Hi everyone it's Lauren and welcome back to my series on Shakespeare. In this
video I'm going to be looking at and analysing Shakespeare's play Macbeth. If
you'd like to see more videos in this series I will leave a link to it in the
description box below and you can find videos there on how to read Shakespeare
and some other videos on Shakespeare's individual plays as well. So I'm going to
give a brief overview of the plot of Macbeth and then have a chat about some
of the themes and the interesting things that's happening with the characters in
the play. The play famously opens with the three witches. King Duncan of
Scotland has been fending off a Norwegian invasion and two of his lordss
have been on the battlefield with him. Macbeth and Banquo stumble across these
three witches. They then very enigmatically bestow some prophecies upon
Macbeth and Banquo, to Macbeth they say 'Hail Thane of Glamis' which Macbeth is
currently, 'Hail Thane of Cawdor and hail he will be king hereafter'
To Banquo they say you will not be king yourself but your sons will be Kings you
will beget a line of kings. They vanish then, very mysteriously and
Macbeth and Banquo are quite skeptical about this and saying this is very odd
they're saying they're calling me Thane of Cawdor
I'm not Thane of Cawdor, they say you won't be King but your sons will be
Kings what's going on here? However immediately after leaving the witches
I'm a messenger from the King comes saying to Macbeth you have just been
made Thane of Cawdor because the Thane of Cawdor was treacherous within this
battle that we've just had and very very quickly
Macbeth then starts to change his mind and thinks this first prophecy has come
true I am now Thane of Cawdor! So what he does
is he sends a letter to his wife Lady Macbeth saying that the king and all of
their Lords are going to come and stay in the castle and relaying this prophecy
to her. She, equally, very quickly then gets on board with the idea that Macbeth
is going to become King and starts plotting how they can make this come to
pass. When Macbeth returns home they plot to murder King Duncan they decide to get
his guards drunk and kill him at night and then plant the daggers on them so it
looks like that they have killed the King so this is exactly what they do. The
king's sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee Scotland straight away, very rightly
assuming that someone who killed their father will have it in for them as well
and so Macbeth, who is a cousin of the king, is then crowned
himself. After this Macbeth and Lady Macbeth start on a psychological tumble
into guilt and paranoia. Macbeth then worries that Banquo's sons will be Kings
he tries to have Banquo killed. Banquo is killed but his son Fleance escapes
Macbeth also orders the death of Macduff who is another loyal Lord, he has
gone to England to see the king's son Malcolm and while he's away his entire
family is killed. On the back of this Malcolm and Macduff launch a revenge
attack on Macbeth. At this point Macbeth is very worried and very paranoid about
his position as king so he goes to visit the three witches again. They give him
another set of prophecies, they tell him that he cannot be killed by any man of
woman born and that he will be king until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane
where the castle is and so Macbeth thinks oh that's fine then because woods
can't move and every man is of woman born so I'm going to be fine. However, very
neatly and very nicely this all climaxes into a large battle at the end where
Malcolm's troops hide themselves under branches of the trees of Birnam Wood and
so it appears that the wood is coming to the castle and Macduff tells Macbeth
just before he fights him that he was 'from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd'
as in he was born by cesarean section so he is not technically 'of woman born'
Macduff kills Macbeth, Lady Macbeth commits suicide offstage and Malcolm is
crowned king. The historical context of this play is quite interesting, it's
thoughts have been written just a few years into the reign of King James I
of England who was and was previously King James VI
Scotland. Elizabeth I died without any children so King James VI
of Scotland then became the rightful heir of England as well. He is
also thought to have been a descendant of Banquo
so this play is very much pandering to his royal lineage and it's a part of
Scottish past which King James I himself would have known well or would
have at least thought that this was part of his heritage. He was also very
superstitious, very interested in witches so you can see how this play really is a
pandering to James I's tastes. There are some really interesting themes
and juxtapositions happening within Macbeth, some of the most obvious themes
are of course ambition and violence and then the after
psychological effects of that violence but what's interesting here is that
Shakespeare is also linking that psychological after-effects and the act
of violence its itself to a supernatura,l unnatural world. We have the witches
themselves who are orchestrating Macbeth's downfall for reasons unknown, but we also
have words from other minor characters and comments about the state of nature
at this time. The doorman for example talks about animals acting very weirdly
owls screeching and horses butting in their stables. There's lots of odd things
happening and it's very much this feeling that murder is so unnatural that
almost nature is adverse to it, is rejecting this act or on the other hand
you could see that nature and the witches themselves has become
contaminated as they are pushing towards these unnatural acts that Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth are about to commit and then Lady Macbeth and Macbeth themselves
have these supernatural-esque experiences. When Macbeth goes to kill
Duncan beforehand he has the famous 'Is this a dagger I see before me' speech
where he is seeing visions of daggers. Afterwards and during the murder he says
that he hears a knocking he also says that he heard a voice yell out, we also
have a dining scene later on in the play when Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost
preside over the table and starts confessing and panicking and Lady
Macbeth has to try and cover it up, and then nearer the end of the play we see
Lady Macbeth who is suffering under her guilt so much that she is sleepwalking
and seeing visions where we have again the famous 'out damn'd spot'
speech. The characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and how they change between
the beginning of the play and at the end is one of the things that is threading
through this whole play and driving it forward. What's really interesting is
that at the beginning, Macbeth is actually quite skeptical of the witches'
prophecies until the first prophecy comes true and then immediately he
starts believing it, he writes to Lady Macbeth who equally seems so eager to
believe this that straight away without really very much prompting she starts
planning a murder of Duncan, which does beg the question have the
Macbeth's thought about this before? Have they always been this ambitious?
