Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course Literature and today we’ll be discussing
Macbeth.
Some people... ...call it the Scottish play or the Bard’s
play because allegedly, back in the 17th century a coven of witches cursed the play to punish
Shakespeare for including their spells.
But that’s just not credible.
So I’m going to call it by it’s real name.
While acknowledging that there have been maybe a lot of riots, deaths and accidents associated
with Macbeth in performance.
But this is a YouTube ch...You know what?
Maybe we should call it the Scottish play.
For the record, I did my own stunts in that bit.
Anyway, today we’ll discuss the historical background for the play, the political and
religious context in which it was written, the play as a likely collaboration, and Macbeth’s
famous dilemma.
All right, time to find out just what all that sound and fury signifies.
INTRO Let’s just go straight to the Thoughtbubble.
As the play begins, the Scottish generals Macbeth and Banquo have defeated the invading
armies of Ireland and Norway.
Great work, Scotland!
They meet three witches who tell Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, that he’s going to
become Thane of Cawdor and then king.
They tell Banquo that while he won’t become king, his sons will.
Macbeth calls these witches “imperfect speakers” and says that all this talk “stands not
within the prospect of belief,” but then Macbeth almost immediately does become Thane
of Cawdor, so he writes to his wife, and she’s like, we’re going to be royalty!
There’s just the small matter of killing the king.
The king, Duncan, comes to stay at Macbeth’s castle, and the Macbeths plan his murder.
They kill the king, but the second half of the plan, killing Duncan’s sons, goes Shakespearenly
awry.
So Macbeth has to worry about those sons; he also has to worry about Banquo’s son,
so he hires some murderers.
Banquo is killed, but his son escapes.
Macbeth starts hallucinating at dinner parties, so he goes to visit the witches and they tell
him: stay away from Macduff (another Thane), no man born of woman can hurt you, and you’ll
be fine as long as Birnam Wood, the forest outside Macbeth’s castle, stays put.
And Macbeth is like, trees can’t travel, I got this.
Still he becomes crueler and more paranoid, executing Macduff’s family and trying to
quash a growing resistance.
Lady Macbeth, haunted by her part in the king’s murder, can’t get an invisible spot of blood
out of her dress, begins to sleepwalk and then dies, a probable suicide.
Macduff, in league with Duncan’s son Malcolm, brings an army to fight Macbeth.
The army uses branches from Birnam Wood as camouflage.
Macbeth holds out until he and Macduff meet on the battlefield.
He says no one of woman born can hurt me and Macduff’s like, “I was a C-section baby!”
Then he lops off Macbeth’s head.
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
So Macbeth is a tragedy, but it’s also a history play.
Kind of.
Like Cymbeline or King Lear, it’s based on historical sources.
But these sources have their own problems and Shakespeare takes plenty of liberties,
some of them artistic, some of them having more to do with the politics of his day and
the preferences of his patron.
Most of what we know about the real Macbeth comes to us from Holinshed’s Chronicles,
published in 1577 and a source for a lot of Shakespeare.
The Chronicles tell us that Macbeth and Duncan were kinsmen in medieval Scotland, and that
Macbeth was a great general, although maybe too cruel and Duncan was a compassionate king,
although maybe too nice.
The chronicles tell us that he was so nice that the country went to the dogs because
Duncan couldn’t enforce the rule of law.
Also after a battle, Macbeth and Banquo meet “thrée women in strange and wild apparell.”
So far, so Macbeth.
But then Shakespeare makes some pretty substantial changes: In Holinshed, Banquo helps Macbeth
slay the king and Macbeth actually becomes a pretty good ruler, at least for a while.
In the Chronicles, “he set his whole intention to mainteine iustice, and to punish all enormities
and abuses, which had chanced through the féeble and slouthfull administration of Duncane.”
/ And Macbeth maintains this justice and punishes
enormities for ten years--before become eventually becoming paranoid and cruel.
So Shakespeare probably made some of his changes out of narrative necessity--murder and tyranny
make for a better story than boringly effective kingships.
He also, of course, wanted to explore how ambition and prophecy and heirs shape human
experience.
But he probably left Banquo out of the murderous plotting for one very specific reason:
King James I was Shakespeare’s patron at the time, and King James I just happened to
trace his lineage back to Banquo, who by the way, is probably a made-up figure.
So obviously, Macbeth the king killer had to be bad, and Banquo the king’s ancestor
had to be good, unless you’re the kind of playwright who’d rather live out the rest
of his career in a dungeon.
Also King James I’s men had just foiled a pretty serious assassination plot, the Gunpowder
Plot, which you may remember because it involved Guy Fawkes and Remember Remember the Fifth
of November and that massively overrated movie V for Vendetta.
Macbeth was probably first performed the following year, so the killing of kings was a touchy
subject, even touchier for James because his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was killed by
Queen Elizabeth and his father was assassinated.
So in this context, it makes sense that Shakespeare would highlight the dire consequences on offer
when someone assassinates a divinely crowned king.
James I as a patron also may help to explain the text’s emphasis on the supernatural,
because James I was super into the supernatural.
So into it that in 1597 he published a book on witchcraft, called “Daemonologie.”
The book really caught on; after it, people in England became a lot more willing to believe
in witches, and fairies, and ghosts, and demons.
Daemonologie also helped perpetuate witch hunts all over Europe.
James, in fact participated in witch hunts himself, most of which targeted vulnerable
women, particularly the poor and the elderly.
So taking the witches seriously is another way to flatter and interest his patron.
Although it should also be noted that Macbeth taking the witches seriously leads to disaster.
Oh, it’s time for the open letter?
An open letter to witch hunts.
But first, let’s see what’s in the secret compartment today.
Oh my gosh!
It’s Yoda, who almost certainly would have been prosecuted as a witch in 17th century
England.
