When Shakespeare first presented Macbeth, a mere year after the foiling of The Gunpowder Plot, he took a gamble. Ever the businessman with an eye for current events and well-renowned for getting bums on seats at the Globe, he seized the opportunity to capitalise on the zeitgeist of the time: the turbulent topic of kingship. The new Stuart King James was a vain and emotional man with a deep sense of entitlement and a misogynistic streak that was excessive even for an age where patriarchy was well-entrenched. Nonetheless, times were changing. With the population being decimated on a regular basis by plague and the discovery of the Americas during the Elizabethan Era, new worlds were (literally) opening up, and with it, came commerce on an unprecedented scale. London was expanding rapidly as a major business outpost and England was becoming a place that was more accepting of men who, through the channels of international trade, could legitimately claim to have elevated their statuses with the accumulation of massive wealth. The common people were finding a voice, whereas previously they had none, and this was reflected on the stage at The Globe in the voices of actors reciting, not just their roles, but their inner selves too. The power yielded by the breakdown of traditional class boundaries became evident in the solliloquies and monologues Shakespeare incorporated in his writing reflecting that, where there is power to be gained, ambition will soon follow.
How must it have felt for James I on the morning of 25th July 1603 as he acceded to the throne of England at Westminster Abbey in a ceremony now commemorated as the Union of The Crowns. It was a subdued affair. London was in lockdown after yet another outbreak of the plague limiting the number of witnesses to the Coronation. His long-suffering wife, Anne of Denmark, who had ruled by his side as Queen of Scotland since 1590, had recently suffered the miscarriage of their 7th child and was unable to attend. Despite his homosexuality being a fairly open secret, James had taken his public duty seriously and dutifully impregnated his patient queen on a fairly regular basis. Tragically, only two of the couple’s nine children survived into adulthood and, of those, his only surviving son and heir, Charles (Later Charles I), would become the first English monarch in centuries to be dethroned and executed. But for the time being, life after the Tudors appeared to be following a benign and traditional course.
Anne’s path to the throne of England had been unstable from the beginning. Following her marriage (by proxy) to James whilst still in Denmark in late 1589, Anne set sail for Scotland to meet her new husband only to be turned back by ferocious storms and forced to take shelter in Norway. In a romantic gesture rare for royal unions, James manfully sailed from Scotland to fetch her himself entirely assured of his ‘Divine Right’ not to become fish food. He had acceded the throne of Scotland at 13 months of age and had known no other life than one of privilege and indulgence. On meeting his traumatised bride for the first time, it is said he kissed her ‘in the Scottish fashion’. (your guess is as good as mine), took charge and arranged to marry her formally - and in person this time - on 23 November 1589, ‘with all the splendour possible at that time and place.’ The ceremony was conducted in French (so that both parties could understand what they were getting into), and the newlyweds then made their way through yet more marine turbulence back to Scotland to begin a reign that would ultimately prove highly politically significant for Great Britain.
Fourteen years later, at his London Coronation, James must have felt a certain satisfaction at the attainment of a lifelong ambition to add England and Ireland to his personal portfolio of kingdoms perhaps tainted with more than a hint of bitter irony. The previous incumbent, Elizabeth I, was also the woman who had had his mother, the catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, executed for treason. He had never known Mary as they were separated when he was less than a year old and, in the intervening years James was raised a protestant detaching him further from any kind of religious affinity with his mother – although there must have been some sense of satisfaction to be had from the knowledge that, despite ‘cousin’ Elizabeth’s violent attempts to defend her crown, it was Mary’s blood that survived her in the end. The conflicted Elizabeth had vacillated obsessively over whether to sign Mary’s death warrant and only relented when presented with conclusive ‘proof’ of the Scottish queen’s treachery against her. Even the strong-stomached Elizabeth it seems baulked at the prospect of killing another woman ordained of God with the divine right to rule.
James VI of Scotland (as was), was a man with a plan. He did not invent witch-hunting (neither did Shakespeare for the record), but his name is synonymous with their vilification and persecution. He was also the first and only monarch of England to publish a book. Daemonologie first appeared in print in 1597 as ‘a philosophical dissertation on contemporary necromancy and the historical relationships between the various methods of divination used from ancient black magic’. In other words, he wrote a book about how to spot witches and dispose of them. I should say tome really. The enormous text was published in three parts and took the form of a Socratic dialogue dealing with, amongst other matters, the Devil’s contract with Man (Book 1), the Appearance of Devils (Book 2) and Possession (Book 3).
Daemonologie also included bonus material: a previously published news pamphlet detailing the proceedings of the North Berwick witch trials that King James himself presided over. It has been heavily implied that King James' involvement in the North Berwick trials may have directly contributed to Shakespeare’s inspiration for Macbeth as the three witches' use quotations closely reminiscent of testimony given in the trials as described in the pamphlet. What could be more flattering to a vain, pseudo-intellectual like James than to hear the words of his own judgement quoted back at him in a play about the Divine Right of Kings?
James’ pursuit of witches was relentless. Having begun the wholesale persecution of witches in Scotland in 1590 – perhaps in response to his belief that it was witchcraft that was responsible for the near wreck of his ship when travelling from Norway. Whilst in Scandinavia, James – who had a morbid fear of violent death – met with intellectuals whose theories had already seen the execution of many women accused of witchcraft in Denmark. James formed the obvious conclusion that their royal brush with death on the Baltic was a joint enterprise of sorcery by witches in his wife’s country and his own and took action.
As King of England, James continued his policy of hunting down and punishing witches but with less vigour than in Scotland which is possibly why Shakespeare felt able to take the risk of putting three of them in one (just one) of his sell-out productions. English people certainly believed in, and feared, witches but were less evangelical about the mention of them so the opening of Macbeth would have provided more of a thrill than a paralysing shock to a contemporary audience. This also suggests that it was the ear of the King, his Patron, that Shakespeare was appealing to when including elements of the supernatural in the play. Shakespeare seems to have deemed the witches an apt theatrical device for drawing attention to more earthly matters concerning the reign of the new Stuart king, including the dangers of sectarian division and the empowerment of women that had been such a source of unrest during the domination of the House of Tudor.
On 5th November 1605, religious tensions boiled over when a cell of Jesuit Catholics audaciously tried to blow the fledgling monarch to smithereens with 36 barrels of gunpowder primed to explode in the vaults beneath the Houses of Parliament. They failed, but it was clear that James’ throne was far from secure as sympathy for those of the marginalised Catholic faith gathered pace. Shakespeare’s decision to create for the stage a story about the violent usurpation of King Duncan’s throne in the 11th century was again evidence of Shakespeare’s keen ability to provide entertainment for the masses in sync with the popular issues of the day.
In double-billing Macbeth as both a tragedy and a history, he also created a deft buffer between his commentary on the dangers of tyrannical kingship and current events. In choosing Scotland as the basis for his narrative, he also kept the action sufficiently close to James’ heart to communicate his warning to tread carefully with the English. The genius stroke of including the character of Banquo, from whom James believed he was descended, would have gone far to cement the impression of Shakespeare’s loyalty to the Crown without causing lethal offence. Or presumably this was the hope. Overall, the play could be seen as a treatise to the new, hot-headed Scottish ruler of England to learn the lessons of his early turbulent reign and honour his kingship and legacy with a desire always to sue for peace.
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