Macbeth is Duncan's cousin so it isn't improbable that he could have been named
Duncan's heir. This is an opportunity which has just sprung itself upon them
but is it an opportunity that they have been hoping for? Is it one that they've
been planning for? Have the witches speaking to Macbeth...is that really just
an excuse just to give them permission to then carry out this murder or is it
really as it appears that they have just heard that Macbeth will become king so
therefore they very quickly put this planning together
to murder Duncan? It's quite interesting because Lady Macbeth is so ruthless in
her ambitions and she really is the driving force at the beginning of the
play. If it had been left to Macbeth alone he probably wouldn't have taken
this opportunity to kill Duncan at least that's the way it's presented, he's very
hesitant he struggles throughout the murder to actually commit it and then
after he's killed Duncan and stabbed him he comes back to Lady Macbeth with the
bloody daggers and he's in an absolute state, he's panicking Lady Macbeth has to
take the daggers back herself and plant them on the guards and finish the deed
because Macbeth is incapable of doing it She really is the strong force she says
'a little water clears us of this deed' this is all fine don't worry about it go
to sleep and it will all be okay in the morning. Throughout the first half of the
play Macbeth continues to be very panicked about his position as king he's
very paranoid especially about the prophecy concerning Banquo and so he
also starts become more ruthless even within his paranoia. He orders Banquo and
his son to be killed, Lady Macbeth at this point is still a
very firm guiding force she's actually helping Macbeth when he's panicking and
seeing Banquo's ghost you see that she is still very stable at this point
whereas he is kind of on the edge, and then as the play progresses they almost
reverse Lady Macbeth descends into this madness, the doctors find her
sleepwalking and she's completely wracked with guilt about what she's done
and what Macbeth is doing, whereas Macbeth especially after he sees the witches for
a second time becomes full of arrogance full of confidence
he thinks he's invincible and it's a complete change to the Macbeth that we
saw at the beginning of the play. Another really interesting technique within
this play is that of what is seen and what is unseen both by the characters
and by the audience, so for example you have Lady Macbeth committing suicide but
this happens offstage. It's a very, very violent play there's a lot of blood in
this play and yet a lot of that happens offstage as well; Duncan's murder happens
offstage, most of the battles are offstage, Macduff's family are killed
while he is not there so he is told about it later from a messenger he
doesn't witness himself and there's an interesting parallel between Banquo's
son Fleance and Duncan's son Malcolm fleeing from where their fathers are
murdered and because they have fleed because they knew that they were in
danger as well there is then suspicion surrounding who actually committed the
murder and the princes end up putting themselves in the frame for Duncan's
murder which allows Macbeth to get away with it because that's the way that this
situation seems to everybody else. Equally we have Macbeth and Lady Macbeth
seeing things that other people can't see, so for example when Macbeth is
seeing the dagger before him he's on stage at this point but the audience
can't see this dagger he's explaining it to us
Lady Macbeth is trying to rub spots out of her hands no one else can see those
and then later on Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost Banquo's ghost comes on and as the
audience we can see Banquo's ghost but the rest of the people around the table
can't see him so it's a really interesting question as to how much of
this is in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's mind, how much of it is psychological and how
much of it is supernatural? With the witches themselves it's quite an
interesting theory because Banquo and Macbeth both see the witches so they can
corroborate that they were there but if Banquo hadn't have been there would we
even believe that these witches existed at all? We also have this chatter around
the castle of these odd unnatural things happening within nature and so there is
a lot of talk about odd things happening but it's really interesting to analyse
where that line might be between what is supernatural objectively and what really
is just the result of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's psychological breakdown and we
see this come up again in another minor theme that comes through of the idea of
sleep. Duncan is murdered while he's asleep
and Macbeth hears his voice while he murders him saying 'Sleep no more! Macbeth
hath murderd sleep!' Later on, Lady Macbeth when she's in her somnambulistic
sleepwalking state is at this point between sleep and awake and almost
between life and death and it's an interesting examination of that point
between life and death between the real world and the supernatural world and
whether we can trust our senses as what we're seeing is true or not. I would love
to keep discussing this play, there's so many interesting things that I could
talk about but I'm just not gonna have enough time so I would love to hear from
you if you have any thoughts on Macbeth, if you've read it. Do let me know if there are
other plays by Shakespeare that you would like me to do a video on and I
will see you next time, bye!