Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrowCreeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more. It is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. (5.5.22-31)

AP Literature and CompositionNorthview High School

Mrs. SteelmanSUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT ON MACBETH

The summative assessment for The Tragedy of Macbeth is a researched, persuasive essay based on a close reading of primary documents and a study of early-modern culture. For this assignment, you will analyze how Shakespeare develops a theme, providing evidence from primary and secondary documents, to reflect on how his themes continue to be relevant today. As you develop your knowledge of sixteenth-

century writing and thinking, your skill in reading Shakespeare’s works will improve, such that the intricacies of his language and the beauty of his words will come alive. Consider this a two-fold assessment: an opportunity to sharpen your skills not only in analysis of Shakespearean language, particularly an early-modern drama, but also in writing, specifically a thesis-driven essay. You have already written many essays based on self-selected theses in response to various prompts, which gave you experience in deriving a thesis from a specific question. You are now undoubtedly ready to think about the themes in a piece of literature and decide for yourself the path you will take for writing.

The paper will be a multiple-draft project that will include opportunities for conferring and revision. On the dates noted on your syllabus, you will participate in a writer’s workshop where you will discuss, research, write, and confer. Our timetable for writing will include required mini-lessons to guide the process; I have recorded short lessons from how to choose a topic to how to submit the essay, which can be found on the website and should be watched in the order they are listed. These instructional clips allow me to meet with students individually while you are working through the short lessons and writing in a timely manner. To be most efficient, in addition to workshop conferring throughout the first week, I will schedule a 15-minute conference with you at which time we will discuss your first draft and iron out lingering concerns. Your final due date will be within one week of our conference. This will be your only grade, and worth 200 points, for the study of Macbeth. One important requirement is that you share your Google document and revision history, providing me the opportunity to monitor progress and to provide feedback. Even if you follow the rubric completely, only essays with a satisfactory revision history will receive a passing grade. You will receive a scored rubric, but my comments will be either written on your document or added as an audio file.

To help you comprehend and internalize the requirements, I will offer ideas to contemplate; you do not, however, need to write about any of these ideas. According to the mini-lectures, you are required to include a prospectus, outline, and reflection, which will help you plan and help me guide. The website will be a vital source not only because of the many research links, but also because of the writing schedule. If you follow the calendar or create your own, the tasks you need to finish will seem manageable. And remember, we are finishing this unit at the end of the semester, so time management of the essence. You will have work to do at home, but you can begin the process early to allow yourself more time.

I will provide you with background on Shakespeare’s world, along with other primary documents from the Renaissance Period and secondary documents written by scholars, all of which might be a new approach to understanding his work. The teaching of Shakespeare is the topic of my dissertation project, and I believe that understanding the historical, cultural context of his writing will gain you entrance to his poetry and plays. My ultimate goal is that you will (as I do) consider Shakespeare one of greatest writers of all time. To that end, we will spend each class period doing three things: reading, writing, and acting. The reading will often be aloud for the purpose to hearing the poetics of his language; the writing will solidify your thinking about what Shakespeare’s words mean, and the acting will be to have fun with a great masterpiece. He is not an “easy read,” but we will discover our own meaning together as a community of learners. The view from the top is amazing.

Analyze how Shakespeare develops a theme, drawing evidence from primary and secondary documents, including The Tragedy of Macbeth, to reflect on how early modern cultural issues are relevant today.  

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Good and evil: Macbeth is balanced in that it describes characters as neither totally good nor evil. Analyze Shakespeare’s development of a major and minor character as they grapple with life as flawed individuals.

Equivocation: the making of ambiguously misleading statements – is at the heart of the play and becomes the reason why Macbeth makes poor choices. Analyze the theme of equivocation. You may want to research A Treatise of Equivocation, written by Jesuit priest Father Garnet, who was involved in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot meant to kill King James.

Fate or the power of suggestion: What or who is responsible for Macbeth’s decision to kill King Duncan? Decide whether the witches, or weird sisters, in the play are responsible for suggesting to Macbeth that he commit regicide, or whether they are merely telling him what “will be”?

Love and marriage: Macbeth and his wife are one of the few happily married couples in his plays. But does Lady Macbeth’s ambitions for her husband cross the line? When is devotion to your spouse “too much”?

Insanity: Madness permeates the play, particularly in the case of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Their coping mechanisms, however, never seem to align at the same time. Analyze the trajectory of madness for these two characters in the play, noting when the lines intersect.

Confusion: Macbeth’s actions are both tragic and confusing. He gives a detailed account of reasons he should not kill King Duncan, but then murders him. Consider other instances of complexity and why Shakespeare develops Macbeth’s character to behave in this manner.

Heaven and hell: Consider Lady Macbeth’s behavior, looking specifically at the way she articulates her relationship with the powers of darkness, and decide whether or not her behavior is the impetus for her husband’s fall from grace.

Gender: What it means to be a man or to be a woman is constantly under negotiation in the play. Decide whether or not Lady Macbeth and Macbeth adhere to Renaissance gender roles.

The deterioration of relationships: During the first act we see how much in love Macbeth is with his wife, yet by the end of Act III, they are no longer on stage together. Discuss the significance of the dissolution of their marriage.

Fertility and children: The Macbeths are childless and yet children are both utterly vulnerable and supremely powerful in the play. Consider the importance of children and the bearing they have on the play.

Motherhood: Ladies Macbeth and Macduff are vastly different maternal models. How do their roles impact the tragic consequences of the play?

Murder: Analyze a theme in the play by conducting a word trace, such as the word blood. Consider how this word changes according to the perspective of various characters and situations.

Kingship: At the end of the play Prince Malcolm considers the future of Scotland. Analyze his words and actions in the play and decide whether or not he will successfully rule in the next realm.

The cyclical nature of history: In one version of the play, Donalbain is seen climbing a hill to the witches’ cave, an action that implies the cyclical nature of the play. If this is true, how is it possible for anyone to successfully rule a nation? Consider the nature of kingship.

Personal identity: Are Lady M. and her husband having identity crises? Consider how he becomes “unmanned” and she becomes “unsexed.” How does this have tragic consequences in their world?

Darkness and evil: Consider how the dark deeds in the play happen at night. Are day and night somehow out of sync?

Ambition: Is Macbeth a play about ambition, love, or evil? Consider the possibility of all three, analyzing how only one is predominant at a time.

Quest for power: Is Macbeth’s ambition solely based on what is good for Scotland or for personal gain? Analyze his motivations for becoming king, such that he would commit regicide to make it happen.

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Sleep deprivation: When did Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stop sleeping? Could the loss of brain rest have affected their minds?

Nature and plant lore: When are fauna and flora mentioned in the play and how important is the inclusion of the “insane root” that Banquo wonders about in 1.3.87? Explore the notion of insanity as it relates to specific plants in the early modern world.

Manhood and friendship: Banquo and Macbeth were considered to be unbeatable war heroes. But were they real friends or did their competitive natures override their obvious friendship?

Tragic flaw: According to Aristotle a character’s tragic flaw, or hamartia, can be the impetus for the tragic flaw from happiness to unhappiness. What was Macbeth’s flaw that caused him to spiral out of control?

