As with the Gunpowder Plot, the official account of the event reads like a melodrama: out hunting in Scotland with his retinue, the king was induced by a strange story of a pot of gold coins to ride off to Gowrie House. There he was lured by Alexander to ascend without attendants into the turret. Left behind in the hall and increasingly anxious, the king’s followers were led to believe that their master had slipped away and ridden off, but just as they were about to go in search of him, they were startled by the sight of James leaning from a window of the turret and shouting, “I am murdered! Treason!” The door of the turret was locked, but John Ramsay, one of the king’s men, managed to ascend by a different stair and break into the chamber, where he found James struggling with Alexander. Ramsay stabbed the king’s assailant in the face and neck, while downstairs other followers of the king dispatched the assailant’s brother, the Earl of Gowrie.
It is probably no accident that the story seems too good to be true. Many disinterested observers must have smelled a rat—a treacherous political killing of two powerful nobles whom the king distrusted and to whom he was in debt to the tune of eighty thousand pounds. The state evidently felt it had to shore up the story of a treasonous attempt on the king’s life. Not only did the Earl of Gowrie betray a subject’s obligation of loyalty to his sovereign, according to the official account, not only did he trample on a host’s obligation to his guest, but he also violated the worship of God: a “little close parchment bag, full of magical characters and words of enchantment” was found on the earl’s body at his death. It was only when the bag was removed from him that his body began to bleed. The Hebrew characters proved that its bearer was a “cabbalist,” the magistrates declared, “a studier of magic, and a conjuror of devils.” The torture of several witnesses with the “boot”—a device that crushed the bones of the feet—produced the full array of evidence that the state required, and a flurry of executions, along with the king’s seizure of the Gowrie property, brought the episode to a close. Scottish ministers were instructed “to praise God for the King’s miraculous delivery from that vile treason.” Several refused, whether because they doubted the story or thought the instruction idolatrous, and were promptly dismissed from their posts. Most grudgingly complied.
Some playwright affiliated with the King’s Men—perhaps Shakespeare himself—grasped that this story would make an exciting play. The company knew, of course, that they would be violating the Elizabethan taboo on representing living magnates and contemporary or near-contemporary events, since someone (and here too Shakespeare is a possibility) would have had to play the part of James. But they may have wanted to test whether the restriction would be continued into the new regime. Moreover, they may have noted that the king had gone out of his way to reward anyone who actively supported his version of the bloody events at Gowrie House, and they calculated that an English audience would find these events fascinating. They were at least partly right: in December 1604 The Tragedy of Gowrie was twice performed before large crowds. But, as a court spy noted, the play did not please everyone: “whether the matter or manner be not well handled, or that it be thought unfit that Princes should be played on the Stage in their Life-time, I hear that some great Councilors are much displeased with it, and so ’tis thought shall be forbidden.” The company did not fall from favor as a consequence of their miscalculation, but the play was evidently banned. There is no record of other performances, and the text did not survive.
A year later, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, the King’s Men thought once again about doing a Scottish play, but they knew that they had to be more careful this time. If they wanted to stage a Scottish tale of treason—the story of a noble host who, corrupted by black magic, attempts to murder his royal guest—they would have to push it far back in time. And if they wanted to perform something that would capture the king’s imagination, they had to study his mind more attentively. That mind, as James’s English subjects were discovering, was extremely strange.
Queen Elizabeth’s godson, a celebrated wit named John Harington, recounted an audience with the king in 1604. James began in a pedantic vein—he showed off his learning, Harington wrote, “in such sort as made me remember my examiner at Cambridge”—and went on to literature, with a discussion of the Italian epic poet Ariosto. Then the conversation took a strange turn: “His Majesty did much press for my opinion touching the power of Satan in matter of witchcraft, and . . . why the Devil did work more with ancient [i.e., old] women than others.” Harington tried to deflect the odd urgency of the king’s question with an off-color joke: he reminded the king that Scripture says the devil has a preference for “walking in dry places.” But James did not simply laugh and move on to other matters. There was, he said, a weird apparition in the heavens in Scotland before his mother’s death, “a bloody head dancing in the air.” The English courtier restrained himself and made no further attempt at comedy.
James’s anxiety about witches and apparitions was no laughing matter, and it obviously behooved anyone interested in the king’s favor—a playwright as much as a courtier—to take its full measure. There may have been an understanding among the King’s Men that their principal playwright would undertake to do some research into James’s fantasy life, with a view toward writing a play specifically designed to please him. No formal agreement would have been necessary, for the desirability of understanding James in order to please him—particularly after the debacle of The Tragedy of Gowrie—was obvious enough. Shakespeare may not have been merely passing through Oxford by chance in August 1605; he may have been there on assignment, watching James’s reactions the way Horatio in Hamlet watches the king.
