William Davenant was christened on March 3, 1606, so if there is any truth to his heavy hints, Shakespeare would have been in Oxford at various times in the late spring and summer of 1605, perhaps in connection with the substantial real estate purchase he finalized in July. The possibility that Shakespeare was making visits to Oxford during this period is intriguing for reasons other than speculation about his secret love life. From August 27 to 31, 1605, King James, accompanied by his queen, Anne of Denmark, and his son Henry, paid Oxford his first official visit. During these four days, the university mounted four plays, three in Latin and the fourth, for the sake of the ladies (and for those gentlemen whose Latin was shakier than they were inclined to admit), in English. These were hardly casual or impromptu affairs: theatrical costumes were hired from the King’s Revels company in London, and the great stage designer Inigo Jones was employed to construct special machinery to change the scenes. If he were anywhere near Oxford at the time, Shakespeare would have had the strongest professional reason to see how the performances were received.
Things apparently did not go well. The queen and the ladies took offense at an almost naked man who performed in the first of the plays, Alba (written in part by the great scholar Robert Burton). The king was apparently bored by this play and the next; actually fell asleep during the third, Vertumnus; and did not even bother to attend the fourth. The one play of the four to survive, Vertumnus, tends to bear out the king’s critical judgment, but its failure must have been a particular disappointment. The officials had turned to Matthew Gwinn, a former fellow of St. John’s College who had in 1603 published a Latin tragedy on the life of Nero and, more important, had been one of the overseers for the plays performed at the visit of Queen Elizabeth to Oxford in 1592. In the early seventeenth century Gwinn was practicing as a physician in London (he was, among other things, the physician of the prisoners in the Tower), but, as a person of distinction and experience, he was brought back to write a play for the scholarly king. He was also commissioned to stage a welcoming event, one that seems to have particularly interested Shakespeare.
As the king, arriving with his entourage, reached St. John’s College, he was greeted with a “device”—a kind of pageant or miniature play—written by Gwinn. Three “sibyls,” that is, three boys dressed to look like ancient prophetesses, greeted James. They approached him, the text says, “as if from a wood”; carrying branches in their hands, perhaps, they emerged, in one observer’s account, from “a castle made all of ivy.” The first sibyl’s words recalled a legendary event that had befallen Banquo, an eleventh-century Scot from whom James traced his descent: Banquo encountered the “fatal Sisters,” who foretold “power without end” not to him but to his descendants. “We three same Fates so chant to thee and thine,” the speaker went on to tell James, launching into a series of antiphonal salutations:
Hail, whom Scotland serves!
Whom England, hail!
Whom Ireland serves, all hail!
Whom France gives titles, lands besides, all hail!
Hail, whom divided Britain join’st in one!
Hail, mighty Lord of Britain, Ireland, France!
From this distance, the greeting ceremony seems an unpromising bit of fluff, but it was carefully calculated to please the king. The invocation of the distant ancestor Banquo reached comfortably back before the terrible awkwardness of his more recent forbears. James was, after all, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, the restless intriguer whom Elizabeth had imprisoned and then, under intense pressure from incensed members of Parliament shouting “Kill the witch,” reluctantly executed. It assured James that his loyal English subjects regarded him not as a Scottish interloper, son of the scarlet whore of Babylon, but as the destined ruler of the united realm. And it extended the vision of fame and grandeur and stability to James’s children, Henry and Charles: “We set no times nor limits to the fates.”
James was nervous, deeply nervous. He could relax, toy with abstruse scholarly questions, get drunk, fondle his handsome male favorites, lose himself in the peculiar joy of killing animals. He could, in the right mood, laugh at himself and be teased, even quite coarsely. But he could never entirely escape the terror that haunted him. Attempts to delight him with fireworks displays or surprises tended to go awry; chance events could conjure up horrible memories of his past; and though he was an ardent hunter, he could never learn to fence, because the sight of a drawn sword would suddenly send him into a panic.
