MacBeth The King

In his introduction, Nigel Tranter refers to Shakespeare's play Macbeth as "brilliant drama but a travesty of history and of MacBeth’s and his wife’s characters and careers. Few historical royal couples, surely, have been so grievously traduced." Tranter, in his 1978 novel MacBeth The King, tries to set the record straight.

The book is painstaking in his historical accuracy, but struggles to provide interesting drama, as Shakespeare knew how to do. Tranter might have been better just to write a straight biography, as MacBeth The King at times drags due to several passages that are full of the bureaucratic trappings of kingship. At times the book bogs down in geography. During MacBeth's last attempt to escape Malcolm and MacDuff, it felt like someone telling you the exact route they took to get to your house.

The real MacBeth was King Malcolm's grandson. He has a Viking half-brother, Thorfinn Raven Feeder, who is a great character. Gruoch, the widow of a slain rival, comes to him as a hostage, but he marries her and they have many children. After Malcolm dies, his cousin Duncan pulls a fast one and is crowned king while everyone else is at Malcolm's funeral on Iona. MacBeth swears fealty to Duncan, and will not rise against him, but when push comes to shove he kills him in battle and becomes king himself.

He reigns about fifteen years, and there are rebellions that are put down. He makes a pilgrimage to Rome, in a chapter that is fascinating historically, as Tranter gives us the lowdown on just how one visited the Pope back in the eleventh century (it was Leo III at the time). Finally, Malcolm Canmore, along with MacDuff and Siward, break through and defeat MacBeth.

One of the problems with the book is that Tranter's MacBeth is pretty much perfect. He's true blue, a great husband (treating Gruoch as an equal), fair to a fault, and smart. I don't think Tranter gives him a bad habit or vice. Surely MacBeth had his bad days when he said things he regretted or kicked the dog. We do get a warts and all depiction of his step-son, Lulach, who briefly succeeded him.

The prose ranges from the sedentary to the thrilling. Tranter describes many battles, and while at times one loses one's place (it's hard to describe topography and geography in text) some of it is thrilling: "Even as the ghastly grinding connection was made, Thorfinn leapt from one ship to the other, sword flailing, jumping over the shields and the sprawling mangled bodies of the Galloway oarsmen, and followed by a stream of axe- and sword-wielding Vikings, yelling hate. It was a chaotic, wild affray, for there was little foot-room on rowing-benches and gangway, and what there was was slippery with blood or cluttered with bodies."

It's fun to connect the dots and see where Shakespeare got his stuff (mostly from a chronicle by Holinshed). "She dreamed that I would not fall by the hand of man until a forest itself rose up and walked! Birnam Wood, in Atholl. Until Birnam Wood marched to Dunsinane in Gowrie." There are no witches, though, or any mention of how MacDuff was "untimely ripped from his mother."

The prose is written in a kind of formal English that borders on parody, using words like "therefrom." Modern English wasn't spoken then, of course. I believe these characters would have spoken Scots, or Gaelic, so perhaps Tranter is trying to give us an idea of what that would have sounded like translated into English.

MacBeth The King is interesting so long as it gives us history, but as a novel it is stodgy. For those who are fascinated by Scottish history, it is essential, though.