hello imagine something extraordinary for a minute let's imagine something you're good at it could be dance it could be singing it could be a sport whatever it is that you want to be good at imagine that you're pretty brilliant at it and suddenly the most powerful person in the world asks you to perform whatever that skill is for them but not just for them also the 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 most influential people in the world in that field now it's difficult for you to imagine that but that's what happened to Shakespeare he became a playwright and then suddenly he's leading a company of the Kings players so he sponsored directly by the king and what this means is whenever the king wants to entertain he asks Shakespeare to bring his company of actors to act but not just that he asks Shakespeare to write a new play for them every time and then replay lots of his old plays this is an extraordinary thing that is difficult for us to imagine but Shakespeare born in Stratford miles away from London miles away from the seat of power miles away from anyone who would be at court is propelled into this exciting powerful society and becomes a favorite of the king so when this happens when King James makes Shakespeare his star Shakespeare is obviously incredibly loyal to him but there are problems Shakespeare was also fairly influential and in the reign of James predecessor and Queen Elizabeth the first but possibly an even greater playwright at the time that Shakespeare was Christopher Marlowe and he was arrested on the 18th of May 1593 for being an atheist for not believing in God and then he was murdered on the 30th of May 1593 and many people thought that was a political assassination so you can see that reality is a difficult thing to keep hold of Christopher Marlowe seemed on top of the world in May 1593 but not long after he gets murdered possibly on the instructions of the Queen and so acting on Shakespeare's consciousness here is the knowledge that everything he has could be suddenly ripped away at a moment's notice now one of the big problems of the day is the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 that could have assassinated all the ruling families in England at the time as well as the king and many of these plotters when they were found turned out to live very close to shakespeare shakespeare's children's godparents were connected as Catholics Shakespeare's father may have been a Catholic now there was a lot of suspicion around everybody at the time but especially those with known links to Catholics and many people were asking as they still ask was Shakespeare himself a Catholic and did he need to avoid suspicion well one reading of the play is that he is doing as much as he can to flatter King James and distance himself from any accusation that he might be part of some Catholic plot once the plot was uncovered and King James obviously survived he had this medal made and look what it depicts innocent for hours with a serpent underneath it so when Shakespeare gives these lines to Lady Macbeth look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under't he's deliberately referencing this medal that everybody in his audience with him understood especially King James and his political message is look I am NOT the serpent I am I am the innocent flower I don't just appear to be the innocent flower but as we've seen is reality what it seems is it ambiguous was Shakespeare actually sympathetic to the Catholics but desperate not to appear so so that King James would still use him and his players and Shakespeare could still become the most successful playwright of his day well of course it's not just Shakespeare's life that he's writing about that might have been what was on his mind but when he's writing the play he's interested in what's happening to King James and also the other influential landowners and noblemen of his time and they would also be absolutely worried that King James might find some reason to turn against them again reality is ambiguous for them because they feel completely unsafe even if they're not and this is why there are so many references in the play to appearance and reality so when the witches say fair is foul and foul is fair they're saying it's really difficult to work out and whether something is good or evil whether events are going to turn out as tragedy or comedy so we can apply that to the witches prophecies who say that Macbeth is going to become king but that leads to the foul nosov him killing Duncan and also the foul nosov him not enjoying being a king at all it could also be a reference to Lady Macbeth who appears fair and beautiful as a woman but is actually foul and bloodthirsty underneath it and the same is true over London in the day that Shakespeare's writing yes it opens up opens up massive opportunity but at the same time there are events like the Gunpowder Plot or there are natural disasters like the plague which killed thousands of people in 1605 and of course the plague broke out nearly every year killing some people so you were never free from it and then there is the uncertainty of war when the battles lost and won so yes Macbeth is successful in defending Scotland against the Norwegians so Scotland is free but in the act of becoming the winner of that battle he becomes so powerful in his own mind that he feels that he's also entitled to rule and then Scotland suffers even more dreadfully perhaps and if Norway had conquered it there's no art to find the man's construction in the face says Duncan ironically criticizing the