Essential Shakespeare by Pamela Bickley & Jenny Stevens

Author:Pamela Bickley & Jenny Stevens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Arden Guide to Text and Interpretation
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2013-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Macbeth the ‘Jamesian’ play

The literature of the early seventeenth century is termed Jacobean (in Latin, James is Jacobus) to designate the reign of James I. The term denotes the characteristic art and architecture of the period and has come, also, to suggest certain characteristics of the drama, most notably the genre of revenge tragedy. The majority of Shakespeare’s plays are Elizabethan, but some of the greatest writing dates from the latter part of Shakespeare’s career and critics are interested to question whether the late, Jacobean plays, could be said to share characteristic features. To what extent can a change in dramatic tone be perceived? To describe a play as ‘Jamesian’ is to introduce another consideration entirely: it signals not simply that the text is post–1603 but that the play dramatizes issues or ideas specifically connected with the new king.

Elizabeth’s final years were troubled by the much-disputed question of succession: the Queen herself was famously unwilling to discuss her advancing years or name her successor. International diplomacy between Spain and sympathetic English nobles advanced the possibility of Catholic succession, or debated whether James might convert to Roman Catholicism. Some weeks before her death Elizabeth was said to have proclaimed ‘I will that a king succeed me, and who but my kinsman the King of Scots’. James VI of Scotland was the child of Mary Queen of Scots and Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, both of whom were descended from the Tudor dynasty, indeed they were first cousins, sharing the same grandmother, Margaret Tudor (Henry VIII’s elder sister). James had the advantage, then, of a strong title and the firm Protestant conviction that would be necessary for Elizabeth’s heir. In terms of Macbeth, the play’s connection with the new king operates in two ways: James’s own preoccupation with kingship and his obsessive interest in witchcraft. Critics have also found references to the contemporary Gunpowder plot in the language of the Porter.

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