Macbeth and the Gunpowder Plot

Macbeth and the Gunpowder Plot James Shapiro discusses equivocation and the politics of 1606 On 5 November, 1605, two-and-a-half years after King James V1 of Scotland ascended the English throne, a group of disaffected Catholic gentry plotted to blow up the House of Lords, hoping to kill the King, eliminate the nation’s religious and political elite, and reverse the Protestant Reformation begun under Henry V111. Thousands of Londoners would also have died in the explosion and ensuing fires. The Gunpowder Plot reverberated powerfully through the following months, as the conspirators were captured, tortured, tried and then publicly executed. It’s less well known that after the plot failed there was a short-lived armed uprising in Warwickshire. The plot and its aftermath in the Midlands touched close to home for William Shakespeare: some of his Catholic neighbours were implicated, as his hometown abutted the safe-houses where the plotters met, weapons for the intended uprising were stored, and a supply of religious items for the hoped-for restoration of the old faith were hidden. That the ‘fifth of November’ is still commemorated to this day – though no attack occurred and only its perpetrators died – suggests that it touched something deep within the culture, something that Shakespeare found himself grappling with in his next play, Macbeth . The manhunt that followed the thwarted attack was accompanied by a search for documents that might shed light on the conspiracy. A month after the plot was discovered, a smoking gun – a Treatise of Equivocation instructing Catholics on how to lie under oath – was found in a suspect’s lodgings. The manuscript was the work of Edward Garnet, a long- sought Jesuit priest who was (unfairly) identified by the government as a mastermind of the plot, and whose decapitated head would soon be displayed on London Bridge where playgoers going to and from the Globe Theatre could see it. The authorities were especially horrified by one of the techniques recommended by Garnet, which came to be known as ‘mental reservation’: when your words and thoughts were at odds, though the person with whom you were speaking could have no idea that this was the case. This sort of equivocation meant saying, for example, ‘I didn’t see Father Gerard…’ while finishing the sentence in your head with the words ‘…hide himself upstairs in the attic.’ It wasn’t a lie exactly, if you believed that God knew your thoughts, even if the person questioning you could not. Yet if this wasn’t a lie, what was? A contemporary succinctly described how this doctrine, once widespread, would lead to chaos: ‘The commonwealth cannot possibly stand if this wicked doctrine be not beaten down and suppressed, for if it once take root in the hearts of people, in a short time there will be no faith… no trust… and all civil societies will break and be dissolved.’ It’s difficult to read this sort of despairing Jacobean vision and not think of Scotland under Macbeth, a nightmare world where words belie intentions and honest exchange is no longer possible. It’s in large part through ‘equivocation’ that Shakespeare found a way of registering the seismic shock of the Gunpowder Plot. Before Macbeth , that word had appeared only once in Shakespeare’s plays, around the turn of the century, when Hamlet, after yet another of the witty Gravedigger’s maddening replies, tells Horatio: ‘How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.’ ‘Equivocation’ is used neutrally here: Hamlet is simply saying that in navigating their way through this conversation they must choose their words carefully. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet , ‘equivocation’ was still a rare and scholarly term; by the time he turned to Macbeth in 1606, familiarity with it was nearly universal, and it was now taken pejoratively to mean concealing the truth by saying one thing by deceptively thinking another. Shakespeare counts on playgoers understanding that this is what Macbeth means when he says, ‘I pull in resolution, and begin / To doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth.’ Macbeth , a play about the assassination of another Scottish king, is rife with equivocation or talk of it, most famously in the Porter scene, where the hungover Porter responds to loud knocking at the castle’s gate and wonders aloud what lost and self-justifying soul has arrived: ‘Knock, knock! Who’s there, in th’ other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. Oh, come in, equivocator.’ It’s as if Shakespeare had taken a joke making the rounds that spring – that the treasonous Garnet ‘will equivocate at the gallows’ – and has the Porter invite us to imagine the Jesuit arriving at his destination, hell itself, having failed to equivocate his way to heaven. The most consequential act of equivocation in the play occurs when Macbeth and Banquo first encounter the Weird Sisters. The first hails Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, the second as Thane of Cawdor, and the third promises him he ‘shalt be king hereafter’; they then tell Banquo ‘Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.’ All true but equivocal, insofar as they withhold vital information (they don’t tell Macbeth that he’ll have to kill to do it, or Banquo that he won’t be alive to see it). Equivocation makes following Macbeth ’s dialogue a mentally exhausting experience, for playgoers – much like those conversing with equivocators – must decide whether a claim should be accepted at face value, and if not, must struggle to reconstruct what may be supressed through mental reservation. In the dangerous world of the play, even the virtuous characters – including Malcolm and Macduff’s wife – must equivocate if they hope to survive. The more that equivocating becomes habitual for Macbeth the more reassurance he demands from the Weird Sisters, who in turn play upon his hopes and further equivocate, summoning apparitions who urge Macbeth to ‘Be bloody, bold and resolute,’ since ‘none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth,’ while assuring him that he shall never be vanquished until ‘Great Birnam Wood’ shall come to Dunsinane. By the play’s end, as he watches in disbelief as the branches cut from Birnam Wood are carried by an approaching army to Dunsinane, a shattered Macbeth fully grasps equivocation’s destructive consequences. At the last, after learning that Macduff is not of woman born, Macbeth reflects a final time on how equivocation has destroyed him: ‘be these juggling fiends no more believed / That palter with us in a double sense / That keep the word of promise to our ear / And break it to our hope.’ Alone among Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, Macbeth is denied a dying, self- revealing speech; the last we hear from him in way of reflection are these hard-earned insights into the workings of equivocation. A tragedy steeped in its moment of creation, written in the wake of what we would now call a failed terrorist attack, at a time when the nation was grappling with issues of union as well as the imagined threat posed by a maligned religious minority, Macbeth continues to speak to our own unsettled and equivocating times. Professor James Shapiro’s most recent book is 1606: The Year of Lear (Faber). His next will be Shakespeare in a Divided America . .

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