Observing how the king responded to the shows put on for him would have been useful (it would in this case have given a clear indication of the sort of thing that put him to sleep), but it did not answer the key questions: What would keep the king awake? What would catch his attention without triggering his fear? What would excite his interest, gratify his curiosity, arouse his generosity, make him long for more? The King’s Men needed to enter the king’s head. Staring at James from the midst of the cheering crowd was no substitute for the kind of conversational insight that Harington had, a privilege from which a mere player would have been excluded. There were, however, other means of access into the king’s interests and imagination. James had taken the unusual step of publishing a learned dialogue on witchcraft in 1597, the Daemonologie. This work, which went through two London editions in 1603 and which Shakespeare could easily have encountered, acknowledges the existence of skepticism—“many can scarcely believe that there is such a thing as witchcraft”—but argues that disbelief is a step toward atheism and damnation. Witches do indeed exist and are a significant danger to the whole realm.
Shakespeare knew about witches long before the Scottish king lectured his subjects on them. He would have heard of the ecclesiastical commissions that traveled through the country seeking out necromancers, conjurers, and magical healers; the parliamentary statutes repeatedly passed making “witchcrafts, enchantments, and sorceries” punishable by death; the laws forbidding anyone from attempting through charms or other illicit means to know “how long her Majesty shall live or continue, or who shall reign as King or Queen of this Realm of England after her Highness’s decease.” He may well have read the act passed in 1604 against anyone who
shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked Spirit to or for any intent or purpose; or take up any dead man, woman, or child out of his, her, or their grave, or any other place where the dead body resteth, or the skin, bone, or any other part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment; or shall use, practice, or exercise any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person shall be killed, destroyed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed in his or her body.
As a person with deep roots in country life, Shakespeare would have heard of and perhaps directly kn
own cases where sick cattle or damaged crops or children dying of lingering illnesses were blamed upon the malevolent magic of neighbors. People could attribute such catastrophes to natural causes as well, but an unexpected blow—a violent storm; a mysterious, wasting sickness; an inexplicable case of impotence—set them grumbling menacingly at the poor, ugly, defenseless old woman in the hovel at the end of the lane. “Many witches are found there,” a German visitor to England noted in 1592, “who frequently do much mischief by means of hail and tempests.”
An ambitious, self-aggrandizing justice of the peace named Brian Darcy published an account of the pretrial examinations of accused witches that he conducted in Essex in 1582. His account provides a close-up, eerily detailed glimpse of a rural community grappling with everyday concerns, and in this case a community being prodded by its magistrate toward violent persecution. Using the testimony of small children and quarreling neighbors to ferret out the occult crimes he knew he would discover, the zealous magistrate identified a whole network of witches who conspired with demonic spirits—“familiars” in the form of dogs, cats, and toads, with names like Tiffin, Titty, and Suckin—to wreak havoc. After she had a falling-out with Mrs. Thurlow, Ursula Kemp sent her spirit Tiffin (“like a white lamb”) to rock Thurlow’s infant’s cradle, until the infant almost fell onto the ground. “Mother Mansfield” came to Joan Cheston’s house and asked for some curds. Joan said she had none, “and within a while after some of her cattle were taken lame.” “Lynd’s wife” reported that Mother Mansfield came to her and asked for a “mess of milk”; she refused, explaining that “she had but a little, not so much as would suckle her calf.” That night her calf died. It is all at a similarly local level: a small uncharitable act, a few harsh words—and then the nasty consequences. A farmer’s wife churns and churns but can get no butter; thread breaks in the spindle, even though the spindle was perfectly smooth; a child who has been robust begins to languish. This was the everyday world of places like Snitterfield and Wilmcote and Shottery, the villages near Stratford that Shakespeare knew from the inside. What was missing, if they were lucky, was a Brian Darcy to transform the ordinary tension, frustration, and grief of early modern village life into judicial murder.
From James’s Daemonologie, Shakespeare would have learned that though the king was struck by the fact that so many of the people accused of witchcraft were old women from small villages, he was not at all interested in the local hatreds and heartbreaks that generated most of the accusations. Unlike Brian Darcy’s, the king’s mind soared away from the familiar rancors of rural life. As befitted a monarch of wide reading, James had grand metaphysical theories, complex political strategies, the subtle ideas of an intellectual and a statesman. He was, moreover, well aware that many of the charges of witchcraft were mere fantasies and lies, and he was proud of his perspicacity.
By themselves, James thought, witches have no magical powers. But they have made a pact with the devil, a pact solemnized in the nightmarish assemblies known as sabbats. In order to lure Christians away from the true faith, the devil deludes his followers into thinking that they have been granted special gifts and that they possess the ability to harm their neighbors. Hence what appear to be the effects of magic are for the most part counterfeits, illusions cunningly crafted to deceive “men’s outward senses.” These illusions are often startlingly impressive, to be sure, but their effectiveness is not surprising, “since we see by common proof that a simple juggler will make a hundred things seem both to our eyes and ears otherwise than they are.” The devil’s power has limits, set down before the foundations of the world were laid—he cannot create actual miracles, he cannot destroy godly magistrates, he cannot read thoughts—but he is more accomplished than the greatest mountebank. Indeed, the devil teaches his disciples “many jugglery tricks at cards, dice, and such like, to deceive men’s senses” with false miracles; he is an exceptionally subtle corrupter of anyone with moral weaknesses; and if he cannot read thoughts, he is learned enough in physiognomy to guess at men’s thoughts by studying their faces.
