Study notes for BEGC-133 Block 1 Unit 4. Covers 18th and 19th century criticism: Samuel Johnson's Preface 1765 (faithful mirror, Daemonologie), Coleridge's On Macbeth 1819 (imagination vs Hamlet's intellect, Porter scene as actors' interpolation, witches as imaginative disconnected from the good), De Quincey's 1823 essay on the knocking at the gate (human reflux after fiendish), A.C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy 1904 (darkness/blackness atmosphere, tragedy within Macbeth, Lady Macbeth "leans on nothing but herself"); Marxist approaches: Victor Kiernan (Macbeth as symbol of feudalism to capitalism transition), Anand Prakash (humanism, witches at periphery, collision of discourses); Cultural Materialism by Alan Sinfield 1992 (feudalism to absolutist state, Macduff stands to Malcolm as Macbeth to Duncan); the real witch debate (Scottish Witchcraft Act 1563, Reginald Scot 1584 sceptical, King James Daemonologie 1597); Terry Eagleton 1986 (witches as heroines, androgynous imperfect speakers); Lady Macbeth as "fourth witch" (bourgeois individualist, feminist reading); England and Scotland (anti-Scottish discourse, Carroll, James VI and Mary Queen of Scots), with critics timeline diagram and all 5 unit-end questions answered. Free PDF download.
A great play is never read the same way twice. Over the last 250 years, critics have looked at Macbeth through very different "lenses" — as a mirror of life, a work of imagination, a study of a guilty mind, a story about class and power, and even a play whose real heroes are the witches. This unit walks you through all of these views in plain language.
Shakespeare's Macbeth is one of the most written-about tragedies in the world. Because it is so rich, critics from many different schools — Feminist, Marxist, New Historicist and others — have all found something in it. This unit gives you a clear overview of how the play has been read and understood over the years, so you can talk about it like a confident student in the exam.
This is the "early" group of critics. They were mostly interested in the play's moral truth, its imagination, and the minds of its characters — not yet in politics or class. Let us meet them one by one.
Johnson, an eighteenth-century critic, edited Shakespeare's plays. His big idea was that Shakespeare held up a "faithful mirror to manners and life" — meaning his plays honestly reflect how real people behave.
One worry was that Macbeth uses witches and magic ("enchantment") to drive the story. In Johnson's time, that could look like a fault. But Johnson cleverly defended Shakespeare: in 1606, ordinary people actually believed in witches. King James had even written a book about them, Daemonologie (1597), and the law against witchcraft was made stricter in 1604. So Shakespeare was simply using ideas his audience took seriously — he could not be blamed for that. Johnson also praised Shakespeare's deep understanding of human nature, for example in Macbeth's famous "Tomorrow and tomorrow" speech about how life slips away unenjoyed.
Coleridge was a Romantic poet and thinker. For him, the key word was imagination. He compared Macbeth with Hamlet: Hamlet, he said, appeals to the intellect (thinking), while Macbeth appeals to the imagination and the emotions (feeling).
Coleridge made two more important points. First, he believed Macbeth has no puns and almost no comedy — it is "wholly and purely tragic." (Because of this, he even thought the comic Porter scene was added later by the actors, not written by Shakespeare.) Second, he saw the witches as creatures of pure imagination — "imaginative disconnected from the good." They stand outside ordinary morality and set the dark mood, or "character," of the whole play.
De Quincey focused on one small, brilliant moment: the knocking at the gate just after Duncan is murdered (Act 2, Scene 3, before the Porter opens the door). He asked why that knocking feels so powerful, and gave a famous answer. During the murder, he said, normal human feeling is suspended — the Macbeths step into a "fiendish" (devilish) world. The knocking is the sound of ordinary human life rushing back in. It makes us feel, by contrast, just how far the murderers had drifted from normal humanity.
Bradley's book is a set of lectures on Shakespeare's tragedies. His two famous ideas about Macbeth are easy to remember:
Bradley also admired Lady Macbeth as one of the most "awe-inspiring" characters Shakespeare ever wrote. His famous line about her shows her terrible strength of will:
Marxism comes from the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-1800s. Marxist critics read literature in terms of class, money and power — especially the lives of ordinary, marginal people, not just kings and queens. When they look at Macbeth, they ask: what does this play say about a society that is changing?
