"Cliff Notes - Macbeth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

Macbeth was first performed in 1606, three years after James I
succeeded Elizabeth I on the English throne. By that time, William
Shakespeare was the most popular playwright in England, and his
company, which had been called the Chamberlain's Men under Queen
Elizabeth, was renamed the King's Men.

You can see from the subject and content of Macbeth that Shakespeare
was writing to please the new king. At the time James became James I
of England, he was already James VI of Scotland, so a play like
Macbeth about Scottish history was a tribute to him. This play was
especially flattering because James was of the Stuart line of kings,
and supposedly the Stuarts were descended from Banquo, who appears in
the play as a brave, noble, honest man. Also, James wrote a book
called Demonology, and he would have been very interested in the
scenes with the witches.

It is not unusual that Shakespeare would have written Macbeth with an
eye toward gratifying his patron. Shakespeare was a commercial
playwright--he wrote and produced plays to sell tickets and make
money.

One of his early plays--Titus Andronicus--was popular for the same
reason certain movies sell a lot of tickets today: it is full of
blood and gore. The witches and the battles of Macbeth, too, may
have been there in part to appeal to the audience.

It was Shakespeare's financial success as a playwright that restored
his family's sagging fortunes. John Shakespeare, William's father,
was the son of a farmer. He opened a shop in Stratford-upon-Avon and
eventually become one of the town's leading citizens.

John married Mary Arden, the daughter of his father's landlord. Mary
was a gentle, cultivated woman, and their marriage helped John
socially in Stratford.

William, their first son, was born in 1564. It seems that by the
time he was twenty his father was deeply in debt, and John's name
disappeared from the list of town councillors. Years later, when
William was financially well off, he bought his father a coat of
arms, which let John sign himself as an official "gentleman."

So Shakespeare was no aristocrat who wrote plays as an intellectual
pursuit. He was a craftsman who earned his living as a dramatist.

We don't know much about Shakespeare's life. When he was eighteen,
he married Anne Hathaway, who was twenty-six. They had three
children, two girls and a boy, and the boy, Hamnet, died young. By