Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth, By Garry Wills
New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
A Book Review by Ted Odenwald
The problem with Macbeth is not that it is a cursed play, doomed to fail in each performance. Nor is it a play that roars through three acts of emotional fireworks only to fizzle into bewildering anti-climax. The problem is, according to Wills, that modern performers, audiences, and readers do not fully appreciate the historical context of the play. Shakespeare, aiming “…to make contemporary excitement work to the advantage of his art,” turned for his thematic material to the most volatile issue of his day in 1606. He focused his play through the Gunpowder Plot, an outgrowth of “…a religious cold war [that] existed between England and papal Rome.” The Bard’s audience was so attuned to the cataclysmic ramifications of this political plot, that nothing in Macbeth would have escaped its attention; the pervasive use of allusions in language, as well as development of character, action, and theme would have been obvious to all viewers. However, intervening centuries have dulled the play’s presentation and reception. The significance of scenes which have been overlooked and even expunged in modern productions, is underscored when viewed in terms of their original topicality.
Wills examines many similarities between scenes in Macbeth and dramas by Shakespeare’s contemporaries—Marsten, Dekker, and Barnes—similarities dealing with the apocalyptic destruction (attempted or accomplished) of a kingdom. He demonstrates that scenes often dismissed as being irrelevant or insignificant in modern times had dramatically important counterparts in the contemporary plays. These scenes, e.g., Malcolm’s testing of Macduff’s loyalty, Hecate’s scenes with the witches, and the witches’ conjuring scene, bore a great impact in terms of the play’s main themes. Through careful analysis of Macbeth, contemporary plays, and official documents from the same time period, Wills hopes to “…recover…the way the Gunpowder Plot filled and colored the popular imagination and its immediate aftermath.”
The official interpretation of the Gunpowder Plot was that “…a cell of papists—the ‘enemy within’ at that time, directed from Rome by skulking Jesuits—had trundled keg after keg of gunpowder into a vault under Parliament,” intending to blow the structure as well as the nation’s royalty and religious and political hierarchy to pieces. The disaster was averted when King James, through what he called “divine intervention,” was able to decipher an encrypted message relating to the plan. To allay the fears generated by this near-disaster, “the king disseminated his official version of the plot in a flood of religious propaganda in the form of sermons, publications, and ‘inspired pronouncements.’” At the core of the king’s interpretation was “…its subsumption into the apocalyptic reading of history that was at the center of the religio-political ideology of the time. The Plot was, on the one hand, a harbinger of the world’s end. Yet … it proved that the end was not yet.”
Wills demonstrates that the Gunpowder Plays, particularly Macbeth, are outgrowths of the milieu, reflecting the beliefs promulgated by James. The author begins with key terminology relating to conspiracy, explosions, catastrophe, treason, sorcery, and devil worship. Citing the Bible [I Samuel 15.32, “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft”], Wills develops elaborate thematic patterns, which run throughout the literature: Jesuitry, witchcraft, and equivocation. The official line was that the Jesuits had “consecrated” their conspiracy through a black mass, invoking the aid of Satan. Wills argues that Macbeth traces the progress of a soul gradually committing itself to the devil. The witches, rather than being just atmospheric devices, are instruments of darkness, guiding him towards damnation. “As Macbeth moves toward his chosen encounter with the witches, his invocations of darkness become more and more explicit—approximating …the witches’ technical forms of invocation.” Macbeth leaves the conjuring scene with a new sense of power, for he has stepped across a boundary to negotiate with hell. He has become “one of literature’s greatest witches.”
Wills notes that the Macbeths’ not appearing together in the last two acts of the play has often been cited as a weakness within the tragedy. But Wills claims that the separation is appropriate because they have grown apart since Lady Macbeth has been unable to “[commit] the formal crime of conjuring, necromancy.” Her speeches are filled with “witch talk,” but she never enters “into supernatural dealings with devils or their agents. There is no reciprocal activity of the sort Macbeth engages in….” She desires to be a witch, but he has become one. “She forms no pact with the devil…She is not hardened for the journey he is taking….”
King James’ investigators claimed that they had discovered “…a guide to dismantling the royal government in England. It was called A Treatise of Equivocation.” The publication, allegedly instructed Jesuits in the art of circumventing the truth. Condemned for mental trickery, they “were scrupulously trying to make sure that whatever they said was true (at some level, in some consciously intended sense).” To the investigators, Jesuits were equivocal in every way—“disguised [not wearing their outlawed clerical robes], pretending to be what they were not, speaking in obscure riddles, lurking in peaceful-looking houses.” Wills claims that threat of equivocation runs throughout Macbeth. “The play’s labyrinthine ambiguities…are often related to Jesuitical equivocation.” Wills believes that all three sinners welcomed to hell in the Porter Scene represent the same equivocator condemned and executed in the Gunpowder Plot. The treble welcoming echoes the witches’ greeting of Macbeth in Act I. The scene in which Malcolm tests Macduff is an echoing of the deceptive devices used by James and his investigators in attempting to draw out the conspirators—fighting fire with fire. Malcolm’s testing “shadows the weaving pattern of the witches in casting spells” and of the Porter welcoming the condemned. Malcolm then “gives us a ‘shorter-catechism’ version of Macbeth’s great conjuring speech,” confessing himself to be unredeemably evil. But he proves to be a “false conjurer,” engaging in equivocation, “a self-refashioning that amounts to sabotage committed upon himself.” It is through this pattern of self-accusation and then purgation that Malcolm shows himself to be worthy and capable of fighting the chaos created by Macbeth’s plotting. The witches themselves are “…equivocators in the most thoroughgoing way. Like the Jesuits, they use words that are true in some level but not in the way their victim could understand.”
Wills concludes that perhaps the play’s modern record has been “…notoriously bad because directors have shied away from the text’s clear indication of theological politics at work.” Much is lost if the witches are seen only as creating atmosphere, for they lead Macbeth through the ultimate conjuring in which he yields his soul to evil. Much is lost if Malcolm is viewed as being “bloodless,” for he is a man defying evil in a ritual shadowing the rituals followed by Macbeth.
Macbeth does hold together throughout because scenes which are often viewed as irrelevant are in fact critical to the overall development of this political-theological play—a play in which nothing less that the fate of the state hangs in the balance.
Ted Odenwald and his wife have lived in Oakland for 39 years. He taught HS English at Glen Rock High School for all of those years plus one more. Now he is enjoying time spent with his family, singing in the North Jersey Chorus and quenching his wanderlust.