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“What bloody man is that?”:Questioning biblical typology inMacbethAdrian Streete aa Queen's University , Belfast, UKPublished online: 18 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Adrian Streete (2009) “What bloody man is that?”: Questioning biblicaltypology in Macbeth , Shakespeare, 5:1, 18-35, DOI: 10.1080/17450910902764264

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‘‘What bloody man is that?’’: Questioning biblical typology in Macbeth

Adrian Streete*

Queen’s University, Belfast, UK

This essay sets out to re-examine the presence of the Bible in Shakespeare’sMacbeth, specifically the book of Kings and Revelation. Although largely ignoredtoday, the exegetical culture within which early modern biblical texts were readprovides new and surprising readings of biblical presences in early modern drama.I argue that Macbeth is sceptical of the political utility promised by its biblicalmodels. The deeply equivocal sense of politics and subjectivity examinedthroughout the play arises because it disrupts the typological understanding ofhistory found in Protestant exegetical culture.

Keywords: Shakespeare; Macbeth; Protestantism; Bible; exegesis; King David;

Revelation; apocalypse

There was then a long warre betweene the house of Saul and the house of David: butDavid waxed stronger, and the house of Saul waxed weaker.

(2 Samuel 3:1)

In an article published in 1955, Jane H. Jack points out a number of important

connections between the Bible and Macbeth (c. 1606�7). Although she draws on a

wide range of biblical analogues from Jeremiah, Kings and Chronicles, Jack

specifically examines the play’s use of the first book of Samuel and of Revelation.

In the case of Samuel, she notes that a number of scenes appear to invoke ‘‘in part

the history of Saul and David’’ (183).1 This ‘‘history’’ is invoked, albeit within the

parameters of a conservative, old historicist paradigm, in both negative and positive

terms in what amounts to a rudimentary form of typological reading.2 Similar to

Saul, Jack notes that Macbeth consorts with witches and forces his rivals into exile.

Yet he ends up defeated, the true king is restored and he receives the tyrant’s head on

a pole. In respect of the New Testament, drawing on imagery and verbal parallels

between Revelation and Macbeth, Jack demonstrates that ‘‘the Book of Revelation

was much in Shakespeare’s mind as he wrote the play’’ (192).3 In both of these cases,

typology is not subjected to any particular ideological scrutiny but is instead

recuperated as a form of source study that places some of the play’s imagery and

language within a defined biblical context. By contrast, in his essay ‘‘Macbeth and

Witchcraft’’ published in 1982, Peter Stallybrass draws upon but critiques Jack’s

article. He finds that while there are ‘‘interesting parallels between Macbeth and the

story of Saul and the Witch of Endor in the Book of Samuel’’, the earlier piece

*Email: a.streete@qub.ac.uk

ISSN 1745-0918 print/1745-0926 online

# 2009 Adrian Streete

DOI: 10.1080/17450910902764264

http://www.informaworld.com

Shakespeare

Vol. 5, No. 1, April 2009, 18�35

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‘‘attempts to separate religion from politics in a way which was totally foreign to

sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinking’’ (35). His suggestion that witchcraft,

sovereignty and the family offer a conflicted ‘‘ideological terrain’’ that the play

explores, persuasively reinstates the connection between religion and politics that

had been lacking in the earlier article, and Stallybrass’s essay has certainly proved

influential for subsequent scholarship on the play.Obviously both of these pieces differ fundamentally in their methodological

assumptions, not least in their respective attitudes to the issue of ‘‘history’’. However,

in this article I want to argue that the history of Shakespeare’s specific interest in and

use of the books of Samuel and Revelation in Macbeth has only been partially

appreciated. It is not so much that these biblical intertexts provide narrative types

and models that can be mapped directly onto the play, although in places this is

clearly the case. Rather, I suggest a more capacious understanding of the relationship

between play and biblical intertexts. Ideas, themes, concepts and even words from the

biblical texts are self-consciously utilized by Shakespeare in order to open up what

Beatrice Groves has called ‘‘ a fund of associations, ambiguities, and analogues’’

(25). This reading practice, I argue, also extends to the exegetical tradition within

which these biblical texts were read and understood in early modern England. Most

early modern bibles carried marginal notes that actively invited the reader into

making exegetical connections, associations and readings. This in turn was reflected

in a broader proliferation of biblical commentaries, paraphrases, and concordances

available to the early modern reader, texts which sought to facilitate and inculcatetypological reading of the Bible as the norm.4

* * *

To explain what this might mean in practice, I want to deal first with the books of

Samuel. In an article on Davidic usages in Shakespeare’s history plays, David Evett

has shown that, while David was traditionally seen as historically conflicted figure by

medieval exegetes, the impact of the Reformation altered this approach. David’s

fortitude, lack of ambition, obedience and refusal to rise up against Saul’s

persecution, notes Evett, ‘‘supplied experiences relevant to the concerns of

Renaissance rulers’’ (141). He also argues that revision of David was based upon

‘‘a change in the concept of ‘‘type’’. From the David who merely prefigures or

foreshadows the reality that was and is Christ, attention swings to a ‘‘substantial’’

David who supplies the first instances of practices, beliefs, and teachings that remain

the same under the New Covenant as they were under the Old’’ (141). Whereas

before the Reformation, figures, symbols and events in the Old Testament hadmainly been read in allegorical terms as foreshadowing the events of the New

Testament, Protestant typology sought to rescue exegesis from this overly symbolic

mode. It favoured of a more ‘‘concrete’’ interpretation of Scripture where, as Gene

Veith puts it, ‘‘the antitype of biblical symbolism is not simply Christ, but the

contemporary Christian’’ (190). In other words, whereas pre-Reformation exegesis

relied upon a symbolic mode of interpretation, post-Reformation exegesis sought to

ground biblical symbols in the presence of history: the subject read the type in

relation to him-/herself. Largely because of this typological function, it was perhaps

inevitable that David would be viewed in largely positive terms during the early

modern period.

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But while Evett’s article is crucial for situating the importance of this Davidic

narrative, I want to argue that his reading of early modern typological practice is

overly positivistic in tone. Since the publication of this article in 1981, a number of

important studies of early modern biblical typology have emerged that enable us to

complicate our understanding of how Shakespeare may have utilized the Davidic

paradigm in his plays. For one, Evett’s piece relies upon a distinction between

medieval and early modern exegetical practice that is too absolute. It posits an

uncomplicated shift from medieval ‘‘allegorical’’ exegesis to early modern typolo-

gical exegesis, the former being seen as straightforwardly ‘‘symbolic’’ and ‘‘allego-

rical’’ and the latter as ‘‘literal’’ and ‘‘historical’’. Writing of the relationship between

the Old Testament and the New, John Calvin notes that ‘‘the gospel points out with

the finger what the law foreshadowed under types’’ (Calvin, Institutes 426).

