Poor Geillis Duncane: a maidservant, she had originally aroused her master’s suspicions because she had proved all too successful in her efforts “to help all such as were troubled or grieved with any kind of sickness.” Though she first protested that she was innocent, a series of brutal body searches and tortures—“the Pilliwinks upon her fingers, which is a grievous torture, and binding or wrenching her head with a cord or rope”—had elicited from her the desired confession. Now she found herself performing the fatal role that had been violently imposed upon her before the fascinated, horrified, and pleased king. “In respect of the strangeness of these matters,” News from Scotland reports, James “took great delight to be present at their examinations.” Witchcraft was not only a frightening danger; it was also a wonderful show.
As Shakespeare grasped, the king was aroused by witches to “a wonderful admiration”—precisely the effect that the King’s Men were hoping to achieve. Hence the astonishing spectacle with which Shakespeare opened his new Scottish show:
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
(Macbeth,1.1.1–2)
Taking over Gwinn’s device—three sibyls stepping forward as if from a wood and prophesying the future—Shakespeare recapitulates the promise to Banquo’s heirs of stable dynastic rule. Yet the pretty civilities of St. John’s College are altogether swept away. Once again Shakespeare radically altered his source, literally introducing opacity—“fog and filthy air”—where there was once simple transparency. The play begins with three strange creatures all right:
What are these,
So withered, and so wild in their attire,
That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’ earth
And yet are on’t? . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so—
(1.3.37–44)
But the scene is a wild heath. When Macbeth enters, the “weird sisters” greet him in terms that startlingly recall, virtually as a quotation, Gwinn’s entertainment:
FIRST WITCH: All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis
SECOND WITCH: All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor.
THIRD WITCH: All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!
(1.3.46–48)
But what was reassuring is now turned inside out, what was warmly welcoming is made chilling. Even within the world of the play, Macbeth, to whom the ostensibly happy prophecy is made, registers the disturbance. “Good sir,” asks his friend Banquo, “why do you start and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?” (1.3.49–50).
Shakespeare was burrowing deep into the dark fantasies that swirled about in the king’s brain. It is all here: the ambiguous prophecies designed to lure men to their destruction, the “Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders” (1.2.26) that once threatened Anne of Denmark, the murderous hatred of anointed kings, the illusory apparitions, the fiendish equivocations, the loathsome concoction of body parts, even the witches’ sailing in a sieve to do their diabolical mischief—
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And like a rat without a tail
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.
(1.3.7–9)
If James had been fascinated by a command performance of diabolical music, the King’s Men would give him that and more:
Come, sisters, cheer we up his sprites,
And show the best of our delights.
I’ll charm the air to give a sound
While you perform your antic round,
That this great king may kindly say
Our duties did his welcome pay.
(4.1.143–48)
“This great king”—the witches are referring to Macbeth, but it is not the imagined usurper who craved demonic entertainment; it is the living king of England and Scotland.
Why should Shakespeare have risked the irony of this transformation? Why, for that matter, did he risk the transformation of Gwinn’s reassuring compliment into a nightmarish tragedy of betrayal and destruction? Macbeth does not represent disaster miraculously averted; it does not confirm the belief that a divinity hedges an anointed king; it does not support James’s fantasy that a truly good man is invulnerable to the malice of witchcraft. Trust is violated, families are destroyed, nature itself is poisoned. To a king who paled at the sight of sharp steel, it offered the insistent spectacle of a bloody dagger, both a real dagger and what Macbeth calls a dagger of the mind. True, the pageant promises the throne to an endless succession of Banquo’s heirs. True as well, the restoration of order in the tragedy’s final moments could be seen as a representation of the order that had been restored to the realm after the Gunpowder Plot: the severed head of Macbeth, carried onstage at the concluding moment by the victorious Macduff, was a reminder of the conspirators’ heads that members of the audience could see every time they walked across London Bridge. Yet Macbeth hardly sits comfortably with the functions of prince-pleasing or popular reassurance. The materials Shakespeare worked with touched off something extremely peculiar in him, something that does not fit the overarching scheme.
Shakespeare was a professional risk-taker. He wrote under pressure—judging from its unusual brevity, Macbeth was composed in a very short time—and he went where his imagination took him. If the cheerful sibyls of St. John’s became the weird sisters dancing around a cauldron bubbling with hideous contents—
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravined salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digged i’th’ dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Slivered in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-delivered by a drab
(4.1.22–31)
—then Shakespeare was obliged to pursue the course. The alternative was to write the kind of play that would put James to sleep and send the thrill-seeking crowds to rival theaters. But this explanation still leaves open the question of why Shakespeare’s imagination took the peculiar turn that it did.
