Why did Shakespeare write Macbeth, and what is its context?

Shakespeare wrote Macbeth around 1606 for the new king, James I, who claimed descent from Banquo and had a documented fascination with witchcraft, publishing Daemonologie in 1597. The play followed the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, so its themes of regicide, treason and equivocation carried sharp topical force, and it endorses the Divine Right of Kings by punishing the usurper and restoring the rightful line.

Macbeth

by William Shakespeare - 1606

Macbeth is a tragedy about a man who murders his king to take the throne and who knows, before he lifts the dagger, exactly what it will cost him. Shakespeare's shortest and most intense play follows Macbeth from honoured Scottish general to paranoid tyrant, pushed on by a witches' prophecy, by his own ambition and by the relentless goading of his wife. By the final act he has everything he killed for, and he finds that it means nothing.

Malcolm's army marches on Dunsinane, using branches from Birnam Wood as camouflage, fulfilling the witches' prophecy. Lady Macbeth dies offscreen, and Macbeth delivers his famous nihilistic soliloquy: "Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage." In the final battle, Macbeth confronts Macduff, who reveals he was "from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d" by caesarean section and is therefore not technically "born of woman." Macduff kills Macbeth and presents his severed head to Malcolm, who is proclaimed the rightful King of Scotland, restoring the natural order that Macbeth's ambition had shattered.

The doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings is central to the play's moral framework. Jacobean audiences widely believed that monarchs were God's appointed representatives on earth, and that to murder a king was not merely a political crime but a sin against the divine order. This belief explains the cosmic disturbances that follow Duncan's murder: an unnatural darkness covers the land, Duncan's horses eat each other, and an owl kills a falcon. The natural world itself rebels against the violation of God's order. Macbeth's Scotland is a land in which "sighs, and groans, and shrieks, that rent the air, / Are made, not mark’d", a nation suffering under a ruler who has no divine mandate. The play's resolution, with Malcolm's restoration, affirms that legitimate succession and divinely sanctioned kingship will always triumph over usurped power.

1. 1“So wither’d, and so wild in their attire” It is Banquo, not Macbeth, who describes the witches, and after “wither'd” and “wild” he turns to what they are not: they “look not like the inhabitants o' th' earth, / And yet are on't”. Everything about them sits on a border, earthly and unearthly, living and something else. The play never settles exactly what they are, so an answer can weigh more than one reading.
2. 2“You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” Banquo's sentence cannot settle: they “should be” women, and yet the beards say otherwise. The witches blur man and woman just as their chant in Act 1, Scene 1 blurs fair and foul. Two scenes later Lady Macbeth asks the spirits to “unsex me here”, so the play's two most sinister female presences both seem to unsettle what a woman was expected to be.
3. 3“All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter!” The three greetings climb: Thane of Glamis, the title Macbeth already holds; Thane of Cawdor, which Duncan has already given him in Act 1, Scene 2, though Macbeth does not yet know it; and king. The first two make the third sound like the next step. Here the witches never tell him to kill anyone. How he becomes king is left to him, and that gap is where an answer about fate and free will begins.
4. 4“why do you start and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?” Banquo sees his friend “start”, flinch, at good news, and asks the question an audience may be asking too: why should a promise of the crown frighten him? A common reading is that the prophecy names a wish Macbeth already had, and later in the scene he admits to a “horrid image” that makes his hair stand on end. “Fair” echoes the witches' “Fair is foul” and Macbeth's own first line, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen”, while “seem” touches the play's concern with appearances.

The question: Starting with this extract, explore how Shakespeare presents the witches' influence on Macbeth. Write about how Shakespeare presents the witches in this extract, and how he presents their influence on Macbeth in the play as a whole.

1. 1“The raven himself is hoarse” The raven was a traditional bird of ill omen, and Lady Macbeth hears it croaking itself hoarse over Duncan's “fatal entrance”. The king has only been announced, yet in her mind he is already dead: the murder is decided before her husband has even arrived home.
2. 2“unsex me here” The imperatives “Come, you spirits” and “unsex me here” are an invocation, the language of someone summoning spirits. She asks to be stripped of the gentleness her world expected of women, which suggests she believes cruelty is not natural to her and must be put there. A Jacobean audience would probably also hear a woman calling on spirits as close to witchcraft.
3. 3“from the crown to the toe, top-full” The image is of a body as a vessel, filled from head to foot with cruelty. “Crown” can also be heard as a pun: the crown of the head, and the crown of Scotland she wants for her husband, as if the cruelty and the ambition filled her together.
4. 4“Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse” She imagines conscience as something that travels through the body and can be blocked, like a passage sealed shut. The whole play proves her wrong: in Act 5, Scene 1 the remorse she walled up comes back in her sleep, and the Doctor says “More needs she the divine than the physician”.
5. 5“take my milk for gall” Milk is the sign of a mother's nurture; gall is bitter bile. Earlier in the scene she feared her husband was “too full o' th' milk of human kindness”, so here she asks for the very quality she despises in him to be poisoned in herself. Motherhood is turned inside out.
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The question: Starting with this speech, explore how Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth's attitude to evil. Write about how she speaks in this soliloquy, and how Shakespeare presents her attitude to evil in the play as a whole.

