Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
& Early Modern English
Sara Rice
EN 307
March 16, 2007
You Don’t Know Billy
» William Shakespeare is lauded as
perhaps the most prolific and
influential writer in the history of
the English language. Why?
 He was one of the first people
to initiate the tradition of
dramatic literature in English.
 Prose was just starting to be
used in plays as Shakespeare
was born.
 He invented and brought
thousands of new words into
Modern English, including
“bedroom” and “lackluster.”
The King’s Men
» In 1603, King James VI comes to power and
takes Shakespeare’s acting company, the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men, as his own The King’s Men.
» In general, Elizabethan stage actors had about
two weeks to rehearse and then put on each
new play. The strain on the actors’ memory was
enormous-- the use of iambic pentameter and
blank verse were extremely helpful to
memorization because they are sound patterns
that are very close to natural human speech.
 A line of iambic pentameter is basically the
length of one human breath.
Macbeth:
The Historical Context
King James VI
» Macbeth is supposed to have been
written in 1606, three years after The
King’s Men gained King James’s
patronage.
» It is the play which best represents the
relationship between Shakespeare
and the King.
» King James claimed to be a
descendant of the real Macbeth, with
only eight kings in between them.
» James was also famous for his
obsessions with the Divine Right Theory
and with witchcraft, two big themes
that Shakespeare incorporates into the
play.
Historical Context,
Continued…
» Shakespeare took the basic story of
Duncan and Macbeth from Hollinshed’s
Chronicles, which dates the reign of these
two Scottish monarchs between 1034 1057.
» Because he had to please his patron,
Shakespeare made the character of
Macbeth much more villainous than he
probably was. (Shakespeare used the
same flattery to please his Tudor patrons
in Richard III)
To frame the passage, here’s
what you need to know:
» Macbeth and his wife, set on
their path of murderous
ambition by prophesies from
a trio of meddling witches,
have killed Scotland’s king
and several others who were
above Macbeth in line for
the throne.
» By this time, in the fifth act,
the Lords and Macbeth have
gone to war over the
kingdom and all of
Macbeth’s deeds are
catching up to him.
Act Five, Scene 5
Lines 9-28
Macbeth.
I haue almost forgot the taste of Feares:
The time ha’s beene, my sences would haue cool’d
To heare a Night-shrieke, and my Fell of haire
Would at a dismall Treatise rowze, and stirre
As life were in’t. I haue supt full with horrors,
Direness familiar to my slaughterous thoughts
Cannot once start me. Wherefore was that cry?
Seyton.
The Queene (my Lord) is dead.
Act Five, Scene Five
Lines 9-28: Continued…
Macbeth.
She should haue dy’de heereafter;
There would haue beene a time for such a word:
To morrow, and to morrow, and to morrow,
Creepes in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last Syllable of Recorded time:
And all our yesterdayes, haue lighted Fooles
The way to dusty death. Out, out, breefe Candle,
Life’s but a walking Shadow, a poore Player,
That struts and frets his houre vpon the Stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a Tale
Told by an Ideot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
Vocabulary
» Wherefore: archaic way to say “why”
(Remember, Juliet doesn’t ask where Romeo is, she asks him why he has to be a
Montague)
» Sences (senses): had several,
interchangeable meanings. Here, it is
likely that Macbeth means his sanity, his
right mind.
» Dismall (dismal): had a different meaning
in Shakespeare’s day-- it could mean
calamitous, which is likely in this context.
Style and Grammar
» First half: soliloquy to the audience and to himself
 Soliloquies were common in Elizabethan
theatre
 General conventions of the soliloquy: the
speaker has to be honest in soliloquy-- they
are performed in order to bring the character
and the audience closer together
» This monologue of Macbeth’s is written in blank
verse, with hints of iambic patterning.
» Punctuation: Shakespeare was notoriously
cavalier and sparse with his punctuation.
Modern editors usually make changes to clean it
all up.
Grammar, Continued…
» The first word of every line is
capitalized, even though many are
in the middle of sentences -> poetic
convention.
» In addition, many of the passage’s
important words (from all parts of
speech) are capitalized.
Spelling
» “Haue” and “vpon”-- in Early
Modern English, the [u] and [v] were
interchangeable.
» Some consonants were still doubled
- “stirre” for stir
» Generally, a more phonetic spelling
than even our Modern Standard
English.
Pronunciations
• “and” was allowed to drop its last letter
in speech: “an’”
• “with” was pronounced with an
unvoiced “th”
For the Groundlings…
The
Globe
was a
twentysided,
Open-air
amphitheatre
- It was built to hold 2,000 people but often
housed an audience as big as 3,000 people
- The stage was only five feet from the closest
groundlings, but the actors had to compete with
weather and crowd noise, so their speech had
to be loud and clear.
Macbeth’s Legacy
» There are two very famous lines taken from Macbeth
 One is the Wyrd Sisters’ “Double, double toil and
trouble: Fire, burn; and cauldron, bubble.” (Act IV,
Scene I)
 The other is from this passage. If the last lines sound
familiar, they should; William Faulkner took
Shakespeare’s “Sound and fury” comment and named
his famous novel after it (1929’s The Sound And The
Fury)
T
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Sources Consulted
» The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Edited by
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor
» The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, HarperCollins
Edition
» Early Modern English by Charles Barber. London: Andre
Deutsch Limited, 1976.
» Oxford English Dictionary (Online)