Murder: Who are the murderers in Macbeth? Are some characters, such as Macduff, judged less harshly because of his reasons for killing? Or is Scotland doomed because kingship is both revered and coveted?

Treason and the crown: What historical event could have been on Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote Macbeth? Research the details of Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot to understand the political significance cultural context.

The Divine Right of Kings: How much power does the Crown hold? Consider James I and his belief that he was appointed by God. Would this idea be refuted or condoned by Shakespeare’s play?

Hospitality customs: According to Lipowitz and Conley, “hospitality customs were cultural trusts placed on all citizens due to the vulnerability of travelers in global communities” (12). If customs diminished threats of violence, how does Shakespeare play with this idea in Macbeth when Duncan visits Inverness?

Consequences and morality: Macbeth does consider what may happen if he commits regicide, yet he goes ahead and does it anyway. Why?

Vaulting ambition: Besides Macbeth, who has designs on the throne? Theater and acting: Think about how Macbeth may have been staged? Shakespeare may have

been considered the pop-culture writer of his times, but he was working within a culture where the Globe was often shut down for incongruous reasons. Research early modern theater to analyze how Shakespeare may have been breaking new ground.

Greek Chorus and the man on the street: Which characters function as someone who comments on events that have transpired since Duncan’s murder. Do these reports come to pass?

Threats and enemies: Who are the real threats in the play? Macbeth may feel threatened by Banquo, but isn’t he also threatening to the wellbeing of both his country and citizens?

Retribution: What happened to Fleance? We do not know much about him after he escapes a near-miss death. Think about those characters who have minor parts but reason for revenge.

Supernatural events: How does Shakespeare use language to separate the Weird Sisters from royalty? Analyze their speech patterns and fascination with odd numbers, herbs dug in the dark, symbolic meaning, and future predictions.

Traitors and enemies: When her son asks Lady Macduff if his dad is a traitor, she responds with her own definition (4.2.51-70). Who else comments on what it means to be an enemy?

AP LITERATURE RESEARCH ESSAYAssessment Rubric

Essays receiving top scores focus on how Shakespeare develops a theme, drawing on evidence from primary and secondary documents, including Macbeth, to reflect on how early modern cultural issues are relevant today. A researched essay of this caliber is formatted according to MLA standards, including heading, in-text citations, and works cited. The thesis is concise, debatable, and cogent and is supported

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with apt evidence from authentic sources and relevant examples from Macbeth. Evidence of balance between scholarly sources and analytical discussion validates the student’s ability to navigate research and evidence for how Shakespeare develops a theme. Using an organic, persuasive format, the student demonstrates proficiency in the synthesis and analysis of sources, which demonstrates critical understanding. The academic tone and elevated vocabulary serve to establish sophisticated style and thought-provoking detail. The essay has evidence of thorough proofreading and revision and attends to mechanics, requirements, and content, employing consistent control over elements of effective writing. 7-8-9 90-100%

Essays in the B range focus on how Shakespeare develops a theme but partially draw on evidence from primary and secondary documents, including Macbeth, to reflect on how early modern cultural issues are relevant today. Researched essays of this description are formatted according to MLA standards but have errors in the heading, citations, or works cited. Thesis statements are somewhat debatable but are supported with evidence from either primary or secondary sources and obvious examples from Macbeth. The balance between scholarly sources and relevant observations is compromised because the writing focuses too much on one or the other. Essays in this range may employ obvious organization and style without insight or sophistication, incorporating vague support and obvious conclusions. Tone may be inconsistent, based on general word choice. Some areas of concern include lack of proofreading and revision, or attention to requirements, which have an effect on the overall quality of the composition.6 80-89%

Essays in the C range are considered to be average quality and do not qualify as academic writing evidenced by consistent control over elements of mechanics and content. The thesis may be superficial or obvious, rendering it difficult to effectively support with authentic sources and relevant observations. MLA guidelines are minimally followed, and the student-selected format focuses heavily on summary. A student’s essay in this range relies predominantly on either primary or secondary sources or limited observations without thorough analysis or commentary. The tone in this essay is erratic based on questionable word choice and inconsistent writing control. The overall quality of the essay is marred by surface errors that distract the reader from the intended message.5 70-79%

Essays in the D range are considered to be ineffective examples of research and composition and do not adhere to MLA standards or effective writing. Little attention is given to reliable and viable sources; the essay is further marred by errors in mechanics and flaws in logic. Neither appropriate planning nor academic tone is evident.3-4 60-69%

Essays in the failing range are those that are not turned in or turned in late without prior consent from the instructor. These essays do not address Shakespeare’s development of theme or, if they do, the essay is incomplete.1-2 0-59%

ASSESSMENT CHECKPOINTS

Conferring Rough copy completed and ready (4 pages) for discussion Pertinent, thoughtful questions for improvement Flexibility and willingness to revise

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Evidence of blocking, prospectus, revision history

MLA Format Google Document Heading Spacing Works Cited In-text quotes and citations Pagination

Thesis and Support Full discussion of theme leading to thesis Clarity of thesis Logic and fluency Development of ideas Balance of quotes and original thought Use of appropriate outside source

Analysis Evidence of close reading Insightful thinking Sophisticated, critical understanding of text Analysis of outside source (they say, I say, extend) Consideration of variant perspectives (complexity) Profundity

Rhetoric (proofreading, writing and revising evidence) Consistent control over elements of effective writing Stylistic devices (parallel structure, periodic sentences) Literary devices (metaphor, simile, alliteration) Appropriate, academic tone Specific, deliberate word choice Active verbs Variety of sentence length and structure Present tense Agreement, capitalization, spelling, punctuation,

contractions, “you”

PROSPECTUS

Thesis: Shakespeare develops a theme of darkness and evil by exploring how murder cloaked by the night produces his own inner wellspring of hell.

Ideas from Text: Darkness of night permeates the killing of King Duncan

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o Regicide takes place at nighto Nature is affectedo Macbeth’s mind is affected such that he cannot sleep

Darkness increases as Macbeth rises to power affects his mental stateo Banquo is murdered to stop his line of offspring from becoming Kingo Macduff’s family is murdered to stop the rebellion against Macbetho Lady Macbeth commits suicide, causing him to question life and purpose

Darkness is associated with evil and its consequenceso The banquet feast where Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghosto Macbeth’s unraveling mind after each murdero The realization of the witches’ riddles and his final soliloquy

Possible Quotes: “The night has been unruly.  Where we lay, / Our chimneys were blown down and, as they say, /

Lamentings hear i’th’air, strange screams of / death” (2.3.61-64). “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, / Till thou applaud the deed.--Come, seeling

night, / Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day” (3.3.51-53). “I have almost forgot the taste of fears. / The time has been my senses would have cooled / To

hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair” (5.5.11-13). “I am afraid to think what I have done. / Look on ‘t again I dare not” (2.2.66-67).