He had good reason for fear. Not only had his mother been executed by the queen on whose throne he now sat, but his father had died at an assassin’s hand. He himself had narrowly escaped assassination on at least one and perhaps more than one occasion. He believed that his enemies would stop at nothing in their attempts to harm him and his children: he feared not sharp steel alone but also wax figurines stuck with pins and the mumbled charms of toothless old women. Like Elizabeth and Henry VIII, he was made intensely anxious by prognostications: attempts to predict the future by sorcery or other magical means were felonies. Hence even Matthew Gwinn’s innocuous little ceremony of greeting had a slight element of daring. Still, it must have been deeply reassuring for James to be told that his rule and the rule of his descendents had been prophesied centuries before—the boys of St. John’s were a kind of theatrical charm to ward off the sick fear at the pit of his stomach. The king’s pleasure must have been evident, for the little ceremony of greeting—whether Shakespeare stood in the crowd watching it or heard about it from one of the bystanders—seems to have stuck in the playwright’s imagination.
A year later, in the summer of 1606, the king of Denmark came to England to visit his sister, Queen Anne. “There is nothing to be heard at court,” writes one observer of the visit, “but sounding of trumpets, hautboys, music, revelings, and comedies.” It was probably on one of these festive occasions that James sat down with his guests to see Macbeth, a new tragedy performed by his company, the King’s Men. When the three weird sisters appeared onstage, did the king recall the pleasant little pageant outside of St. John’s College? Probably not. He had, after all, seen many extravagant shows since his accession to the English throne, and there were other things to occupy his mind.
But Shakespeare must have seen, or heard about, those three boys dressed up as ancient sibyls, and he had not forgotten them. He conjured them up in Macbeth to restage the reassuring vision of unbroken dynastic succession. Midway through the play, Macbeth goes out to talk with the “secret, black, and midnight hags.” “My heart / Throbs to know one thing,” Macbeth says to them,
Tell me, if your art
Can tell so much, shall Banquo’s issue ever
Reign in this kingdom?
(4.1.64, 116–19)
The witches urge him to content himself with what he already knows, but Macbeth insists on an answer. He cannot endure the uncertainty—“I will be satisified,” he shouts (4.1.120)—and he gets in response a strange spectacle, a pageant that resembles the entertainments mounted to reassure kings.
It is the general pattern of Shakespeare’s tragedies that when the hero gets what he wants, the result is devastating. Macbeth wins a great battle for his king, Duncan, and is handsomely honored, but the honor only whets his restless discontent. He kills Duncan and seizes the crown, but the treason initiates an unending nightmare of suspicion and anxiety. He orders the assassination of his friend Banquo, but the ghost of the murdered man haunts him, and he is dismayed by the escape of Banquo’s son. He longs to feel secure, unconstrained, and “perfect,” as he puts it, “Whole as the marble, founded as the rock.” Instead he feels “cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears” (3.4.20–21, 23–24). It is to relieve these doubts and fears that he turns to the witches and demands that they show him what lies ahead. But the answer Macbeth sees is for him a singularly bitter one, since it is not his own line of succession that is on display in the witches’ pageant but the heirs of a man he has murdered, Banquo. Eight kings pass
before him, the last bearing a glass that shows many more to follow. The magic mirror is a familiar device from witch lore, and it may in the court production in 1606 have served a further purpose: the actor could have approached the throne and held the glass so that Banquo’s heir James would see his own reflection. Here, as in the Oxford device, the fatal sisters prophesy “power without end.” “What,” asks the despairing Macbeth, “will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?” (4.1.133).
