Understanding Macbeth: Ten Key Terms Unlocking Shakespeare's Themes

These 10 words and phrases are going to give you the key, the access to grade nine. Not just using the words, but

understanding their relevance to Shakespeare's ideas. At number one, we have the divine right of kings. So, King

James is a controversial king. That's why we had the gunpowder plot to try and get rid of him. He is not Elizabeth I's

son. So there are many nobles who want to replace him. Where are those nobles? They are in the audience because no

mcbth was not produced at the Globe. It was at the court of King James. King James commissioned the play. Shakespeare

is writing for his king to flatter him to acquire power and influence and kaching kaching loads of money. So his

play has to support King James's right to be king. And that is why McBth is a cautionary tale warning against the

consequences of assassinating the king. This now brings us to the great chain of being.

This is a kind of religious interpretation of the monarchy. It says the king is

appointed by God. And therefore to get rid of the king is to go against God is therefore to sacrifice your soul and

also invite punishment not just in the afterlife but now. And so one way of looking at the play is that everything

that happens to McBTH is a divine punishment because he has disrupted the great chain of being and attacked the

divine right of the king to rule. Now we can clearly see why Shakespeare has written this play and what he wants

the audience to think about it. Our next word is reicside. Why is reocide, the killing of a king, such a

hot topic? Well, obviously you've just heard about the gunpowder plot. And you've also learned that the nobles who

might want to get rid of King James are right there in the audience. It's like an episode of Traitors. Nobody knows who

they are, but they know they're there. And Shakespeare is trying to reach out to them and warn them. This is what will

happen to you if you dare to think like this crazed fool McB Beth. Our next word is patriarchal. Now this is fascinating.

A patriarchal society as you know is one ruled by men in the interests of men. And yet we have Lady McBth, my dearest

partner in greatness. Lady McBth, who appears so skillfully to manipulate McBth and persuade him into this

terrible crime of reicide. Well, what is going on here? Is Shakespeare on the side of women or is

he against them in this play? So one interpretation the most common one is that Lady McBth represents everything

that is evil about woman. She is like Eve who tempted Adam with the apple into sinning against God and therefore

invited their banishment from Eden. This was called original sin. And who got the blame? It was Eve. Damn it. You can

never trust a woman. And therefore, Lady McBth is this villainous figure who becomes like a witch. Unseex me here,

she says, and film me from the crown to the toe, top full of dyest cruelty, so that she can become evil, her true

nature. Well, that's one interpretation, but the other one is that Shakespeare is subtly saying this whole tragedy

happens because of how we treat women. Lady McBth has no power of her own. She can only acquire power through marriage

and through the achievements of her husband, McBth. Is it any surprise that she therefore

pushes him as far as she can? And then we flip to the witches. These ugly beard, not beards, these ugly beings

with their beards. And yet they are women. They have no power in society because they are ugly. patriarchal

society only gives them power through their relationships with men. And consequently, these powerless women seek

power where they can find it through the evil [clears throat] of the supernatural.

And so, a subtle interpretation might be that Shakespeare understands the push of women in society towards

what society considers evil. because they have been denied any other kind of power.

Sophisticated grade nine point which allows you to think how far do we sympathize with Lady McBth versus how

far do we condemn her. Next we have the word emasculate to take away a man's sense of his masculinity.

This is how Lady McBth manipulates her husband. She's constantly undermining him as a coward, telling him, "This is

the very painting of your fear." Telling him, "What beast was it then that made this promise to me?" She undermines him

as a man, and in order to reestablish his reputation as a man, in his wife's eyes, he agrees to commit reicide. But

that brings us to an alternative interpretation that's easy to get top grades with with our next word

machavellian. So the word means to exploit other people in fishly [clears throat]

clever and evil ways. So we've talked about how Lady McBth undermines McBth by emasculating him. But this

brings us to McBth. How Machovalian is he? Consider the letter that he writes his wife telling her all about

the witch's promises and what is promised thee. My dearest partner in greatness. Why does he bother to send

the letter? He's going to arrive moments later. Clippity clock clippity clock on his horse. What's the point of the

letter? It's to get her thinking, to get her planning because he knows Lady McBth is Machavelian and he knows she will

want power in a patriarchal society. He knows she will come up with a brilliant plan of how he can become king.

He expects her to come up with the assassination plot for Reicside and he is using her as an excuse, the extra

spur. Do you remember I have no spur to prick the size of my intent but vaultting ambition which oh leaps itself

and falls on the other. He is saying I am like the horse and I'm going to do this vault but I'm going to fall.

Kaboom. Unless I have a good rider with a spur in the foot, you know, jabby jabby control the horse. Who is going to

be the rider on McBth's horse? It's going to be Lady McBth. She is the one who's going to take his ambition but not

lead to the disaster of the fall. She is the one that is going to lead to a successful leap becoming king. He

[clears throat] knows she is the brains behind his brawn. But he has a cunning machavelian plan to persuade her to come

up with the means of regicide which he can then follow and become king. [clears throat] Also he can keep his

conscience clean by blaming her. What a marriage. This brings us to number seven. duplicity

appearing to be good on the surface but doubledeing and being deceitful underneath it. That is McBth. He takes

on the title of the traitor, Fain of Gord. And then he becomes the traitor. He deceives his wife with the letter,

doesn't he? He doesn't let her know that he's manipulating her. She tells him, "Be an expert in

duplicity. Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it." Their marriage is

based on duplicity with each other. And it is also a duplicitous face that they put out into the world. At number eight,

