Although most of Shakespeare's plays were written in the Elizabethan period, which means during Queen Elizabeth I's reign, Macbeth was actually written later, in 1606, during the Jacobean period. This was a turbulent political period because after Elizabeth's death in 1603, she had no heirs to whom she could pass on the crown. So the Scottish king, James I, who was a distant relative of Elizabeth, replaced her as ruler. and became the first king of both England and Scotland.
Some were so distressed by this perceived imposter that they had conspired a year before the play was written to assassinate the new king in the infamous gunpowder plot. There's no doubt that the controversial passage of power from Elizabeth to James influenced the theme of usurpation in Macbeth, which means stealing the throne. from the rightful ruler.
But Shakespeare avoids suggesting that King James had assumed the English throne by the same foul means as Macbeth. Far from it. The reason why Shakespeare writes a play about such a horrible and bloody deed as regicide, or murdering a king, is not because he wanted to liken James to Macbeth, but because he wanted to warn anyone who had any desires for the throne, like the gunpowder plotters from a year earlier.
that ambition will always end in downfall. Basically, Shakespeare is warning against doing to King James what Macbeth did to Duncan, because divine justice will always punish your arrogance. So Shakespeare is actually sucking up to the new king, not challenging his right to the English throne. We get an even better sense of this through his characterisation of Banquo, who was supposedly a distant ancestor of King James. who had lived in 11th century Scotland, when the real Macbeth had been king.
Shakespeare deliberately characterises Banquo as honourable and good-hearted, affirming the nobility of King James's bloodline. And remember how the witches prophesy that Banquo's descendants will be kings? Some of whom carry double scepters, which means they'll rule multiple countries. Shakespeare is alluding to King James'accession to the throne of both England and Scotland, and by subtly inserting the king into the play, he is positioning James as part of the force of good that triumphs over Macbeth's evil tyranny. So not only does Shakespeare's early Jacobean context shape his glorified portrayal of King James and his ancestors, but political events at the time, like the foiled gunpowder plot, inform Shakespeare's cautionary message about ambition.
Now that we've unpacked the political context in which Shakespeare was writing, let's look at the concept of the great chain of being, which was one of the most influential Renaissance ideas that influenced Macbeth. The great chain of being was a belief in a sacred order that underpinned all existence. It was a strict hierarchy in which everybody had a place.
At the top was God, beneath him was the king, who served as God's lieutenant, and below were the people who had to serve the king. Obeying that sacred structure preserves peace and order, but when someone oversteps their place, like when Macbeth kills the king he is supposed to serve, the chain of being is thrown into chaos. That's exactly what happens upon Duncan's murder.
Macbeth's sin sends the natural world, the heavens, and especially his own mind, helter-skelter until the forces of good can restore the sacred hierarchy. So when you explore this tension between order and chaos as a theme in your essay, it's crucial to identify that as a reflection of the Renaissance belief in the great chain of being. This ties into another dominant contextual concern that shapes the ideas of Macbeth.
Shakespeare was writing in a period that straddled two paradigms, which are like ways of thinking about the world. Religious thought, especially Christianity, had dominated the Middle Ages and still underpinned the way Shakespearean audiences would have conceived the world. But at the same time, the Renaissance was in full bloom and it inspired new philosophies like humanism that challenged old religion in the way they embraced the power of the individual. So, in Macbeth, Shakespeare is simultaneously exploring the old world religious paradigm characterised by superstition and determinism, which was the belief that everyone's life was determined by fate, not free will, and new humanist ideas that individuals could shape their own destiny.
Obviously, the ghosts and witches and constant allusions to hell and heaven strongly evoke the religious ways of thinking during the period, as does the impression that Macbeth's fate is locked in by the witch's prophecy. It's worth adding that King James was obsessed with witches, so Shakespeare's inclusion of all these symbols of old-world superstition were intended to indulge the new king's fascinations. But Shakespeare deliberately leaves it open to interpretation whether all these ghosts and visions are just the hallucinations of a madman who's hiding from the fact that it's his own black and deep desires driving his actions, not some supernatural force.
