Context

Macbeth was written in about 1606, early in the reign of King James I. James had been King James VI of Scotland, and became king of England too in 1603. Shakespeare's company became the King's Men, with James as their patron.

This helps explain the play's choices. It is set in Scotland. Banquo, whom James believed was his ancestor, is shown as noble, and the line of kings in Act 4 Scene 1 points to James himself.

The play also flatters James's beliefs: that kings are chosen by God, and that witches are real and dangerous.

James was fascinated and frightened by witchcraft. In 1590 he believed witches had tried to drown him by raising storms against his ship, and he took part in the North Berwick witch trials that followed. In 1597 he published Daemonologie, a book about witches and how to find them.

Most people in 1606 believed witches were real servants of the devil, and many accused women were executed.

So a Jacobean audience would take the Weird Sisters seriously, and would see Lady Macbeth calling on spirits as truly dangerous. One witch even plans to torment a sailor with storms, which would remind James of his own experience.

On 5 November 1605, a group of Catholic plotters tried to blow up Parliament and kill King James. The Gunpowder Plot failed, and the plotters were executed.

Macbeth was written soon after, and it shows a king's murder bringing chaos and horror. At their trials, the plotters were accused of equivocation: giving misleading answers with double meanings. In Act 2 Scene 3, the drunken Porter jokes about an ‘equivocator’ (Act 2 Scene 3) who could not lie his way into heaven.

The witches' double-meaning prophecies use exactly this trick.

Jacobeans believed in the divine right of kings: a king was chosen by God and answered only to God. Killing a king, regicide, was therefore a sin against God, not just a crime.

They also believed in the Great Chain of Being: everything in creation had its place, from God and the angels at the top, through kings and nobles, down to animals and plants. Breaking that order would upset nature itself.

That is why, after Duncan's murder, nature goes wrong: day stays dark, an owl kills a falcon, and Duncan's horses eat each other (Act 2 Scene 4). Order only returns when Malcolm, the rightful king, is crowned.

A tragedy, as described by the Greek thinker Aristotle, shows the fall of a great man. The tragic hero:

1. starts high, admired by others;
2. has a hamartia, a fatal flaw, which for Macbeth is ambition;
3. falls through his own choices;
4. often realises too late what he has lost.

The audience should feel pity and fear: pity for the man he was, and fear that anyone could fall the same way.