Shakespeare constructed Macbeth around, or perhaps as, a piece of flattery. The flattery is not direct and personal, the fulsome praise characteristic of many other royal entertainments in the period, but indirect and dynastic. That is, James is honored not for his wisdom or learning or statecraft but for his place in a line of legitimate descent that leads all the way from his noble ancestor in the distant past to the sons that promise an unbroken succession. In order to enhance this point Shakespeare had to twist the historical record. Gwinn’s pageant probably took Banquo from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicle, a book Shakespeare had used heavily in his English histories. But when, following Gwinn’s lead, Shakespeare opened to the Scottish section of Holinshed, he would have found that Banquo figures as one of the murderous Macbeth’s chief allies, not as his moral alternative. (“At length therefore, communicating his purposed intent with his trusty friends, amongst whom Banquo was the chiefest, upon confidence of their promised aid, he slew the king.”) Shakespeare’s Banquo, by contrast, is a figure of probity and decency. When Macbeth cautiously asks for his assistance, without specifying what action he has in mind, the upright thane delicately but firmly declares his allegiance to the reigning king. Shakespeare transforms James’s ancestor, then, from a collaborator into a resister. It must have been agreeable to James—whose immediate past was a sickening tangle of conspiracy and betrayal—to be told that his line was founded on a rock of rectitude.
The vision of stable rule and secure dynastic succession would have appealed to more than the king alone. A few months earlier, the whole country had been deeply shaken by the discovery—at the last possible minute—of a plot to destroy James, his entire family and court, and virtually all the political leaders of the realm. On November 4, 1605, the night before King James I was due to appear in person to open a new session of Parliament, officers of the Crown, alerted some days before by a hint in an anonymous letter, apprehended Guy Fawkes in a cellar that extended beneath the Parliament House. The cellar was loaded with barrels of gunpowder and iron bars, concealed by a load of lumber and coal. Carrying a watch, a fuse, and tinder, Fawkes intended to put into execution a desperate plot devised by a small group of conspirators, embittered by what they perceived as James’s unwillingness to extend toleration to Roman Catholics. Under ferocious torture, Fawkes revealed the names of those who had conspired with him to blow up the entire government. The conspirators were hunted down. Those who resisted were killed on the spot; others were arrested and, after a trial that the king watched in secret, were hanged, cut down while they were still alive, slit open, and hewed in quarters.
Among those arrested and brought to trial for the Gunpowder Plot was Father Henry Garnet, the head of the clandestine Jesuit mission in England. Garnet, against whom there was very little hard evidence, pleaded innocent, but the government prosecutors made much of the fact that he was the author of A Treatise of Equivocation, a book defending the morality of giving misleading or ambiguous answers under oath. Once again James watched the trial from a secret vantage point. Convicted of treason, Garnet was dragged on a hurdle to Saint Paul’s Churchyard for execution, his severed head then joining the others displayed on pikes on London Bridge.
“The King is in terror,” wrote the Venetian ambassador; “he does not appear nor does he take his meals in public as usual. . . . The Lords of the Council also are alarmed and confused by the plot itself and (by) the King’s suspicions; the city is in great uncertainty; Catholics fear heretics, and vice-versa; both are armed, foreigners live in terror of their houses being sacked by the mob.” If the bloody denouement of what the prosecutor, Sir Edward Coke, called a “heavy and doleful tragedy” was meant to bring calm to the nation, it did not entirely succeed. On March 22, a rumor quickly spread that the king had been stabbed with an envenomed knife, some said by English Jesuits, some by Scots in women’s apparel, some by Spaniards and Frenchmen. Gates were locked, soldiers were levied, courtiers looked pale, women began to wail—until the king issued a proclamation insisting that he was alive. The country had experienced a nightmare from which it had not yet completely awakened.
The King’s Men, like the other theater companies, would have had to think hard about what would best suit this moment, both for the general London audience and for the court. In Macbeth, Shakespeare seems to have set out to write a play that would function as a collective ritual of reassurance. Everyone had been deeply shaken: the whole of the ruling elite, along with the king and his family, could have been blown to bits, the kingdom ripped apart and plunged into the chaos of internecine religious warfare. The staging of the events of eleventh-century Scotland—the treacherous murder of the king, the collapse of order and decency, the long struggle to wrest the realm from the bloody hands of traitors—allowed its seventeenth-century audience to face a symbolic version of this disaster and to witness the triumphant restoration of order.