Protestant typology certainly seeks to align history with exegesis: its teleology

promises the revelation of ‘‘truth’’ as history shifts from ‘‘types’’ to ‘‘things’’.

However, the process is not as straightforward as is implied by Calvin. For one thing,

as the theologian Richard Muller has noted:

Luther, Calvin, and their contemporaries did not simply trade allegory for literalinterpretation. They strengthened the shift to letter with increased emphasis on textualand philological study, and then proceeded to find various figures and levels of meaning[that] marks a continuity � not a contrast � between sixteenth-century biblicalinterpretation and the exegesis of at least the preceding four centuries. (12)

This suggests that the distinction between typological ‘‘literalism’’ and more figural

ways of interpreting the Bible in the early modern period is rather more contested

than had been thought previously. So when I refer to ‘‘figural’’ reading or exegesis,

this usage marks a constitutive tension in the practice of early modern biblical

reading and interpretation and reading, one that is examined in Shakespeare’s play.

On the one hand Protestant exegesis seeks to rescue interpretation from what it sees

as overly symbolic modes such as allegory. On the other hand, its own exegetical

practice invariably falls back upon the very figural modes that it seeks to disown.

Indeed, this view has been interestingly borne out by a number of literary

scholars. Lisa Freinkel’s complex work on early modern figura has shown that ‘‘From

its Pauline inception Christian figurality grounds itself not in history per se but in the

readerly, promissory construction of that history’’ (4). It is important to recall that

biblical exegesis in the early modern period is always contained within a much

broader eschatological matrix, one predicated upon the second coming when ‘‘the

first things are passed’’ (Revelation 21:4)5 and past, present and future will be

collapsed into the radical imminence of divine judgement and revelation. However,

until that promised time, it is the figural that must bear the weight of this

eschatological expectation. Thomas Luxon explains what this might mean in a

Protestant context:

By reducing the dispensational divide between ‘‘Old Testament’’ times and Jesus’advent, the Reformers effectively reduced the divide that once distinguished betweenGod’s figural self-revelation (to the ‘‘Jews’’) and his actual self-revelation (toChristians), with the result that what was once taken to be actual must now beunderstood as figural. (43)

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For all that Protestantism encouraged a ‘‘literal’’, typological reading of the Bible, as

Freinkel and Luxon show, this method of interpretation is much more likely to result

in a figural reading, one that foregrounds the inherently promissory nature of

interpretation and history. Protestant figural exegesis seems to promise the

unvarnished truth and location of history. It seeks to exchange ‘‘types’’ for ‘‘things’’.

However, the deferral implicit in Protestantism’s eschatological view of world history

means that, almost by default, the ‘‘type’’ comes to stand in for the ‘‘thing’’,positioning the subject at one remove from the un-meditated presence of history. As

we will see in Macbeth, that promissory function applies both to the biblical

intertexts as well as Shakespeare’s exploration of Macbeth’s crime, creating a deeply

equivocal sense of politics and kingship throughout the play.

This emphasis on history is also important since it brings me back to the second

biblical book that Macbeth draws upon, namely Revelation. This book is predicated

upon the notorious eschatological promise mentioned above, the second coming:

‘‘Euen so, come Lord Iesus’’ (Revelation 22:21). Viewed in conventional exegetical

terms, this promise stands both at and as the typological end of biblical and world

history, and it represents the ultimate triumph of ‘‘things’’ over ‘‘types’’. However,

given the context I have been outlining, I will suggest that Shakespeare’s use of the

book throughout Macbeth is also designed to undercut this traditional exegetical

reading. Rather than ‘‘revealing’’ history in its unvarnished, literal truth, Macbeth’s

use of Revelation presents ‘‘time’’ in the play as a typological hiatus in history, one

that may be deferred terribly and infinitely. Conventionally viewed, Macbeth’sbiblical typology should point towards the historical emergence of Christ, whether as

Davidic type or Christ at the second coming. What we are presented with instead is

the gradual emergence of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as, variously, types of

antichrist as well as mirrors of other biblically compromised figures, a mimetic

realization that renders their biblical appropriations contested and fraught at a

political level.

In terms of Saul and David, Shakespeare taps into a much more sceptical,

politically equivocal tradition of reading the Old Testament narrative in early

modern England, one that chimes with the figural implications of Reformed exegesis.

This tradition stresses the agonistic relationship between Saul and David as well as

the awkward political implications of each man’s rule. In terms of Revelation,

Macbeth presents us with an eschatological view of history that never materializes as

exegesis conventionally suggests it should. The construction of the Witches and the

Macbeths also needs to be seen through this eschatological lens since it shows us how

Shakespeare manipulates and undermines conventional typological paradigms.

Shakespeare had a sophisticated understanding of the unstable political andtemporal models found in numerous places throughout the Bible. But Macbeth

does more than destabilize the exegetical assumptions that its biblical source texts

might have engendered: it shows that the politics of early modern typological reading

are themselves often disturbingly equivocal.

* * *

It is often remarked that the opening scene of Macbeth initiates the play’s broader

concern with inversion and referential ambiguity: ‘‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’’

(1.1.10).6 Less often commented upon is the sense of temporal urgency that defines

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the opening scene: ‘‘When shall we three meet again?’’ (1.1.1, my emphasis).

Whatever it is that the Witches have been doing, it needs to be done again, and

quickly. The first Witch not only wants to set a time but also a location for the

meeting with Macbeth: ‘‘Where the place?’’ (1.1.6, my emphasis). Though we cannot

know how this scene might have been performed in 1606�7, it is intriguing to

speculate whether its textual brevity would have been mirrored in a performance of

almost indecent haste. Certainly an audience attuned to contemporary discussions ofdemonology would have noted the Witches’ typically inverted discourse. But recent

work in the field has also shown that inversion was commonly understood within a

much broader eschatological framework. For many, maleficent practices would have

invoked an invariably apocalyptic timeframe.

In order to explain this, I want to turn to the dedicatory epistle to Henry

Holland’s A Treatise Against Witchcraft. Here he points out that ‘‘there are two

spiritual kingdoms in this world, which haue continual hatred and bloody wars,

without hope of truce for euer The Lord and king of the one, is our Lord Iesus, the

tyrannical vsurper of the other, is Sathan’’ (Sig. A2r).7 The apocalyptic rhetoric is

noticeable here, and it is enforced by the Calvinistically inspired assertion that ‘‘all

men liuing without exception, are eyther true subiects of the one, or slaues vnto the

other’’ (Sig. A2r). For Holland, this is an imminent matter. While the ‘‘Neuters of

this worlde, dreame that they may indifferentlie view the scarres and woundes of

other men, and neuer approach neere those bloody skirmishes’’ it is in fact the case

that all those who deny the imminent threat of witchcraft ‘‘must be numbered withthe rebels and enemies of our Lord Christ, when the warrefare shall be ended.’’ (Sig.

