Pagans & Powderkegs: The Ironic Evil of Shakespeare's Scottish Drama
“They can raise storms and tempests in the air, either upon Sea or land, though not universally, but in such a particular place and prescribed bounds, as God will permit them so to trouble.” (King James I, Daemonology, 1597)Macbeth’s supernatural evil, repeated through time with extremely powerful magical charms and the spilling of blood, was the acting out of King James’ own ruthless Scottish heritage, cloaked in an air of Godly power and pomp. While a plot to assassinate the leadership of England with devilish explosives had just been thwarted, within the next generation King James’ own son would become the first monarch in Europe to be tried and executed, in a revolutionary uprising. James’ own treatise on witchcraft, “Daemonology,” would be used to torture and execute tens of thousands of accused pagans, and would haunt the New World at the Salem witch trials. Under a cloak of good triumphing over evil, Macbeth actually heralds the dawn of a brutal, Machiavellian era of colonization, genocide, and industrial warfare.
Did Shakespeare consciously cast a curse upon the English culture, or did his flair for irony unwittingly unleash the powerful forces surrounding the Macbeth legend? Recent attempts by witches in Scotland to lift the “Macbeth curse” have met with tragic ends. It seems the ghosts of this play still haunt the psyche of humankind, and refuse to be put to rest.
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself…
Considering that Shakespeare’s most likely source for historical reference, Raphael Holinsheds’ Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587) recounts Banquo as conspiring with Macbeth in the plot to kill Duncan (whom he portrays as ineffective), and chronicles the real Macbeth as a decent monarch who reigned well for seven years until he turned on Banquo, it is very ironic, but politically expedient, of Shakespeare to turn the characters of the tragedy toward more vicious ends.
The most outstanding irony of Macbeth’s contorted history is that Banquo’s ghost was a figment of the Scottish imagination. Banquo was a MYTHICAL figure Scottish genealogists created to give legitimacy to the Stuart family tree. So as Shakespeare shows Banquo murdered by Macbeth, he is twisting Holinshed’s history by the ear, and forcing Britain to question the concept of royal lineage in general. What happens when the Divinity of the Sovereign in God’s Chain of Being becomes completely corrupted?
But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny!
What raging of the sea, shaking of the earth!
Commotion in the winds! Frights, changes, horrors
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married of calm states
Quite from their fixture! O’ when degree is shak’d
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick.
(Trolius and Cressida, 1. 3. 95-103)
Like America’s current “War on Terror,” at the time Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, the British monarchy was fighting it’s own war on terrorism and “evil.” Numerous attempts had been made on Queen Elizabeth’s life, and a major plot to assassinate the entire royal family with explosives, by Guy Fawkes and a conspiracy of Jesuits, had only narrowly been avoided. In James’ war on witches in Scotland, evidence of a plot by witches to drown him by stirring up storms at sea had been revealed to the public.
“They can make folks to become frenetic or Maniac, which likewise is very possible to their master to do, since they are but natural sicknesses: and so he may lay on these kinds, as well as any others. They can make spirits either to follow and trouble persons, or haunt certain houses, and affray oftentimes the inhabitants: as hath been known to be done by our Witches at this time. And likewise thay can make some to be possessed with spirits, & so to become very Demoniacs: and this last sort is very possible likewise to the Devil their Master to do, since he may easily send his own angels to trouble in what form he pleases, any whom God will permit him to use.”
(King James I, Daemonology, 1597; qtd. Nostbakken 107)
Ironically, in Shakespeare’s support of this “War on Terror,” much as our current cultural war is doing, the portrayal of the evil forces actually contributed to the chaos and the influence of disorder. Every time Macbeth was performed, the Weird Sisters and Hecate unleashed potent incantations, both magically and in the public mind. The murderous intrigue of the play and the power witches held over otherwise invincible warriors was actually a promotion of evil influence. The more so-called Christians projected evil on the landscape, and subjected the accused evil-doers to unspeakable acts of “Divine Inquisition,” the more they themselves became twisted toward evil ends. King James’ treatise on demons and witches, taken in a more cynical light, should have been seen as the ultimate crafty trick of the Devil, to cause people to do murderous and immoral things to the common healers of the time.
Macduff What’s the disease he means?
Malcolm ‘Tis call’d the evil.