traitor the Thane of Cawdor but missing Macbeth's face who is also a traitor and instead offering that beth great reward perhaps this symbolizes how at the back of shakespeare's mind he's wondering how his rewards as one of the Kings favorites might suddenly be taken away by James's suspicions about his involvement with any Catholic families or Catholic plot when Lady Macbeth says to Macbeth false face must hide what the false heart doth know he's echoing sentiments that James must feel that there may be further conspirators further terrorists if you like out to plot his downfall if we go back to the time of Queen Elizabeth the first she had a great rival the Earl of Essex he was very popular in the country and she had him executed well the Earl of Essex his son in 1606 is 14 years old and King James decides to have him married off to one of the families of his executors in other words he's trying to stop families plotting against him by making them loyal and to the extent that they had to accept people who were if you like their old enemies and this is a metaphor for how he wants the country to accept him even if many in the country see him as a foreign ruler from Scotland an enemy if you like so we could even read this as a coded message where Shakespeare is saying look you might not agree with this king but you've got to hide that and just put up with the fact that he's here all we might look at it as a kind of psychological message from his own unconscious mind and telling him to keep his own feelings to himself and keep flattering and ingratiating himself with the new king then we have this ironic statement from Duncan when he comes from at Beth's castle and says this castle hath a pleasant seat it's deeply ironic because it's going to be very unpleasant for him he's going to be murdered there but Shakespeare is also pointing out a wider truth in the play this is dramatic irony because we can work out that Duncan is going to be killed there and therefore we see his future and he doesn't but in the act of presenting that Shakespeare is telling all his audience look none of us can predict our own futures and what seemed so pleasant now could actually turn out to be our own tragedy our own death and how does Shakespeare solve this in his own life well one way of looking at his plays is as a solution to this problem yes life is ambiguous but what happens if we embrace that so if all reality is possibly not what it seems what if I make my living pretending that the real the Unreal is real so when Shakespeare becomes a playwright he actually embraces this idea of we can't really know what truth is by creating his own truth on stage the truth is what you make it and if you like Shakespeare is a much better liar than anyone else at his time because he creates the best dramas and the proof of that of course is that his players his group of actors become the Kings players he becomes visibly to everybody else in London and therefore the country the best playwright however we can also notice a tone of regret here when Macbeth talks about his own life coming to an end and Lady Macbeth life coming to an end he says life's but a walking shadow and this is an allusion to the actor on the stage and he's saying actually our own lives are just shadows we think they're real we think they've got substance but actually they don't they're illusions and they can be taken from us at anytime they don't necessarily have any meaning if there is a God and God is writing a script for us that we're not in control of and it can all end terribly and we could see this as Shakespeare looking up his own achievements and thinking actually they're not so special my success can be taken away from me at any time just as my life could and then finally when Malcolm tells Macduff I think angels are bright still though the brightest fell actually I think that's Macduff talking to Malcolm in the scene that's usually cut from the play and he's making a really interesting observation about God and Satan so as Shakespeare's audience would know the brightest angel the best angel was in fact Satan and Satan was God's favoured angel God himself didn't see that Satan would fall would become evil and this perhaps is the final message of the play if even God can't see Alton they whether someone is the innocent flower or the serpent then what hope is there for mankind everything that we treasure could be taken away from us at any moment and what Shakespeare's solution to this age-old dilemma well it's to throw yourself into the things that you value and for him it's the creation of a new reality and this perhaps is an interesting similarity between Macbeth and Shakespeare Macbeth does not leave things to chance he goes out and gets what he actually wants and Shakespeare is exactly the same and this play also leaves nothing to chance Shakespeare deliberately uses the same symbolism that King James used in order to ingratiate himself with King James and to show his loyalty and so finally when we look at the play we can see it as a great masterpiece of art that Shakespeare uses to enthrall his audience but we can also at the same time see it as a masterpiece of propaganda in which he spreads King James's message around the country showing people that it's not just a wicked act to kill the king but actually a pointless one which will come back and bite you like the serpent does just like Macbeth is ultimately killed as a result of his own evil acts well thank you very much for sticking with me look out for some more videos and thank you very much for watching my channel