Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
The great chain of being - Coggle Diagram
The great chain of being
Hierarchal structure
Elizabethans believed that God set out an order for everything in the universe. Therefore the King or Queen was in charge because God put them there and they were only answerable to God (the Divine Right of Kings). This meant that disobeying the monarch was a sin as they were God, this allowed them to ill whoever they wanted.
It also led to the idea that if the wrong person was monarch then everything would go wrong in the country until they changed
The great chain of being is a major influence on Shakespeare's Macbeth. Macbeth disturbs the natural order of things by murdering the King and stealing the throne. This shows all of nature into uproar, including a story related by an old man that the horses in their stables went mad and ate each other, a symbol of unnatural happenings
-
King James
He ruled England when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, was convinced that a group of witches were plotting to bring about his death and played an active role in the North Berwick witch trial
-
In 1604 after Jams ascended to the English throne, a new witchcraft Act was passed, extending the related crimes that could be punished with death. Shakespeare thought that James would approve of the play because he portrayed witches to be demonic and evil.
By combining the presence of witches with similar themes in the world of Macbeth, Shakespeare used witchcraft to signal to his audience that Scotland was in a vulnerable and unsettled state. What made witches dangerous was their overweening ambition and willingness to sell their souls in order to achieve power.
-