Whether or not Shakespeare ever traveled to Scotland is unknown. In fact, we know nothing at all of his whereabouts between the christening of his twins, Hamnet and Judith, in Stratford-upon-Avon, on february 2, 1585, and 1592, when he had made enough of a name for—and by some lights, a nuisance of—himself on the London stage to be attacked by robert Greene in his Groatsworth of Wit as an “upstart crow,” a “Shake-scene” stealing other men’s thunder. However, the Scottish geography in Macbeth is surprisingly accurate—I had no idea just how accurate, in fact, until I started to research this book. That he might have been in Scotland is as much a possibility as his being anywhere else; companies of English players traveled north of the border with some frequency.
In 1583, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir francis Walsingham, forced a reorganization of England’s theatrical companies by cherry-picking the best actors from each for a new company called the Queen’s Men. Why he did so is unclear; he was not a known patron or enthusiast of theater, nor were players part of his day-to-day concerns as a secretary of state. (regulating the players was part of the lord chamberlain’s duties.) Walsingham’s motives may well have included weaving actors into his network of spies. Roving players, after all, offered perfect cover for watchful eyes and ears inside the far-flung houses of the great. At the very least, as scholars Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean have argued in The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, from this point on, Elizabeth’s spymaster used government licensing of traveling acting troupes to give the impression of a vast network of watchfulness. Later, Walsingham certainly used some playwrights, most famously Christopher Marlowe, and possibly Thomas Kyd, as spies. It is my imagining that the young Shakespeare might also, willingly or unwillingly, have been among his “intelligencers.” It does seem likely, however, that any player caught in the dubious circumstances into which I set Mr. Shakespeare at Dirleton would have found himself suspected as a spy.
In the autumn of 1589, the Queen’s Men were sent north to Edinburgh to join in the celebration of King James’s impending marriage to Princess Anne of Denmark. The celebrations had to be postponed after storms drove the princess’s fleet back from Scottish shores, all the way to Scandinavia, and the impatient king took ship in pursuit. (Eventually, those storms were blamed on witches, resulting in one of the worst witch-hunts in Scottish history, spearheaded by King James himself, but that is another story.) That same year, civic records show that a company of English players acted in Perth, about ten miles distant from Dunsinnan and within striking distance of Dunkeld and Birnam Wood. I am not the first to wonder whether a twenty-five-year-old actor named William Shakespeare could have been among them. The Dunsinnan House account book, however, is a fictional document.
Shakespeare’s main source for Macbeth was Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. He did not rely solely on the history of King Macbeth, however, but pieced together a story using dramatic episodes from the lives of other kings. In particular, he had to fish about for the story of Lady Macbeth because the historical Lady Macbeth, whose name was Gruoch (Lily’s middle name), is little more than a blank. It is usual to see Shakespeare spinning her tale from the brief mention of another noble-man’s revenge-urging wife. Some scholars, however, have also noted the uncanny resemblance that her story bears to the near-contemporary history of Elizabeth Stewart, countess of Arran.
This lady was, as stated in the novel, the daughter of John Stewart, fourth earl of Atholl. The date of her birth is unknown, though it must have been after May 1547, when her parents married, and before April 1, 1557, when her father remarried following her mother’s death. She was married herself on December 24, 1567, which would make her only thirteen by the birth year of 1554 sometimes proposed for her (without, so far as I can tell, any basis in fact); I have chosen to push her birth to an early point in her parents’ marriage, mostly to allow for a fictional meeting with John Dee at a time when he was in Antwerp in 1563.
She went through three husbands: Hugh fraser, fifth Lord Lovat, who died suddenly, and some thought suspiciously, in 1577; the king’s elderly great-uncle robert Stewart, successively earl of Lennox and then earl of March, whom she married in 1579 and divorced in 1581, on grounds of impotence while pregnant with her third husband’s child; and the swashbuckling Captain James Stewart, for a time earl of Arran, whom she married two months after her divorce from March was final. She did have royal, if also bastard, blood in her veins, as one of her maternal great-grandmothers was an illegitimate daughter of Scotland’s King James IV. A Highlander both by birth and by her first marriage, she was said to frequent “the oracles of the Highlands” and possibly to be a witch herself. She was also said to lust after the crown.
She appears to have been both fashionable and sensuous, with a french-inflected sophistication of style, speech, and sexual morality that bewitched the king but made his Calvinist ministers come close to spitting with rage. The story of her breaking open Queen Mary’s chests of gowns and jewels as soon as her husband was given the keys to Edinburgh Castle was recorded by the English ambassador to Scotland. For a while in the early 1580s, she and her third husband were two of King James’s most trusted courtiers, people he sought out for both policy and play. So quick and decisive was their rise to power that they aroused envy and fear on the part of almost everyone else around the king. After they fell from grace in late 1585, they took refuge, just as Kate discovers, with her eldest son by her first marriage, Simon fraser, sixth Lord Lovat, in the lands of clan fraser, south and west of Inverness, where they were said to live on a remote isle in Loch Bruiach. It is a place that is still surprisingly remote, a distillation of the stark beauty of the Highlands.
