In medieval Scotland, Macbeth, a general in King Duncan's army, and his fellow soldier, Banquo, are returning from a successful battle. On a barren heath, three witches appear and greet Macbeth as "Thane of Glamis," "Thane of Cawdor" and "King hereafter." They also prophesy that the future heirs of the throne will be descended not from Macbeth, but from Banquo. The witches disappear, and a messenger from the King arrives announcing that Macbeth has been named Thane of Cawdor, thus fulfilling the first part of the prophecy. King Duncan declares that he is nominating his son, Malcolm, as heir, and announces that he will spend the night at the Macbeths' castle.
Alone, Lady Macbeth reads her husband's letter describing the witches' revelations. She fears that Macbeth lacks the courage to commit murder and seize the crown. Returning home, Macbeth expresses reservations about murdering the King, but Lady Macbeth convinces him that the deed must be done. That night, Macbeth stabs the sleeping Duncan, and two guards are framed for the crime.
The next morning, Macduff, a nobleman, discovers the body of the King. The King's son, Malcolm, flees to England, and the lords of the kingdom vow to avenge the King's murder. Macbeth is appointed King, but with the witches' prophecy in mind, he arranges for the murders of Banquo and his son, Fleance. Although Banquo is killed, the hired assassin does not succeed in killing Fleance.
At a royal banquet, Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost sitting in his chair, disrupting the ceremonies despite Lady Macbeth's efforts to control the situation. He returns to the witches, who share new visions with him: to beware Macduff, that he can never be killed by "one of woman born" and to never fear until he sees Birnham Wood begin to move. These twisted predictions lead Macbeth to think that he is safe from harm, although the witches still show that Banquo's descendants will ascend the throne.
When Macbeth learns that Macduff has fled the country to join with Malcolm, he orders Macduff's wife and children to be put to death. Haunted by the sins she has committed, Lady Macbeth begins sleepwalking. Malcolm and Macduff advance an army to challenge Macbeth, cutting down the branches of Birnham Wood to disguise their number. Macbeth is strengthening his own army, when news reaches him that Lady Macbeth has died. Macbeth goes into battle. Face to face, Macduff reveals that he was "from his mother's womb, untimely ripped," and defeats Macbeth. Malcolm becomes King of Scotland.
THE HISTORY OF MACBETH
Macbeth was written by William Shakespeare between 1603 and 1607. One of the greatest tragedies ever written, the play was based on the true story of Mac Bethad mac Findlaich, King of the Scots in the 11th century.
It is known that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth partially as a celebration of King James, who had just ascended the throne in 1603. King James had a great fascination with witches, and the witches of Macbeth were likely inspired by his interest. In addition, much of the plot of Macbeth is surmised to have been inspired by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when a group of English Catholics attempted to assassinate King James of England, as well as King James VI of Scotland.
Shakespeare's most popular play, Macbeth is performed more often than any of his other works. Its first public performance was in 1611 at the Globe Theatre in London. The first actor to play the role was the esteemed Richard Burbage.
There have been 48 productions of Macbeth on Broadway over the years. In fact, Alan Cumming is the first Scotsman to perform "The Scottish Play" on Broadway in more than a century.
Legend has it that prior to the premiere of Macbeth, the boy playing Lady Macbeth suddenly died, and Shakespeare himself stepped into the role. This is one of several myths that are credited with the origin of the superstitions surrounding the play. In 1849, a fight broke out between two famous Shakespearean actors, Edwin Forrest and William Charles Macready, who were both to star in respective productions of Macbeth in Manhattan. This fight escalated into the historic Astor Place Riots, which left 25 people dead and 120 injured. There are hundreds of reported incidents of "the curse of Macbeth" including several where a real dagger has been mistaken for a prop dagger, resulting in the death of an actor.
The curse of Macbeth is well-known throughout the world. For centuries, thespians have avoided saying the title of the play out loud in a theatre, preferring to use "The Scottish Play."
It has become tradition, when the name "Macbeth" is spoken in a theatre, for the guilty party to spin around three times, spit over their left shoulder, and yell an obscenity. There are several ritualistic ways to guard against the curse of Macbeth, but none have been definitively proven to ward off the curse.
Summary
The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The next eleven lines are devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the speaker stipulates what mainly differentiates the young man from the summer’s day: he is “more lovely and more temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”; in them, the sun (“the eye of heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is fleeting: its date is too short, and it leads to the withering of autumn, as “every fair from fair sometime declines.” The final quatrain of the sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever (“Thy eternal summer shall not fade...”) and never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved’s beauty will accomplish this feat, and not perish because it is preserved in the poem, which will last forever; it will live “as long as men can breathe or eyes can see.”
Commentary
This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may be the most famous lyric poem in English. Among Shakespeare’s works, only lines such as “To be or not to be” and “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” are better-known. This is not to say that it is at all the best or most interesting or most beautiful of the sonnets; but the simplicity and loveliness of its praise of the beloved has guaranteed its place.
On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is incidentally personified as the “eye of heaven” with its “gold complexion”; the imagery throughout is simple and unaffected, with the “darling buds of May” giving way to the “eternal summer”, which the speaker promises the beloved. The language, too, is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained clause—almost every line ends with some punctuation, which effects a pause.
Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children. The “procreation” sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker’s realization that the young man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also live, the speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” Sonnet 18, then, is the first “rhyme”—the speaker’s first attempt to preserve the young man’s beauty for all time. An important theme of the sonnet (as it is an important theme throughout much of the sequence) is the power of the speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying the beauty of the beloved down to future generations. The beloved’s “eternal summer” shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in the sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the speaker writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”Summary
This sonnet compares the speaker’s lover to a number of other beauties—and never in the lover’s favor. Her eyes are “nothing like the sun,” her lips are less red than coral; compared to white snow, her breasts are dun-colored, and her hairs are like black wires on her head. In the second quatrain, the speaker says he has seen roses separated by color (“damasked”) into red and white, but he sees no such roses in his mistress’s cheeks; and he says the breath that “reeks” from his mistress is less delightful than perfume. In the third quatrain, he admits that, though he loves her voice, music “hath a far more pleasing sound,” and that, though he has never seen a goddess, his mistress—unlike goddesses—walks on the ground. In the couplet, however, the speaker declares that, “by heav’n,” he thinks his love as rare and valuable “As any she belied with false compare”—that is, any love in which false comparisons were invoked to describe the loved one’s beauty.
Commentary
This sonnet, one of Shakespeare’s most famous, plays an elaborate joke on the conventions of love poetry common to Shakespeare’s day, and it is so well-conceived that the joke remains funny today. Most sonnet sequences in Elizabethan England were modeled after that of Petrarch. Petrarch’s famous sonnet sequence was written as a series of love poems to an idealized and idolized mistress named Laura. In the sonnets, Petrarch praises her beauty, her worth, and her perfection using an extraordinary variety of metaphors based largely on natural beauties. In Shakespeare’s day, these metaphors had already become cliche (as, indeed, they still are today), but they were still the accepted technique for writing love poetry. The result was that poems tended to make highly idealizing comparisons between nature and the poets’ lover that were, if taken literally, completely ridiculous. My mistress’ eyes are like the sun; her lips are red as coral; her cheeks are like roses, her breasts are white as snow, her voice is like music, she is a goddess.
In many ways, Shakespeare’s sonnets subvert and reverse the conventions of the Petrarchan love sequence: the idealizing love poems, for instance, are written not to a perfect woman but to an admittedly imperfect man, and the love poems to the dark lady are anything but idealizing (“My love is as a fever, longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease” is hardly a Petrarchan conceit.) Sonnet 130 mocks the typical Petrarchan metaphors by presenting a speaker who seems to take them at face value, and somewhat bemusedly, decides to tell the truth. Your mistress’ eyes are like the sun? That’s strange—my mistress’ eyes aren’t at all like the sun. Your mistress’ breath smells like perfume? My mistress’ breath reeks compared to perfume. In the couplet, then, the speaker shows his full intent, which is to insist that love does not need these conceits in order to be real; and women do not need to look like flowers or the sun in order to be beautiful.
The rhetorical structure of Sonnet 130 is important to its effect. In the first quatrain, the speaker spends one line on each comparison between his mistress and something else (the sun, coral, snow, and wires—the one positive thing in the whole poem some part of his mistress is like. In the second and third quatrains, he expands the descriptions to occupy two lines each, so that roses/cheeks, perfume/breath, music/voice, and goddess/mistress each receive a pair of unrhymed lines. This creates the effect of an expanding and developing argument, and neatly prevents the poem—which does, after all, rely on a single kind of joke for its first twelve lines—from becoming stagnant.
Shakespeare - Analysis of Sonnet 2 |
In Sonnet 2, Shakespeare stresses to his lover that beauty will not last, and that it is selfish and foolish for anyone not to prepare for the loss of beauty and youth by having a child to carry on unsurpassed beauty. The sonnet can be cynically seen as Shakespeare's attempt to get his lover to sleep with him rather than as a lesson in living life. In the first quatrain Shakespeare says that later on, your youth will be worthless. The greatness of your youth, admired by everyone now, will be, will be as worthless as a "tatter'd weed of small worth held". Shakespeare says this worthlessness will be when forty years of age wrinkles your brow and when there are, "deep trenches in thy beauty's field". The personification is seen in the metaphor: "deep trenches in thy beauty's field" which can be seen as wrinkles in a beautiful face. This gives readers a picture of the old age that has yet to come for some. In the second quatrain, when what has yet to come for some has came, and when you are asked, where is your beauty now? And when you're asked, "where are all the treasures of thy lusty days?" You must reply that These "treasures of thy lusty days" or offspring from your youth are lost in "thine own deep sunken eyes" states the poet. In this place of old age where your youth is, is also greed and self-obsession which is written as "all-eating shame and thriftless praise" by Shakespeare. The metaphor of "all-eating shame" is effective in how readers sense a feeling of negativity from the words of Shakespeare's hand. In the third quatrain, where Shakespeare's hand rhymes of regret, the ideal answer is shown. The poet states, "This fair child of mine shall sum my account and make my old excuse, proving his beauty by succession thine!" This was the answer wished to be used but could not be. Shakespeare says, "How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use" which regrets, if only your beauty could have been put to a greater use. The couplet then describes what it would be like to have this baby. Shakespeare poetically states that this baby would be "new made when thou art old" This means that the baby would be young while you are old. The final line tells how you would see your own blood flow warm through the baby while you are cold. "And see thy warm blood when thou feel'st it cold." |
