Context
The most influential writer in
all of English literature, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to
a successful middle-class glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded
no further. In 1582 he
married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her.
Around 1590 he left
his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and
playwright. Public and critical acclaim quickly followed, and Shakespeare
eventually became the most popular playwright in England and part-owner
of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth
I (ruled 1558–1603) and
James I (ruled 1603–1625),
and he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare’s
company the greatest possible compliment by bestowing upon its members
the title of King’s Men. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired
to Stratford and died in 1616 at
the age of fifty-two. At the time of Shakespeare’s death, literary
luminaries such as Ben Jonson hailed his works as timeless.
Shakespeare’s works were collected and printed in various
editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century
his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was
well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works
led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but the dearth
of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s
personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded
from this fact and from Shakespeare’s modest education that Shakespeare’s
plays were actually written by someone else—Francis Bacon and the
Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates—but the support
for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory
is not taken seriously by many scholars.
In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, Shakespeare must
be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets
that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A
number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have transcended even the category
of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the
course of Western literature and culture ever after.
Shakespeare’s shortest and bloodiest tragedy, Macbeth tells
the story of a brave Scottish general (Macbeth) who receives a prophecy from
a trio of sinister witches that one day he will become king of Scotland.
Consumed with ambitious thoughts and spurred to action by his wife,
Macbeth murders King Duncan and seizes the throne for himself. He
begins his reign wracked with guilt and fear and soon becomes a
tyrannical ruler, as he is forced to commit more and more murders
to protect himself from enmity and suspicion. The bloodbath swiftly
propels Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to arrogance, madness, and death.
Macbeth was most likely written in 1606,
early in the reign of James I, who had been James VI of Scotland
before he succeeded to the English throne in 1603.
James was a patron of Shakespeare’s acting company, and of all the
plays Shakespeare wrote under James’s reign, Macbeth most
clearly reflects the playwright’s close relationship with the sovereign.
In focusing on Macbeth, a figure from Scottish history, Shakespeare
paid homage to his king’s Scottish lineage. Additionally,
the witches’ prophecy that Banquo will found a line of kings is
a clear nod to James’s family’s claim to have descended from the
historical Banquo. In a larger sense, the theme of bad versus good
kingship, embodied by Macbeth and Duncan, respectively, would have
resonated at the royal court, where James was busy developing his
English version of the theory of divine right.
Macbeth is not Shakespeare’s most complex
play, but it is certainly one of his most powerful and emotionally
intense. Whereas Shakespeare’s other major tragedies, such as Hamlet and Othello, fastidiously
explore the intellectual predicaments faced by their subjects and
the fine nuances of their subjects’ characters, Macbeth tumbles
madly from its opening to its conclusion. It is a sharp, jagged
sketch of theme and character; as such, it has shocked and fascinated
audiences for nearly four hundred years.
