Macbeth

1. What does the word "ambition" mean to you — is it a compliment, a criticism, or both, and what decides which one it is?
2. If you could know one true thing about your own future, would you want to be told it? What would change about how you lived afterwards?
3. Is bravery in a crisis the same quality as bravery in a decision made slowly and in private, or are they two different things?
4. What do you think a leader owes the people who follow them, and what do followers owe a leader in return?
5. How much does reputation — what other people say about you when you are not in the room — actually shape who you become?
6. Shakespeare's audiences watched these plays in daylight on a bare stage with almost no scenery. If you could not show your audience anything, what would you have to do with language to make them see a place?

• Ambition: keep track of what each character says they want, and of what they turn out to be willing to trade for it.
• Conscience and the private mind: Shakespeare lets characters speak alone on stage, so notice how the things they say to themselves differ from the things they say to each other.
• Kingship and its duties: several characters describe what a good ruler should be, and their descriptions do not always agree.
• The performed self: watch the gap between the face a character shows a guest or a king and what that same character has just admitted in private.
• Nature as a mirror: weather, darkness, sleep, birds, and horses keep echoing what the human beings are doing, so track those images as a second commentary running under the plot.
• Manhood and courage: notice how often characters challenge each other by questioning what it means to be a man, and who uses that challenge as a weapon.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, the son of a glover and town official, and had a grammar-school education rather than a university one. By his late twenties he was in London working as an actor and playwright, and he eventually became a shareholder in the most successful theatre company of the age, performing at the Globe and later at the indoor Blackfriars playhouse. Over roughly two decades he wrote or co-wrote some thirty-eight plays and 154 sonnets, moving between comedy, English history, and tragedy, and he retired to Stratford a prosperous man. He wrote for a working theatre rather than for readers, which is why his plays are built for the ear — the poetry does the work that scenery and lighting do today.

Macbeth was written around 1606, near the start of the reign of King James I, who had been King James VI of Scotland before inheriting the English throne in 1603 and who became the patron of Shakespeare's company, renamed the King's Men in his honour. That new royal audience shaped the play: James was Scottish, deeply interested in the supernatural, and the author of a book about witchcraft, and only months earlier England had been shaken by the Gunpowder Plot, a failed conspiracy to kill the king — so a Scottish play about loyalty, treason, and prophecy would have landed on a very raw nerve. Shakespeare took his raw material from Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, a Tudor history book, and reshaped it freely, compressing years into days and reassigning events to suit the stage; the historical Macbeth of the 1040s ruled Scotland for roughly seventeen years and was not, by most accounts, the man in this play. The text we read survives only because two of Shakespeare's colleagues collected his plays into the First Folio of 1623, seven years after his death.