Comparison between the Great Gatsby and Macbeth
Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most intense plays and one his most complex psychological studies. It is also a play about which there is a great deal of historical background, which I think you'll find interesting because it reveals Shakespeare's creative process. The play was written in 1605--1606. It's one of the plays where the date is pretty firmly established by internal references to external events, and most scholars have agreed on the date. Shakespeare was at the height of creative powers, and his theatrical company, the King's Men, was the official royal acting company. He had the large Globe Theater, a large public playhouse on the south bank of the Thames. He would soon open the Blackfriars Theater, a small private theater within the city itself where the plays were performed indoors, and he and his men performed often at the court for the king and his family. The Blackfriars Theater would be exempt from the law prohibiting theaters within the City of London by being a private club. It could accommodate only a couple of hundred people, opposed to the Globe audiences of a couple of thousand, and therefore Shakespeare charged a higher price for entry. That in turn meant that the audience was wealthier and more sophisticated than the average attendee at the Globe was. Because the plays were performed indoors by artificial light, they could be done at any time or weather. Because it was a smaller theater, the acting style used could be more subtle and understated than the broad, overly dramatic acting used in the Globe before audiences of several thousand.
As far as we know Shakespeare's company continue to perform all the plays in both theaters; it's just that the productions would have differed in the way they were performed. Once you know something of the complex historical background, a very curious fact emerges about this bloody, violent drama: the story of this psychotic killer and his fiendlike wife was actually written as a
As far as we know Shakespeare's company continue to perform all the plays in both theaters; it's just that the productions would have differed in the way they were performed. Once you know something of the complex historical background, a very curious fact emerges about this bloody, violent drama: the story of this psychotic killer and his fiendlike wife was actually written as a