The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

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Macbeth

Macbeth
Possibly Shakespeare's most intense tragedy, and certainly his most Jacobean—in that its interests in Scotland, in witches, and in the Stuarts' ancestor Banquo suggest that Shakespeare was here deliberately catering to the tastes of his company's patron King James—Macbeth was probably first performed in 1606. The Porter's remarks about equivocation and treason appear to allude to the trial of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, which took place from January to March of 1606, and the First Witch's undertaking to condemn a ship called ‘the Tiger’ to 81 weeks of storms (1.3.6–24) may allude to a real ship of that name which reached Milford Haven in June 1606 after a traumatic voyage of just that duration. Banquo's ghost may be glanced at in two plays written in 1607, the anonymous The Puritan and perhaps Beaumont and Fletcher'sThe Knight of the Burning Pestle. Internal evidence, moreover, particularly the play's metre, also...

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