Macbeth Context

• Born: William Shakespeare on  23rd April 1564 to Mary Arden, the daughter of a local gentry family and John Shakespeare, a glover and tenant farmer of yeoman class in Stratford-on-Avon
• He  probably attended Stratford Grammar School where he would have learnt:
• Greek and Latin Literature
• Rhetoric
• Christian ethics.
• He left school in 1579 at the age of 15.
• in 1582 (18yrs) he married Anne Hathaway who was 8yrs his senior.
• 6 months later their daughter Susanna was born. 2yrs after that, twins Hamnet and Judith arrived.
• He wrote many plays and sonnets (poetry) over his lifetime and he was also an actor.
• He died on 23rd April 1616.

• •Before he took up a career as a playwright Shakespeare had many and varied other jobs.
• •He most probably worked with his father in commercial trade, as a law clerk and served as a soldier or sailor as England was threatened by Spain.
• •Whilst in London he became an actor with the Chamberlain’s men before gaining patronage from King James I, when the company became the King’s Men.
• •Macbeth was written for King James I in 1605.
• •Between the early 1590’s and 1620’s Shakespeare composed the most extraordinary body of works in the history of world drama.
• •He moved roughly from comedies to histories to tragedies.
• •His farewell to the stage was The Tempest.

Witches - Definitely 

Ghosts - Yes

Star signs - Yes

God -Yes Most people had a strong belief in God. 

Breaking a mirror is bad luck - Yes, although most people did not own mirrors.

Wishing on a candle - Probably – this was a medieval custom.

Macbeth was probably written some time between 1604 and 1606.It was first performed in 1606 in front of King James I at Hampton Court Palace.

King James was crowned in 1603, and in honour of his coronation, Shakespeare changed the name of his group of players (actors) from ‘The Chamberlain’s Men’ to ‘The King’s Men’.

Shakespeare knew how important it was for the King to like him and his work. The King had the power to stop a company of players from working if he so wished. As it happens, he liked Shakespeare’s company and gave them permission to perform in any appropriate building, including The Globe Theatre.

Of course, this meant that Shakespeare’s plays had to please King James.

People at this time believed in the Great Chain of Being, whereby every person, animal and even plant or mineral was assigned a place in the world by God. It was wrong to aspire to a different place. God, of course, was at the top of the chain. Everyone else was in a strict order descending from God.

Along with this came the ‘divine right of kings’, which meant that the King was chosen and anointed by God; to go against the King, therefore, was to go against God.

His own father was killed and the family home was blown up with gunpowder.

James came to the Scottish throne at 13 months old. There were several attempts on his life throughout
his reign.

James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was Catholic and the Catholics hoped that, as King of England, James would bring Catholicism back. However, James had been brought up as a Presbyterian and so did nothing to change the Church in England at the time. James feared the revenge of the Catholics and believed they might plot against him.

Owing to some odd coincidences when he married, James also had a great fear of witches and witchcraft.

•Up until the 1700’s most people in England believed in witches and witchcraft. This way of life was related to Pagan (non-Christian) beliefs and had been tolerated for many years.
• However, some religious leaders across Europe tried to stamp out these beliefs. In Denmark once such belief was that witches were agents of the Devil. This was the first time that witches had been connected to religion in this way.
•This led to a period of witch hunting where people were tried and often executed for being witches. The witch hunts lasted for more than 150 years. So, if people behaved in a slightly odd way or were around when bad things happened, they were likely to be accused of being a witch. Suspected witches were burnt at the stake or drowned.

•The most famous witch trials that happened in England occurred in 1612 at Pendle Hill in Lancashire - 12 people were arrested for being witches. They were charged with the murder of 10 people. In this case, however, the guilty were hanged as English law did not permit the burning of witches.

•Other witch hunts took place in the 1640s in East Anglia led by Matthew Hopkins, otherwise known as the Witch Finder General whilst the most famous American witch trail was in 1692 in a small town called Salem, in Boston Massachusetts. 

In 1589, James married Anne of Denmark – by proxy, which means he wasn’t there and used another man to represent him! When Anne set off to meet her husband by ship, a great storm blew up and the ship had to take shelter on Norway’s coast.
James decided to set sail himself and meet his bride, but his ship too was stopped by foul weather and storms. When the couple finally met and set off for Scotland, yet another bout of stormy weather made the crossing difficult.
James and his wife believed that witches were casting spells to try to keep Anne out of Scotland. James was aware that witches were being hunted and burned in Denmark and he began to believe in these ideas himself.

• James’ interest in witches didn’t end there. He actually became involved in a witch trial in 1590 in North Berwick and was present at the interrogations and torture of the accused. He became convinced that these were the ‘witches’ who had tried to sink the ships when he and his bride were trying to meet.
• Around 100 people were arrested and accused of trying to kill the King with black magic. Seventy were convicted, and although there are no records to say what happened to them, the usual punishment for witchcraft in Scotland at the time was burning at the stake.

• James wrote a book about witchcraft in 1597 – it was called Daemonologie and considered magic, sorcery, fairies, werewolves, ghosts and wtiches.
• James describes how witches can make demons appear to help them commit foul deeds. James is also clear that most witches are women:
• 'fearefull aboundinge at this time in this countrie, of these detestable slaves of the Devill, the Witches
• or enchanters’.
• ‘What can be the cause that there are twentie women given to that craft, where ther is one man?’
• ‘The reason is easie, for as that sexe is frailer then man is, so is it easier to be intrapped in these grosse snares of the Devill, as was over well proved to be true, by the Serpents deceiving of Eva at the beginning, which makes him the homelier with that sexe sinsine.’
• Key Words
• Homelier = familiar
• Sinsine = since then

• James was not a well-liked king to begin with, but in 1605, a very sinister plot was hatched. Guy Fawkes and his fellow Catholics decided to use gunpowder to blow up the House of Lords, the King and most of the English nobility at the state opening of Parliament in November 1605.
• Fawkes was discovered, with the gunpowder, in a cellar and put in the Tower of London to be interrogated and tortured. He was executed on 31 January 1606, as were the other conspirators.
• King James declared 5 November to be a day of celebration for his deliverance – and we still celebrate it today!
• The memory and the shock of how near he came to death would be very fresh in the King’s mind when he watched the play Macbeth in 1606.

• • There is an age-old system in Scotland of family groupings known as Clans. These family groupings have given many Scots their surnames, provided a great amount of family pride, and produced a fierce sense of community which still exists to this day
• • Historians reckon that the first clans probably emerged in the 11th century, around the time of our Macbeth
• •They were forged out of different tribes based on family ties. The word clan comes from the Gaelic "clann", which means children or descendants
• •The big difference between the clans and the feudal society which existed in most of lowland Scotland was that the latter was based entirely on a hierarchy built around the ownership of land. The clan system was very different because it was built around relationships.

• •The Thane was a clan chief, who took on the responsibility of looking after the people in his area, land he had been given by the Scottish King (akin to Earldoms or Dukedoms today).
• • It is almost certainly not the case that everyone in a clan belonged to the same family, as is popular belief. The chief and his children would be the most important figures in the clan, but many other clansmen were not blood relations. They would simply be people who lived locally and looked to the Thane for protection.
• •Although most people believe “Clan Tartans” have always existed, they are actually an 18th and 19th century invention. However, plants and mottos for families have existed for much longer.

Women in the Jacobean Era were meant to be Subservient and the main role for them was to be mothers and wives. 

Lady Macbeth opposes this viewpoint as she strives to be more masculine and earn the respect of her husband and his peers.