Research Ideas: Primary: The Bocke of Plaies and Notes therof per forman for Common Pollicie (1610) Primary: Woodcut of Macbeth and Banquo meeting the witches; from Raphael Holinshed’s

Chronicles of England (1577) Secondary: “Why, This is Hell”: “The world around him becomes increasingly infused with

the dark projections of his mind” (Karim-Cooper 2). Secondary: Shakespeare-navigator.com Secondary: Field-of-themes.com: “Darkness: Signs of Chaos in Macbeth” 

Relevance: Politics and the darkness of thought

o Fear of immigrants as they face a new administrationo Dylann Roof, convicted murderer in Charleston, faces death penaltyo Fort Lauderdale airport shootings

International politics o Arab and Middle East unrest

Problems here in our city/countyo Cyber-bullyingo Cyber-theft

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SOURCES, EARLY PERFORMANCE AND PUBLICATION

Shakespeare based the story of Macbeth, as he did his other plays based on episodes from British history, on the account he found in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles. He did not follow events straightforwardly, however, often combining episodes from other periods of Scottish history to intensify and enrich his story.

There are many other less direct influences. The title role of Seneca’s play Medea suggested the character of Lady Macbeth and contemporary belief in the supernatural contributed to the presentation of the Witches.

Macbeth was probably first performed at the Globe in the second half of 1606, two years before Shakespeare’s company – the King’s Men – acquired their indoor theatre at Blackfriars. Its Scottish setting, witches and prominence of Banquo, one of the ancestors of the Stuarts, all suggest that Shakespeare had in mind the tastes of his company’s patron, James I.

It is one of four Shakespeare plays seen at the Globe by the doctor, astrologer and magus, Simon Forman. Forman’s account of what he saw in his commonplace book (or Book of Plays and Notes there of per Forman for Common Policy) differs in many respects from the version of the play which has come down to us – but whether because it was indeed different, or because Forman became confused with the account of the story in Shakespeare’s original source for the play, or simply because he couldn’t remember, it is impossible to say. His perfunctory notes suggest that he drew no conclusion from his theatrical experience, but that he wanted to remind himself of some of Macbeth’s most striking scenes, one of which may have had some professional resonance for him. After a hasty account of the conclusion of the play, Forman adds a retrospective afterthought: ‘Observe also how Macbeth’s queen did rise in the night in her sleep, and walk,

and talked and confessed all, and the doctor noted her words.’ His notes, though scrappy and idiosyncratic, are treasured as one of the very few eyewitness accounts of a performance at the original Globe.

No edition of Macbeth was published in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The play first appeared in print in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after the playwright’s death. It is unusually short, and many scholars believe it to have been substantially cut in places. The text inherited by the editors of the First Folio may have derived from a promptbook adapted (possibly by the playwright Thomas Middleton), for a later Jacobean production of the play.

Renaissance Astrology

“Sources, Early Performance and Publication.” Kings and Rogues. London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2010. 2. Print.

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SYNOPSISIn recognition of Macbeth’s contribution in repelling a foreign invasion, King Duncan announces his intention to make him Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth and his friend Banquo hear of the promotion from three witches, who add that Macbeth shall become king but that the descendants of Banquo will also become kings.

Macbeth conveys this news to his wife by letter, who determines that her husband shall become king. Macbeth arrives with the news that Duncan will stay at their castle that night. She urges Macbeth to kill him. Duncan is murdered, as are his two grooms, and the crime is discovered in the morning. In spite of Macduff’s suspicions towards Macbeth, blame falls upon Duncan’s sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, who have fled from Scotland.

In their absence, Macbeth is duly elected king, but the witches’ prophecy makes him suspicious of Banquo, and he orders his murder. Banquo is killed, but his son Fleance escapes. At a banquet held at Macbeth’s castle, the ghost of Banquo appears to the king alone.

Macbeth consults the witches, who conjure up a series of apparitions warning him to fear Macduff, but seeming to reassure him that no man born of woman can defeat him and that he will remain unvanquished until ‘great Birnham Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him.’

Macbeth remains suspicious of Macduff and when he learns that he has fled to England, Macbeth orders the slaughter of the wife and children Macduff has left behind. In exile in England, Macduff meets Malcolm. Following a test of Macduff’s character and the arrival of news describing the terrible fate of his family,

Macduff and Malcolm join forces against Macbeth.

As Macbeth makes preparation for battle, a guild-stricken Lady Macbeth takes her own life. Malcom’s army, disguised as a wood,

Macbeth and Banquo meet the witches in Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland,

and Ireland.

approaches the castle, as though in fulfillment of the witches’ second prophecy. A battle commences and at length Macbeth and Macduff meet on the field. As they close together, Macduff reveals that he was ‘from his mother’s womb untimely ripped’ and so the witches’ first prophecy is fulfilled. Macbeth is killed and Malcolm is hailed king of Scotland.

“Synopsis.” Kings and Rogues. London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2010. 3. Print.

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INTO THE VORTEX

FAUSTUS: How comes it then that thou art out of hell?MEPHISTOPHELES: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Heather Neill talks to the director Lucy Bailey about bringing Macbeth to the Globe Theatre.

HN Your previous Globe productions in recent years Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens were remarkable for their distinctive, often violent, imagery. No doubt Macbeth also suggests a brutal world.

LB My first instinct on reading the play was to try to understand the mindset of Medieval Scotland. Holinshed, in his Chronicles of Scotland (Shakespeare’s source for Macbeth), depicts a nightmarish brutal world, equivalent to a modern slasher film. Eleventh-century Scotland was a land of shocking barbarity and tremendous turbulence, where Kings were violently overthrown every six or seven years.

HN Has the Globe itself, the shape of the building, influenced your approach?

LB Yes, very much so, I have set the whole thing in a medieval Hell, inspired by the circular architecture of the Globe. Standing in the yard and looking at the space, it occurred to me that

the descending circles of the Globe echoed Dante’s description of hell as a vortex, of nine descending levels. Dante describes the very bottom of Hell as the pit,

which is the equivalent to the pit of the Globe in my mind – here he and Virgil walk across a frozen lake where the traitors, who are the most heinous of sinners, are stuck in ice, in permanent agony. There’s a wonderful image of this by Gustave Doré, which has inspired both myself and designer Katrina Lindsay in our approach to the design of the piece. We are in both a literal Hell and a Hell of the mind. Macbeth is mentally in Hell from the moment he meets the witches at the top of the play.

HN Macbeth is both hero and villain. Why does he so appeal to modern audiences?

LB Macbeth is a surprisingly modern man in that he questions the very existence of God. He has immense arrogance, vanity, daring, and a huge ego. We all recognize that lust for power in our contemporary leaders, who have become despots and tyrants. The paradox is that despite Macbeth’s pursuit of violence, we continue to identify with him. He risks all. He courts damnation. He sells his soul only to discover the banality of all existence. The extraordinary thing about Shakespeare’s play is that it is akin to Beckett and other 20th-century dramatists who portray the deep absurdity and final meaninglessness of our little lives here on earth.

HN And yet murdering his king, who is also his guest and therefore deserving of protection, causes him terrible anguish.

LB It is absolutely the worst thing he can do – to kill a king. It’s hard for us to understand today just how terrible that crime was considered to be.

