Macbeth
By William Shakespeare
Macbeth (full title The Tragedy of Macbeth) is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. It is thought to have been first performed in 1606. It dramatizes political ambition’s damaging physical and psychological effects on those who seek power. Of all the plays that Shakespeare wrote during the reign of James I, Macbeth most clearly reflects his relationship with King James, patron of Shakespeare’s acting company.
It was first published in the Folio of 1623, possibly from a prompt book, and is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy. A brave Scottish general named Macbeth receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that he will someday become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the Scottish throne. He is then wracked with guilt and paranoia. Forced to commit more and more murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion, he soon becomes a tyrannical ruler. The bloodbath and civil war swiftly take Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into madness and death. Shakespeare’s source for the story is the account of Macbeth, King of Scotland, Macduff, and Duncan in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. However, the events in the play differ extensively from the history of the real Macbeth.
The events of the tragedy are usually associated with the execution of Henry Garnet for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In the backstage world of theatre, some believe the play is cursed and will not mention its title aloud, referring to it instead as “The Scottish Play”. The play has attracted some of the most renowned actors to the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. It has been adapted to film, television, opera, novels, comics, and other media.
Genre: Fiction And Literature | Drama
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William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor.
Biography
He is widely regarded as the most excellent writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon” (or simply “the Bard”). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every primary living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire.
At 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner (sharer) of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later known as the King’s Men. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare’s private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and whether others wrote the works attributed to him. Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered among the finest English works.
In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of Shakespeare’s plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare’s, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare’s dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a visionary poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, who hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: “not of an age, but for all time”.
William Shakespeare
