Macbeth
For a plot synopsis, see the Folger edition's opening page. For a real understanding of the play, you'll need to read Shakespeare's Macbeth using the assigned edition for your course, a specific edition required by your professor (strongly recommended). If your professor has not required a hard-copy edition, you may choose your own from your favorite library or read the text of the play in a Digital Edition produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Avoid relying on internet summaries or modern-language re-tellings.
With respect to genre, Macbeth is a tragedy, though Shakespeare took the story of the title-character from historical chronicles. Accordingly, it exhibits the basic features of tragedy--blood, mass deaths, a primary male character whose tragic flaw sets up his fall from grace––but also explores a number of concepts and themes related to English and Scottish history.
Image of Macbeth and the witches
The play's thematic interests include:
National Identity
This is a play about the country of Scotland and its violent history. What imagery and figurative language does Shakespeare use to describe the country, its inhabitants, and those who are disloyal to it? Pay attention to imagery associated with England in this play, as well as the particular role England plays in the resolution of Macbeth.
Royalty and Loyalty
Macbeth is also concerned with the notion of legitimate royalty; who is a rightful king? Who assumes power in the proper channels, and who takes it in an unscrupulous way? Pay attention to imagery and metaphors associated with kingship, authority and power.
Ambition and Guilt
Like many of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth stages the dangers of unchecked ambition, a problem for people who are close to those in power. Certainly, the Macbeths together are overly ambitious, but the word comes up in the play in the context of other characters. What degree of ambition is acceptable or necessary, according to the world of the play? What particular factors feed characters’ ambition? What motivates their desire to move ahead in the social, political, or military circles in which they operate?
The flip-side of ambition is (in the play at least) guilt, an emotion that follows fast on the heels of violent acts. Take note of how guilt registers in characters’ speech and behaviors.
War and Bloodshed
Macbeth is a soldier; his primary relationship to the king at the beginning of the play is one of military service. When do Shakespeare’s characters invokve war, blood, and violence literally? When does Shakespeare deploy these concepts figuratively to create violent imagery?
Masculinity, Femininity, Humanity
Macbeth is interested in what constitutes “manliness,” a construct Shakespeare sets up in opposition to feminine and bestial characteristics and alongside “humanity.” Note imagery clustered around ideas about what it means to be a man and, more particularly, a human (as opposed to brutish or inhumane). Image of Lady Macbeth.
Parents and Children
Though the tragedy does not seem to have much focus on the domestic lives of the characters, Macbeth does feature several sets of families in Macbeth. Lady Macbeth’s claim to “have given suck” raises questions about Macbeth’s own family that the play ultimately never answers, allowing audiences to find contrasts to the titular character in Banquo, Duncan, and MacDuff. Related to the subject of parenthood is the notion of dynasty––important to Elizabethan subjects in the years preceding the childless Queen’s death––invoked in the play by Banquo/Fleance as well as Duncan’s two sons, Malcolm and Donalbain.
