Macbeth: Kings and Witches

Wednesday 19th February 2014

Macbeth

• 1606 – the King’s Men – the Globe Theatre• 1608-9 – moved to the indoor Blackfriars Theatre

(which had a different social mix in the audience because it was more expensive)

• so became associated with the same kind of special effects as those Jonson and Jones employed in Court Masques: use of machinery, music and spectacle. Addition of Hecate and associated scenes (III.v, III.iv and IV.i)

The politics of Macbeth• One can read Macbeth as an intensely conservative political

drama:– Performed only months after the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, it

demonstrates the terrible consequences of regicide;– It serves to legitimate James’s authority by presenting his rule as

supernaturally-foretold: Banquo was his ancestor, and the procession of ‘eight Kings’ in 4.1 illustrates his royal lineage (conveniently omitting his politically-awkward mother, Mary Queen of Scots).

– The divinely-appointed King’s ability to heal scrofula with ‘holy prayers’ is narrated in a (completely unnecessary) passage in Act 4 (4.3.141-60). James is known to have participated in such ceremonies himself.

From Steve Purcell’s lecture, “Performing Patriarchy in Macbeth”

The Historical Moment• John Chamberlain’s letter to Ralph Winwood, 18th Dec. 1604:

‘The tragedy of Gowrie with all the action and actors hath been twice represented by the King’s players, with exceeding concourse of all sorts of people, but whether the matter or manner be not well-handled, or that it be thought unfit that princes should be played on the stage in their life-time, I hear that some great counsellors are much displeased with it, and so [it] is thought [it] shall be forbidden.’

• 1605 – the Gunpowder Plot – Jesuits and witches. The text of the play has an allusion to Henry Garnet (the Jesuit Superior in England).

• Shakespeare’s Sources: Holinshed Chronicles (1577; 1587 edition which S used); Boethius’s Latin Chronicle of Scotland (c.1527); Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582).

See You, Jimmy. (Or the Scottish Play)

Personal flattery of James in: • ‘parade of Kings’ scene (IV.i) – note ambiguity

of missing out Mary Queen of Scots (refer to Holinshed source)

• Edward the Confessor ‘touching for the King’s Evil’ (scrofula) in IV.iii – James reluctant to ‘touch’ but certainly backs up some idea of ‘magical kingship’

Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana (1579).

Great Chain of Being, or scala naturae

• universe consisted of a series of hierarchies• Heaven: God>descending series of angelic beings• Skies: Sun>descending series of planets• Animal kingdom: Lion>descending series of beasts• Political Order: King>descending series of authorities

reaching down to village constables and churchwardens

• Man’s body: Head> hierarchy of organs (cf Coriolanus)• Microcosm/macrocosm. Network of correspondences

between the hierarchies.

Great Chain of Being 2

• Emphasis on unity and harmony• Each part of the hierarchy mutually

dependent• Meant respecting the status quo, and that

included persons of royal blood – arbitrary kingship was out

Divine Right of Kings• Divine right theorists argued that monarchy was a form of

government particularly approved by God – agreed with the principles of hierarchy and unity inherent in the Great Chain of Being.

• James’s reign was different from Elizabeth’s where it was most common to maintain that England had a mixed constitution with final authority lying with statute law as approved by Parliament: king, Lords and Commons.

• James was a popular successor to Elizabeth but the mixed constitution would have debarred him from the throne

• After the Gunpowder Plot (1605), tyrannicide was a doctrine only Catholics dared defend

“The rude eye of rebellion”• Rebellion was also wrong during Elizabeth’s reign, even if

she was not an absolute monarch• An Homily against Disobedience and Wylful Rebellion

(1570): “As God the creator and lord of all things appointed his

angels and heavenly creatures in all obedience to serve and to honour his majesty, so was it his will that man, his chief creature upon the earth, should live under the obedience of his creator and lord…And as God would have man to be his obedient subject, so did he make all earthly creatures subject unto man, who kept their due obedience unto man so long as man remained in his obedience unto God.”

Here you may see the first author and founder of rebellion, and the reward thereof; here you may see the grand captain and father of all rebels ; who persuading the following of his rebellion against God their Creator and Lord, unto our first parents Adam and Eve, brought them in high displeasure with God, wrought their exile and banishment out of Paradise, a place of all pleasure and goodness, into this wretched earth and vale of all misery; procured unto them sorrows of their minds, mischiefs, sickness, diseases, death of their bodies; and, which is far more horrible than all worldly and bodily mischiefs, he had wrought thereby their eternal and everlasting death and damnation, had not God by the obedience of his Son Jesus Christ repaired that, which man by disobedience and rebellion had destroyed, and so of his mercy had pardoned and forgiven him: of which all and singular the premises the Holy Scriptures do bear record in sundry places. Rom. v. 12. 19, &c.

Thus you do see, that neither heaven nor paradise could suffer any rebellion in them, neither be places for any rebels to remain in. Thus became rebellion, as you see, both the first and the greatest, and the very root of all other sins, and the first and principal cause both of all worldly and bodily miseries, sorrows, diseases, sicknesses, and deaths, and, which is infinitely worse than all these, as is said, the very cause of death and damnation eternal also.

After this breach of obedience to God, and rebellion against his majesty, all mischiefs and miseries breaking in therewith, and overflowing the world, lest all things should come unto confusion and utter ruin, God forthwith, by laws given unto mankind, repaired again the rule and order of obedience thus by rebellion over-thrown ; Gen. iii. 1 7. and, besides the obedience due unto his majesty, he not only ordained, that, in families and households, the wife should be obedient unto her husband, the children unto their parents, the servants unto their masters ; Gen. iii. Ki. Job xxxiv. 30. and xxxvi. 7. Eccl. viii. 2. and x. 16, 17. 20, Psalm xviii. 50. XX. 6. and xxi. 1. Prov. viii. but also, when mankind increased, and spread itself more largely over the world, he by his holy word did constitute and ordain in cities and countries several and special governors and rulers, unto whom the residue of his people should be obedient.

GenderCatholicsWitches and Kings

World of Antitheses

Janet Adelman, ‘Escaping the Matrix: the Construction of Masculinity in Macbeth and Coriolanus’, ch. 6 (pp. 130-146) in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (Routledge, 1992).

Stuart Clark, ‘King James’s Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship’, pp. 156-81 in Sydney Anglo (ed.) The Damned Act: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (Routledge, 1977).

Divine Right and Democracy: an Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England, ed. David Wootton (Penguin, 1986), introduction (pp. 21-86) and Chapter 1: ‘The Divine Right of Kings’ (pp. 91-128).

References