Dante and Virgil on the frozen Lake of Cocytus

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Henry VIII, queen Elizabeth I and James I put enormous energy into propagating the nature of Kingship as God-anointed. James I was particularly obsessed by his own holiness, and set about aligning Kingship to having powers of healing simply by touching the afflicted. It was a clever way of protecting himself from assassination – and it worked. Traitors suffered terrible torture and disgusting deaths. When Lady Macbeth asks Macbeth to kill the king, it’s a big task!

HN the marriage of the Macbeths is one of the few successful ones in Shakespeare, at least to begin with. But it deteriorates fast, doesn’t it?

LB They are a golden couple, like the Kennedys. I’ve cast a very young Lady Macbeth. In my mind, she doesn’t begin as a fiend-like queen; she’s gorgeous, the sex bomb of Scotland! She is driven by greed and desire for power and instant elevation, like many young people today who crave instant fame, and bonkers amounts of money. The idea of wealth and power is for her intensely intoxicating. She’s naïve rather than heartless. She is playing with fire and has no real understanding of the consequences. Her frustration is that, as a woman, she can only achieve it through him.

HN Lady Macbeth has obviously had a child. Have your actors invented a back-story to explain the absence of children and perhaps their determination to win the crown?

LB We began by inventing elaborate back-stories, which became far too modern in their emphasis on grief and denial. I realized that it was all nonsense and very far from Shakespeare’s actual portrayal. He doesn’t see them as childless. There is so much contemporary criticism stressing the sterile nature of the marriage and how Lady Macbeth compensates for her childless state by pouring her energies into her husband’s career. I can’t see that in the play at all. At the start of the play, this amazing couple has everything – looks, adoration and position. They are madly in love, - they are not thinking about children – their priority is power and advancement. Once

Macbeth makes his pact with Fate, it’s part of the deal that he will have no children. Banquo’s issue will become the future kings. From this moment onwards the Macbeth’s marriage bed is sterile – they don’t sleep, they don’t have sex. The poisonous prophecy of the witches literacy destroys all personal fulfillment, sexual and spiritual.

HN James I was, of course, very interested in witchcraft and wrote a treatise on the subject. How do you see the Witches?

LB They are the gatekeepers to Hell in my production and, in that sense, relate to the stewards, who are the gatekeepers of the Globe theatre. In rehearsal we spent time rooting the Weird sisters as damaged, victimized women, products of a cruel superstitious society. They also inhabit the Hell that is the landscape of the play. They are literally in league with the devil – their task is to drag down as many other poor souls to eternal torment. They live in torment, so their satisfaction is to torture and corrupt others. They choose Macbeth as their next victim, as he is the juiciest challenge – the man at the top of fortune’s wheel – ripe to pluck down. They also detect that he is one of their own.

HN Why do superstitions about the Scottish play persist?

LB It’s generally believed that because Macbeth was always staged in very dark conditions, many accidents happened. At least we won’t have that problem at the Globe – fingers crossed!

Neill, Heather. “Into the Vortex.” London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2010. 4-6. Print.

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PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE

The marital state rarely features in Shakespeare’s plays – except for Macbeth, where, as Michael Dobson reveals, it is one of the few positive things in a world of perpetual war and bloodshed.

Shakespeare spent a great deal of his career dramatizing betrothals, but very little of it depicting marriages. With the exceptions of Oberon and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (who spend the bulk of the play engaged in a bitter custody dispute and appear to have been serially unfaithful for years) and of Leontes and Hermoine in The Winter’s Tale (whose relationship is even more cruelly disrupted by jealousy, to the extent of being put into a 16-year state of suspension for whole of the fourth act), the only couples he shows us who are already securely married belong to history and tragedy, rather than to comedy. The usually political or dynastic alliances we see in the histories are rarely very satisfactory: in Henry IV, Part I, for instance, Mortimer and his Welsh wife lack a common language, so that they have to use her father Glendower as an interpreter, though even under these trying conditions these pretenders to the throne seem happier with one another than do actually crowned couples, such as Richard III and Lady Anne or Henry VIII and Katharine of Aragon. In the tragedies, by contrast, marriages sometimes look more promising than this, but they are correspondingly likelier to be cut short – like that of Romeo and Juliet, condemned to the Capulet tomb long before their relationship can mature into the sort of sour, mutually distrustful public institution in habited by Juliet’s parents,

or that of Othello and Desdemona, destroyed by Iago before the briefly-happy couple have even returned from their enforced Cyprian honeymoon. Even for the more pragmatic Gertrude and Claudius in Hamlet till death us do part does not turn out to be very long. Audiences who come to Shakespeare hoping to eavesdrop on the intimacies of the married – an appetite which most of the rest of mainstream English drama from Vanbrugh through Pinter and beyond is more than happy to satisfy – are generally disappointed.

The one shining exception to this is Macbeth, which may well be, as is often said, “Shakespeare’s supreme exploration of evil” or “Shakespeare’s most powerful dramatization of murder,” but which is also his greatest depiction of a marriage. This is something which is often overlooked, largely thanks to a long-standing simplification not only of this play’s characterization but also of its politics.

Kathleen McCall as Lady Macbeth

According to popular stereotype, Macbeth tells the story of how Scotland’s proper hereditary monarchy gets briefly interrupted when, during an epidemic of witchcraft, a power-hungry monster of a wife succeeds in nagging her husband into killing the rightful king and usurping the throne, until normality is triumphantly restored by an army of avenging patriots. Seen in this light, Macbeth has repeatedly served as a stern moral fable aimed primarily at wives who might be tempted to Romeo and Juliet

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pursue ideas above their proper domestic station. Even today journalists seems to be trained to mention Lady Macbeth whenever a woman shows any sign of wielding political authority, or even conversing as an equal with a powerful husband, whether she be Hillary Clinton or Cherie Blair. Mary Cowden Clarke typifies this treatment of Lady Macbeth as exemplary unwomanly woman in her fictionalized account of “The Thanes Lady” in The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850-2): here the future lady, “destined to read a world-wide lesson, how unhallowed desires and towering ambition can deface the image of virtue in a human heart,” begins her life (predictably, during a thunderstorm) by causing the death of her own mother, who dies of disappointment on learning that her child isn’t a boy.

The familiar reading of the play, though, gravely misrepresents Lady Macbeth, a character who actually feels herself to be so feminine that she needs to summon spirits to “unsex” her before entering into conspiracy with her husband, and who, shocked by what she sees as Macbeth’s disloyalty when he tries to withdraw from it, is so maternal that the idea she invokes as the worst thing she can possibly imagine is that of dashing a baby’s head to the floor. (Actresses who have nonetheless insisted on playing Lady Macbeth as though this is the sort of thing she does for fun the whole time have simply misread this passage’s syntax.) Perhaps just as seriously, this view of Macbeth greatly distorts Shakespeare’s picture of the world against which its protagonists’ relationship is counterpoised. The Scotland of Macbeth isn’t initially a hereditary monarchy at all, and it isn’t clear that all of its inhabitants think of themselves as Scots, never mind as subjects of King Duncan; at the start of the play the country, overrun by the Norwegians and by Irish mercenaries, is in what appears to be a customary state of savage civil war. It is only after Macbeth, Banquo, and the rest of Duncan’s army have imposed Duncan’s rule by extreme violence that, to the surprise of many within his court, the king newly monopolizes power within a single family by declaring his son Malcolm to be his heir. Macbeth’s choice, however badly and wickedly he chooses and however

disastrously things turn out for all concerned, isn’t between leaving everything in settled peace and becoming a killer: it’s between continuing to commit mass slaughter in order to keep Duncan and his kin in power and committing assassination in order to replace them.