A2r) In this commonplace view, maleficent practices cannot be separated from the

end time of Christian eschatology, a time that is also imagined in militaristic terms.

This militantly apocalyptic mindset is fairly typical of early modern witchcraft

treatises, a fact that tends to be overlooked in critical discussion of Macbeth.8 Viewed

apocalyptically, the presence of witches exemplified a broader cultural understanding

that time itself was desperately short. In Daemonologie, James I explains this

outlook: ‘‘the consummation of the worlde, and our deliuerance drawing neare,

makes Sathan to rage the more in his instruments, knowing his kingdome to be so

neare an ende’’ (81).9 To put it slightly differently, the time invoked by the Witches is

pressing, urgent and apocalyptic because it is a prelude to a transcendent time after

the second coming.10 As Stuart Clark puts it: ‘‘In early modern demonology,

magicians and witches were in fact the precursors of the Antichrist, part of Satan’s

preparation for his arrival’’ (333). Whatever else it does, the temporal urgency of the

Witches’ language in the first scene impels us to view them as operating within this

apocalyptic timeframe. We might also think of their urgent questioning in 1.3:‘‘Where hast thou been, Sister? / . . . Sister, where thou?’’ (1.3.1�3). The reference to

‘‘When the battle’s lost and won’’ (1.1.4) certainly connotes the temporal moment of

the play and Macbeth’s quelling of civil dissention. But it also locates the ‘‘battle’’

within an apocalyptic framework that is imminent but, importantly, still to be

contested.

If the Witches represent the inverse of good, then we might expect the play to

oppose that inversion with the arrival of a good King and his retainers in 1.2. Yet

Shakespeare throws that implied political parallel into doubt in a number of ways.

Harry Berger has argued that 1.2 demonstrates that ‘‘there is something rotten in

Scotland’’ (74), a view with which I agree. But what has not been noted is the way in

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which Scotland’s political dubiety is invoked through biblical discourse. This is

heralded at the very start of the scene in Duncan’s strange opening line: ‘‘What

bloody man is that?’’ (1.2.1) Notwithstanding the slightly disjunctive fact that the

King does not recognize a captain in his own army, this line intriguingly echoes

Psalm 5. In the Geneva translation, the sixth verse reads: ‘‘Thou shalt destroy them

that speake lyes: the Lord will abhorre the bloody man and deceitfull.’’

David speaks this particular Psalm when he is, as the notes in the Geneva Bible

state, ‘‘oppressed with the cruelty of his enemies, and fearing greater dangers, [and]

calleth to God for succour’’ (Prefatory Notes to Psalm 5). As any early modern reader

of the Bible would have known, David’s main enemy Saul, first king of the Israelites,

provides the impetus for many of David’s laments in the Psalms. In his commentary

on this particular Psalm, Calvin notes that for David the ‘‘greater the lawlessness

with which his enemies proceeded against him, the more earnestly did he supplicate

preservation from God, whose office it is to destroy all the wicked’’ (Calvin, Psalms

86). Calvin also points out the ungodly and sinful nature of the ‘‘bloody man’’:

‘‘there is no madness worse than contempt of God, under the influence of which men

pervert all right’’ (87). Read in this exegetical light, the scene may associate the

Captain (and perhaps even Duncan) with the sinful ‘‘bloody man’’ who persecutes

David, a somewhat uncomfortable alignment. Indeed, as a Captain in a war lead by

Macbeth and Banquo, the ‘‘bloody man’’ may stand as metonym for the actual war.

If we associate the ‘‘bloody man’’ with Saul, as many early modern exegetes did, then

this adds a further layer of complexity. As William Perkins notes, Saul conjured the

Witch of Endor because God ‘‘refused to answer him, either by dreames . . . or by the

Prophets’’ and he wished to know ‘‘the issue of the warre’’ (108) with the Philistines.

However, these identifications are far from straightforward. I would argue, therefore,

that this exegetical uncertainty is reflected in the political dubiety of Scotland’s war.

Unsure whether we are invited to identify the ‘‘bloody man’’ with David or with the

tyrant who persecutes him, the reference introduces the narrative of David and Saul

into the play’s signifying realm, but it does so in deliberately equivocal, figural terms.

The apocalyptic language of the Captain’s speeches casts the battle and Macbeth

and Banquo in a similarly contested light, one that mirrors, perhaps unexpectedly,

the opening scene. The Captain begins by describing the ‘‘broil’’ (1.2.6) he has just

left as ‘‘Doubtful’’ (1.2.7), and it is interesting in this regard that Macbeth’s victories

are far from being clear-cut. For all that he fixes Macdonwald’s head ‘‘upon our

battlements’’ (1.2.23), the Captain notes that the victory is only provisional:

As whence the sun ’gins his reflection

Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break,

So from that spring whence comfort seemed to come

Discomfort swells.

(1.2.25�28)

Here we see a temporality subject to dizzying alteration and, indeed, reversal: the

battle seems both ‘‘lost and won’’ (1.1.4). The apocalyptic overtones of this speech

are echoed in the ‘‘fresh assault’’ (1.2.33) that Macbeth and Banquo are obliged to

rebuff. Duncan asks: ‘‘Dismay’d not this our captains, Macbeth and Banquo?’’

(1.2.34), to which the Captain replies:

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Yes, as sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion!

If I say sooth I must report they were

As cannons overcharged with double cracks,

So they doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.

Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds

Or memorize another Golgotha,

I cannot tell �But I am faint. My gashes cry for help.

(1.2.35�42)

Again, the provisionality of this speech is noticeable and strange: ‘‘If I say sooth’’; ‘‘I

cannot tell’’. But what is most significant about these words is the way that they

invoke biblical discourse to cast doubt on Macbeth and Banquo’s political and

militaristic conduct. Eagles and lions are fairly ubiquitous in the Bible, and their

often-militaristic connotation in this book explains the contrast the Captain makes

between these creatures and their prey, sparrows and hares. But one of the few places

that the eagle and lion are spoken of together is in 2 Samuel 1:23. This is where David

laments the deaths of Jonathan and Saul: ‘‘Saul and Ionathan were lovely and

pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided: they were swifter

then eagles, they were stronger than lions.’’ If this verse is accepted as a possible

intertext for the Captain’s invocation of eagles and lions in this speech, then it opens

up an intriguing set of possible connections.