I mean aside from the magic and the cryptic speech patterns, there’s just something
to his look that I suspect wouldn’t have gone over well.
Dear witch hunts, I’m gonna take the controversial opinion that I am opposed to the social order
blindly attacking the weak.
That’s what a witch hunt is.
The power structure looking to defame and/or murder people who cannot defend themselves.
the publication of direct and accurate quotations, even if they’re unflattering?
Not an example of a witch hunt.
Legal investigations into actual non-supernatural crimes?
Not a witch hunt.
And lastly, if you travel to a bunch of different locations to find certain items, that is not
a witch hunt.
That’s a scavenger hunt.
In short, witch hunts, I am opposed to you, but I am also opposed to wrongful characterizations
of you.
Best wishes, John Green.
All right.
Let’s turn to a moment to authorship.
All of Shakespeare’s plays were written by Queen Elizabeth.
And yes, that includes the ones that were written after she died.
What’s that?
Oh, Stan informs me that most scholars agree that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
But it’s possible that Macbeth was written in part by someone else, too.
For a while scholars have been arguing about whether another Jacobean playwright, Thomas
Middleton, contributed to a later revision of the play.
This wouldn’t have been unusual.
Collaboration was common at the time and some of Shakespeare’s early and late plays were
collaborations.
Middleton almost certainly contributed to Timon of Athens, for instance, a Shakespeare
play that is famously not as … what is the adjective I’m looking for … finished as
Macbeth.
Evidence for Middleton’s collaboration includes the fact that the witches’ songs show up
in his own play The Witches.
Also, a couple of the stage directions sound like Middleton’s, as do the diction and
the meter in a few cases.
But even the most enthusiastic Middleton cheerleader only credits him with at most a hundred or
so lines.
But of course who wrote the play is only tangentially related to what’s in it--and Macbeth has
survived through the centuries not primarily because it was written largely by Shakespeare
but because it is, you know, great.
So as the play begins, Macbeth has just won an important battle.
He’s the hero of the day—a day still steaming in blood.
And then he meets the witches, who have been laying in wait for him and they give him the
prophecy.
Now we might wonder if the witches are real, actual witches or just some embodiment of
Macbeth’s own ambitions and desires, though the fact that Banquo sees them argues for
reality.
But maybe they’re both real and metaphorically resonant.
We should also wonder if their prophecy is true.
Can they really see into the future or are their words a way to mess with Macbeth and
tempt him to do something terrible?
Is Macbeth’s fall inevitable or could he have avoided it if he’d ignored the witches’
pronouncements?
Now I’d argue that this is not just a problem for Macbeth--all of us would like to know
if our future is fated or our will is free.
In some way, Macbeth learning his future seems to change his future--
Like was he going to be King before he found out he was going to be king?
Well that gets into the question of predestination, which was one of the central religious debates
of the era in Europe-- are you predestined to go either to heaven
or to hell, or do we have free will to choose our eternal fates?
Shakespeare’s England was at the center of these conversations--it was officially
newly Protestant but deeply religiously divided.
And one of the geniuses of Macbeth is that it explores how difficult it can be to tell
fate from choice-- I mean Macbeth and his wife make a lot of
choices, but they also fulfill every single prophecy
Macbeth knows he shouldn’t kill the king.
This is a very important idea in both Game of Thrones and 17th Century England.
James I believed in a divine right of kings, the idea that kings are ordained by god to
rule
Undercutting that idea was very dangerous for political stability, because then anybody
could be king, or maybe we don’t even need kings.
and Shakespeare basically upholds this idea.
So on the one hand then you have moral prohibition, the risk of earthly punishment, and eternal
damnation.
And on the other side you have the opportunity to become the king of scotland, the 732nd
most important kingdom at the time.
Deciding between doing what you should do and doing what you want to do shouldn’t
be that difficult--but it is, as anyone who has ever lived an actual human life can tell
you.
In the end, Macbeth cannot resist his ambition.
But once he’s made the decision, he sees a dagger hovering in the air in front of him:
“A dagger of the mind, a false creation,/ Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain.”
Now, is Macbeth insane and hallucinating things or is this another supernatural goad?
I mean, Macbeth feels conflicted about his choice and the appearance of a dagger both
shows his distress, but he interprets it as legitimizing his choice to kill the king.
Not for the first time, the supernatural being open to human interpretation.
A dagger hovering in the air seems like a pretty good sign to go ahead with a murder
that Macbeth both desires and is horrified by.
Reading Macbeth, you have to get used to that push/pull of attraction and repulsion.
From the time the witches say, “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” this is a play full
of contradictions and double meanings.
A lot of scholars link this linguistic ambivalence to the issue of equivocation, which means
answering in ways that are deliberately unclear.
It’s a method that Catholics, who were persecuted in England in Shakespeare’s day, were encouraged
to adopt, chiefly via Henry Garnet’s “A Treatise on Equivocation.”
Shakespeare’s father was likely a Catholic, but the play suggests that there’s something
evil in ambiguous speech, like the kind the witches, who speak in half-truths, use.
And it suggests the same about conflicted or ambiguous morality, like the kind Macbeth
initially practices.
But I don’t think this linguistic ambivalence is just reflective of a 17th century religious
debate.
I also think it’s reflective of Macbeth’s psychological ambivalence,
He is both excited and afraid at the thought of becoming king via murder and that gives
us a little bit of insight into a man who begins the play as a decorated war hero and
ends it as a decapitated butcher.
We’ll pick up next time with a further discussion of Macbeth’s complicated and fascinating
character.
Until then, if any weird sisters approach you on a blasted heath, do not listen to them.
After all, it’s not the prophesying that did the damage.
It’s the believing
the prophecy.
Thanks for watching.