Kiernan argues that Macbeth stands for "change" — not just personal ambition, but the change of a whole age, with old and new "social forces in a state of collision." He notes that Macbeth is the second usurper (throne-grabber) in Shakespeare's tragedies, after Claudius in Hamlet, and that the play was written near James I's troubled accession (the Gunpowder Plot was in 1605). Most importantly, Kiernan spots a daring political question hidden in the play: do people have the right to remove a bad ruler? This quietly challenges King James's own belief that even the worst crowned king must be obeyed.
Prakash, a present-day Marxist critic, reads the play as a struggle for humanism (human dignity). He stresses that the play is about "larger processes than individual initiatives" — it is not one person's story but the pressure of a whole political climate on its characters. For him the witches sit at the "periphery" (the edges of society), pushed there by the powerful people at the centre. The play, he says, is a "head-on collision of two discourses": the world of high politics and the world of the deprived.
Cultural Materialism is a newer approach that grew out of Marxism. It reads the play against the real social history and politics of Shakespeare's time, and pays special attention to people on the margins — women, commoners, the lower orders.
In his essay "Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals," Alan Sinfield says England was moving from feudalism to the "absolutist state" — that is, from a time when power was shared among the church, regions and nobles, to a time when all power was centred in one all-powerful monarch. Whenever a ruler grabs that much power, there will be "dissidents" — people who resist.
Sinfield's sharpest point is about the ending. King James's book Basilikon Doron (1599) drew a neat line between the "lawful good king" and the "usurping tyrant" — so the king's violence is fine, but the rebel's is a crime. But Sinfield notices that at the end of the play, Macduff stands to Malcolm exactly as Macbeth once stood to Duncan. In other words, the "good" new order is also built on killing. So the play is not simply a neat story of evil erupting in a good system and then being cured.
The line between a "lawful king" and a "tyrant" is not as clean as the rulers claimed. The state's own violence can look a lot like the tyrant's.
To understand the witches in Macbeth, we have to know that witchcraft was a hot, real debate in Shakespeare's England, not just fantasy. Two opposite views stood out:
Holinshed's Chronicles — Shakespeare's main source — described the witches in two ways at once: as "weird sisters," like goddesses of destiny, and also as demon-like creatures. Shakespeare keeps this rich double meaning, which is why the witches feel so hard to pin down.
Eagleton turns the usual reading upside down. For him, the witches are the real heroines of the play, with a "positive value." They live in their own "sisterly community" on the edges of society, refusing the violent, competitive world of warriors and kings. Their strange, riddling speech and their nature — "androgynous (bearded women), multiple (three-in-one) and 'imperfect speakers'" — break all the "stable social, sexual and linguistic forms" that hold the normal world together.
In Eagleton's view, the witches are the "unconscious" of the play: a hidden force that threatens the established order, which is exactly why those in power feel they must repress it with laws and trials. Because the witches refuse normal rules, they become a kind of subversive, rebel energy that the official world fears.
This idea connects directly to Lady Macbeth. Like the witches, she breaks the rules set for a woman of her time. She asks the spirits to "unsex" her, she pushes her husband to murder, and she uses bold, "strange" language that does not follow the polite rules of normal society. Because she lives by the same rule-breaking, ambitious energy as the witches, critics often call her the "fourth witch."
Eagleton goes one step further and calls Lady Macbeth a "bourgeois individualist" — meaning she behaves like a modern, self-driven person chasing personal power and benefit, even if it means breaking the social rules. This fits a world that was slowly becoming more mercantile (driven by trade and personal ambition), pointing ahead to a time when the old idea of the all-powerful king would itself be challenged. But note the limit of her time: as a sixteenth-century woman, Lady Macbeth can only chase her ambition through her husband — she can rise only if Macbeth seizes the crown.
A last useful "lens" is the tension between England and Scotland. The play is set in Scotland, and King James I had just united the English and Scottish thrones — so this was a live political topic.
