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How many children had Lady Macbeth?

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Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#31

Post by gumby »

o11c wrote: post #18
gumby wrote: post #2

> Shakespeare’s plays, according to Knights, were first and foremost “dramatic poems,” works of literary art unified through metaphor and language, rather than a record of interactions between characters. To treat Macbeth as the final episode in the life of Macbeth was to confuse literature and history, to take the figures of drama for real persons, with biographies that reached back before the beginning of the play…

For the lazy: The historical Lady Macbeth had a son from her prior marriage, Lulach, who was accepted as heir by her husband and succeeded him to the throne. But he was a weak king and got killed within a year.

Though few, if any of the contemporary audience would have known this. It wasn’t one of his historical plays. It was just casual context.

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#32

Post by trealira »

actionfromafar wrote: post #29
trealira wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The music likes me not" - "The music" is the grammatical subject, so the third-person singular conjugation "likes" is used. "Me", being the object form of the first-person pronoun, is the object of the sentence. It's comparable to how in Spanish, you'd say "Me gusta la música" and not "Yo gusto la música" - the person that does the liking is the grammatical object, and the thing that the person likes is the grammati…

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/think when was it "to seem"?

In Old English:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/methinks#English

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%BEyncan#Old_English

Edit:

According to Wiktionary, it seems the meaning "to seem" was the Old English verb þyncan, and there was another verb þenċan, which meant "to think." That is, it came from the combination of two different verbs that sounded similar. So, maybe it wasn't the best example.

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#33

Post by jfengel »

eru wrote: post #25
gumby wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the days of the kingdom of Alba no such convention existed — it was feudal.

Which convention do you mean? If you have primogeniture in feudalism, you still need to figure out you do with the other offspring.

In Scotland at the time, there wasn't primogeniture at all. You got to be king by general acclimation -- you were king when everybody said you were king.

The previous king might nominate a successor, and it might be his son -- any son. And if the thanes didn't like it, they'd fight about it. ("Thane" was an Anglo-Saxon context that's not really appropriate to Scotland at the time, but they had something kinda parallel.)

Shakespeare hints at that, in an important scene were Mac expects to be named the heir. Shakespeare's audience would have understood that, because it had been roughly the same in England under the Saxons. (That was more than a half-millennium ago, but the history was well understood by the educated, using the same sources Shakespeare did.)

There was a problem with offspring in general. Shakespeare actually discussed that one, too, in King Lear. Properties could be divided, but not indefinitely, and it often caused fighting. It's what led to the clan system, which really evolved after the Norman invasion but hints of it lay earlier.

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#34

Post by arethuza »

eru wrote: post #21
AlbertCory wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree. It's not a meaningless question but definitely not one that the actor playing Lady Macbeth needs to answer for herself. As for "having multiple children leads to downward mobility" -- I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'd like to see some actual data on that. I thought the pattern was more "first son inherits, second son goes into the Army or Navy, third et al go into the clergy." And a clerical life wa…

> I thought the pattern was more "first son inherits, second son goes into the Army or Navy, third et al go into the clergy." And a clerical life was not bad at all, until 1850 or so. At the time of the historical Macbeth the pattern would have perhaps been similar, but would not have involved the Navy. Especially not for a king of Scotland. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadet_branch

Out of interest, why do you say "Especially not for a king of Scotland"?

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#35

Post by rightbyte »

trealira wrote: post #11
Jun8 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of usage is archaic. AFAIK the "have you any wool" formation sounds quite natural in German ("Hast du Wolle?"), though.

Archaic English bears other similarities to other modern European languages. For example, the verb "like" used to be similar to the Spanish verb "gustar" in that the person that's pleased is the grammatical object and the thing is the subject. For example, this is Shakespeare's Two Gentleman of Verona, Scene 2, Act 4: Host. How now! are you sadder than you were before? How do you, man? the music likes you not. Julia.…

> the music likes you not.

> You don't like the music

Shouldn't it be "the music like you not"? Since the music is the object and thus no 's' added to the verb for 'you'?

Also, wouldn't accusative make the word order arbitrary at the time written?

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#36

Post by eru »

jfengel wrote: post #33
eru wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which convention do you mean? If you have primogeniture in feudalism, you still need to figure out you do with the other offspring.

In Scotland at the time, there wasn't primogeniture at all. You got to be king by general acclimation -- you were king when everybody said you were king. The previous king might nominate a successor, and it might be his son -- any son. And if the thanes didn't like it, they'd fight about it. ("Thane" was an Anglo-Saxon context that's not really appropriate to Scotland at the time, but they had something kinda paralle…

Thanks! Sounds a bit like the election of the German king in the Holy Roman Empire by the Great Electors. (It was customary for the king to semi-automatically become emperor.)

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#37

Post by eru »

arethuza wrote: post #34
eru wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought the pattern was more "first son inherits, second son goes into the Army or Navy, third et al go into the clergy." And a clerical life was not bad at all, until 1850 or so. At the time of the historical Macbeth the pattern would have perhaps been similar, but would not have involved the Navy. Especially not for a king of Scotland. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadet_branch

Out of interest, why do you say "Especially not for a king of Scotland"?

If you are a minor noble, you might send your younger sons to serve in the church. But if you have the resources of a king, you are more likely to find your extra sons some minor fiefdom to rule.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2a0xxn/comme... for what I mean.

(Of course, some still went to the church occasionally.)

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#38

Post by rurban »

gumby wrote: post #31
o11c wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the lazy: The historical Lady Macbeth had a son from her prior marriage, Lulach, who was accepted as heir by her husband and succeeded him to the throne. But he was a weak king and got killed within a year.

Though few, if any of the contemporary audience would have known this. It wasn’t one of his historical plays. It was just casual context.

Casual context? It was the most important background story to understand Macbeth.

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#39

Post by CRConrad »

AlbertCory wrote: post #13
jfengel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to take Macbeth seriously as a history... what with the witches and all. His source is a piece of propaganda that makes Richard III look like a documentary. As a drama, the fact that the Macbeths appear to have zero children is very important. Fathers and sons are recurring themes -- Duncan's rebuff of Macbeth as the next King, Macduff and his son, Siward and Young Siward, etc. The absence of a descendant f…

I tend to agree. It's not a meaningless question but definitely not one that the actor playing Lady Macbeth needs to answer for herself. As for "having multiple children leads to downward mobility" -- I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'd like to see some actual data on that. I thought the pattern was more "first son inherits, second son goes into the Army or Navy, third et al go into the clergy." And a clerical life wa…

> As for "having multiple children leads to downward mobility" -- I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'd like to see some actual data on that. I thought the pattern was more "first son inherits, second son goes into the Army or Navy, third et al go into the clergy." And a clerical life was not bad at all, until 1850 or so.

Sure, perhaps "not bad", but surely a step or three down from being lord of the manor (or duke of something bigger)? And as soon as you have more than two kids, there are more of these socially-downwards-mobile ones than of those that get to stay in the caste they were born into.

So yes, seems perfectly plausible that for the majority of those children, their parents having multiple children does lead to downward mobility.

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#40

Post by CRConrad »

arduanika wrote: post #23
Jun8 wrote: post #4

This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others): * Do you have any wool? * Have you got any wool? Either of these I find totally fine, though I personally prefer the latter. Anybody else sha…

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

And that was less than a hundred years ago.
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