Something comparable to the potent blend of opportunism and imaginative generosity, appropriation and moral revulsion aroused in Shakespeare by the crowd’s laughter at Lopez’s execution may have been at work. When Shakespeare learned about the king’s wonder and delight at Geillis Duncane’s performance, he grasped what could be done to gratify the king’s fantasies, and at the same instant his imagination began to enter into the figure of the condemned. He and his company would perform in the place, as it were, of the witch and her coven. They would sing the songs and chant the charms and provide the fascination that James desired. And they would complicate that fascination, moving through the figures of the weird sisters to the larger, more familiar world of domestic intimacy and court intrigue.
It is the general gift of the imagination to enter into the lives of others, but in the case of witches there is a special and particular bond: witches are the progeny of the imagination. The witchmongers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—the men who thought that there should be more denunciations of neighbors, more body searches, tortures, trials, and, above all, executions—believed that witches trafficked in fantasy. According to the famous witchcraft manual, the Malleus maleficarum, devils provoke and shape fantasies by direct corporeal intervention in the mind. Demonic spirits can incite what the authors, the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, call a “local motion” in the minds of those awake as well as asleep, stirring up and exciting the inner perceptions, “so that ideas retained in the repositories of their minds are drawn out and made apparent to the faculties of fancy and imagination, so that such men imagine these things to be true.” This process of making a stir in the mind and moving images from one part
of the brain to another is, they write, called “interior temptation.” It can lead men to see objects before their eyes—daggers, for example—that are not in fact there; conversely, it can lead men not to see other objects—their own penises, for example—that are still there, though concealed from view by what the inquisitors term a “glamour.” Hence, Kramer and Sprenger write, “a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding because it belonged to a parish priest.”
Reading this and other passages in the Malleus maleficarum, an older contemporary of Shakespeare’s, an English country gentleman named Reginald Scot, said that he was tempted to regard the whole work as a “bawdy discourse,” a kind of obscene joke book. But he checked the impulse: “these are no jests,” he writes, “for they be written by them that were and are judges upon the lives and deaths of those persons.” Scot’s response in 1584 was to publish The Discovery of Witchcraft, the greatest English contribution to the skeptical critique of witchcraft. On his accession to the English throne, James ordered all copies of Scot’s book to be burned. But it seems, from allusions that he made to it, that Shakespeare got hold of a copy and read it when he wrote Macbeth.
Scot argues that it is the masters of language, the poets, who have been the principal sources of the murderous fantasies that lead to witch hunts. The poet Ovid affirms, writes Scot, that witches
can raise and suppress lightening and thunder, rain and hail, clouds and winds, tempests and earthquakes. Others do write, that they can pull down the moon and the stars. Some write that with wishing they can send needles into the livers of their enemies. Some that they can transfer corn in the blade from one place to another. Some, that they can cure diseases supernaturally, fly in the air, and dance with devils. . . . They can raise spirits (as others affirm) dry up springs, turn the course of running waters, inhibit the sun, and stay both day and night, changing the one into the other. They can go in and out at auger holes, and sail in an egg shell, a cockle or muscle shell, through and under the tempestuous seas. They can go invisible, and deprive men of their privities, and otherwise of the act and use of venery. They can bring souls out of the graves.
Such are the visions that poets have given us, and they have led people to torture and kill their innocent neighbors. But, Scot concludes, there is a defense against this ghastly mistake: do not believe the songs that poets sing.
The King’s Men did not preach anything of the kind: dressing themselves up as witches, they were determined to profit from those obsessions. The weird sisters in Shakespeare’s play apparently traffic in bad weather: “When shall we three meet again? / In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” (1.1.1–2). They seem to cause unnatural darkness: “By th’ clock ’tis day, / And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp” (2.4.6–7). They make themselves invisible, fly in the air, dance with devils, sail in a sieve, cast spells, and drain men dry. But, though many of the demonic powers listed by Scot as the inventions of poets are alluded to in Macbeth, it is oddly difficult to determine what, if anything, the witches actually do in the play.
The opacity in Macbeth is not produced by the same radical excision of motivation Shakespeare so strikingly employed in Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. If the audience does not know exactly why Hamlet assumes his madness or Iago hates Othello or Lear puts the love test to his daughters, it most assuredly knows why Macbeth plots to assassinate King Duncan: spurred on by his wife, he wishes to seize the crown for himself. But in a tortured soliloquy, Macbeth reveals that he is deeply baffled by his own murderous fantasies:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
(1.3.138–41)
At the center of the familiar and conventional motive there is a dark hole—“nothing is / But what is not.” And this hole that is inside Macbeth is linked to the dark presence, within his consciousness and within the play’s world, of the witches. Do they actually arouse the thought of murdering Duncan in Macbeth’s mind, or is that thought already present before he encounters them? Do they have some affinity with Lady Macbeth—who calls upon the spirits that attend on mortal thoughts to “unsex” her (1.5.38–39)—or is their evil completely independent of hers? Does the witches’ warning—“beware Macduff” (4.1.87)—actually induce Macbeth to kill Macduff’s family, or has he already waded too deep in bloodshed to turn back? Do their ambiguous prophecies lead him to a final, fatal overconfidence, or is his end the result of his loss of popular support and the superior power of Malcolm’s army? None of the questions are answered. At the end of the play the weird sisters are left unmentioned, their role unresolved. Shakespeare refuses to allow the play to localize and contain the threat in the bodies of witches.