As early modern exegetes made clear, leaving aside his status as King, Saul’s

behaviour throughout his reign presents the interpreter of the Bible with a number of

difficulties. In a commentary on the first book of Samuel published in 1607 and in a

section entitled ‘‘Whether Saul is to be held a reprobate, and so euerlastingly

condemned’’, Andrew Willet is suitably scathing:

. . . the safest way is, to leaue Saul vnto the iudgement of God, and not without thewarrant of the Scripture to giue any sentence of his condemnation. And yet by the wholcourse of the historie, by Sauls wilfull transgressions, his disobedience to the Prophet innot staying his coming, failsifying of the Lords word in sparing of Agag the King ofAmalek: in putting to death the innocent Priests: in persecuting Dauid, and breaking hisoath and faith there giuen vnto him, in consulting with a witch, and lastly in hisdesperate ende, it is euident, that the more arguments may be gathered of Saulscondemnation, then of his saluation: yet because nothing is expressly set downetouching his state with God, it is better so to leaue it. (347�48)

Saul is more than an inconveniently wicked King. According to a conservative

reading of early modern political theory, as the first King of Israel he must be

granted the respect and obedience that all monarchs should rightly expect. However,

as Willet’s list makes clear this has to be reconciled somehow with the recognition

that Saul is not only wicked, but also notorious for his persecution of David. I will

deal with the political implications of this fact later, but for now it is enough to point

to the typological problem that this example presents to the early modern biblical

reader. As Willet points out, ‘‘Dauid was a type of Christ’’ (189). Although Saul

‘‘intendeth nothing but murther and mischeife’’ (189) towards David in many places,

David’s fortitude in withstanding these trials conventionally figures him as a good

and devout king, and prefigures him in terms of his New Testament manifestation.

But notice that the Captain’s speech at 1.2.35�42 places Macbeth and Banquo within

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the context of David lamenting after the deaths of Jonathan and Saul. Are we invited

to read the reference as invoking Saul’s wickedness or David’s lament? Or is the

answer in fact neither? It is significant that the Captain ‘‘cannot tell’’ whether

Macbeth and Banquo ‘‘meant to bathe in reeking wounds / Or memorize another

Golgotha’’.11 This is just one of many moments in this play when characters are

unable or unwilling to define clearly what they see or have seen. To associate

Macbeth and Banquo with the ‘‘reeking wounds’’ is to align them with the OldTestament paradigm: to claim that they ‘‘memorize another Golgotha’’ is to affiliate

them with the New Testament prefiguration that would end in the second coming.

The fact that the Captain refuses to confirm either reading mirrors the exegetical

equivocation of its biblical intertexts: his refusal also problematizes the historical

utility of these intertexts. Placed between the Davidic typology of the Old Testament

and the eschatological promise of the New, the actions of Banquo and Macbeth are

subject to a figural disruption that refuses rather than confirms typological history.

* * *

When Macbeth and Banquo meet the Witches, the inability of either man to

‘‘interpret’’ (1.3.44) the figures before them is foregrounded. Banquo’s statement that

the Witches greet Macbeth with ‘‘present grace’’ (1.3.53) is important in this regard.

As we have seen, the Witches are associated with an eschatological sense of

apocalyptic time where, as Clark puts it, witchcraft ‘‘became a perfectly fittingaccompaniment to an age in which the historical balance was tilted as far as it could

go in the devil’s direction without actually breaking the continuity of the faith’’

(328). This shows that any ‘‘grace’’ associated with this ‘‘time’’ must necessarily be

false. John Stachniewski has importantly pointed out the ways in which Macbeth

engages with contemporary Calvinistic debates concerning election and reprobation.

Unwittingly then, Banquo’s comment points up what Stachniewski calls Macbeth’s

‘‘reprobate development’’ (175). We may question whether Macbeth can definitively

identified as a reprobate, as Stachniewski suggests.12 Nevertheless, it is significant

that Macbeth frames the Witches’ ‘‘prophetic greeting’’ (1.3.76) within an impending

apocalyptic sense of time

Macbeth’s understanding of himself as a ‘‘man’’ is now predicated upon ‘‘what is

not’’ and the present, associated with specific fears and anxieties, gives way to the

horribly apocalyptic ‘‘imaginings’’ of the future. The aphoristic belief that ‘‘Time and

the hour runs through the roughest day’’ (1.3.146) will soon be supplanted by the

apocalyptic anti-time that will be expressed fully in Macbeth’s actions. As he says to

Lady Macbeth, ‘‘I dare do all that may become a man’’ (1.7.46). While ‘‘become’’may be read as ‘‘befitting’’, it also signifies Macbeth’s growing realization that the

course of actions he is embarking upon will result in his ‘‘becoming’’ a different man

by ushering in a time predicated on ‘‘what is not’’. Macbeth’s subjectivity always

appears to hold out the promise of a unified ‘‘state’’: crucially, though, it is a ‘‘state’’

that never quite arrives.

His ‘‘becoming’’ is also predicated upon a desire that ‘‘Vaulting ambition’’

(1.7.27) encourages, but which is controlled paternalistically. As Duncan says to

Macbeth, ‘‘I have begun to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of

growing’’ (1.4.28�29). These words invoke a sense of monarchical time that is

ordered and determined by the patriarch. They also echo Psalm 92:12 where David

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states: ‘‘The righteous shall flourish like a palme tree, and shall grow like a cedar in

Lebanon.’’ The irony is that this verse is prefaced by one that reads: ‘‘Mine eye also

shall see my desire against mine enemies: and mine eares shall heare my wish against

the wicked, that rise vp against me.’’ Duncan’s Davidic rhetoric may be politically

expedient. But it is ironically undercut by his inability to recognize that his enemy is

also the one that he seeks to raise.13 The King’s stated ‘‘hereafter’’ (1.4.39) refers to

his naming of an heir. Yet it also stands in odd counterpoint to the Witches’

prophecy ‘‘All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be King hereafter.’’ (1.3.48) So when

Macbeth reports to his wife that the Witches offered him the greeting ‘‘Hail, King

that shalt be!’’ (1.5.9), their ‘‘Hail’’ certainly points towards the political dispensa-

tion desired by Macbeth. Nevertheless, if we view the Witches as maleficent versions

of Judas when he betrayed Christ (‘‘Haile Master’’, Mark 14:45), then their words

position Macbeth rather differently. Constructed simultaneously as Christ and

antichrist, one whose time is both imminent and still to come, Macbeth is figured in

the sickening space between these typological possibilities.

Interestingly, the ‘‘all-hail hereafter’’ (1.5.54) that Lady Macbeth invokes when

she meets her husband replicates this typological ambiguity. Her injunction to her

husband, ‘‘To beguile the time, / Look like the time’’ (1.5.62�63), is an attempt to

inscribe Macbeth as not simply the antithesis of divinely ordained providence, but as

its legitimate successor. In his wife’s fantasy, if Macbeth is successful in his actions

then the anti-time that he institutes will run contrary to, or rather be indistinguish-

able from, the regular time of Duncan and his legitimate heirs. The Macbeths must

‘‘mock the time with fairest show’’ (1.7.81) by providing the course of history with a

figural, perverted, alternative route. This also applies to Lady Macbeth. Critics such

as Janet Adelman and Terry Eagleton have pointed out the many connections

between Lady Macbeth and the Witches. Less often commented upon is the biblical

underwriting of Lady Macbeth’s apocalyptic subjectivity. Take, for example, her

invocation to Macbeth:

Hie thee hither,

That I may pour my spirits in thine ear

And chastise with the valour of my tongue

All that impedes thee from the golden round

Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem

To have thee crowned withal.