The plot of Macbeth, to be sure, is very far from the Gunpowder Plot: there is no Catholic conspiracy, no threatened explosion, no last-minute reprieve for the kingdom. But Shakespeare plants subtle allusions of which the most famous is a joke that must have provoked a ripple of shuddering laughter through its original audiences. The strangely comic moment comes in the immediate wake of one of the most harrowing scenes of dread and soul sickness that Shakespeare ever wrote. Macbeth has just treacherously murdered the sleeping king Duncan, a guest in his castle. Deeply shaken by the deed and gripped by fear and remorse, he and his ambitious wife are exchanging anxious words when they hear a loud knocking at the castle gate. The knocking is a simple device, but in performance it almost always has a thrilling effect, an effect subtly anticipated by Macbeth’s horrified sense before the murder that the very image of what he is about to do makes “my seated heart knock at my ribs” (1.3.135). As the insistent knocking continues, the conspirators exit to wash the blood off their hands and to change into their nightgowns. Lady Macbeth is—or strives to seem—icily calm, calculating, and confident: “A little water clears us of this deed” (2.2.65). Not so the appalled Macbeth: “Wake Duncan with thy knocking. I would thou couldst,” he declares in horror or despair, longing or bitter irony (2.2.72). At this point, a porter, roused by the noise but half-drunk from the evening’s revelry, appears. As he grumblingly goes to unlock the gate, he seems to be still in a dream state. He imagines that he is the gatekeeper in hell, opening the door to new arrivals. “Here’s an equivocator,” he says of one of these imaginary sinners, “that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator” (2.3.8–11). This treasonous equivocator knocking on hell’s gate is almost certainly an allusion to the recently executed Jesuit Henry Garnet.
Why didn’t Shakespeare, or any other playwright, represent more directly the supremely dramatic events of November 1605? After all, those events not only formed a perfect story of national danger and salvation but even—as carefully stage-managed by James’s principal adviser, the Earl of Salisbury—gave the king himself a crucial role in uncovering the diabolical plot. The anonymous letter of warning said only that “they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them.” Salisbury claimed that he and the Privy Council were not sure what to make of these opaque phrases until the king brilliantly deciphered them and sent them searching the cellar. The statute making November 5 a day of national thanksgiving proclaimed that the ruinous plot would have succeeded “had it not pleased Almighty God, by inspiring
the King’s most excellent Majesty with a divine spirit, to interpret some dark phrases of a letter showed his Majesty, above and beyond all ordinary construction.” This melodramatic account seems like a gift specially prepared for a theater company; why couldn’t the King’s Men accept it?
The answer lies in part in a long-term history of official wariness, a history that extends back before the public theaters in London were even built. In 1559, the first year of Elizabeth’s reign, the queen instructed her officers not to permit any “interlude” to be “played wherein either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the commonweal shall be handled or treated.” While it would have been almost impossible to enforce such a prohibition in the broadest sense, without simply banning the theater, the censors were alert to anything that came too close to contemporary controversies. Moreover, the monarch and the ruling elite were uneasy about being represented onstage, no matter how flattering the portrayal. By allowing such representations, they would in effect be ceding control of their own persons, and they feared that the theater would only succeed, as the queen put it, in “making greatness familiar.”
Nonetheless, in the wake of the national near catastrophe and the last-minute redemption, it is surprising that the text of Macbeth does not contain so much as a prologue, written to the king, celebrating the recent escape; or a complimentary allusion to James’s role as the special enemy of Satan and the beloved of God; or a grateful acknowledgment of the happiness of being ruled by Banquo’s wise heir. That Shakespeare limited himself to dark hints about an equivocator who belongs in hell may be linked to a disturbing experience that his company had had the previous winter. The King’s Men were by all measures a great success: between November 1, 1604, and February 12, 1605, they gave no fewer than eleven performances at court, all but three of them plays by Shakespeare. But one of these performances ran into the kind of trouble that could have had disastrous consequences. Buoyed by the monarch’s patronage and secure in their place as the premier company, they evidently decided to test the conventional limits of representation. They thought they might interest the king and please their larger audience with a play based on a dramatic event in James’s life: his narrow escape from assassination, or so he claimed, in August 1600 at the hands of the Earl of Gowrie and his brother Alexander.