The Tragedy of Macbeth

Shakespeare's Macbeth presents the most familiar of all tragic patterns: the rise and fall of a powerful but flawed man. The story comes from an account of eleventh-century Scottish history which Shakespeare found in Hol-inshed's Chronicles, the most popular book of British history in his day. Shakespeare transforms Holinshed's rather crude narrative of treachery, murder, political rebellion, and revenge into a tensely structured tragic ac­tion. The course and pace of this action are determined by a complex in­terplay between the internal desires and fears of the main characters and the external forces of circumstance and fate.

Macbeth was probably the last of Shakespeare's four great tragedies to be written —it follows Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. It may have been writ­ten for a specific performance before James I at Hampton Court Palace in 1606. The company of which Shakespeare was a member, you will recall, had been taken over by James I in 1603 and renamed The King's Men. Even more specifically, James I was King of Scotland when he came to the English throne, and his family, the Stuarts, claimed descent from a line of Scottish kings that went all the way back to Banquo. The very positive character­ization of Banquo in the play, and the prophetic procession in Act Four, Scene 1, showing the eight future kings descendent from Banquo, would certainly have flattered King James, the ninth Stuart monarch. But the power of Shakespeare's play goes far beyond its immediate historical signifi­cance. Like all great tragedies, Macbeth offers us a timeless image of the human will struggling against forces, including those of the mind itself, which are beyond its ultimate control.

Macbeth has always been a success on the stage, partly because of its ingeniously suspenseful construction, partly because of its ominous, brood­ing atmosphere, and partly because of the brilliantly conceived roles of Mac­beth and Lady Macbeth. Great actors from all periods in the history of Eng­lish theater have triumphed in Macbeth's "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech, and in Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene shortly before she dies. Both characters combine qualities of good and of evil, of strength and of weakness. And in a sense both grow in self-awareness even as they become more desperately enmeshed in the consequences of their evil actions. The theatrical power of Shakespeare's skill in characterization is nowhere more convincingly displayed than in Macbeth.

Lecture 6

THE JACOBEAN ERA (1603-1625)

Plan:

1. Civil War, the Protectorate and the Restoration

2. The Metaphysical Poets

3. John Donne

4. Andrew Marvell

5. Ben Jonson

THE JACOBEAN ERA (1603-1625)

On the surface the final years of Queen Elizabeth's reign were a time of confidence and security. After the victory over the Armada, something like a public cult had developed around the personage of the origin Queen, or Gloriana, as the poets often called her. When Spenser addressed her at the beginning of his Faerie Queene as 'Goddess heavenly bright,/Mirror of grace and Majesty divine,/ Great Lady of the greatest Isle," he was expressing an ideal most of his countrymen held to the end of Elizabeth's life. True, there was a certain unreality in praising the chaste beauty of an unmarried woman in her sixties. True, too, was the unsettling fact that Eliza­beth had faced a serious rebellion led by the Earl of Essex in the final years of the century. She also had to contend with a House of Com­mons increasingly reluctant to provide sufficient tax revenues for the running of government. But Elizabeth maintained control through all of this! With her death in 1603, the Tudor dynasty came to an end. She was succeeded by her cousin, James Stuart, already King of Scotland and the son of Elizabeth's former archenemy, Mary, Queen of Scots. James I ruled his kingdom of Scotland together with that of England until 1625, and the period of his reign is known as the Jacobean Era. (Jacobean comes from Jacobaeus, a Latin form of the name James.) The reign of James I initiated a time of deep religious and political unrest in England. It was as if the turbulent energies in English soci­ety that Elizabeth had managed to contain and harness had grown too intense for the old order and for the abilities of James, a morose, pedantic man who possessed none of Elizabeth's instinct for prac­tical politics. We can perceive the emerging religious unrest when we recall that during James's reign the first group of English Puri­tans, strict Protestants who wished to "purify" the Church of England, came to America because they did not feel free to practice their dissenting beliefs in England. Political ferment was reflected in the House of Commons, which asserted its growing power against the Crown and also gained the support of the people by refusing to vote taxes. In the early part of the seventeenth century, even deeper philosoph­ical and intellectual changes were beginning to undermine faith in the older Elizabethan world view. The forerunners of modern as­tronomy, Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo (1564-1642), had argued that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe, and that there might even be a plurality or infinity of worlds. These and other early scientific investigations called into question the very basis of the divinely ordered, hierarchical universe. Most peo­ple rejected the new discoveries and clung to their old ideas, but not without being disturbed by the dawning of a new age of scientific thought.