SOURCE: Turner, John. “Duncan.” In Open Guides to Literature: Macbeth, pp. 36-54. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Turner studies the figure of Duncan in Macbeth, focusing particular attention on this character's status as a signifier of feudal ideology and on performance interpretations made by directors Trevor Nunn and Roman Polanski in their productions of the drama.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was increasingly a ‘reinforcement of patriarchy’ in England and Scotland as the new Renaissance states struggled to secure legitimacy for themselves (Stone 1979: 109). By ‘patriarchy’ I mean a political system concentrating power in the hands of men, especially men within their families—power secured in the Renaissance by primogeniture and authorized by a network of mutually sustaining analogies between the powers of father, God and king. While the aristocracy of the middle ages had defined their power in terms of ‘dominance over kin...