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GRADE 9 GCSE MACBETH CONTEXT
Grade 9 GCSE Macbeth context revision. Unique and developed Macbeth context to reach for a grade 9 essay.
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Macbeth: Grade 9context analysis
November 07, 2016
Aiming for a Grade 8-9.... then you need to have a detailed
understanding of how contextual factors influence the play.
Social and historical context
A Scottish King had just taken the throne....leading to an atmosphere
of FEAR and INSECURITY
Macbeth was written in the early years of the reign of James I of England
(James VI of Scotland), probably in 1604-5. After nearly fifty years of rule,
Queen Elizabeth I had died leaving no direct heirs and the throne was
passed to her cousin James. There had been fears of uprising at the
queen’s death – after an earlier heirless death, that of Edward VI in 1553, a
faction at Court had sought to secure its own power by placing Lady Jane
Grey on the throne instead of Edward’s sister, Mary. The situation was
even more dangerous on Elizabeth’s death in 1603, for Scotland was a
traditional enemy of England and the fear of a popular revolt against
the King of Scotland becoming King of England was very real.
In the event, however, the transfer of power went off without a hitch. In part
this was probably due to the fact that James had a decent record as King in
Scotland – he was perceived has having brought decades of religious strife
to an end, and had maintained peace at home and abroad. Another factor
in play was undoubtedly that he was a man; while England had been
(largely) devoted to Elizabeth, there remained a general feeling that being
ruled by a queen was somehow not quite right.
, The roots of Macbeth are inextricably linked to James’ Scottishness,
of course. Scotland was, for his audience, alien enough to allow
Shakespeare to portray shocking events such as regicide but close enough
to allow him to draw allegorical meanings out: the loyal warrior-hero
Macduff, and the moral king-in-waiting Malcolm, are probably meant to
reflect the two sides of James which most appealed to his new English
subjects.
Modern productions of Macbeth are often at a loss as to how to deal with
the three witches. For all that it is a play that deals with power and deceit,
Macbethhas superstition and the supernatural at its heart. Today’s
cynical audience, increasingly distant from the culture which took Exodus
22:18 ("Do not allow a sorceress to live") so literally, may find it hard to
believe in the witches, but the Seventeenth Century audience would have
had no such problem. King James himself wrote a treatise on how to
deal with witchcraft, and interrogated suspected witches himself.
Within half a century of the first performance of Macbeth the eastern
counties of England would endure the reign of terror of Matthew Hopkins,
the self-proclaimed ‘Witchfinder General’. This pre-enlightenment society,
where scientists – or natural philosophers, as they termed themselves –
were just as likely to be exploring alchemy as physics (see the career of
Isaac Newton), took signs and portents very seriously. Belief in God was
practically universal, denial of God an heretical crime, and if God existed
then so must the full gamut of the forces of evil.
Macbeth deals with a debate that was beginning to emerge in the last years
of Elizabeth’s reign, and would come to a head in the reign of James’ son,
Charles I: where does true authority lie – in the person of the King, or
with the representatives of the people? Macbeth himself recognises
that he has no grounds for killing Duncan and seizing the Crown, apart
from ‘vaulting ambition’: in all respects Duncan has been a good King and,
in killing him, Macbeth is committing a crime not only against the man but
against God, for the conventional view was that Kings held their crowns by
Divine Right. James was a particularly strong proponent of this view,
writing his treatise ‘Basilikon Doron’ as a handbook for his son, stressing
the relationship between King and God. However, the rising merchant and
urban classes – who provided much of the Crown’s income from 1580-
1640 – were beginning to insist on the role of Parliament in effective and
just government. By 1649 the concept of Divine Right would have been
totally undermined, and the successful general Oliver Cromwell would
replace the executed Charles I by Parliamentary will.
Macbethforeshadows these events, with a strong military leader
taking power from an inept King (it is hard to feel sympathy for Duncan
when he confesses that he had built an ‘absolute trust’ on one treacherous
Thane of Cawdor – and then he makes precisely the same mistake again).
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