A most miraculous work in this good king;
Which often, since my here-remain in England,
I have seen him do. How he solicits Heaven,
Himself best knows: but strangely visited people,
All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,
The mere despair of surgery, he cures,
Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,
To the succeeding royalty he leaves
The healing benediction. With this strange virtue,
He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy,
And sundry blessings hang about his throne,
That speak him full of grace.
Macbeth indirectly references an important prophecy about King James which had been presented in dramatic form the year before Shakespeare wrote it. The three Weird Sisters are a twisted reference to the “Three Sybils,” a Latin play which was performed for King James at Oxford in 1605, which Shakespeare likely witnessed first-hand.
In the same year, 1605, the sinister Gunpowder Plot nearly took out the entire royal family using the alchemical potion of gunpowder, associated with the devil and witches in the popular mind, and gave England a powerful metaphor for the “evil enemy” of the Empire, much as Bin Laden and Al Qaeda have been demonized after the attacks on the World Trade Towers. Shakespeare quite ironically turned the Three Sybils into his Weird Sisters, as a wrinkled reflection of the themes of treason and terror, which were haunting the kingdom outside the theatre.
“ But will God permit these wicked instruments by the power of the Devil their master, to trouble by any of these means, any that believes in him?
No doubt, for there are three kinds of folks whom God will permit so to be tempted or troubled; the wicked for their horrible sins, to punish them in like measure; The godly that are sleeping in any great sins or infirmities and weaknesses in faith, to waken them up the faster by such an uncouth form: and even some of the best, that their patience may be tried before the world, as JOB’S was.”
(King James I, Daemonology, 1597)
In the history of European theatre, no play has gained such a troubled reputation as Macbeth. Since its very first performance in front of King James, it has generated superstition and curses, literally, physically, and psychologically.
"No other play has had more bad luck associated with it: coronaries,
car accidents, mysterious ailments, botched lines, and sword
wounds. The theatrical superstition is not taken lightly: even to
pronounce the play's title is considered bad dressing-room form. Its
very names is a curse....It's also considered as the height of bad
dressing-room form to quote from the play under any circumstances.
For hundreds of years it's been delicately referred to as 'The Scottish
Play' or simply 'That Play.'"
(Norrie Epstein, The Friendly Shakespeare, qtd. Macbeth Homepage)
As the dramatic tradition carries Macbeth forward in time, it also carries the legendary curse of the play, which holds that nearly every traditional production stirs up so much “toil and trouble” that often people are permanently injured, psychologically disturbed, or even killed. One of the few film directors who dared to present the wicked tragedy on screen, Roman Polanski (1971), was enchanted with other manifestations of evil, in Rosemary’s Baby and the Fearless Vampire Killers, his two preceding films before the Manson family murdered his wife Sharon Tate.
Macbeth, while purportedly a morality play about deliberately misleading language and treason, by the addition of extensive magical rituals and incantations becomes instead a Black Mass of murderous consequences. While attempting to give form to the mysterious world of the supernatural, it actually unleashes the spirits and characters which society professes to be afraid of. Similar to modern horror films, Macbeth was designed to scare the wits of the common folk and dissuade any one with treasonous intentions. Yet at the same time it gives power to the underclass and the revolutionary, showing how vulnerable the ruling class can be.
Macbeth exposes the nightmarish and anarchic results of allowing doublespeak and half-truth, or “equivocation,” to entice and influence the future. Yet Shakespeare himself is a premier master of the double-entendre in the English language! Witness how he weaves his magical “equivocations” into the drama of Macbeth more effectively than an entire coven of witches could have! This is the profound irony that Shakespeare celebrates with this political tragedy, and the challenge he puts forth to our culture: where does the “truth” lie?
And every one shall share I’ th’gains.
And now about the cauldron sing,
Like elves and fairies in a ring,
Enchanting all that you put in.
2 Witch By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.—
As King James’ war against witchcraft would degenerate into murderous mob behavior, the evil of Macbeth is embodied and empowered every time it is performed. What is the lesson for a ruthless society watching ruthlessness play out-- that conspiracy doesn’t pay, or that one should choose one’s allies more wisely? Would Macbeth have done much better, for example, if he had made friends with the witches, and been less afraid of the consequences? The Chain of Being appears to be very tenuous in retrospect, and Macbeth is an historical measure of how low “nobility” will go to achieve domination.
“We must be free or die who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake.”
--William Wordsworth
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