In the English mind, Scotland was often pictured as feudal, rough and "backward," while England saw itself as more civilised and "the way ahead." You can see this in the play: Macbeth turns Scotland into a land of anarchy and fear, and it is a visit to England — and to King Edward "the healer" — that points the way to a cure.
There was also real political strain. James VI of Scotland was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic who had plotted against Queen Elizabeth and was executed in 1587. This made James's claim to the English throne sensitive and open to challenge. As the critic Carroll points out, an "anti-Scottish discourse" — built from maps, legends and unreliable histories — dominated English attitudes, tied to England's own project of nation-building. By setting the play in Scotland and showing England as a helpful ally, Shakespeare was carefully handling these complex feelings.
| Word | What it means (in simple terms) |
|---|---|
| Machiavellian | Following Machiavelli's The Prince — cold, clever scheming to grab and keep power. |
| Imagination | The creative, feeling-based faculty the Romantics (like Coleridge) prized above cold reason. |
| Normative | The "normal" rules and norms set by the dominant group in society. |
| Culture (Marxist) | In Marxism, culture is part of the "superstructure" built on top of the economy. |
| New Historicist | A way of reading that studies a text alongside the art, documents and history of its period. |
| Cultural Materialism | Reading that links social hierarchy and culture, and gives voice to marginal groups. |
| Dissidents | People who resist or disagree with the ruling power. |
| Absolutist state | A state where all power is centred in one supreme monarch. |
| Bourgeois individualist | A self-driven, ambitious person of the rising trading/middle class chasing personal gain. |
All the questions from this unit, answered in clear and simple language for your exam.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, critics read Macbeth mainly as a story about life, imagination and the human mind — not yet about politics or class. Four critics stand out.
Samuel Johnson (1765) praised Shakespeare for holding a "faithful mirror to manners and life," meaning the play honestly shows how real people behave. He defended the use of witches by reminding readers that in 1606 ordinary people genuinely believed in witchcraft — King James had even written Daemonologie (1597) — so Shakespeare was only using ideas his audience accepted. Johnson also admired Shakespeare's deep grasp of human nature, as in the "Tomorrow and tomorrow" speech.
S.T. Coleridge (1819), a Romantic, said the play works through imagination and emotion rather than intellect. He contrasted it with Hamlet (which appeals to the thinking mind) and argued Macbeth is "wholly and purely tragic," with no puns or comedy — which is why he thought the comic Porter scene was added by actors. He saw the witches as pure imagination, "disconnected from the good."
Thomas De Quincey (1823) focused on the famous knocking at the gate after the murder. He explained that the knock marks the return of ordinary human life after the "fiendish" act, suddenly showing us how monstrous the murder was.
A.C. Bradley (1904) gave two lasting ideas: the play has an atmosphere of "darkness," and the tragedy comes from inside Macbeth himself, not from the witches forcing him. He also called Lady Macbeth one of Shakespeare's most "awe-inspiring" creations, who "leans on nothing but herself."
Together, these critics show how early criticism moved from Johnson's idea of truth to life, through Coleridge's imagination, to Bradley's focus on character and the inner mind.
Lady Macbeth is often called the "fourth witch" because she behaves very much like the three witches of the play. Like them, she breaks the rules that society sets for a woman of her time.
The clearest sign is her famous prayer to the spirits to "unsex" her — to strip away her gentle, "womanly" feelings so she can be cruel enough for murder. The witches too are unnatural and beyond ordinary gender rules (Eagleton even calls them "androgynous, bearded women"). Lady Macbeth also uses bold, "strange" language that ignores the polite norms expected of women — language closer to the supernatural world of the witches than to normal society. And just as the witches push Macbeth toward his fate with their prophecy, Lady Macbeth pushes him toward the murder with her taunts about his manhood.
Terry Eagleton deepens this by calling her a "bourgeois individualist" — a self-driven person chasing personal power and benefit, even by breaking social rules. This fits a world that was slowly becoming more mercantile and ambitious. But we must remember the limit of her age: as a sixteenth-century woman, she cannot rise on her own. She can only reach the crown through her husband — so she makes Macbeth the tool of her ambition.