This reflects humanist beliefs in free will, and humanist ideas are elsewhere conveyed in the play, especially through Macbeth's apparent loss of faith in the Christian afterlife by the play's end, which mirrors the growing doubt in the Renaissance period. of religious beliefs. So again, it's important to locate Shakespeare's thematic exploration of the tension between fate and free will as part of the wider contextual friction between Christian tradition and emerging Renaissance humanism in the early 17th century.
Now let's look at how Shakespeare's Jacobean context shapes his portrayal of women. Shakespeare wrote in a pretty misogynistic period in history, and while it might be a bit of a stretch to condemn Shakespeare himself as a sexist, his female characters were doubtless influenced by the gender stereotypes that prevailed at the time. The art, literature and culture of Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages had constructed an ideal of femininity as passive and virtuous, while men were idealised as courageous. physically powerful and sexually potent. This stemmed from the biblical belief that women were the source of sin, so they must be subdued by men to prevent them from recommitting the crimes of Eve.
It should be obvious enough that the characterisation of Macbeth and his wife subverts these traditional gender roles. However, Lady Macbeth takes on... typically masculine qualities of dominance and cruelty, while Macbeth is chided as womanly due to his cowardice. What's more, Lady Macbeth discards the feminine trait of maternal love, while Macbeth loses the supposedly masculine virtue of reason as he descends into madness.
So Macbeth and his wife are inversions of traditional Jacobean gender stereotypes. There is still debate among critics about why Shakespeare does this. Is he trying to warn against straying from the natural order of gender roles and allowing evil women, like Lady Macbeth and the witches, to corrupt moral male minds? Perhaps he's blurring these gender traits because he wants to challenge the gender roles that his society so rigidly believed in.
Or maybe there's yet another reason, and he's trying to illustrate the dangerous potential of the violent brand of masculinity that his society celebrated by showing the strife that's caused when we snuff out our capacity for love and care for fear that they make one seem womanly. All can be argued well, and often it's sophisticated to show not just how Shakespeare is shaped by his context, but how he also reacts against it. To wrap up this lesson, let's look at how context has shaped the form. of Macbeth. Form can be a tricky concept to get your head around at first, but it basically means the type of text the composer has used and the unique ways in which they've used it.
In Shakespeare's case, we know the form of Macbeth is a play, or more specifically, a dramatic tragedy, which is basically a play with a moral message in which everyone usually dies at the end. It's easy to cop out and say that Shakespeare wrote plays because he loved them, but when we look at some of the developments of the Renaissance period in which he was writing, it becomes clearer why Shakespeare embraced this particular form, and more specifically, how he used it. The Renaissance was characterised by a rediscovery of ancient sources after Europe had been plunged into the Dark Ages for centuries. Finally, some of the great works of art and philosophy left behind by the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome were found again, and they hugely influenced Shakespeare's generation of composers.
Shakespeare particularly would have been influenced by classical Greek theatre. When closely analysed, his plays, including Macbeth, often mimic the conventions of Aristotelian tragedy, which was a type of tragic play formulated by Aristotle, who was an ancient Greek philosopher and playwright. This type of play was characterised by a few key narrative stages. The tragic hero first suffers a turn of fortune, called peripatia, then their hamartia, which is their fatal flaw, ambition, in Macbeth's case, leads them down a path of self-destruction. This suffering evokes the audience's pity, something Aristotle called pathos.
Eventually, the tragic hero realises and accepts their doom in a moment called the anagnorisis, so that the audience can finally experience an emotional release in their death, which is the phase called catharsis. If you go through Macbeth, you can see that the play's narrative follows these Aristotelian conventions almost exactly. So in addition to analysing how context has influenced the themes Shakespeare explores, your essay should identify how the Renaissance rediscovery of ancient works, like those of Aristotle, has shaped Shakespeare's choice of form and the very structure of his play's narrative.
We hope you enjoyed this Schooling Online production. For more easy lessons on Macbeth, check out our explanation of the play's plot summary.