Context: Jacobean Witchcraft & Power
A Play Written for a King
Macbeth was first performed around 1606, three years after James VI of Scotland became King James I of England. Shakespeare wrote it partly as a royal compliment. James claimed to be descended from Banquo, so casting Banquo as noble and Macbeth as a villain flattered the new king. Every detail — Scottish setting, royal lineage, witches, regicide — is shaped by the fact that James would be watching.
James I was obsessed with witchcraft (he wrote Daemonologie in 1597), had survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and believed kings were chosen by God. All three obsessions — witches, regicide, Divine Right — drive the plot of Macbeth.
The Divine Right of Kings
James believed in the Divine Right of Kings — the idea that a king is appointed by God and answerable only to him. Killing a rightful king was therefore not only murder but sacrilege. Macbeth’s assassination of Duncan is presented as an act that upends nature itself: horses eat each other, day turns to night, and an owl kills a falcon. These portents show the audience that Macbeth has broken the moral order.
Duncan is deliberately drawn as a saintly, generous king — “his virtues / Will plead like angels” — so that his murder is a clear offence against God. When Malcolm is finally crowned at the end, the Divine Right order is restored and harmony returns. Audiences in 1606 would read this as moral reassurance after the shock of the Gunpowder Plot.
A small group of English Catholics led by Robert Catesby (and including Guy Fawkes) attempted to blow up Parliament while the Protestant king and his lords sat inside. The plot was discovered on 5 November 1605. Shakespeare’s play arrives in the theatre less than a year later, and Macbeth is sometimes called his ‘Gunpowder play’.
The Porter’s speech in Act 2 Scene 3 is a direct topical reference. He imagines an “equivocator” who “could swear in both the scales against either scale” — a pointed reference to Father Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest who defended the Catholic doctrine of equivocation and was executed in 1606. The Weird Sisters’ deliberately ambiguous prophecies are a dramatic version of the same idea.
Witches in Jacobean England
James had personally interrogated witches he blamed for raising a storm against his ship in 1590. His book Daemonologie (1597) set out the king’s view of witchcraft: witches were servants of the Devil, able to predict the future and manipulate weather, but always subordinate to God. Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters fit this model: they can predict but cannot compel, and their words always require Macbeth’s willing action to come true.
In 1604, Parliament passed a new Witchcraft Act that made witchcraft a capital crime. Between 1590 and 1680 over 500 people were executed in Scotland alone for witchcraft. When the Weird Sisters say “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” they are literally threatening an upside-down moral universe — for a Jacobean audience, that was terrifyingly real, not metaphor.
For a Jacobean audience, witches were not fictional. The belief that spoken prophecy had the power to shape events gave the Weird Sisters genuine menace — they risked the moral order every time they spoke.
Gender, Honour and the Warrior Code
Jacobean Scotland is dramatised as a violent, masculine world. Macbeth is first introduced to us by the wounded Captain as the soldier who “unseam’d” the rebel Macdonwald “from the nave to the chops.” Violence is equated with masculinity, and gender is used by Lady Macbeth as a weapon: she accuses Macbeth of being unmanly when he hesitates to kill Duncan, telling him to “screw your courage to the sticking-place.”
Honour in this world depends on your loyalty to the king. When Macbeth breaks that loyalty, he betrays not just Duncan but the whole Scottish warrior code. By the end, Macduff — loyal, faithful and a husband and father — re-establishes honour through lawful violence. Shakespeare uses this arc to argue that masculinity without virtue becomes tyranny.
Shakespeare’s main source was Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), a popular history of Britain. The real Macbeth was an 11th-century Scottish king who took the throne after killing Duncan in battle and ruled for 17 years. Shakespeare darkens the story: compresses the timeline, invents the witches’ prophecies and makes Duncan saintly rather than weak. Knowing this helps you discuss Shakespeare’s dramatic choices rather than treating the play as history.
Why Context Matters in Exam Answers
Weak answers drop context into an essay as a paragraph of biography. Strong answers use context to explain a line. When you quote Macbeth’s “two truths are told / As happy prologues”, you can immediately link it to Jacobean ideas about equivocation, the Gunpowder Plot and the danger of ambiguous speech. Context should sharpen your reading, not replace it.