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

his mid-twenties, Shakespeare was a successful actor and playwright
in London, and he stayed in the theater until he died, in 1616.

Macbeth was written relatively late in Shakespeare's career--when he
was in his forties. It was the last of what are considered the four
great tragedies. (The others are Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.)
Macbeth is one of the shortest of Shakespeare's works, and its
economy is a sign that its author was a master of his craft. You are
amazed at the playwright's keen understanding of human nature and his
skill in expressing his insights through dramatic verse as, step by
step, he makes the spiritual downfall of Macbeth, the title
character, horrifyingly clear.

All Shakespeare's plays seem to brim over with ideas--he is always
juggling several possibilities about life. England, too, was in the
midst of a highly interesting period, full of change.

Queen Elizabeth was a great queen, and under her rule England had won
a war against Spain, which established it as a world power. America
was being explored. Old ideas about government and law were
changing. London was becoming a fabulous city, filling with people
from the countryside. Even the English language was changing, as
people from distant areas came together and added new words and
expressions to the common language.

More than a half-century earlier, Henry VIII, Elizabeth's father, had
broken away from the Roman Catholic Church and established the Church
of England. Forty years later, in the middle of the 17th century,
King Charles I would lose his head, executed by the Puritans in a
civil war.

Elizabeth was not as secure on the throne as you might think. Though
her grandfather, Henry VII, had stripped the nobles of England of
much power, Elizabeth still struggled with them throughout her reign.
She had to be a political genius to play them against each other, to
avoid the plottings of the Roman Catholics and to overcome the
country's financial mess created by her father, Henry VIII.

A lot was "modern," a lot was "medieval" about the way people thought
in Shakespeare's time. People were superstitious, and the
superstitions became mixed up with religion. Things that nobody
understood were often attributed to supernatural forces.

You can feel some of these things moving behind the scenes as you
read Macbeth. But none of this background--not the influence of
James I or the intrigues of Elizabeth's court or the superstitions of
the times--should determine the way you read the play. It has a life
of its own, breathed into it by Shakespeare's talent and art. It
stands on its own and must be evaluated on its own terms. So now
let's turn to the play itself.