Macbeth, like many of Shakespeare’s other tragedies, falls into both the history play and tragedy categories of Shakespeare’s plays.
- Adding to the Elizabethan audience’s fascination, tragedy is rooted in the Greek dramas of Aristotle and the three great writers Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles and the Roman adaptations of their plays (Schwartz).
- Shakespeare began writing tragedies because he found that other tragic writings lacked artistic purpose and form—specifically suspense and a climax.
- Shakespeare always focused his tragedy on the fall of a hero. His hero, almost always being a man of high social status, but having some moral weakness, character flaw, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or such, that is responsible for the fall.
- Tragedy, according to A.C Bradley, has three parts: an exposition, a conflict, and a catastrophe. The exposition shows the beginning state of the protagonist and sets up the conflict, which leads to the tragic ending. In a tragedy, the hero sets up his fall with action or lack thereof, which, with other causes, brings his fall. Bradley believes "Shakespeare's characters bring their fates upon themselves, and [...] deserve what they get" (qtd. in Schwartz).
- According to Northrop Frye, there are five stages to tragedy: encroachment, complication, reversal, catastrophe, and recognition.
- In the first stage, the protagonist makes an error in judgement that leads to their downfall. Frye says the mistake is "often unconscious", and Macbeth is one of the exceptions (qtd. in Schwartz).
- The second stage builds up the forces that will lead the protagonist to his fall.
- Reversal, the third stage, is when the protagonist realizes his fate is the opposite of what he expected.
- During the final stage, recognition, the audience and the protagonist see the event in a new perspective, in which he can "see the irony of his actions" (qtd. in Schwartz).
- Meanwhile, history plays, as the name suggests, are based upon historical events, however often issues and ideas are often from the present.
- For example,
- This also gives an evil feel to the witches and their tales of Macbeth's coming fortune, setting the mood for the tragic events that follow.
- Unfortunately, because the modern reader is often ignorant of ideas and issues of the Elizabethan audience, history plays are often hard to read or convert to other media.
- Shakespeare’s sources for these plays include Plutarch, Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (1598) and Hall's The Union of the Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and York (1542) (Schwartz).
- Shakespeare’s history plays are based upon English history from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries as well as Roman history and myths. In Shakespeare's time, there was an audience for plays based on both these sources because the English history plays are nationalistic, the 16th century was a time when people admired and loved classical
Finally, our group discovered that tragedy follows a specific pattern and although Shakespeare encompassed many details from the works of others, he remains one of the best known authors in the world.
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Ed. Nicholas Brooke.