Macbeth leaves the weird sisters unpunished but manages to implicate them in a monstrous threat to the fabric of civilized life. The genius of the play is bound up with this power of implication, by means of which the audience can never quite be done with them, for they are most suggestively present when they cannot be seen, when they are absorbed in the ordinary relations of everyday life. If you are worried about losing your manhood and are afraid of the power of women, it is not enough to look to the bearded hags on the heath, look to your wife. If you are worried about temptation, fear your own dreams. If you are anxious about your future, scrutinize your best friends. And if you fear spiritual desolation, turn your eyes on the contents not of the hideous cauldron but of your skull: “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!” (3.2.37).
The witches—eerie, indefinable, impossible to locate securely or to understand—are the embodiment of the principle of opacity that Shakespeare embraced in his great tragedies. Shakespeare’s theater is the equivocal space where conventional explanations fall away, where one person can enter another person’s mind, and where the fantastic and the bodily touch. This conception of his art is what it meant for him to take the place of Geillis Duncane and perform his theatrical witchcraft before the wondering gaze of the king. There is no record of the king’s response, but Shakespeare’s company never fell from its position as the King’s Men.
CHAPTER 12
The Triumph of the Everyday
SHAKESPEARE SEEMS TO have begun contemplating the possibility of retirement—not so much planning for it as brooding about its perils—as early as 1604, when he sat down to write King Lear. The tragedy is his greatest meditation on extreme old age; on the painful necessity of renouncing power; on the loss of house, land, authority, love, eyesight, and sanity itself. This vision of devastating loss surged up not in an eccentric recluse and not in a man facing the onset of his own decay, but in a hugely energetic and successful playwright who had just turned forty. Even at a time when life expectancy was short, forty years old was not regarded as ancient. It was the middle of the passage, not the moment of reckoning. Shakespeare was in age closer to the play’s young people—Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia; Edgar and Edmund—than he was to the two old men, Lear and Gloucester, whose terrible fates he depicts.
Once again, there is no easy, obvious link between what Shakespeare wrote—here a tremendous explosion of rage, madness, and grief—and the known circumstances of his own life. His father had died in 1601, probably in his sixties. In 1604 his mother was still alive and not, as far as we know, either mad or tyrannical. He had two daughters, but he could hardly claim that he had given them everything or that they had attempted to turn him out of his own house. He had, it is true, a younger brother named Edmund, the name of the villainous plotter in King Lear, but Edmund Shakespeare—an aspiring actor in London—was obviously no match for the bastard son of Gloucester, any more than Shakespeare’s
brother Richard could conjure up, in anything but name, England’s homicidal hunchback king.
Shakespeare might well have been set to thinking about the story of Lear by a widely discussed lawsuit that had occurred in late 1603. The two elder daughters of a doddering gentleman named Sir Brian Annesley attempted to get their father legally certified as insane, thereby enabling themselves to take over his estate, while his youngest daughter vehemently protested on her father’s behalf. The youngest daughter’s name happened to be Cordell, a name almost identical to Cordella, the name of the daughter in the venerable legend of King Leir who tried to save her father from the malevolent designs of her two older sisters. The uncanny coincidence of the names and the stories must have been hard to resist.
Whether or not the Annesley case actually triggered the writing of the tragedy, Shakespeare was singularly alert to the way in which the Leir legend was in touch with ordinary family tensions and familiar fears associated with old age. For his play’s central concerns, Shakespeare simply looked around him at the everyday world. This seems at first an odd claim: of all of his tragedies, King Lear seems the wildest and the strangest. The old king swears by Apollo and Hecate and calls upon the thunder to “Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!” (3.2.7). His friend, the Earl of Gloucester, thinks he is the victim of divine malevolence: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport” (4.1.37–38). The Bedlam beggar Poor Tom screams that he is possessed by a legion of exotic devils: Modo, Mahu, and Flibbertigibbet. But despite the constant invocation of a grand metaphysical frame, the play’s events, terrible and trivial alike, occur in a universe in which there seems to be no overarching design at all. The devils are altogether fictional, and the gods on whom Lear and Gloucester call are conspicuously, devastatingly silent. What surrounds the characters with their loves and hatreds and torments is the most ordinary of worlds—“low farms, / Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills” (2.3.17–18)—and the action that triggers the whole hideous train of events is among the most ordinary of decisions: a retirement.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Page 39