(1.5.24�29)

As far as I am aware, it has not been noted that this speech interestingly echoes, and

subverts, 2 Thessalonians 2.14

As Stuart Clark notes, this text was routinely used to confirm the ‘‘inherently

demonological character of history in its final phase’’ (330), and we might notice

how Lady Macbeth seeks to replace a providential sense of history with an

alternative time that she can interpret and bring into being. The speech inverts the

epistolary construction of 2 Thessalonians 2 in a couple of ways. First, Lady

Macbeth speaks these words after reading Macbeth’s letter from the Witches. More

interestingly, the second verse reads as follows: ‘‘That ye be not suddenly mooued

from your minde, nor troubled neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter, as it were

from vs, as though the day of Christ were at hand.’’ All the things that Paul instructs

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the Thessalonians not to be effected by, spirits, letters, words, are inverted in Lady

Macbeth’s invocation of them. Paul’s message is that the Thessalonians not be

deceived by what the Geneva marginal notes call ‘‘the glistering of the world’’, ‘‘false

prophets’’ or those that ‘‘bragge of fained propheticall reuelations’’ (Marginal notes

a and 2, 2 Thessalonians 2). As Paul warns: ‘‘for that day will not come, except there

come a departing first, and that that man of sinne be disclosed, euen the sonne of

perdition’’ (2 Thessalonians 2:3). This refers to the antichrist, that ‘‘wicked man’’

who will ‘‘sit as God in the Temple of God, shewing himselfe that he is God’’ (2

Thessalonians 2:4). Although Paul notes that Christ will ‘‘abolish with the brightnese

of his coming’’ (2 Thessalonians 2:8), it is clear that the time of the antichrist will be

a time when it is also extremely difficult to distinguish true from false, a fact that

underlies much of the power of Lady Macbeth’s speech.

This fact also applies to her self-construction in preparation for Duncan’s

murder. When she says that she will ply the ‘‘chamberlains’’ with ‘‘wine and wassail’’

(1.7.63�64) in order to facilitate the crime, this may have brought to mind the actions

of the whore of Babylon who ‘‘made all nations to drinke of the wine of the wrath of

her fornication’’ (Revelation 14:8). Moreover, as the next verse tells us, those who

consort with the whore will receive the mark of the beast ‘‘in his forehead, or on his

hand’’ (Revelation 14:9). Lady Macbeth invokes the ‘‘beast’’ (1.7.47) that causes

Macbeth to lose his nerve, and although Lady Macbeth will ‘‘gild the faces of the

grooms’’ (2.2.54) with the blood of Duncan, both she and her husband are marked

indelibly on the hand, a fact perhaps reflected in Macbeth’s inability to pronounce

‘‘Amen’’ (2.2.29), the last word of Revelation, and thus the typological confirmation

of the second coming.15

* * *

It is no mistake that Macbeth’s most terrifying explorations of subjectivity before

and after his murder of Duncan take place in relation to figural forms that he cannot

fully understand or rationalize. These include the ‘‘dagger of the mind’’ (2.1.38) and

Banquo’s Ghost, which Lady Macbeth calls ‘‘the very painting of your fear’’

(3.4.60).16 This terror can also be seen in a slightly different form in his speech before

the murder:

But in these cases

We still have judgment here, that we but teach

Bloody instructions which, being taught, return

To plague th’inventor. This even-handed justice

Commends th’ingredience of our poisoned chalice

To our own lips.

(1.7.7�12)

The antithesis between ‘‘judgment’’ and ‘‘justice’’ is biblical and it is associated with

the institution of David’s reign: ‘‘Thus David reigned over all Israel, and executed

iudgement and justice unto all his people’’ (2 Samuel 8:15). The purpose of

Macbeth’s apocalyptic inversion of this verse can be read in a couple of ways. First,

as Calvin points out in a sermon on this verse: ‘‘These words ‘justice’ and ‘judgment’

are joined together in order to convey total righteousness which is characterised by a

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constancy and magnanimity which resists all evil’’ (Calvin, Samuel 418).17 Seen in

this light, the irony of Macbeth’s biblical invocation is obvious. Indeed, this verse is

critical in early modern exegesis as it provides an exemplum of typological reading.

Calvin writes: ‘‘as Psalm 72 says, ‘Lord, give judgment to your king, and he will

govern your people in justice and judgment’. This shows that David was a type which

had its perfect fulfilment only in our Lord Jesus Christ’’ (420). But whereas David’s

‘‘iudgement’’ connotes political stability and ‘‘justice’’ and prefigures Christ,

Macbeth’s ‘‘judgment’’ prefigures a perverted form of ‘‘justice’’ that returns to

‘‘plague th’inventor’’ and which prefigures an act of regicide.

When Duncan’s murder is discovered, the play elides its Old and New Testament

intertexts in fascinating ways. Macduff says:

Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope

The Lord’s anointed temple and stole thence

The life o’ th’ building!

(2.3.66�68)

The fact that this murder is described as the ‘‘great doom’s image’’ (2.3.77) and ‘‘this

horror’’ (2.3.80), and that Malcolm and Banquo are invited to awake ‘‘as from your

graves’’ (2.3.79), places the action firmly within the apocalyptic framework I have

been outlining. Lady Macbeth’s reference to the ‘‘hideous trumpet’’ (2.3.81) is also

part of this lexis. Biblically, this discourse draws upon the last two verses of

Revelation 11. The verse refers to the Gentiles’ anger before the opening of the Ark

as ‘‘the time of the dead’’, and goes on to say: ‘‘Then the Temple of God was opened

in heauen, and there was seene in the Temple the Arke of the couenant: and there

were lightenings and voices, and thunderings, and earthquake, and much haile’’

(Revelation 11:18�19). However, it is not just Revelation that this scene invokes.

Throughout the two books of Samuel, the idea of the Lord’s anointed is particularly

prevalent.18 Shakespeare could have recalled Samuel’s anointing of Saul as the first

King of Israel: ‘‘Hath not the Lord anointed thee to be gouenor ouer his

inheritance?’’ (2 Samuel 10:1) or else David’s refusal to resist Saul’s persecution at

1 Samuel 24:7 ‘‘The Lord keepe mee from doing that thing vnto my master the Lords

anointed, to lay mine hand vpon him, for he is the Anonyted of the Lord.’’19 It is

hard to know whether to align Duncan with Saul or with David. In a sense, that is

precisely the point.

