Witches & Jesuits

As I continue to read about Macbeth, I found Gary Wills' study of the play, Witches & Jesuits, fascinating. He starts with the question, "Why are modern productions of Macbeth so bad?" which led to the play being considered cursed (anyone who works in the theater knows that you should never say the play's title aloud anywhere inside a theater, and instead refer to it as "the Scottish play"). He points out this is really only a twentieth-century phenomenon; no one considered it cursed when Sarah Siddons or Edwin Booth were playing it.

What I found most interesting about this book is how Wills put the play in context. Most scholars estimate that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in 1606, so it would have come right on the heels of the Gunpowder Plot (November 5, 1605)--an attempt by radical Catholics to blow up Parliament, which would have killed King James and almost everyone else of importance. Wills compares it to a communist plot to blow up the Capitol on the night of the State of the Union address during the 1950s.

Anyone watching the play would have gotten the clues. Words like "vault" (Guy Fawkes was found in a vault underneath Parliament with all the gunpowder), "blow," (a word that James himself used as a clue from an anonymous letter warning of the attack, and most of all, "equivocator," a word tied to Jesuits, who were basically seen as henchmen to the devil. It's interesting to note that these men, seen as harmless today (Pope Francis is the first Jesuit to become Pope) were considered traitors and demons back in Shakespeare's day (think of them back then as some people look at Muslims today). Several of them were captured and executed for the crime in an England that was devoutly Protestant.

Wills goes through the play and finds evidence of Shakespeare using the Plot as fodder, such as the Porter's entire speech, in which he points out that it all refers to Henry Garnet, one of the conspirators (he claimed he only heard the plot in confession, and then couldn't reveal it). He also refers to several other plays from the period, largely forgotten today, that are of the same bent--The Whore of Babylon, by Thomas Dekker, and especially The Devil's Charter, by Barnabe Barnes, in which Pope Alexander VI (a Borgia) used necromancy to work his evil. Imagine someone writing a play today casting the Pope as a Satanic villain?

Wills also discusses the use of witches in the play. He reasons that many productions in modern times don't make full use of them, and some even present them as part of Macbeth's imagination (which can't be so, since Banquo sees them). Witchcraft was a hot topic in Shakespeare's day, James himself had written a book about it. "In fact, there is not a single play by Shakespeare that does not have some reference to witchcraft, some metaphor based on it, some terms associated with it in a technical sense." He also decries most productions for cutting the scene with Hecate, who instructs the witches on what to do.

For those who are deeply interested in Shakespeare, or Jacobean drama in general, this is a wonderful book. For anyone else, I would imagine this would be deadly dull. But of course I'm in the former camp.