So calling her the "fourth witch" is fair: she shares the witches' rule-breaking, rebellious, norm-defying energy. Yet there is a key difference. The witches are "mutable" and survive untouched, while Lady Macbeth is finally destroyed by guilt — her sleepwalking and "Out, damned spot" show that, unlike the witches, she could not escape the human cost of what she did.
The witches can be read in several different ways, and that richness is exactly why they are so important. To understand them, we first need the real-life background: in Shakespeare's England, witchcraft was a serious public debate. Reginald Scot (1584) dismissed witches as just poor old women and called the fear of them superstition, while King James in Daemonologie (1597) insisted they were real agents of the devil who must be punished. Shakespeare's witches sit right in the middle of this argument.
As a dramatic force: the witches set the dark mood of the play and plant the seed of ambition, but — as Bradley argued — they only influence Macbeth; they do not force him. The choice to murder is his own.
As "weird sisters": Shakespeare's source, Holinshed, described them as both goddess-like figures of destiny and as demons. Shakespeare keeps this double meaning, so they feel mysterious and impossible to fully explain.
As rebels (Eagleton): Terry Eagleton boldly calls the witches the "heroines" of the play. He sees them as exiles living in their own community on the edges of society, refusing the violent, competitive world of warriors. Their riddling speech and their nature — "androgynous, multiple and imperfect speakers" — break the "stable social, sexual and linguistic forms" of normal life. In this reading they are the "unconscious" of the play: a threatening, subversive energy that the powerful try to repress through laws and trials.
So the witches are not just spooky decoration. They are at once a plot trigger, a symbol of fate, a reflection of a real social debate, and a rebel force that questions the ordinary order of the world.
In the late sixteenth century, the English mostly looked at Scotland through a negative, "anti-Scottish" lens. Scotland was pictured as feudal, rustic and rough, with difficult terrain — in short, "backward." England, by contrast, saw itself as more civilised and modern, the country showing "the way ahead."
The critic Carroll explains that this anti-Scottish feeling was built from "maps, legends, unreliable histories" and a few travellers' tales, and was tied to England's own project of nation-building and self-definition — England partly defined itself by saying what it was not (not Scotland).
There were strong political reasons for the tension too. James VI of Scotland was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic who had plotted against Queen Elizabeth and was executed in 1587. This made James's later claim to the English throne sensitive and easy to contest, so relations between the two countries were strained.
We can see these attitudes inside the play. Under Macbeth, Scotland becomes a land of fear, blood and anarchy, while England, with its saintly King Edward "the healer," is shown as the place of cure and order. By setting the play in Scotland yet presenting England as a helpful ally, Shakespeare was carefully managing these complex feelings — especially because King James had just united the two thrones.
A Marxist reading does not treat Macbeth as just one man's personal story. Instead it asks what the play reveals about class, power and a society in change. Marxism (from Marx and Engels) pays special attention to economic forces and to the people pushed to the margins of society.
Victor Kiernan reads Macbeth as a figure of "change" — not just personal ambition, but a clash of larger "social forces" at a turning point in history. He links the play to the uncertain time around James I's accession (the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). His sharpest point is political: the play quietly raises the question of whether people have the right to overthrow a bad ruler — which directly challenges James's belief that even the worst crowned king must be obeyed.
Anand Prakash reads the play as a struggle for humanism. He stresses that it is about "larger processes than individual initiatives" — a whole political climate pressing on the characters. For him the witches sit at the "periphery," pushed to the edges by the powerful people at the centre, so the play becomes a "collision of two discourses": high politics versus the deprived.
Cultural Materialism (Alan Sinfield) extends this. Sinfield sees England moving from feudalism to the absolutist state (all power centred in one monarch), which always creates "dissidents." His key insight is the ending: Macduff stands to Malcolm just as Macbeth stood to Duncan, so the "good" new order is also founded on killing. The neat line King James drew between a "lawful king" and a "tyrant" turns out to be blurred.
So a Marxist analysis shows Macbeth as a play about a changing world — the shift toward centralised royal power, the silenced people at the margins, and the uncomfortable truth that the violence of the "lawful" state can look much like the violence of the tyrant.
End of Unit 4 · End of Block 1: Shakespeare — Macbeth
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