THE ERA OF DISILLUSIONMENT

The Era of Disillusionment
Professor Little pointed out that with the passing of the golden Queen Elizabeth I (“I am the mother of this country and its subjects my children”) and the following ascension of the absolutist James I (“I am God on Earth”) to the throne of England, there is a clear shift in the tonality of Shakespeare’s plays – away from the light & comedic and towards the dark & complex.
Woven into the individual plots and themes of each of the later plays is now an ever-present examination of Disillusionment and Professor Little suggested that this all-embracing theme of Shakespeare’s Jacobean production can be seen as a sort of headline for the later plays, and in this way Disillusionment is the thematic root from which several interpretive variations may spring.
Professor Little went on to show how in Macbeth, Lady Macbeth’s Illusion that she is in control of her sex, her womanhood, her menstrual cycle as expressed in Act 1, scene 5 where she conjures her sexual powers – “make thick my blood/Stop up th’access and passage to remorse” – is dashed at the end of the play where the blood on her hands that can’t be washed away and keeps coming back is her own blood, her menstrual blood, the woman in her that cannot be killed.
Likewise, Macbeth’s Illusion – that as a god-like, invincible King his powers are eternal as long as he diligently crushes any threat to his masculine authoritarianism – is pointedly exposed as a very mortal human, almost laughable misinterpretation of fairy words, when at the end of the play Macbeth’s army is beaten by “the Great Birnam Wood” and he dies at the hand of a man who was “not of woman born.”

Susanne Wejp-Olsen, section 1E