1. 1“Is this a dagger which I see before me” The soliloquy opens with a question, and questions dominate its first half. Macbeth cannot trust his own senses, and the audience is left unsure too: the play never settles whether the dagger is a supernatural sign or a hallucination, which is exactly the uncertainty an answer should explore.
2. 2“A dagger of the mind, a false creation” Macbeth diagnoses himself: the dagger may come from a “heat-oppressed brain”, a mind feverish with what it plans. The more convincing reading is that guilt is already at work before the crime, since the vision appears only after he has decided to kill.
3. 3“Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going” To marshal is to lead, as an officer leads troops. But the dagger leads him only “the way that I was going”. This is the key line for any question about fate and free will: whatever the vision is, it points him where he has already chosen to go, and in Act 1 he had hoped “chance may crown me / Without my stir”.
4. 4“gouts of blood” The vision changes as he watches: drops of blood appear on the blade and handle that “was not so before”. Blood becomes the play's chief image of guilt, from Macbeth's “Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” in the next scene to Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking.
5. 5“It is the bloody business which informs / Thus to mine eyes” He argues himself out of the vision: “There's no such thing”, only the murder shaping what he sees. The shift from terror to explanation shows a man trying to control his conscience with reason, a pattern that returns throughout the play, where reason never silences his conscience for long.

The question: Starting with this soliloquy, explore how Shakespeare presents Macbeth's state of mind before he murders Duncan. Write about how Shakespeare presents Macbeth in this extract, and how far Macbeth is driven by forces outside himself in the play as a whole.

1. 1“Out, damned spot! out, I say!” The woman who once gave orders to spirits now gives orders to a stain, and it will not obey. “Damned” carries its full religious weight: she speaks as if the mark is on her soul. Her speech is broken prose, not the controlled verse of Act 1, and its fragments jump between moments.
2. 2“Hell is murky” In Act 1 she called on night to wrap itself “in the dunnest smoke of hell”. Now hell is not a useful darkness to hide in but a place she seems to see and dread. One reading is that she has realised her damnation; another is simply that her nightmares have taken her there.
3. 3“Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard?” She replays her own taunts from the night of the murder, still attacking her husband's courage as she did with “When you durst do it, then you were a man”. The sleepwalker is trapped in the scene she once controlled, speaking lines to a husband who is not there.
4. 4“who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him” The horror she refused to show in Act 2, when she said “A little water clears us of this deed”, surfaces here. She does not name Duncan here; he is only “the old man”, as if even now she cannot say it, and the amount of blood is what she remembers.
5. 5“The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now?” A jingling rhyme, almost a nursery rhyme, about the murder of Lady Macduff. Lady Macbeth played no part in that killing, which Macbeth ordered alone, yet she knows of it and it haunts her. Her guilt has spread to cover crimes she did not plan, and the childish sound makes it more disturbing.
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The question: Starting with this extract, explore how Shakespeare presents the effects of guilt. Write about how Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth in this extract, and how he presents guilt in the play as a whole.

1. 1“Bring me no more reports; let them fly all” He opens with orders, as a king should, but the orders are to stop the news and let his thanes desert. Macbeth sounds less like a king ruling Scotland than a man waiting to be proved safe, and his confidence seems to rest entirely on the two prophecies he repeats to himself in the next lines.
2. 2“What’s the boy Malcolm? / Was he not born of woman?” Macbeth sneers at Malcolm as a “boy”, the word he throws at the servant a moment later, “Thou lily-liver'd boy”. The question is meant to be scornful, but it is a trap he sets for himself: he hears “born of woman” in its ordinary sense, while the prophecy is waiting for the one man who, as Act 5, Scene 8 reveals, was “Untimely ripp'd” from his mother's womb. An audience that has learned to distrust the witches' words may already suspect a trick he cannot see.
3. 3“Shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear” A rhyming couplet (“bear” and “fear”) that sounds final and certain, the way a speech often closes. The alliteration of “sag” and “shake” gives the boast a strong beat. It is interrupted at once by a frightened servant, and within a dozen lines the certainty has collapsed into “I am sick at heart”.
4. 4“The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac’d loon!” Macbeth turns on a frightened servant with insults about his pallor and cowardice: “cream-fac'd”, “linen cheeks”, “whey-face”, “lily-liver'd”. Each accuses the servant of the fear Macbeth has just said he will never feel, which suggests the fear is really his own, turned on someone who cannot answer back. It is a long way from the “brave Macbeth” of Act 1, Scene 2.
5. 5“I am sick at heart” The first admission of weakness in the scene, spoken between his shouts for Seyton, the officer who attends him. The sentence is broken off by those shouts, and the bravado cracks. From here the speech turns from orders to reflection, and Macbeth looks at his own life instead of at his enemies.

The question: Starting with this extract, explore how Shakespeare presents Macbeth as a tyrant. Write about how Shakespeare presents Macbeth in this extract, and how he presents Macbeth as a tyrant in the play as a whole.