South Atlantic Modern Language Association "Macbeth": King James's Play Author(s): George Walton Williams Source: South Atlantic Review, Vol. 47, No. 2 (May, 1982), pp. 12-21 Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3199207 . Accessed: 07/01/2011 11:39 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=samla. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. South Atlantic Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to South Atlantic Review. http://www.jstor.org Macbeth:King James's Play GEORGEWALTON WILLIAMS SOME THIRTYYEARS AGO in a study entitled TheRoyal Play of Macbeth(1950), Henry N. Paul argued that Shakespeare had writ- ten Macbethwith the intention that it should be a compliment to King James.' In 1978 Mr. MarvinRosenberg, in his magisterialand penetrating examination of TheMasks of Macbethquestioned Paul's thesis, arguing that there are many aspects of the play which would not have pleased James at all.2 My own sense of the matter is that Shakespearedid indeed write to please his king, but I intend here to bring forth no evidence of new sources that Shakespeare might have used to compliment his king;3 I propose rather to examine the play itself in an attempt to argue that its structure exhibits the influence of James upon its composition. In the first place, there is nothing inherently impossible or unlikely in the proposition that Shakespeareshould write a play to please his king. Shakespearedid not, in fact, live in a vacuum, and stage performancesdid not invariablyeschew all matters of topical or public interest. Shakespeare had been born in 1564, five years into the reign of Elizabeth.He had known one single monarchyfor 39 years when Elizabeth died, and the arrival of a new monarch could not have been inconsequential or unnoticed. Furthermore, King James adopted Shakespeare's acting company, the Lord Chamberlain'sMen, as his own and gave it his royal patronage. The King's Men, as the Company then became, marched in James's coronation procession through the streets of London in 1604, having received an allotment to purchase liveries for the occasion, and again in 1606, shortly before the presumed first performance of Macbethon the occasion of the state visit of King SouthAtlantic Review 13 Christianof Denmark, James's brother in law.4 Ten years after the change of monarchs in 1603, Shakespearewrote a splendid tribute to the dead queen in HenryVIII, and eight years before 1603he had made an overt allusion to the "imperialvotaress" in A Midsummer Night's Dream,a compliment to the queen who was almost cer- tainly present at the original performance of that play. There is no reason then to hold that Shakespeare would have been unready, unwilling, or unable to write a play that had special reference to the reigning monarch, and I am prepared to believe that he did undertake the writing of Macbethin 1605-1606 with James in mind, to please his patron the king. It is immaterial whether or no that purpose was paramount in the original artistic conception or that it remained steady throughout the composition of the play, and I will not speculate as to whether or no the result did please James. Had that monarch been attentive to the play as he watched it in 1606, he might well have found things in it that did not please.5 But that is another story. My thesis is that regardless of Shake- speare's original intention and regardless of James's reception, the influences of James and of James's interests are evident, as Paul and others have observed, in narrative, theme, image, and lan- guage. I suggest that they are present also in the structure of the play, and that they are there in so commanding a manner as severely to strainthe coherence of the play. Macbethis King James's play in a way that Shakespeare never intended and of which he was perhaps unaware. The narrative account that lies behind Shakespeare's Macbeth derives, of course, from Holinshed's Chroniclesof England,Scotland, and Ireland,the same volumes from which Shakespeare drew the stories of Lear, of Cymbeline, and of RichardII and his successors. It is not easy to say what Shakespearewas looking for in his search through the Chronicles,but what he found was the story of a Scottish thane Mackbeth, who killed his King Duncane, became king himself, and was eventually destroyed by the old king's son Malcolme Cammore.6 It was the familiar story of murder and retribution which Shakespeare had utilized not long before in writing JuliusCaesar and (with a difference) in Hamlet.This legend would provide the framework of a play which could present a succession of kings, a mirror for a magistrate, in which James might observe the good King Duncan, the wicked King Macbeth, and the good King Malcolm, and so observing might be instructed 14 GeorgeWalton Williams on the necessity of vigilance before envious courtiers. It would be a suitable lesson to set before a king, especially a new king, espe- cially-as later events were to prove-James.7 In the legend of Mackbeth,Shakespeare found also references to Banquho, the Thane of Lochquhaber,a friend of Mackbeth's,who "gathered the finances due to the king." Banquho, Shakespeare discovered, had been with Mackbeth when he met the "three women in strange and wild apparell";they had prophesied that of Banquho "those shall be borne which shall governe the Scotish kingdome by long order of continuall descent." He learned that Mackbethkilled Banquho, but that Banquho's son, "by the helpe of almightie God reserving him to better fortune, escaped that danger," and that his descendants did indeed come after many generations to govern Scotland "by long order of continuall de- scent."8 It is apparent that in the legend of Macbethand in the legend of Banquo we have two parallelfables: Macbethkills Duncan and his descendant returns immediately to claim the throne; Macbeth kills Banquo and his descendant returns after many generations to claim the throne. Both of these legends are featured in the cavern scene with the witches (IV.i): on the one hand, the three appari- tions that rise from the cauldron and, on the other, the pageant of the eight kings. The two sets of magic trickery and spectacular stage effect are related through that characteristicof Macbeth'sthat we observe in Act I-the desire to know more. Aside from this association in human psychology-not negligible of course-the two sets have no necessary association with one another, though, together, they contributemightily to the tone of ominousness and mystery, sharing thereby a common function. The three apparitionsfrom the cauldron derive directly from the story of Mackbeth in the Chronicles.Their prognostications are specified there, issuing from "certeine wizzards" and "a certeine witch, whome hee had in great trust," and whom Mackbeth consulted on several occasions. The manifestations that the three "masters" take are Shakespeare's own-the armed head, the bloody babe, and the crowned child-and we can readily under- stand why Shakespearewould choose such concrete and dramatic props. The show of the eight kings derives or grows from the germ of the prophecy in the Chronicles,"the long order of continuall de- scent." When he sees this royal procession, Macbeth's reaction is electric:"Horrible sight!" (IV.i.122), and the witches depart, slith- South Atlantic Review 15 ering through the trap to follow their cauldron down to the lower regions. In response to the three apparitions from the cauldron, Macbeth determines to kill Macduff. In response to the show of Kings, Macbeth determines to kill Macduff's family. The narrative line of the play is clear here. The apparitions from the cauldron alert Macbeth to the danger of Macduff and lure him into a sense of security, "mortals' chiefest enemy" (III.v.33), so that he is incapa- ble psychologically of coping with the later discoveries that Mac- duff is not of woman born and that Birnam Wood has indeed come against high Dunsinane hill. The show of kings produces in Macbeth a frenzy of despair in which he proposes the destruction of the future-anything that represents a genealogical succession. Macbeth's frenetic energy which in terms of the show of history should have been aimed at Banquo's issue, Fleance, or, more profitably in terms of the play, at Duncan's issue, Malcolm, dissi- pates itself fruitlessly and gratuitously against Macduff's issue, young Macduff, from his mother's arms untimely ripped. The news of the murder of young Macduff, as it reaches Malcolm and Macduff in England after they have agreed to march against Scotland, is medicine to their great revenge but not an instrument in their decision.