Portrays Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's downward spiral as they struggle with the punishing physical and psychological effects of greed. The play is set primarily in Scotland, and follows the character of Macbeth, a bold Scottish general, as he becomes power-hungry and demented with political ambition. Of all of his plays, Macbeth may best reflect Shakespeare's relationship with sovereign nobility. V1, who was a patron of the playwright's acting company. Shakespeare penned the play during the reign of James Like so many of Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth speaks to each generation with a new voice.Īfter you have read the play, we invite you to turn “ Macbeth : A Modern Perspective,” by the late Professor Susan Snyder of Swarthmore College.William Shakespeare's play The Tragedy of Macbeth, or Macbeth, is one of his shorter tragedies, and was probably written between 1599-1606. Today, the line between Macbeth’s evil and the supposed good of those who oppose him has been blurred, new attitudes about witches and witchcraft are being expressed, new questions raised about the ways that maleness and femaleness are portrayed in the play. More recently, his story has been applied to nations that overreach themselves, his speeches of despair quoted to show that Shakespeare shared present-day feelings of alienation. In earlier centuries, Macbeth’s story was seen as a powerful study of a heroic individual who commits an evil act and pays an enormous price as his conscience-and the natural forces for good in the universe-destroy him. Why do people do evil knowing that it is evil? Does Macbeth represent someone who murders because fate tempts him? because his wife pushes him into it? because he is overly ambitious? Having killed Duncan, why does Macbeth fall apart, unable to sleep, seeing ghosts, putting spies in everyone’s home, killing his friends and innocent women and children? Why does the success of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth-prophesied by the witches, promising the couple power and riches and “ peace to all their nights and days to come”-turn so quickly to ashes, destroying the Macbeths’ relationship, their world, and, finally, both of them? In its depiction of a man who murders his king and kinsman in order to gain the crown, only to lose all that humans seem to need in order to be happy-sleep, nourishment, friends, love- Macbeth teases us with huge questions. What he created, though, is a play that has fascinated generations of readers and audiences that care little about Scottish history. It is possible, then, that in writing Macbeth Shakespeare was mainly intent upon appealing to the new interests in London brought about by James’s kingship. ” A Scottish king and his court.įrom Raphael Holinshed, The historie of Scotland (1577). Shakespeare’s Macbeth supplied its audience with a sensational view of witches and supernatural apparitions and equally sensational accounts of bloody battles in which, for example, a rebel was “ unseamed . . . James had already himself executed women as witches. Such accounts could feed the new Scottish King James’s belief in a connection between treason and witchcraft. He also came upon stories of witches and wizards providing advice to traitors. In Scottish history of the eleventh century, Shakespeare found a spectacle of violence-the slaughter of whole armies and of innocent families, the assassination of kings, the ambush of nobles by murderers, the brutal execution of rebels.
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