As for the normality happily restored at the end of the play, the Macbeths’ opponents present a pretty strange anthology of alternative models for domestic life. It’s as if Shakespeare deliberately decides to make his play’s central conflict more interesting by compensating the Macbeths for being in the wrong by making their relationship visibly richer and more engaging (until their mutual guilt destroys it) than any other play. Ranged against them in the last act are Macduff, who inexplicably leaves his wife and children at Macbeth’s mercy, and who is enabled to kill Macbeth by the fact that he was untimely ripped from his mother’s womb (presumably killing her in the process); the alienatingly stoical Siward, who does not care how many sons he loses in battle so long as they are all doing their proper masculine duty; and Malcolm, who has become an accomplished liar during his exile, but who seems to be telling the truth when he insists that one of his chief qualifications for kingship is the fact that he is “unknown to woman.” (As for Malcolm’s patriotism, his first act on having claimed the Scottish throne via an English invasion is to bring its honours system into line with that of the neighbouring state of which he is now a client by redesignating his thanes as earls.) In the ritually bloodstained all-male warrior world of Macbeth, achieving any male-female relationship as close, confiding and mutual as that of the Macbeths is an anomaly. The tragedy at the heart of this play isn’t just that they destroy Duncan, Banquo, and Madduff’s family, however shocking and affecting these losses are; it’s that they destroy their own marriage in the process.

Dobson, Michael. “Portrait of a Marriage.” London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2010. 7-9. Print. Michael Dobson is a Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Birbeck, University of London. He is

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co-editor, with Stanley Wells, of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare.

***

A SCOTTISH PLAY?

First performed some three years after James VI of Scotland assumed the throne of England, Macbeth reveals a great deal about contemporary English attitudes to their northern neighbours, as Rob Maslen explains.

17th century map of Scotland by John Speed

How Scottish is Macbeth? The answer, of course, is not at all. It’s a play written by an Englishman, performed in England, to an audience the bulk of whom would have been English – and Southerners at that. But the play is also evidence of Shakespeare’s intense interest in Scottish history, hardly surprising given his status as chief playwright for a company new christened the King’s Men, patronized by King James VI of Scotland who had assumed the English throne in 1603. And it’s evidence, too, of just how unsettling the rapprochement between these two nations, which had for centuries shared little but a border and an intense mutual hatred, must have been for everyone involved.

Macbeth is about the near impossibility of holding a single kingdom together, or even of defining its limits: an impossibility that manifests itself in the dreadful trouble the play’s characters have in holding themselves together – that is, in keeping body and soul in one piece, or in reconciling their convictions with their

actions, or in saying what they think. The threatened dismemberment of Scotland and its inhabitants in the play neatly parallels the religious, regional and factional divisions that had split the northern kingdom throughout the 16th century. And the Scottish royal family had felt the effects of these internal conflicts for generations before they were exacerbated by the Reformation. As Sir Charles Piggott pointed out to the English parliament in 1606 – the year that Macbeth is written – the Scotts “have not suffered above two kings to die in their beds, these 200 years.” The Stuarts had been subjected to a seemingly endless series of assassinations and massacres, more often at the hands of their own subjects than those of their English neighbours.

Ancient Scotland was no better, as Shakespeare would have seen as he browsed through Holinshed’s chronicle seeking plots for James’ entertainment. The kings who reigned before and after the 11th-century monarch Macbeth met their ends in appallingly inventive ways: by poison, witchcraft, or (in one case) an elaborate trap involving a golden apple and hidden crossbows, whose quarrels were launched at Kenneth II “with great force and violence” when the apple was touched. And the Scots had a habit of importing their violent ways into the neighbouring kingdom. The last Scottish monarch before James – his mother, Mary Queen of Scots – was accused of murdering James’ father (which led to her exile in England), then hatching a series of plots against her cousin Elizabeth I (which led to her execution). James himself had twice been kidnapped, in 1582 and 1600, and his experience of near shipwreck en route to collect his wife Anne of Denmark in 1587 left him certain that he had narrowly avoided murder by witchcraft. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, whereby disaffected Catholics planned to destroy James and the English Parliament in one devastating explosion, may have convinced some Englishmen that the Scots had transplanted their own particular version of political Hell into English soil.

A whiff of sulphur accompanied the stench of gunpowder. Scotland seems to have been

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associated in England with the supernatural partly perhaps because of the spooky ballads that spread through England from north of the Border (think of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer), and partly because of James VI’s own treatise on witchcraft, which insisted on the material dangers it posed as fiercely as the Englishman Reginald Scot had insisted on its non-existence. The witches in Macbeth, whose agency is so hotly disputed (Did they drive Macbeth to murder, or did they merely unlock a murderous tendency he already possessed?), cater for both the English and Scottish views of witchcraft. They introduce the theme of double-talk or “equivocation” – saying one thing and meaning another, or convincing yourself through chop-logic that it’s permissible to do the unforgivable – that pervades the play. For them, “fair is foul and foul is fair,” and their delight in reversing moral polarities infects Macbeth’s language, so that he can persuade himself that in a world where “nothing is but what is not” he might get away with regicide. The witches’ later prophecies – that Macbeth cannot be killed by a man born of woman, that he will be safe until Burnam Wood comes to Dunsinane – are classic examples of equivocation: they sound impossible, yet prove accurate because of unforeseeable circumstances (Macbeth’s killer was born by Caesarean section; the wood is uprooted to be used as camouflage by an invading army). The witches’ double-speak reflects both the treachery associated with Scotland by the English, and the merging of two cultures and two languages under James, which transformed the English court into a hotbed of mutual misunderstandings.

The Scottish King’s inheritance of England had been anticipated for years, as the English panicked over the ageing Elizabeth’s refusal to name an heir. That period of anxiety has its aftershocks in Macbeth. Problems of succession had often been solved in Scotland by spates of blood-letting – as when Kenneth II murdered the heir to the throne, Prince Malcolm, to ensure that his own son wore the crown. Shakespeare’s Macbeth re-enacts all the atrocities perpetrated by Scots through history against inconvenient heirs. His massacre of MacDuff’s children stands

in for his desire to massacre Duncan’s Malcolm and Donalbain, Banquo’s heir Fleance, and with them the whole line of monarchs that descended from Banquo to James. Each time he thinks he has the kingdom and its succession under control, a new child emerges to taunt him. Young Fleance escapes from the scene of his father’s murder, and his escape leaves Macbeth “bound in / to saucy doubts and fears.” Later the witches summon up two infant spirits to taunt Macbeth with the fact that his children will not succeed him. At the end of the play, a Scottish Prince, Malcolm, defeats Macbeth at the head of an English army composed largely of “unrough youths.” Children die at Macbeth’s hands only to be resurrected like a succession of vengeful “newborn babes / Striding the blast.”