The earl’s end mimics Macbeth’s—though perhaps it was the other way around: As Kate says, in 1596 he was ambushed by enemies who cut off his head and flaunted it on the tip of a lance. With enemies like that, their long sojourn on a remote island becomes understandable.
Lady Arran’s end is somewhat mysterious and at least metaphorically offstage, just like Lady Macbeth’s. She was first reported dead in childbed in 1590. Elsewhere, she was said to have died “miserably” in 1595 up in the Highlands; perhaps that misery was a euphemism for the suicidal end that Shakespeare suggests for Lady Macbeth. Yet another, later tradition has her die swollen to marvelous size, thus fulfilling a prophecy that she should be the greatest woman in all Scotland. The possibility that she was attacked as a witch is my own addition to history.
How Shakespeare might have come across her story is also unknown, though a handful of English players working in London as he rose to fame had a fair amount of experience working in Scotland and might have told him her tale. Among these was the king’s favorite English actor during his tenure in Scotland, Lawrence Fletcher, another of the original members of the King’s Men. It seems equally possible, however, that if Shakespeare went up to Scotland in his youth, he might have learned of her—or seen her—for himself, and possibly even acted before her.
The Arrans are known to have entertained James with a sumptuous feast and a play of robin Hood when the king spent twelve days at their newly acquired castle of Dirleton, beginning on May 1, 1585—as it happens, the old Celtic festival of Beltane. The king was not coming to celebrate either May Day or Beltane, however, but to escape a fierce outbreak of plague in Edinburgh. The earl is said to have fallen deathly ill after the banquet—perhaps he left abruptly in the middle. While the festivities at that castle are historical, Shakespeare’s appearance there is of my making.
John Dee was one of the foremost intellectuals in England during Shakespeare’s lifetime, though he was shown more respect on the Continent. His interests, whether focused on mathematics or magic, were both theoretical and practical.
He was in Antwerp in early 1563, copying an exceedingly rare manuscript of the Steganographia by Johannes Trithemius, a work nominally about using angels and demons to convey secret messages at a distance. In reality, it is a three-part book about
codes, in code. Dee knew that about the first two parts; the code of the third part is not known to have been broken until the late twentieth century and was generally believed to be about demonic magic, as it claimed to be. Whether or not Dee possessed the secret of the third part is unknown. It is this manuscript that I have imagined him accepting the young Lady Elizabeth Stewart’s help in copying.
Most of Dee’s life is traceable through letters and diaries, including a spiritual diary that covers in detail many of his attempts to invoke angels. No diaries survive, however, from 1601 to his death in 1608 or 1609, the period that covers the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot and the writing of Macbeth. This may be because he had stopped keeping a diary; on the other hand, his diary may have been destroyed.
Dee was not adept at seeing spirits in his mirrors and crystal balls himself; he almost always used a seer or scryer. His eldest son, Arthur, tried to fill this role for a time during his boyhood but apparently with no more success than his father had. For many years, Dee’s most trusted scryer was a man named Edward Kelley—who seems, at this distance in time, to have been at least half con man, a fact that makes it very difficult to understand Dee. Kelley and Dee parted ways on the Continent, however, before Dee returned to England in 1589.
Beyond the close of Dee’s surviving diary in 1601, we know very little about his scryers or his dealings with the spirit world. Persistent rumors repeated through the nineteenth century, however, said that he—or one of his scryers—foretold the Gunpowder Plot by seeing it in a mirror. Linking his scryer and his black mirror to the boy-actor Hal Berridge and the mirror in Macbeth is my fiction.
That Dee’s papers are fragmentary should not, perhaps, be surprising. What’s astonishing is that any of them survived. The first editor of his spiritual diary, published in 1659, claimed that Sir robert Cotton, the collector of a library perhaps even greater than Dee’s, dug up a number of Dee’s manuscript diaries from his garden. Others were discovered in a hidden compartment in an old chest and partly used up by a cook looking for scrap paper to line her pie tins before her master realized what she was using.
Dee invoked angels into mirrors and “show-stones,” or crystal balls. The black obsidian mirror stolen by the witches in this book is a real object, and its history as given is pretty accurate: It was once a ritual object related to the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca. Dee is thought to have acquired it during his travels on the Continent, when he would have had easier opportunity to come into contact with Spanish culture, including precious objects plundered from the New World, than he would have had at home, at least after Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant reign set England and Spain on a course toward war.