As I have shown, the conventional reading of David’s rule saw him as wise and

virtuous, especially since he refused to resist Saul. And although Saul was a morally

dubious king, resistance to him would have been deemed unacceptable according to

conventional political wisdom. However, an examination of exegetical writings on

both kings during the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century reveals a much more

contested political terrain than this summary would lead us to suspect. In terms of

Saul, his very legitimacy as king was subject to a surprising degree of sceptical

scrutiny. Advising Prince Henry in Basilicon Doron on which books of the Bible are

particularly worthy of attention, James omits to recommend 1 and 2 Samuel, and in

a discussion of obedience in The Trew Law he makes the rather strained argument

that although ‘‘Saul was chosen by God for his vertue’’ it is the case that his

wickedness came ‘‘from the corruption of his owne nature, & not through any

default in God’’ (James, The Trew Law 67).

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Those seeking to defend obedience realized they were on difficult ground with

Saul and other Protestant exegetes make little attempt to disguise the problems

presented by his reign and actions. In The Coronation of Dauid by Edmund Bunney,

he notes that Saul’s legitimacy was suspect from the outset:

Whereas therefore Ishai the father of Dauid was of the tribe of Judah which had thepromis, it is so much the more likely that some one might be taken thence, vnto whomethe Kingdome should be established: then of the family of Kish the father of Saul, beingof the tribe of Benjamin, vnto whome no such promise was made. (5�6)

Andrew Willet casts a similar doubt: ‘‘The Hebrues thinke, that Saul was not

anointed with the same oyle, wherewith Dauid and Salomon were anointed’’ and

that the vessel used to anoint the kings ‘‘signified the vnstablenesse and short

continuance of their two kingdomes’’ (59�60). Likewise, Henoch Clapham writes

that Samuel anointed Saul ‘‘after the which, the Spirit (not of Sanctification, but) of

Government and Maiestie came vpon him’’ (72). For these mainstream English

Protestant writers, Saul’s legitimacy is decidedly provisional. Bunney makes the

conventional disclaimer that subjects should ‘‘lay no violent hands on any of the

Lords annointed’’ (54). But does that negate the following extraordinary passage?

. . . most of our persecutions also, that are by wordly and godlesse Princes raysedagaynst vs, may well bee referred to that euill spirit that reigneth in the world, and hathalreadie so strongly possessed these Saules of ours. Neither is it only by this euill spirit ofthe Lorde, that these Saules of ours are so farre out of temper: but for that it greeueththem also to part with their kingdome. Not that the Gospell doth any way meddle in thedisposing of earthly kingdoms, or to encomber the title of any . . . but for that it callethto account their maner of gouerment and sometimes vrgeth them to make a plainealteration of it. . . . So farre therefore as they are wedded vnto their corrupt manner ofgouerment, and so farre as they account their kingdoms and states to stand therby: sofarre also may they stand in some doubt of their kingdomes by reason of the Gospell,and feare that it will molest them therein. (Bunney 18)

Similarly, Willet maintains in a section entitled ‘‘Whether it be not lawfull to kill a

tyrant, seeing Dauid spared Saul’’ that ‘‘it is not lawfull for any priuate man to lay

hands, no not vpon a tyrant’’. However, this does not prevent him from stating that

private men, who are ‘‘stirred by some extraordinarie motion of the spirit’’, may

legitimately resist and that ‘‘Tyrants and wicked gouenours may be remooued by the

whole state’’ (294). What, then, are we to make of these arguments and how might

they inform this reading of Macbeth?

First, each writer quoted is a conforming Protestant. Nevertheless, I think their

political exegesis of the David/Saul paradigm is likely to have been influenced by

certain radical developments in Protestant resistance theory during the sixteenth

century. Quentin Skinner has noted that, towards the end of his life, Calvin began to

modify his doctrine of passive political resistance and ‘‘started to move towards an

acceptance of the constitutional theory of resistance’’ (214).20 Significantly, the

Reformer undertook this shift in a series of Sermons on 2 Samuel. This is important,

because it brings to the fore the possibility that both Saul and David can be used to

justify political resistance, albeit in different ways. In the case of Saul, it made sense

for the author of a resistance tract like Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos to state that ‘‘If

then Saul although he were a King ought to obey God, it follows in all good

consequence that subjects are not bound to obey their king by offending God’’ (18).

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Calvin is no less condemnatory: ‘‘the reign of Saul was cursed, since he was not the

legitimate king whom God had promised’’ (Calvin, Samuel 307). In the case of

David, though, the argument is different. Because of the severity of Saul’s

persecution, David was de facto positioned as a rebel. For example, in his sermon

on 2 Samuel 1:23, Calvin wonders ‘‘why David should have grieved over the death of

Saul’’? He grants that it would have been a ‘‘sacrilege’’ for David to rebel outright

but nonetheless that David ‘‘had always found him [Saul] disloyal and so cruel thathe had reached a state of rebellion from which it was impossible to reclaim him’’

(Calvin, Samuel 5�6). The dubiety of Saul’s legitimacy as king is what justifies, even if

it does not fully excuse, David’s ‘‘state of rebellion’’.

This is a critical development in Protestant political thought and it is exegetically

driven by the inescapable fact that, personally and politically, David spent a

significant part of his time, as one early modern writer puts it, in a ‘‘most fearfull and

damnable estate’’ (Holland, Davids 39).21 So although David never actually rebelled

against Saul, he does behave in a number of ways that could be construed as

politically contentious. For example, although David was noted for his mercy, this

has to be squared with rather more questionable actions such as ordering the killing

of the Amekalite who brings him the news of Saul and Jonathan’s death (2 Samuel

1:15). Significantly, David tries to justify this action by scapegoating the Amekelite

as one who has ‘‘slaine the Lords Anoynted’’ (2 Samuel 1:16). Not only is this an act

hard to excuse on political or ethical grounds, it is also a verse that takes us back to

Macbeth. Macbeth says of the supposed killers of the ‘‘anointed’’ Duncan: ‘‘I dorepent me of my fury / That I did kill them’’ (2.3.106�7). In this, he shows himself

incapable of the very act undertaken by David. But this is undermined by the fact

that we know that the chamberlains will undoubtedly die, and that the one speaking

these words is the regicide. Macbeth is lying, but the Davidic associations of his

words do not detract from this fact: rather they actively enforce it. The point is not

that the biblical intertexts framing Duncan’s murder forces us to identify any one

figure particularly with Saul or David. Instead, these associations show us that

typology does not exculpate political dubiety in an ethical sense: indeed, it may

actively underwrite such political bad faith.

