Insight Text Guide
Robert Beardwood & Kate Macdonell
Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Copyright  Insight Publications 2010
First published in 2007,
reprinted 2008, 2010, 2011 by
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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
contents
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
iv
CHARACTER MAP
Ross, Lennox
Noblemen who
initially remain
with Macbeth
but then join
Malcolm’s forces.
Macduff
Nobleman who
is reluctant to act
against Macbeth
until his family is
murdered.
Support
Hates
and kills
Banquo
Scottish
nobleman
and friend
to Macbeth;
murdered by
Macbeth but
returns as a
ghost.
Join
forces
Malcolm
Duncan’s elder son;
flees to England
following Duncan’s
death; initially
cautious but gains
English support
and leads forces to
overthrow Macbeth.
Fears
Plots
downfall
of
Macbeth
Ambitious Scottish
nobleman and
brave soldier;
devoted to his wife
but powerfully
influenced by her;
murders Duncan
and becomes a
ruthless tyrant.
Orders the
murder of
Distrusts
Believes the
prophecies of
Witches
Three 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.
Loves &
respects
Murders
Admires &
rewards,
then is
betrayed by
Names as
successor to
the throne
King Duncan
Scottish king
who is loved
and respected;
defeats the
Norwegian
invaders only
to be murdered
by Macbeth.
Loves &
inspires
Plans the
murder of
Lady Macbeth
Ambitious and determined to
gain power; persuades Macbeth
to murder Duncan but becomes
guilt-stricken; finally goes mad
and commits suicide.
1
Mac b e t h
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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Mac b e t h
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
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Mac b e t h
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 interpretation 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
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Mac b e t h
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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