related question: would Hamlet audience think that of Elsinore, Denmark? it's my town of birth and I've always been curious why Shakespeare choose the setting.

Great consternation surrounds the reasons exactly why Shakespeare chose to write a play like Macbeth just a few years into the reign of King James I. I'll try to outline some of the arguments.

Obviously James I was himself Scottish, but would the rest of English society be familiar with Thanes/Thegns?

The theory put forward by certain Shakespeare scholars like Charles Barrell and Eva Clark, Lilian Winstanley and Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, is that audiences didn't need to be familiar with 11th century Scotland, they just needed to be familiar with James I and in particular his mother Mary, Queen of Scots.

The reason I have put those scholars in sets of two is that Barrell and Clark were what is known as 'Oxfordians' in that they primarily believed that many of Shakespeare's plays, in particular Macbeth, were actually penned by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. The other two, Winstanley and Stopes, are known as 'Stratfordians' who believed William Shakespeare to be the true author. As a side note, both Oxfordians and Stratfordians note that Macbeth contains a surprising amount of accurate information from someone (Shakespeare) who likely never visited Scotland. Stratfordians attribute this to Shakespeare's use of Holinshed's Chronicles, a work published in 1587 by Raphael Holinshed detailing the history of England, Scotland, and Ireland. What is interesting is that in 1567, when de Vere was 17, Raphael Holinshed served on a jury which found de Vere not guilty of murdering one of his household staff. It is certainly true that de Vere would have had a far greater knowledge of Scotland and it's history than William Shakespeare, though that isn't enough to entirely discount Shakespeare as the true author.

As to why a play like Macbeth should appear at this time? Some scholars believe it to subtly mock James I and his dubious parentage, others (Winstanley and Stopes) believe it was to mourn the passing of an age of 'refined' English monarchs into an age of 'barbaric' Scottish ones, by reminding the English commonfolk of the scandals of Scotland that had occurred under Mary, Queen of Scots. Few believe it was intended to celebrate James I as no record exists of the King having ever seen the play or even acknowledged its existence, this despite his position as patron of Shakespeare. This is besides the fact that James was well known to be terrified of assassinations/violent deaths, his father Lord Darnley was famously assassinated in 1567, while his mother was executed by his predecessor Queen Elizabeth I in 1587. So a play about two Kings being violently murdered is hardly likely to have pleased King James.

The murder of King Duncan, succeeded by his murderer Macbeth, is considered to be a allusion to the murder of Mary's husband Lord Darnley (himself a King consort), orchestrated by Mary's advisor Lord Bothwell who married Mary just three months later in May of 1567. By June of that same year many Scottish lords were outraged enough that Scotland was on the brink of civil war. Mary abdicated in favour of her infant son James, who could be considered much like that of the young Prince (now King) Malcolm at the end of Macbeth. Mary, seeking refuge in England, was held captive by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I for 19 years before being executed for treason.

The inclusion of witchcraft in Macbeth is also telling. James I, while still James VI of Scotland, wrote a treatise on witchcraft, "Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into three Books: By the High and Mighty Prince, James &c." which was published in succession to "Newes from Scotland" about the 1590 witch trials of North Berwick, in which King James himself was intimately involved. This also takes the form of the character of Banquo (who at this time was believed to be a real person from whom the Stuart line was descended and an ancestor of King James) being told by the witches that his descendants would be kings.

There's also the matter of the Gunpowder plot of 1605 making subtle appearances here and there throughout the play. The most damning of these is Lady Macbeth's line to her husband to "look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't." Following the discovery and foiling of the Gunpowder plot, King James had a commemorative medal struck featuring a snake hidden amongst flowers. Notably, daffodils and roses feature as the flowers, symbols of Wales and England, though I can't identify what the others are, they don't appear to be thistles (Scotland).

As with the best drama, Macbeth contains elements of truth relevant to the history of the new King James I and his parentage. The purpose of the play seems almost to be that of a warning to the English people that this new King comes with a history steeped with blood, not only of the last 20-40 years, but also stretching far back through the centuries of Scottish rule.

There were two basic types of playhouse in Renaissance England. One is the stereotype you're probably familiar with, open to the air with a mosh pit of sorts for the hoi polloi (a ticket would have been about 1/10 of a day's wage for an artisan). There were also fully indoor theatres that served a more restrained and elite audience.

I open with a consideration of the diversity of Shakespeare's likely audiences for Macbeth because, as Claire McEachern says, we can't talk about "Scotland" in early modern literature but rather Scotlands, plural, according to the background and the agenda of a particular person, including changing over time and texts.

The most important audience, in the sense of the person and group Shakespeare absolutely had on his mind during composition, was (scholars argue) newly ascended King James I, also James VI of Scotland. In contrast to contemporary plays like Eastward Ho! (...that would actually be spelled, Eastward Hoe), which actually got their authors into some hot water, Macbeth presents a much more equitable view of Scotland, Scottish nobles, and Scottish kings. When he moved his court to England, James brought with him a chunk of the Scottish nobility. To them, obviously, Scotland was anything but exotic.

The English nobility and intelligentsia are an interesting question. By 1603, there was, I'd say, more than a half century of really solid considerations of the potentials and pitfalls of an English-Scottish union from writers on both sides, taking into full consideration past (and present) enmity. Writers pursue different strategies to show why a union might actually work. Some authors stress Scottish unity and English unity and what good they could do together. More interesting and much more revealing, I think, are the writers who seek to align Scotland with England by portraying the Scottish lowlands as civilized and cultured in contrast to the barbarian, rustic highlands. That says a lot about the dominant cultural ideas that they believed they needed to write against at the same type they reinforced them.

But at the same time the angry/violent/barbarian stereotypes endure in some texts, other propagate a much more mundane, GTFO sort of attitude. Assuming that what offended James of "Eastward Ho" was its dialogue and not its staging, the general gist is just "Gosh, these Scottish are such a bother, always underfoot wherever you go." In other words, a completely mundane presence. The back and forth flow of immigration across borders, especially Scots to England on account of the much stronger English economy, would certainly have contributed to that. When James traveled south for his coronation, he was viewed as...a king, not some creature with his face on his chest.

But we should never overestimate the actual presence of actual human beings to overcome stereotypes of exotic and violent. So when we push beyond the literate classes that leave us stylized written evidence of their views on Scotland, a most interesting clue appears: the witches.

Shakespeare's inspiration for Macbeth is the late-16C Holinshed's Chronicles (which is not, in general, as nice to the Scottish as Macbeth), and the Chronicles do have three "Weird" sisters who give prophecies to Macbeth. But they are nymphs--tricksters and tempermental and otherworldly, but not evil. Shakespeare adopts them as the weyward sisters and turns them into old, ugly hags in the manner of many swirling stereotypes of witches at the time.

It's popular and easy to view the witches' presence/new form as a nod to James, who was relentlessly afraid of witchcraft to the point of writing his own witch-hunting tome. But Shakespeare's desire to please his new king places the focus on the wrong place. Because nearly all of the witches' presence in Macbeth? Doesn't actually come from him.

Macbeth was probably first performed around 1605-06, but our surviving copy comes from 1623. And plopped right into it are scenes ripped straight from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch. These included multiple songs by the witches, as well as an extensive scene where the goddess Hecate visits them.

Why did these scenes worm their way into a play they weren't part of? Because that was what audiences wanted to see, what readers wanted to read. And that's what they did, and those were the ideas that the play reinforced, even as it portrayed noble Scottish characters as "real people": a dark, violent, magical, Scotland.

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