Rupert Goold (born 1972) is an English theatre director. He is the artistic director of Headlong Theatre (previously the Oxford Stage Company) and from 2010 he will be an associate director at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Goold was born in Highgate, England (a suburb of North London). His father was a management consultant, and his mother was an author of children's books. He attended the independent University College School,graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1994 and studied at New York University on a Fulbright Scholarship. He was trainee director at Donmar Warehouse for the 1995 season, and assisted on productions including 'Art' and Speed-the-Plow in the West End.^{[citation needed]}

Goold was artistic director of the Royal and Derngate Theatres in Northampton from 2000 to 2005. Prior to that, he was an associate at the Salisbury Playhouse in 1996-97. In addition to his work as a director he has co-authored three adaptions for the stage.

Goold directed Patrick Stewart (whom he had previously directed as Prospero) as Macbeth in his acclaimed Minerva Studio staging of Macbeth at the Chichester Festival Theatre in May 2007. In September 2007 the production transferred to the Gielgud Theatre in London, then the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York and then to the Lyceum Theater on Broadway. At the 2007 Evening Standard Theatre Awards, Macbeth won two awards: Stewart won the Best Actor Award, while Goold won The Sydney Edwards Award for Best Director. It also won Goold a 2008 Olivier Award for Best Director. He says he wasn't concerned with thoughts of a career anti-climax. "I came home to an empty house after the Olivier Awards, clutching my trophy for Best Director and I realised that I'd peaked. It was now going to be downhill all the way. But I still felt quite comfortable with the realisation that nothing could get better after this." He won the Best Director Evening Standard Award again in 2009 for ENRON.

Sir Patrick Stewart, OBE (born 13 July 1940) is an English film, television and stage actor, who has had a distinguished career in theatre and television. He is most widely known for his television and film roles, such as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and its successor films, Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men film series, and as the voice of Avery Bullock in American Dad!.

Stewart was born on 13 July 1940 in Mirfield, near Dewsbury in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. He is the son of Gladys (née Barrowclough), a weaver and textile worker, and Alfred Stewart, a Regimental Sergeant Major in the British Army who served with the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and previously worked as a general labourer and as a postman.

In a 2008 interview, Stewart said: "My father was a very potent individual, a very powerful man who got what he wanted. It was said that when he strode onto the parade ground, birds stopped singing. It was many, many years before I realised how my father inserted himself into my work. I've grown a moustache for Macbeth. My father didn't have one, but when I looked in the mirror just before I went on stage I saw my father's face staring straight back at me."

Lady Macbeth is a fictional character in Shakespeare's Macbeth (c.1603–1607). She is the wife to the play's protagonist, Macbeth, a Scottish nobleman. After goading him into committing regicide, she becomes Queen of Scotland, but later suffers pangs of guilt for her part in the crime. She dies off-stage in the last act, an apparent suicide.

The character's origins lie in the accounts of Kings Duff and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of Britain familiar to Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth appears to be a composite of two separate and distinct personages in Holinshed's work: Donwald's nagging, murderous wife in the account of King Duff, and Macbeth's ambitious wife in the account of King Duncan.

Lady Macbeth is a powerful presence in the play, most notably in the first two acts. Following the murder of King Duncan, however, her role in the plot diminishes. She becomes an uninvolved spectator to Macbeth's plotting, and a nervous hostess at a banquet dominated by her husband's hallucinations. Her fifth act sleepwalking scene is a turning point in the play, and her line, "Out, damned spot!," has become a phrase familiar to most speakers of the English language. The report of her death late in the fifth act provides the inspiration for Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech.

King Duncan is a fictional character in Shakespeare's Macbeth. He is the father of two youthful sons (Malcolm and Donalbain), and the victim of a well-plotted regicide in a power grab by his trusted captain Macbeth. The origin of the character lies in a narrative of the historical Duncan I of Scotland in Raphael Holinshed's 1587 The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, a history of Britain familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Unlike Holinshed's incompetent King Duncan (who is credited in the narrative with a "feeble and slothful administration"), Shakespeare's King Duncan is crafted as a sensitive, insightful, and generous father-figure whose murder grieves Scotland and is accounted the cause of turmoil in the natural world.

King Duncan is a father-figure who is generous but firm ("No more that Thane of Cawdor shall deceive / Our bosom interest. Go pronouce his present death / And with his former title greet Macbeth."), insightful ("There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face."), and sensitive ("This castle hath a pleasant seat. The air / Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses."). However, the role is full of irony; he is completely deceived in the intents of Macbeth and therefore may come across as naive. Although a modern reader may view Duncan as an incompetent monarch in this respect, Duncan represents moral order within the play and his murder signals the onset of chaos.