Context, or AO3, is worth real marks in the exam, but only when it deepens your analysis rather than sitting in a separate paragraph of history. The most useful Macbeth context all points one way: it explains why murdering a king was the most horrifying crime imaginable to Shakespeare's audience. Learn these few ideas well and drop them in as single sharp sentences.
King James I and the Divine Right of Kings
Shakespeare wrote Macbeth around 1606, early in the reign of King James I, and the play is shaped to appeal to him. James believed firmly in the Divine Right of Kings, the idea that a monarch is chosen by God and answerable only to God. Under this belief, killing a king was not just murder, it was a sin against the whole God-given order of the universe. This is why Duncan is called 'the Lord's anointed' and why his murder feels like a cosmic crime, not merely a political one.
The Gunpowder Plot and the fear of regicide
In 1605, just before the play was written, a group of conspirators tried to blow up King James and Parliament in the Gunpowder Plot. It failed, but it left the country terrified of regicide, the killing of a king. An audience watching Macbeth would have felt that fear freshly, and the play's message, that killing a king brings chaos, guilt and ruin on the murderer and the whole nation, was reassuring to a king who had nearly been assassinated. The Porter's talk of 'equivocation' in Act 2 even nods to the trial of the plotters.
Witchcraft and King James
The witches were not a fantasy element to Shakespeare's audience. Many people genuinely believed in witches, and King James was obsessed with them. He wrote a book called Daemonologie about how to identify and fight witchcraft, and he oversaw witch trials. Putting witches at the heart of the play was therefore both topical and flattering to the king. Their role in tempting Macbeth also raises the question the play never quite answers: how much is Macbeth fated, and how much does he choose?
The natural order and the Great Chain of Being
People in Shakespeare's time believed in a fixed order to the universe, sometimes called the Great Chain of Being, with God at the top, then the king, then nobles, and so on down. A rightful king sitting on his throne kept this order in balance. When Macbeth murders Duncan and takes the crown he was never meant to have, he breaks that order, which is why nature itself goes wrong after the murder: the sky stays dark by day, an owl kills a falcon, and Duncan's horses turn wild and eat each other. Order is only restored when the rightful king, Malcolm, takes the throne.
The tragic hero
Macbeth follows the ancient structure of tragedy, in which a great man is brought down by a fatal flaw, or hamartia. Here the flaw is ambition. Shakespeare's audience would have recognised the shape of the story and felt both pity and fear as Macbeth fell, understanding it as a warning about what happens when a person lets one desire override everything else.
See how this context deepens each theme on the Macbeth themes page, especially the supernatural, and connect it to the King Duncan and Macbeth pages.