When early modern exegetes attempted to explain similarly dishonest behaviour

by David, for example when he feigns madness in exile in 2 Samuel 21, they resort to

extremely equivocal formulations. I use the word ‘‘equivocal’’ deliberately here since

equivocation in Macbeth is conventionally read by critics in relation to the Jesuit

practice of ‘‘ethical lying’’ invoked by the Porter in 2.3.22 However, what has not

been noted is that the Saul/David narrative offered exegetes a chance to construct a

Protestant version of equivocation. Here is Andrew Willet on David’s ‘‘lying’’madness: ‘‘There is great difference to be made between dissembling in words, which

properly is to lie, and in signes: for signes are not so properly ordained to expresse

the minde, as words are: it may be lawfull for a man to dissemble in his behauiour,

when he cannot in speech’’ (238). What Willet effectively says is that the figural sign

is the essence of a lie.23 There is a startling congruity between this argument and

contemporary Jesuitical discussions of equivocation. Macbeth’s actions (the murder)

are displaced onto another, and his rhetorical invocation of David’s ethically dubious

behaviour after Saul’s death only serves to confirm that the division of speech from

action cannot escape the figural equivocation of words. Macbeth’s assertion that

‘‘from this instant / There’s nothing serious in mortality’’ (2.3.91�92) conjures up an

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ethical realm where typology is arrested, and where exegesis is as compromised as

those who invoke the practice.24

When Malcolm avows that he has none of ‘‘the king-becoming graces’’ but rather

abounds ‘‘In the division of each several crime, / Acting in many ways’’ (4.3.92�98),

we may well be reminded of David’s seeming renunciation of kingship while in exile,

for example in 1 Samuel 27:1. These words could also be read as a much more

realistic assessment of Davidic kingship. But with almost indecent haste, he recants

this assertion and asks God to reject the ‘‘Devilish Macbeth’’ and to ‘‘Deal between

thee and me’’ (4.3.118�22). Whether or not this is designed to invoke David’s words

to Saul ‘‘The Lord be iudge betweene thee and me, and the Lord auenge me of thee,

and let not mine hand be vpon thee’’ (1 Samuel 24:13), the point is surely that

Malcolm’s assumption of the Davidic model recalls the equivocal position of his

biblical model in respect of the king. If Malcolm is to see his promise through, he will

have to resist a tyrant. However, although he asserts that he has ‘‘at no time broke

my faith’’ (4.3.129), he acknowledges also to Macduff that his ‘‘first false-speaking /

Was this upon myself. What I am truly / Is thine, and my poor country’s to

command’’ (4.3.131�33). In order to assume the Davidic mantle, Malcolm accepts

that the role will demand ‘‘faith’’ and ‘‘false speaking’’ in roughly equal measure. But

this is an assumption that only goes so far: whatever else David was, he was not a

regicide. By pledging his allegiance to Macduff and to his country in this way,

Malcolm himself adopts the typically Davidic pose of refusing to resist, while at the

same time benefiting from those who are prepared actively to resist.

* * *

While Malcolm adopts this equivocal Davidic discourse, at the end of the play

Macbeth is constructed as that tragic figure of patriarchal rebellion and death,

Absalom. For one, the Witches’ prophecy that Macbeth will not be harmed until

‘‘Birnam Wood remove to Dunsinane’’ (5.3.2) is oddly reminiscent of the battle

fought between David and Absalom’s forces in 2 Samuel 18 where we are told that

‘‘the wood deuoured much more people that day then did the sword’’. It is interesting

that Absalom dies by being caught by the head ‘‘in an oake’’ tree (2 Samuel 18:10), a

fact that Macbeth may allude to when he warns a servant that if he lies, ‘‘Upon the

next tree shall thou hang alive’’ (5.5.37). For John Calvin, the example of Absalom

proved that ‘‘it is a very rare thing for the children of princes to bear good fruit’’

(Calvin, Samuel 427). Although he grants that ‘‘It is true that God raised up

Solomon to succeed’’ David (427), the wickedness of his other children again renders

the king a problematic figure. Indeed, considering Absalon’s wickedness in

particular, Calvin says of David: ‘‘it is certain that he would a thousand times

rather have chosen to die than suffer such humiliation’’ (543). So why did God allow

this humiliation to happen? Calvin explains that ‘‘It was Absalom who was the rod

that God used to punish David’’ (545). For the theologian, this seemingly arbitrary

fact is explained because it is a decision that ‘‘surpasses all human intelligence’’: the

judgement God exercises here represents ‘‘a profound abyss’’ (546). Interestingly

though, Calvin does grant that such capricious behaviour, especially in the case of a

king who is ‘‘a type and image of our Lord Jesus Christ’’, could lead people to

conclude that ‘‘God commits sin and is the Author of it’’ (543, 546).

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For Macbeth, his alignment with Absalom causes us to recall, in a strange way,

the eschatological temporality of the Witches and the argument that, if maleficent

figures and tyrants like Macbeth are to be incorporated within a predestinarian logic

then God must in some way be the author of evil. Macbeth’s assertion that he begins

‘‘To doubt th’equivocation of the fiend, / That lies like truth’’ (5.5.41�42) suggests a

world where figural ‘‘truth’’ is even more terrifying than the ‘‘fiend’’. Calvin’s

assertion that ‘‘whenever the wicked are in control over us, and trouble us, althoughthey do it unjustly, God is still in charge of it’’ (Calvin, Samuel 547) would appear to

grant, albeit equivocally, this disturbing fact. The supplementary anti-time of

maleficent practice has, in fact, become the thing itself. In Macbeth’s case, this fact is

invoked by the ‘‘walking shadow’’ and the disturbingly figural ‘‘poor player’’ who,

after his temporary moment in the limelight, is ‘‘heard no more’’ (5.5.23�25). For

Lady Macbeth, the figural comes to define her very subjectivity as the ‘‘memory of a

rooted sorrow’’ (5.3.43) that presages the suicide of a ‘‘desperate’’ figure whose

‘‘violent hands’’ (5.11.36) now bear the ‘‘mark’’ of death.

In the case of the play’s broader political purpose, this reading is also significant.

As is well known, Shakespeare does not implicate Banquo in Macbeth’s crimes

because of King James’ belief that the former was directly related to him. However,

the Saul/David narrative that I have been examining in Macbeth calls into doubt

another well-known early modern biblical typology, namely King James’ self-

identification with David’s ‘‘good’’ son, Solomon. Calvin writes that Solomon is the

‘‘image of our Lord Jesus Christ’’ (Calvin, Samuel 599), a sentiment that King Jamesunsurprisingly concurs with in his own writings: ‘‘good Kings in their gouerment,

must imitate GOD and his Christ, in being iust and righteous; Dauid and Salomon,

in being godly and wise’’ (‘‘Star Chamber’’ 204). The problem is that, just as in order

to praise James, Shakespeare is obliged to overlook the fact of Banquo’s historical

implication in Macbeth’s crimes, so James’ alignment with David and Solomon is

based necessarily on a selective and contested reading of typological history and

exegetical reality. Macbeth may be a tyrannous regicide, but even if he is not

‘‘directly’’ related to him ancestrally, like the troubling figure of Saul, he stands

indubitably in the line of kings that provides James with his legitimacy.