MacDuff and Malcolm

The reign of “boy Malcolm” promises fresh new possibilities for the kingdoms that have combined to put him on the throne. The new king promises to make himself “even with” his helpers of all ranks, thus anticipating a fair and equal partnership between Scottish ruler and subject, and between the erstwhile enemy nations. But the bloody head of Macbeth, dangling like a chunk of Scotland’s history from the fist of his killer, MacDuff, may be seen as undermining Malcolm’s self-assurance with a second promise: that the Stuart dynasty will continue to encounter more than its share of rebels and regicides – including, as we now know, the decapitation of James’ son.

Accompanied by omens like this, it’s no wonder that a hundred years would pass before the union of England and Scotland would be finally ratified.

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Maslen, Rob. “A Scottish Play?” London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2010. 10-11. Print.

Rob Maslen is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His Shakespeare and Comedy was published by Arden in 2005.

***

WHY, THIS IS HELL

The infernal regions permeate the world of Macbeth. Farah Karim-Cooper explores some of the changing ideas about Hell and its associations.

Perceptions of Hell in Shakespeare’s time were complex and varied, but it is clear that the idea of Hell was an evolving one and by the time Shakespeare was writing Macbeth, there were multiple representations with roots in Classical, Biblical and medieval ideas. An examination of these written and illustrated accounts shows that there were several identifiable themes dominating representations of Hell: it is punitive; the punishment is appropriate to or reflects the sin; the graphic nature of the descriptions is designed to provoke religious fear and great emphasis is placed upon physical and psychological pain.

The idea of Hell had been around in the pre-Christian era and many Renaissance texts that depict it draw from the vivid, sometimes grotesque accounts of the underworld or Hades to be found in the writings of Homer, Plato and Virgil. Plato’s description of Tartarus, the region of the underworld to which sinners are sent, had a lasting impact on writers such as Dante, Shakespeare and Milton. Plato writes that

Souls taken down to Hell, St. Peter’s Church 1480

those “who have committed many and terrible deeds of sacrilege, murder foul and violent or the like – are hurled into Tartarus which is their suitable destiny, and they never come out.” For the ancient Greeks, Tartarus was a punitive environment and provided a precedent for the view that the punishment should suit the sin. The Roman poet Virgil created perhaps the first vivid idea of this region in The Aeneid, in which he sets the scene with rivers of ‘torrent flames,” the “sound of moaning” and noxious fumes. Virgil’s descriptions show a keen awareness that the threat of an everlasting punishment could have far more impact if it was related in terms of sight, sound and smell.

Early Christian theology contributed significantly to establishing conventions for describing hell. St. Augustine referred to Hell as a “lake of fire and brimstone,” designating it as a place of torment. Biblically, of course, the overpowering trope is fire, and, as described in Mark, 9.45, it is a “fire that shall never be quenched.” Other passages threaten sinners with being hurled into a furnace, where the clamour of “wailing” and “gnashing of teeth” (Matthew, 13.50) can be heard. From the Bible were drawn countless dramatizations in mystery cycles, paintings, woodcuts, poems, sermons and narratives of episodes in which Satan and his demons are spectacularly portrayed preying on souls of sinners with a colourful array of tortures at their disposal. Among some of these episodes were images of the Last Judgment, a popular theme amongst artists throughout Europe in the

Detail of the descent into Hell in a panel from “The Last Judgment” of 1473 by Hans Memling. Muzeum Narodowe, Gdansk. Bridgman Art Library.

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Middle Ages and Renaissance. Referred to in medieval liturgical poetry as dies irae, the “day of wrath,” the last judgment was prefigured as the moment when justice would finally be done. Painters such as Jan van Eyck, Hieronymous Bosch, Hans Memling and Michelangelo created terrifying portraits of this moment with naked sinners tumbling down into a burning hell, their bodies lashed, impaled or eaten by demons. Other Medieval visions of Hell, such as William Caxton’s 1480 translation of a French vision, portray it as a “pytte of fyre…ful of alle stenche and of sorrowes.”

One of the most famous influential and inventive of all depictions can be found in Dante’s The Divine Comedy, an allegorical fiction describing the poet’s journey through Hell (“Inferno”), Purgatory (“Purgatorio”) and Heaven (“Paradiso”). In the “Inferno,” Hell has a complex geography consisting of nine circles. Dante assigns a different sin to each level, with the ninth reserved for traitors, treachery being the worst conceivable sin. In this circle stands Cocytus, a lake of ice, where each group of betrayers is encased, within it lie four levels, with, at the very bottom, Satan Himself, who is waist deep, perpetually weeping and beating his six wings; he attempts to escape his everlasting imprisonment. He is imagined as a hairy monster with three heads consuming in each of his mouths the vilest of traitors: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.

Satan in Dante’s 9th circle of Hell

The Globe’s production of Macbeth draws its inspiration from the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré’s interpretation of Dante’s “Inferno,” and explores the notion that treachery is the most heinous crime.

In post-Reformation England, Hell evolves further and becomes increasingly complex and

multi-faceted, both philosophically and representationally. The 17th-century English playwright, Thomas Heywood reinforces and extends the old idea of Hell when he writes in The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (1635): “In Hell is Griefe, Paine, Anguish, and Annoy.” Linking the pains of Hell to the senses, Heywood continues:

The Sight with Darknesse, and the Smel with Stinke,The Taste with Gall, in bitterness extreme;The Hearing, with their Curses that blaspheme;The Touch with Snakes & Todes crauling about them,Afflicted both within and without them.

Key to post-Reformation descriptions is the presentation of Hell as a metaphor. Protestant writers spoke of Hell dichotomously: no longer just a place, it becomes also a condition that afflicts the mind and the conscience – what Heywood refers to above as both “within and without.” In Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Faustus asks Mephistopheles how he could leave Hell, to which he answers: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” Equally, in the mid-Jacobean period, Thomas Tuke, in his Discourse of Death, says it is not easy to say precisely where Hell is located, but that it exists, “is cleere enough.” Milton’s Paradise Lost explores the mental condition of Hell’s inhabitants, providing a direct parallel for the type of psychological pain that Adam and Eve would later experience. Milton’s Satan articulates the poet’s exploration of an “inner hell”: “Which way I flie is Hell, myself am Hell.”

When we consider Macbeth, it is this concept of an inner hell that seems the most interesting. The symbolism in the play is replete with images of fiends, witchcraft and devils; Hell is omnipresent in the play. But Hell is also a state of mind. We witness Macbeth’s decline into a personal Hell, a tormenting chasm of sleeplessness and psychological anguish, while simultaneously, the world around him becomes increasingly infused with the dark projections of his mind. His terrifying and phantasmagoric visions are compounded by the darker forces that Shakespeare, or perhaps Thomas Middleton

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(author of some of the witchcraft scenes), injected into the world of the play. The post-Reformation Hell, Shakespeare’s hell, is as Macbeth discovers, both “within and without.”