Heratia or Herashia. This is the tragic hero's tragic flaw, their fatal flaw. The whole idea of a tragedy is that you

take someone who is noble and good, but there is one little weakness that grows and grows until it destroys them. That

is the hamasha. On the one hand, Shakespeare is doing this so that his audience know where

they are. You're in a tragedy, guys. And this is what's going to happen to our hero. We all know it's coming because it

happens in every tragedy. On the other hand, he's writing a cautionary tale. And what he's saying to

his audience is many of you will have the same her ambition to become king. And this might

lead you to reicside. And this play is going to teach you WHY REICIDE WILL DESTROY you by destroying your mind,

destroying your hopes, killing your wife, preventing you from having any children and then cutting you off in

your prime. Don't kill the king. King James, we love him. There is a subplot about being

homosexual, but I'm not going to teach you that here because your teachers probably haven't told you.

Now, at number nine, we have hubris. Hubris is pride before the fall. This is another part of his hamasha, his tragic

flaw. He has this sense at least in the words that he uses that he is invincible. He believes that no man born

of a woman can kill him because the witches have told him. But remember the witches are duplicitus. They are the

fiends that lie like truth. On the other hand, a more sophisticated interpretation of McBth says no, he

doesn't believe the witches when they say he's not going to die. He understands the opposite. He understands

that he is going to die, but he just doesn't understand how it can be someone who's not born a woman that kills him.

That's why he goes out looking for them. He says, "Who is he that is not born a woman? like I've got to find him because

obviously all his nobles have abandoned him. He's on his own fighting in his castle with only a few loyal soldiers

and he knows his numbers up. He's going to die. He just can't understand how. And at this stage,

he is no longer hubristic. He doesn't believe he can get away with it. He is desperate for death.

However, if we go back, think about the reicside. When he killed

Duncan, all the nobles accepted it, didn't they? The only thing that flipped things was

when he decided to kill Banquo, then saw Banquo's ghost, and then said, "Never shake thy gory locks at me. Thou canst

not say I did it." All the nobles, they're sitting down, tucking into their dinner. They hear about McBth talking to

this person with gashes on their head, bloody locks, and they think, "Oh, McBth is talking to someone who's been

savagely murdered. I wonder who that could be. King Duncan Dun." And so this acts like a

confession. So McBth's downfall is actually not his hubris. It is his bloodlust. It's the

decision to keep killing. The decision to kill Banquo and the attempt to kill Fle.

Why is that? Well, obviously he sees them as a threat because of the witch's promises. So we can say, "Oh, yep.

That's his heratia." Again, it links back to his ambition to remain king. But he's going to be punished because

he has violated the great chain of being and the divine right of kings and God is now punishing him, driving him mad so

that his mind is full of scorpions, he cannot sleep, etc., etc., etc. [clears throat]

And this brings us to the ultimate number 10, nihilism or if you don't like the body part, nihilism.

And it means despair because there is no point to existence. There is no meaning. There is no God.

There is just what you do and what you can get away with. And so at the end in his tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

speech, McBth realizes that life signifies nothing. It's just a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury. He's

looking at his own life and he's looking at his achievements and becoming king and he realizes he's sacrificed his soul

for nothing. He has taken no pleasure in being king. He's always been paranoid, always been plotting, and now he's lost

his wife, and he's just about to lose his own life. If you are a romantic as I am, his nihilism is caused by losing

Lady McBth. Out brief candle, he says, using the same language that she used. Out damned spot. This language choice

isn't an accident. It's Shakespeare's way of showing that they are uniquely in love with each other. They're like two

parts of the same hole. It brings us back to the dearest partner and greatness that he began with.

Unfortunately, committing reicide has driven them apart, has driven her mad.

And now his nihilism isn't just that he's going to die. It's that committing reicside has driven his wife to her own

destruction. He loves her. He misses her. He says she should have died hereafter. Like we

should have died together or she should have died at a time when I can properly mourn her, not when I'm about to be

defeated in battle by the flipping English and that blooming boy Malcolm. So when we get to the end of the play,

you have two choices. One, order is restored when Malcolm takes the throne. Therefore, the great chain of being is

restored. The divine right of kings is restored. It is the end of nihilism. But

what about the witch's prophecies that Fleance should become king and then beget or give birth to? Well, he doesn't

actually give birth because he's a boy, but you know what I mean. A great line of kings unto the crack of doom.

[clears throat] Well, how is Fle going to become king? Something terrible must happen to

Malcolm. Maybe the world is a nealistic place. There is only sound and fury and no meaning. And

Malcolm is also for the chopper. Or maybe not. You might be an optimist and think Malcolm will say, "I've got no

sons. I'll give away my kingdom to that lovely boy, Fleance." This is my slightly lighthearted way of

saying you can interpret the ending both in a dark nehistic way or in an optimistic way praising King James

because remember Banquo was believed to be King James's ancestor. Fleiance was believed to be King James's ancestor and

therefore Fleiance delivers the ultimate king James. Harrah, pay me lots of money,

King James. I hope you've really enjoyed the play. Witches are bad, aren't they? Reicide's even worse. Hey, you nobles,

let this be a cautionary tale. If you would like a serious way of turning all this into an essay or into revision

cards or attach it to loads of quotes, and why wouldn't you? They're all in the description. Well, not literally. You

got to click on a link, but it's a computer. You know how to do that. Good luck.