The devil’s goal is the ruin not of a tiny hamlet but of a whole kingdom, and hence his principal target is not this or that local villager but God’s own representative on earth, the king. It is to ensnare princes that the devil teaches his disciples, his “scholars,” as the owlish James calls them, his tricks. And, as one might expect of a malevolent being who has lived for centuries, closely observed men and beasts and the natural world, and thoroughly mastered the arts of deception, the devil’s tricks are impressive. “He will make his scholars to creep in credit with Princes,” James writes, “by fore-telling them many great things”—the outcome of battles, the fate of commonwealths, and the like—“part true, part false.” If Satan’s scholars only spoke lies, their master would soon lose credit, and if they straightforwardly told the truth, they could scarcely do the devil’s work. So their prognostications are “always doubtsome, as his Oracles were.” Through his astonishing agility Satan provides other means for witches to please princes, “by fair banquets and dainty dishes, carried in short space from the farthest part of the world.” And he seems to confer upon his agents spectral forces, “which all are but impressions in the air, easily gathered by a spirit,” in order to delude men’s senses.
Ambiguous and deceptive prophecies; seductive pleasures; airy, insubstantial illusions—these are among the devices witches employ, James thought, when they set out to destroy someone. Shakespeare, as Macbeth shows, took careful note. He may also have gone out of his way to acquaint himself with the king’s actual dealings with witches. He could have inquired about these dealings from anyone who had been in Scotland during James’s reign there, and there were many potential informants, since a great number of his compatriots followed James to London. He could also have read about them in a sensational pamphlet, News from Scotland, published in 1591. Two years before, a storm had disrupted James’s marriage arrangements; his bride-to-be, Anne of Denmark, was supposed to sail from Denmark to Scotland in 1589, but thunder, lightning, and rain forced the ship to take refuge in Oslo. James impetuously sailed there and married her. When he returned some months later to Scotland, he became convinced that the tempest had been the result of diabolical intervention. He became directly involved in an unprecedented series of witchcraft investigations, investigations that claimed to discover a network of witches in North Berwick—about twenty miles from Edinburgh, on the Firth of Forth—involved in communal devil worship.
One of the accused, Agnes Thompson, confessed to the king and his council that on Halloween 1590 some two hundred witches had sailed to the town in sieves. Then, while one of the coven, Geillis Duncane, played a tune on a small instrument, a “Jew’s trump,” they sang and danced their way into the kirk (church) where Satan impatiently awaited them. The devil put his buttocks over the pulpit railing for the witches to kiss, as a sign of fealty, and then made his “ungodly exhortations,” focusing his malice against “the greatest enemy he hath in the world,” namely, the king of Scotland. James thus found himself the direct object of attack in the satanic sermon, no doubt a satisfying confirmation of the sanctity of his royal person, but also unnerving. For during interrogation—and James was an enthusiastic user of torture to obtain confessions—Agnes Thompson disclosed some of the devices that had been used against him: “She confessed that she took a black toad, and did hang the same up by the heels three days, and collected and gathered the venom as it dropped and fell from it in an oyster shell, and kept the same venom close covered, until she should obtain any part or piece of foul linen cloth that had appertained to the King’s Majesty.” If she had been able to get hold of a fragment of his shirt or handkerchief, she told the king, and had anointed it with the venom, then she would have “bewitched him to death.” And though this plot was frustrated, she and her companions had succeeded in causing at least some harm. They had christened a cat, tied body parts from a dead man to its limbs, and then thrown it into the sea. The
effect was to raise “such a tempest in the sea as a greater hath not been seen” and to provoke a contrary wind against the king’s ship, coming from Denmark. “His Majesty had never come safely from the sea, if his faith had not prevailed above their intentions.”
Disposed though he was to believe every one of these absurd charges, James was eager not to seem naive, and he declared that the miserable women he was interrogating, stripping, prodding obscenely, and torturing were all “extreme liars.” But one of them, Agnes Sampson, took him aside and told him “the very words” that he had exchanged with his bride on their wedding night in Norway. James was astonished “and swore by the living God that he believed that all the devils in hell could not have discovered the same, acknowledging her words to be most true.” The king was then convinced that the witches were present not only on the tempest-tossed sea and in the graveyard where they dug up corpses and performed their obscene rites, but also in the bedroom, where they somehow overheard the most intimate moments of marital conversation.
These beliefs, and both the political pretensions and the deep fears they bespoke, were not hidden away in some dark place where only James’s intimates knew of them; they were matters of public record. Shakespeare seems to have noted them carefully, and he may have observed something still more germane to his purpose. When James heard that the witches had danced into the North Berwick kirk to the sound of a reel played on a small trumpet by Geillis Duncane, he was struck with “a wonderful admiration.” He sent for the witch and commanded her to play the same dance before him.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Page 38