Karim-Cooper, Farah. “Why, This is Hell.” London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2010. 12-15. Print.

Farah Karim-Cooper is Head of Courses and Research at Shakespeare’s Globe.

***

James I and WitchcraftJames I considered himself to be an intellect. In particular James saw himself as an expert on witchcraft, which was still an issue in Stuart England in so far as many did not share the same views as James. The idea of black and white witches can be traced back to Roman times. However in the sixteenth century a new Christian theory developed based on Christian theology, canon law and philosophical ideas. This theory was that a witch had made a deliberate pact with the devil – almost a form of a personal arrangement – but that a witch did not act alone. Therefore if one witch existed in a locality, there had to be more. This led to a shift in the persecution of witches. Whereas a village may have punished an individual in the past, now the Christian witch theory demanded that more be found within one locality. This resulted in many arrests for witchcraft as the difference between white and black witchcraft effectively ended. The authorities of the time believed that even healing had to be as a result of pact with the devil – so white witches were also persecuted. The arrest of one ‘witch’ almost certainly led to more arrests as torture was allowed to be used on suspects to find out the names of other witches within a locality. There are no accurate figures for the arrest and punishment of witches in the early seventeenth

century – which could indicate poor record keeping or simply that so many were arrested that records were never updated. The wholesale persecution of witches started in Scotland in 1590 when James VI was king – the future James I of England. Witchcraft had been a criminal offence in Scotland prior to 1590 but action against suspected witches was limited. However after 1590 and in the last thirteen years of the reign of James, Scotland fully accepted the Christian witch theory so that when one witch was found, others were hunted out. Prior to 1590, it seems that witchcraft was seen as a minor issue by those in power. In 1583, the General Assembly complained that witchcraft carried no punishment despite being outlawed in 1563. Why did this change in 1590? The issue may well have been James himself. James was well known to adopt a topical issue of the time and to develop an “expert” knowledge of it. Prior to 1590 no Scottish theologian, philosopher or lawyer had shown any real interest in the whole idea of witchcraft and therefore to James it was not a fashionable topic. Some of the writings of James before 1590 do make reference to Satan and devils. However, Christina Larner views these as references to the Roman Catholic Church or to Catholic Spain – a common practice at this time. Why is 1590 a key year? The year saw the start of a series of trials for treason. Three hundred witches were accused of gathering to plot the murder of James. It is known that James had a morbid fear of violent death. Therefore these trials were of especial interest to him and he suddenly developed a very keen interest in demonology and witchcraft. Evidence for the ‘crimes’ remain patchy at best. Witches were accused of attempting to drown James by calling up a storm while he was at sea with his new wife. Other charges include trying to kill James by melting a wax effigy of him. They were also accused of performing perverted rituals in a church in Berwick – though it is not clear what this had to do specifically with trying to kill the king. However, it did point the way to

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witchcraft and it is thought that over one hundred witches were actually put on trial. It is said that a large number were executed but there is accurate no figure for this. While the witches were accused of classic witchcraft, the main issue as far as James was concerned was the plan to murder him – treason. The trials also had a major political aspect as there was an attempt to incriminate Earl Bothwell in the proceedings. One theory put forward is that the whole story was a plot made up by those nobles in Scotland who wanted to devalue the standing of Bothwell within Scotland – and expand theirs. However, this can not be proven. Why did James become interested in the Christian witch theory – that witches worked in groups and had made a pact with the devil? It almost certainly occurred in 1589 when he visited Denmark to meet his future wife. It was in Denmark that James met a number of intellectuals and philosophers including the astronomer Tycho Brahe. Witches were actively hunted out in Denmark where the theory of a demonic pact had been widely accepted. The king’s journey back to Scotland proved to be a very rough and stormy one and one ship was lost. Witches were blamed - working in both Scotland and Denmark. When the Danish court made a reciprocal visit to Scotland in 1590, the topic of witchcraft and sorcery may well have been a topic of conversation.  When he became king of England in 1603, James claimed never to have been responsible for pushing ahead with persecutions of witches. However, the evidence suggests differently. In 1591 he showed a particular interest in the trial of Mary Napier – arrested for consulting a witch and linked to treasonable activity. She claimed to be pregnant at the time of her arrest. Despite the 1563 law outlawing witchcraft, no one had ever been arrested in Scotland for consulting a witch. Yet James wrote to the court ordering them to find out if she was pregnant or not and that if she was not, she should be burned. That Napier was a friend of Bothwell’s also indicates that James was willing to use witchcraft for political ends.

The court acquitted Napier – much to the anger of James. In 1597, James felt sufficiently knowledgeable about witchcraft that he wrote “Daemononlogie.” This was an eighty page book that expounded his views on the topic and it was meant to add to the intellectual debate that was going on within Europe about witchcraft. The book has three sections on magic, sorcery and witchcraft and one on spirits and ghosts. Having produced this book, James decided to end the standing commission that had been established to hunt out witches. However, the persecution did not end. By the time he left for England in 1603, witches were still being arrested and of those arrested, half were executed. Between 1603 and 1625, there were about twenty witchcraft trials a year in Scotland – nearly 450 in total. Half of the accused were found guilty and executed. However, in England James found a very different environment. The whole issue of demonic behaviour – the Christian witch theory – had never been readily accepted in England and James was quick to lose his self-imposed expert tag on witchcraft. He viewed England as a more civilised society where intellectuals discussed issues of a philosophical nature – but that did not include witchcraft. For James, any association with the topic was seen as a potential embarrassment. Prosecutions for witchcraft did occur in England while he was king – such as in Lancashire in 1612. However, the trials were covered in such detail by the press of the day that they gave the impression that such events were common when they were not. Midway through the reign of James in England, people could tell jokes about witchcraft – something no one would have done in Scotland in the 1590’s when the thinking of James dominated policy. There was a 1604 Witchcraft Act which some believed was more harsh that the law introduced under Elizabeth I. However, only one clause in it was more draconian and that was execution for the first offence of raising evil spirits. However, it was never used in the reign of James and seems to have been only used once in 1645.   

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For James, witches hinted at a less than sophisticated society. In England he believed he was in a country where he could best show off his intellectual ability – but the topics did not include witchcraft or demonology.

Trueman, Chris. “James I and Witchcraft.” Historylearningsite.Web. 07 Jan. 2012.

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ROUNDHEADS AND REGICIDE

Rapturous Welcome for the New KingJames set out for

London in May 1603. He was so eager to get there that he rode 40 miles in less than four hours. That was fast going for the time, but too fast. On the way to London, James fell off his horse, injuring himself. His doctors thought he had broken his collarbone.

When James reached London at last, he received a great welcome. Thousands turned out to see their new king enter the city. Celebrations went on far into the night. But the excitement soon wore off when the public discovered its new monarch not only looked weird, but that his personal tastes and habits were truly repugnant.

A Grotesque Oddity With Repulsive HabitsThe English discovered that King James

was extremely strange. He looked creepy. He had spindly legs. His tongue was too big for his mouth. It slopped about when he ate or talked. He drooled. He did not wash very often. His

hands were always black with dirt. He looked scruffy because he dressed so badly.

