Macbeth

Macbeth

1. The four humours

   • Greek physician Hippocrates (ca. 460 BCE–370 BCE) is often credited with developing the theory of the four humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—and their influence on the body and its emotions.
     • The humours affect your whole being, from your health and feelings to your looks and actions.
       • The key to good health (and being a good person) is to keep your humours in balance. However, everyone has a natural excess of one of the humours, which is what makes us all look unique and behave differently.
         • If blood dominates, you will have a sanguine temperament
           • yellow bile makes you choleric
             • black bile melancholic
               • phlegm leads you to being phlegmatic
   • These humours were thought to be connected to different organs inside the body; to the four elements of earth, water, fire and air; and even to the movements of the stars in the sky.
     • The Wheel of Fortune
       • In Classical and Renaissance concepts, we have a certain linear path, and our destiny is dictated by Fate and by our own choices or actions. A hamartia, or fatal flaw, will determine a tragic ending, for instance.
         • With a Wheel of Fortune, we sense that our lives are on a perpetual wheel, and sometimes we are moving toward the top and sometimes we are moving toward the bottom. In the iconic image, blind Fortune will spin her wheel and those who are happy will experience misfortune, and those suffering will be brought higher.
         • However free thinkers are starting to believe in humanism and are conflicted with many views. This caused many philosophical debates
       • The Wheel of Fortune was a medieval concept with its antecedents in Roman mythology. The Roman goddess Fortuna was characterized as having a Rota Fortunae (wheel of fortune) or a ship's rudder in one one hand and a cornucopia in the other. With these instruments she controlled the fates of people by the spin of the wheel. She spins the wheel randomly, and thus people who are at one time at the top of the wheel and living luxurious lives are, with the spin of the wheel, humbled and brought down. As the spinning of the wheel is capricious, those who are at one time in a favorable position have no choice but to accept the misfortune, pain, and death that awaits them as the wheel spins.

2. Notes written in pink are evidence from/for the play!

3. Macbeth is set in the 11th century C.E. and is very loosely based on real historical events.

   • Macbeth was an early Jacobean drama is known in the theatre to this day as the 'Scottish play'. On the face of it, the tragedy is so tailored to James it must surely have been written with him in mind, probably in 1606.
     • What's the difference between Elizabethan and Jacobean? The Elizabethan era coincides with the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603) and the Jacobean era coincides with the reign of King James (1603-1625).
       • It was the start of the time transition between when women were called witches and then being called hysterical
   • When Shakespeare was working in the theater, the Renaissance movement in the arts was peaking in England. The new openness and humanism are reflected in Shakespeare’s plays.
     • Broadly speaking, the Renaissance period is used to describe the era when Europeans moved away from the restrictive ideas of the Middle Ages. The ideology that dominated the Middle Ages was heavily focused on the absolute power of God and was enforced by the formidable Roman Catholic Church.
       • From the 14th century onward, people started to break away from this idea. The artists and thinkers of the Renaissance did not necessarily reject the idea of God. In fact, Shakespeare himself may have been Catholic. The Renaissance cultural creators did, however, question humankind’s relationship to God.
         • This questioning produced enormous upheaval in the accepted social hierarchy. And the new focus on humanity created new-found freedom for artists, writers, and philosophers to be inquisitive about the world around them. They often drew on the more human-centered classical writing and art of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration.
           • The upheaval in social hierarchy allowed Shakespeare to explore the complexity and humanity of every character, regardless of their social position. Even monarchs were portrayed as having human emotions and were capable of making terrible mistakes. Consider King Lear and Macbeth.
   • Time Period Influences
     • Gender roles
       • Masculinity
       • Femeninity
       • Power balance