There is one final piece of typological reading that is pertinent here. Macbeth’s

comment that ‘‘I ’gin to be aweary of the sun, / And wish th’estate o’ th’ world were

now undone’’ (5.5.47�48) is suitably apocalyptic in construction. But it may also, as

Naseeb Shaheen notes, draw upon the ‘‘superscription to Psalm 127 in the Geneva

Bible’’, a text that reads ‘‘he sheweth that the whole estate of the world, both

domesticall and politicall, standeth by Gods meree prouidence’’ (641). Whereas the

Psalmist praises the providence of God, Macbeth curses it. The Psalmist also notesthat ‘‘children are the inheritance of the Lord, and the fruit of the wombe his

reward’’, and that the man who has many children is blessed since those children

‘‘shall not be ashamed, when they speake with their enemies in the gate’’ (Psalm 127).

In terms of Macbeth, the irony is rendered equivocal by the fact that he is childless

and aligned with the would-be patricide Absalom. But when we realize that the

speaker of this Psalm is not David but in fact Solomon, we might read this moment

as emblematic of a broader comment on the problems inherent in the attempt to

literalize typology in early modern biblical exegesis. Placing the inversion of a

Solomonic Psalm about lineage and children in the mouth of the childless regicidal

Macbeth invites us to consider that while a patriarchal king may manipulate the

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history of his ancestors, determining the ‘‘hereafter’’ of his children is just, if not

more, likely to validate the radically contingent nature of such associations as it is to

affirm the providential ‘‘grace of Grace’’ (5.11.38).

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Theresa McNaughton for her invaluable support during the writing of thispiece.

Notes

1. Shaheen is the standard authority in this field. See also Stritmatter.2. Beatrice Groves has recently argued that ‘‘The currency and status of the Bible made it an

uniquely powerful source, and a brief allusion to a biblical story could open up a fund ofassociations, ambiguities and analogues.’’ As she points out in relation to Shakespeare,he: ‘‘harnesses the power of biblical language and Christian stories and uses themmetonymically to express, echo, and comment upon central themes, ideas, and emotionswithin the plays’’ (25). See also Shuger; Marx; Killeen and Forshaw.

3. Jack also shows that Shakespeare may well have drawn upon a short commentary on partof the 20th chapter of Revelation written by James I and published in 1603.

4. Aside from a vast array of biblical commentaries and popular concordances such asRobert Herrey’s, which was often appended to copies of the Geneva Bible, paraphrasessuch as THE DOCTRINE of the Bible and THE HISTORY OF THE BIBLE werepopular texts that combined paraphrase with Protestant exegetical commentary.

5. All references are to the Geneva Bible. THE BIBLE THAT IS, The Holy Scriptures . . .On Revelation, see also Patrides and Wittreich.

6. All references are to the 1986 Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor edition of Shakespeare, TheComplete Works.

7. This text is dedicated to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and its apocalyptic register,although typical in witchcraft writings of the period, may have been designed to appeal toEssex’s militant Protestant pretensions.

8. Calvinistic writers tend to make more of this apocalyptic strain, but it is to be found innearly all demonological writings of the period across the religious spectrum.

9. This passage also contains a marginal reference to Revelation 12.10. The play’s obsessive discussion of ‘‘time’’ has been noted by a number of critics, including

Foster and Guj.11. Shakespeare only ever refers to Golgotha one other time in his works, in a similarly

apocalyptic speech by the Bishop of Carlisle in act 4 of Richard II.12. The question of whether a person could definitively know whether they were a member of

the elect is a fraught one in the period and brings into play questions of grace, as thisscene does. Strictly speaking, for a Calvinist, saving grace extends only to the elect andassurance of this state is thus attainable. However, this issue was much debated withinProtestant orthodoxy and there was by no means a consensus on this subject, a factstemming from the strict Augustinianism associated with Calvin’s successor TheodoreBeza, who taught that to be saved and to know one was saved were not the same thing.Later, the anti-Calvinists (or Arminians) would also challenge whether knowledge ofsalvation is ever completely assured. On this issue, see Cummings (252�64).

13. In the Bible, Samuel makes his sons Judges of Israel but they turn against him and so theElders ask him to anoint a King. He picks Saul, with dubious consequences.

14. Clark also writes: ‘‘In fact 2 Thessalonians 2 was the source for so many explanations ofwitchcraft that it deserves to rank with those other biblical texts that have always beenseen as seminal for European beliefs on the subject’’ (331).

15. Macbeth says ‘‘Amen’’ four times in contradistinction to the ‘‘salutation Apostolicall’’(note 11 to Revelation 22) that is spoken twice and is directed towards the ‘‘holy and electmembers . . . in Christ’’ at the end of Revelation.

16. Macbeth’s ‘‘If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly’’ is notonly an ironic reference to Jesus’ words to Judas ‘‘That thou doest, doe quickly’’ (John

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13:27), it is another moment when we are unsure how to interpret the biblical language,given that Macbeth speaks Christ’s words but carries out Judas’ actions.

17. This prefigural logic is also found in the book of Jeremiah, 22:15 and 23:5. There is afurther irony here as the first verse of the next book in 2 Samuel refers to the Saul/Jonathan pair that we have seen invoked earlier. David asks: ‘‘Is there yet any man left ofthe house of Saul, that I may shew him mercie for Ionathans sake?’’ (2 Samuel 9:1).

18. In terms of the Ark, it was of course Solomon who built the first temple to hold it. GivenJames’ Solomonic pretensions, it is interesting that Shakespeare should cast his forebears,Saul and David in such an equivocal light in this play. Unlike his son, David dances beforethe Ark, a topic that was the subject of a tract by James (A MEDITATION).

19. David repeats his refusal to strike the Lord’s anointed at 1 Samuel 26:11.20. On Macbeth and theories of resistance, see also Norbrook.21. Although he condemns outright rebellion, Willet’s AN HARMONIE outlines what the

justifications for David rebelling against Saul would be (265�66).22. For a good recent discussion of equivocation, see Kinney (239�42).23. See also Fulke on 2 Samuel 24, which states that ‘‘Dauid did not only slide out of the way

of humane slipprinesse, but also did fall into some great and notorious offences’’ (56),and goes on to offer a very equivocal justification of David’s behaviour.

24. Macbeth’s soliloquy at 3.1.48�71 may represent an inversion of 2 Samuel 3. Here Davidseeks to establish his realm and the inheritance of his children. Noticeably, Abnerthreatens David’s throne and we are told that David ‘‘feared him’’. However, unlikeMacbeth and Banquo, David and Abner resolve their dispute. Central to this are David’schildren, which, of course, Banquo has but Macbeth does not. Moreover, Davidcondemns the murder of Ishbosheth, Saul’s son, and executes the perpetrators. Bycontrast, Macbeth seeks to kill Banquo’s son and rewards the murderers. Nevertheless,despite their differing behaviours, both David and Macbeth undoubtedly benefit from therespective crimes.

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