What was King James I's role in the creation of Macbeth?

Answer 1

In about 1950, a scholar by the name of Henry N. Paul published a book in which he claimed that Macbeth had been written explicitly to please King James, and was premiered at court. Although his ideas were totally speculative and not backed by any evidence, people jumped on the bandwagon, as they tend to do when someone advances a new and interesting theory. After sixty years, everyone has forgotten that this idea comes from the imagination of one man. However, the facts are these: Shakespeare did not materially change the story he got from Holinshed, and in particular did not add witches or the idea that Banquo was the ancestor of the Stuarts to the story; there is no evidence that any monarch ever directed any playwright which story to dramatize, despite rumours about Queen Elizabeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor; there is no evidence that Macbeth was ever played at court, even though we have several records of groups of plays performed; there is no evidence of what King James thought of the play, although we know that it was less popular with the public than other plays of Shakespeare. So there is no real reason to suppose that King James had anything to do with the creation of this play at all, any more than he had with any other play. Very possibly, Shakespeare may have thought that the public would be interested in Scottish history as opposed to English history after the failure of the Gunpowder Plot, but there is no evidence of that either. It's pure speculation.