in fairies?
00:13:05It's just part of what humanity likes
00:13:07to entertain itself with in terms of belief systems.
00:13:11If you believe in fairies, you'll
00:13:16go along with the white magic of A Midsummer Night's Dream,
00:13:18and indeed, of The Tempest.
00:13:22If you believe in witches, you'll
00:13:25go along with the black magic of Macbeth.
00:13:27Shakespeare, like everyone else, was
00:13:35concerned that the monarch who followed
00:13:39the perfect ideal virgin queen might not be up to scratch,
00:13:42might not be as good as she was.
00:13:48Could anyone be?
00:13:51And even the greatest of the perfect monarchs, Hamlet,
00:13:53dies when he reaches perfection, and is followed
00:13:58by someone who is patently not going to be as great
00:14:01and complete a king as he was.
00:14:04The other thing that King James had
00:14:09written about a couple of years after Demonologie in a book
00:14:12called Basilikon Doron in 1599 was the sanctity of kings.
00:14:15He believed in the great chain of being,
00:14:25the order of things, that the king was the nearest to God,
00:14:28was anointed, if you like, the divine right of kings.
00:14:33And this is mentioned with the qualities
00:14:40of healing of the English king in Macbeth in act four.
00:14:43This is a mirror to kingship.
00:14:49It is looking at kingship, power, good kings, bad kings.
00:14:55We have three-- three--
00:15:04kings on stage--
00:15:07Duncan, who is the most perfect king.
00:15:10All his virtues, trumpet-tongues, speak for him.
00:15:13We have Macbeth, whom we realize more and more and more
00:15:18is a fiend and a devil.
00:15:22And then we have Malcolm, who has pretended
00:15:26to be a bad king in act four, when
00:15:31he's been talking to Macduff, but he ends up
00:15:33as the model of a young new king.
00:15:36Three on-stage kings.
00:15:40That number three will keep coming up.
00:15:43The other king that is talked about, the healer,
00:15:46is only mentioned, but he is the other king in question.
00:15:49So with these three kings on stage,
00:15:54we are looking at different aspects of kingship.
00:15:58And this different aspect of is going
00:16:04to be a recurring way of seeing things.
00:16:08Now, Macbeth traditionally is called a tragedy of ambition.
00:16:11Well, I'm here to tell you, sorry.
00:16:19That's nonsense, absolute nonsense.
00:16:21It reduces the thing to a banal level.
00:16:24Yes, Macbeth is ambitious.
00:16:28Yes, Lady Macbeth is very ambitious.
00:16:30No, she is not the fourth witch.
00:16:35That is nonsense.
00:16:37The fourth witch is Hecate, who will
00:16:38come in a scene which we will have to discuss later
00:16:41that may not have been completely written
00:16:43by Shakespeare.
00:16:45However, the key word that we are stumbling
00:16:48towards with all this preamble now
00:16:51comes into play, "equivocation," equal voices.
00:16:55Simple, right?
00:17:04In the first scene, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair."
00:17:05That's it.
00:17:11That's the key to the whole play.
00:17:11The key word to describe that ambiguity, if you like,
00:17:14is "equivocation."
00:17:19Now, in 1605, 1606, equivocation was such a big buzzword.
00:17:21It was almost the buzzword of the moment.
00:17:28And Shakespeare, who always responded very rapidly
00:17:32to actual things happening on the streets of London
00:17:36there and then, he takes this equivocation.
00:17:39The word comes in Hamlet once I think.
00:17:43It comes in again and again here.
00:17:48And we will see that practically every concept illustrated
00:17:50in the play, including as we've just seen,
00:17:56the question of kingship, is equivocated.
00:17:59We will see examples, so many examples,
00:18:05that you get fed up of me saying the word "equivocation,"
00:18:08but I'm going to keep saying it.
00:18:12I said a moment ago about the mirror to kingship.
00:18:14Hamlet had said in his discourse to the players
00:18:18that the purpose of drama, and theater, and playing,
00:18:23as he called it, was to hold the mirror, as it
00:18:27were, up to nature, to show the form and pressure of the time.
00:18:32That is exactly what the show of kings in act four
00:18:39does to the audience.
00:18:43And in one of the great Pirandellian tricks
00:18:46that Shakespeare manages to give us, a stunning moment,
00:18:50a whole line of kings proceeding from Banquo's son Fleance, whom
00:18:55the witches say will beget a line of kings, all the way
00:19:01down through the centuries, to the very, very actual moment
00:19:06of the performance when the mirror is held up
00:19:12to the face of King James VI and I,
00:19:16bringing the question of kingship in your face, king,
00:19:22to get him to react to the whole question of what a king should
00:19:30be.
00:19:37It's amazing that Shakespeare didn't end up in jail.
00:19:40Many of the other playwrights of the time like Marlowe and Ben
00:19:43Johnson ended up in jail because they managed
00:19:46to offend the powers that be.
00:19:48Shakespeare got away with it all the time.
00:19:51He got away with it because he was so good.
00:19:53And there were elements of flattery in this--
00:19:56that the presumption, of course, was that King James could never
00:20:00be such a nasty person as Macbeth turns out to be.
00:20:07But we've got to wonder, how did such a nasty tragic hero
00:20:13managed to retain the audience's sympathy for any length of time
00:20:20at all?
00:20:25And the answer is that Macbeth must
00:20:27start a play as an absolute unquestioned hero.
00:20:30And what we are seeing is not a progress
00:20:38towards being a tragic hero, but a decline towards that status.
00:20:43Hero, well, we shall see.
00:20:53At the beginning, he is, however, compared,
00:20:57as happens again and again, face to face, fair is foul.
00:21:02He is fair, and the tyrant traitor MacDonald is foul.
00:21:07The positions will be reversed by the end of the play, when
00:21:17he, Macbeth, represents foulness and Malcolm represents
00:21:21fairness.
00:21:27
Cite this Lecture
APA style
McRae, J. (2018, August 28). Shakespeare: Macbeth - Introduction [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-macbeth-john-mcrae/act-3-scenes-2-3
MLA style
McRae, J. "Shakespeare: Macbeth – Introduction." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 28 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-macbeth-john-mcrae/act-3-scenes-2-3