James was terrified of being assassinated. Many Scottish kings in the century or two before had been murdered. So he always wore dagger-proof padded clothes, giving him an alarmingly lumpy shape. As if this were not enough, King James I had some shocking habits. He made crude jokes. In front of his courtiers, he would make statements, such as “God’s wounds! I will pull down my breeches and they shall also see my arse.” When he went hunting, he would jump feet first into the innards of animals he had killed and mingle in their blood and gore.

But his unpleasant appearance and habits aside, and idiosyncratically for his time, James was tolerant about religion. Many contemporaries were not. English Protestants detested Roman Catholics, and Catholics feared persecution. Many had gone into hiding. James decided to put an end to all this. He decreed that Catholics should be allowed to follow their faith openly. But so many roman Catholics came out into the open that James became frightened. Hastily, he withdrew his decree. It was back to square one.

An Ambitious Plot FailsKing James soon found, however, that he

was in a no-win situation. After their disappointment, a group of Catholics led by Guy Fawkes hatched the famous Gunpowder Plot of 1605. It was very ambitious, involving nothing less than blowing up the Houses of Parliament when King James and his ministers were in attendance.

The plot never got going. Guy Fawkes was discovered red-handed in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament, together with his stock of gunpowder. The plotters were hung, drawn and quartered as traitors. Ever since, Guy Fawkes Day has been celebrated in England on November 5. Dummy models of Fawkes are displayed in the street. Children ask passersby to give them a “penny for the Guy.” Fireworks displays take place all over England.

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Guy Fawkes caught and arrested.

James believed in witchcraft. There had been a Witchcraft Act in Queen Elizabeth’s time. But that was not enough for James. He changed the act to include cannibalism among the dark practices performed by witches.

“If any person or persons shall use, practice or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil or wicked spirit…or take any dead man or child out of his or her grave, or the skin, bone or any part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manners of witchcraft…they shall suffer the pains of death.”

Kings Chosen by GodA dangerous notion James brought with

him from Scotland was the Divine Right of Kings, the belief that God appointed the king. James, therefore, believed he was above the law and told Parliament so in 1610: “The state of monarchy is the supremest thing on earth. As to dispute what God may do is blasphemy…so it is seditious in subjects to dispute what a king may do…Kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods.”

This was alarming rhetoric. English kings had never before been allowed to carry on in such a way. Parliament and its predecessors, the English barons, had fought a long battle for the right to advise the monarch. Now here was King James telling Parliament that they could “go to hell”: he chose his “sweet Steenie,” the Duke of Buckingham, as his one and only advisor.

Luxury Lifestyle funded by the Public PurseJames also found a way around

Parliament’s chief power: their right to grant the king money. James obtained funds in other

ways: he imposed taxes on imported goods, forced the aristocracy to accept loans, and sold offices to the highest bidder. All of this was illegal.

Parliament fumed. But they settled down to wait; sooner or later the king would run out of cash. When he did so, Parliament had the chance to hit back. The king spent money like water. His coronation had cost 20,000 pounds. His wife, Queen Anne, went overboard with expensive clothes and jewels. James gave cash away in handfuls to courtiers. Entertainments at his court were always lavish. The most popular, the masque, cost a fortune. Many such masques were staged at the court of King James.

King’s Surprising TurnaroundEventually, in 1621, James needed

money so badly that he was forced to call a Parliament. The members got their “shots” in first. For a long time they had been angered by the partiality James showed to Roman Catholics. They wanted England to be Protestant through and through. Above all, they wanted an end to James friendship with Catholic Spain. Their demands, in the form of a “Protestation,” were entered into Parliament’s journal. James was furious. He sent for the journal. He tore out the pages where the Protestation was printed. Parliament knew what they could do with their Protestation.

Then, quite suddenly, King James gave in. In 1624 he let Parliament have everything they had ever wanted: a say in foreign policy; an end to preference toward Catholics – even the right to make war.

“If I take a resolution, upon your advice, to enter into a war,” James told Parliament, “ then yourselves…shall have the disposing of the money. I will not meddle with it.”

Parliament, triumphant at last, voted the king the enormous sum of 30,000 pounds. James’ turnaround had been amazing. But there were good reasons for it. He was only 57 but getting older. He had suffered a stoke. He was becoming senile and did not have long to live. Letting Parliament have what it wanted was the only way to get a quiet life. James died on March 27, 1625 at his country home, Theobalds in Hertfordshire.

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Thirteen years earlier, James’ heir, Prince Henry, had died of typhoid fever. This was not only a tragic loss for his parents, but also for England.

Henry, only 18, had been a bright young man. He had up-to-date ideas about working with, instead of against, Parliament. He was a devout Protestant. When Henry came to the throne, so it was said, all the problems his father had caused would be cured. But it was not to be. What England got instead of Henry was a new version of King James, King Charles I, his second son.

Lewis, Brenda Ralph. “Roundheads and Regicide.” A Dark History: The Kings & Queens of England 1066 To the Present Day. New York: Metro Books, 2005. 147-153. Print.

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BLOODY TYRANT OR BENEVOLENT KING: WILL THE REAL MACBETH PLEASE STAND UP?

Did Shakespeare Lie to Us?

Most of Shakespeare's tale comes from Raphael Hollinshed's "Chronicle of Scotland" (1580s) and John Bellenden's translation of Hector Boece's "History and Chronicles of Scotland" (1536), the only histories readily available at that time. These works were based upon the writings of Andrew of Wyntoun, who got the tale from Fordun, a Celtic historian who surely used the annals from Ireland and Northumbria as well as texts we no longer have, along with 300 years worth of folklore and legend. So the Bard did do his research. However, he exercised poetic license in painting Lady Macbeth as an evil, conniving queen who urged her husband to commit murder in order to gain power. That story is found several pages

prior to Macbeth's in one of the histories, and it is attributed to a different Celtic queen. Shakespeare obviously borrowed it to add an interesting dimension to his play.

The three weird sisters who counsel Macbeth also appear first in the account by Wyntoun, and they clearly represent the three Fates in the imagery of the day: the maiden, the matron, and the hag--the Past, the Present and the Future. This is considered by all scholars to be a literary device, and not historical.

As for Banquo, whose murder Macbeth supposedly arranged, there is no historical evidence that such a person existed. We don't know that he didn't--we simply can't prove that he did. Since he is portrayed as the progenitor of the Stuart kings, this could well be a piece of revisionist history by those seeking to establish a noble forebear for the Stuart line.

And did Macduff lay on, slaying Macbeth and sticking his head on a pike? Again, there is no historical evidence for the person of Macduff. It may be that the person who actually killed Macbeth at the skirmish outside Lumphanan was named Macduff--we simply have no proof. As for cutting off his head and sticking it on a pike, it would not have been out of keeping with practices of the time--the Celts were head hunters, believing the severed heads of their enemies gave them power and status.

Wells, Catherine. “Bloody Tyrant or Benevolent

King: Will the Real Macbeth Please Stand

Up?” SFF. 2007. Web. 07 Jan. 2012. Print.

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