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  • 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 witchesimperfect speakersand says that all this talkstands 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 meetthrée 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 theeble 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, calledDaemonologie.”

  • 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 aswhat is the adjective I'm looking forfinished 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.

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course Literature and today we'll be discussing

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