SOURCE: “The Politics of Aloofness in Macbeth,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 26, No. 3, Autumn, 1996, pp. 531-60.

In the following essay, Baldo contrasts the styles of rule of Queen Elizabeth and King James and studies the way in which James's aloofness is reflected in Macbeth. Baldo explains that whereas Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays reflect Elizabeth's theatricality and interrupted succession, Macbeth is a reflection of James's aloof style of rule and of his emphasis on lineal succession.

There is the same method through all the world in general. All things come to their height by degrees; there they stay the least of time; then they decline as they rose.

—Owen Feltham, Resolves, XLIX

The King our Soveraigne is lawfully and lineally descended … and that by so long a continued line of lawfull descent, as therein he exceedeth all the Kings that the world now knoweth.

—The Lord Chancellor, 1608

Jonathan Goldberg sums...