That is, if Dee acquired it at all. The attribution to Dee comes from Horace Walpole’s eighteenth-century identification, which is based on hearsay and does not clearly trace the mirror’s passage back through time to Dee. Walpole’s claim, however, is certainly seductive and has long been accepted as the likely truth. The mirror is on display—as Dee’s—in the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery.
The other mirror—Lady Nairn’s mirror, which she claimed had been a prop used by the King’s Men—is a figment of my imagination. So far as I know no known prop certainly belonging to that company has survived.
Lady Nairn’s silver cauldron—and the cauldron in Joanna’s shop, for that matter—are both based on the huge Gundestrup Cauldron in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, the most glorious silver object of Iron Age Celtic Europe. Probably made in the first century B.C., it shows, among other scenes, a horned man sitting cross-legged and holding a serpent, and another man being thrown into a cauldron: possibly a scene of human sacrifice.
The cauldron symbol that Carrie uses is a real Pictish symbol found on stone carvings in Scotland.
The knife that Kate finds is no particular real knife but a variant of the seax, a single-edged style of blade used by Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Scots—both men and women—throughout the pagan period. Several knives and swords of similar date have been found with runic inscriptions, some of which appear to have been magical.
In Wiccan tradition, a black-handled knife, or athame, is part of the ritual equipment used by each individual witch. Athames are not used for cutting, which is actually taboo; they are used for directing energy. White-handled knives, or bolines, are used when cutting, carving, or whittling is necessary. Carrie and Ian’s willingness to use their knives not only for cutting but for killing sets them far beyond the bounds of any acceptable behavior in Wiccan practice.
The making of pattern-welded blades is an ancient and exacting art. There are still a few swordsmiths in Scotland and elsewhere forging blades that men like the real Macbeth would probably have loved to wield.
Dunsinnan Hill is a real place with the remains of an Iron Age hill fort at its top. Medieval Scottish chronicles say that Macbeth refortified it with great difficulty, and apparently with great irritation of his followers. It has been excavated twice, in the early and mid-nineteenth century. The trenches from those excavations still pock the summit, which has fine views of Strathmore and the Highlands to the north. Lower down the hill, a modern and still active quarry has significantly gnawed away the western side of the hill, though the summit with its fort is protected.
There are more legends and stories about this hill than I could include in this novel. The nineteenth-century excavations, for instance, found evidence of collapsed souterrains, or stone-lined underground chambers, of unknown—but possibly ritual—significance. One of them is said to have held three skeletons: a man, a woman, and a child with a battered skull. Other tales say that the hill was once the hiding place of the real Stone of Scone, or Stone of Destiny.
At the western foot of the hill is a small wood that hides the Bandirran Stone Circle. There is a cottage, or bothy, roughly where I put Eircheard’s smithy. So far as I know, it has never been used as a forge.
In contrast to the hill and the stone circle, Dunsinnan House is a castle of my making; a farmhouse stands in roughly the spot where I situated it. There is an actual Dunsinnan House—which I discovered after I had already built my fictional one—but it is in a different place and has nothing to do with the building in this novel.
The Birnam Oak and its two companion sycamores are all that remain of the primordial virgin forest that once blanketed much of the lower Highlands. They do seem, as Kate muses, creatures from an elder world.
The island in Loch Bruiach is a crannog: a man-made islet probably first constructed in the Neolithic or Iron Age period. There is no castle on it, and I have my doubts about whether it could support such a heavy stone structure, other than in fiction. However, if the fraser chronicles are to be believed, it must once have sported a suitable home for a dowager Lady Lovat. I based my castle on three buildings: the ruined Castle urquhart on the shores of nearby Loch Ness, the rebuilt castle of Eilean Donan on Scotland’s western shores, and fonthill, in Riverdale, New York.
The current incarnation of Her Majesty’s Theatre was built for Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree; it opened its doors in 1897. It is the fourth theater to stand on the same site in Haymarket, which has been part of London’s theatrical world since the restoration. Since 1986, it has been running The Phantom of the Opera. Beerbohm Tree’s dome room is a real place, currently rented out as rehearsal space, though both the secret cupboard and its cache of occult books are my invention. With the exception of DEE and the Theatre, the titles of the books in that cupboard, however, are real—and each of those volumes is potentially quite valuable.
Joanna Black Books and Esoterica is obviously a fictional shop, but Cecil Court, the street in which it stands, is one of my favorites in all of London. Joanna’s shop is a composite of actual occult bookshops elsewhere in London, descriptions of John Dee’s library as it once existed out in Mortlake, and other details from my imagination. The name “Joanna Black” is a female and anglicized version of “John Dee,” “Joanna” being a feminine form of “John,” and “Dee�
� coming from the Welsh du, meaning “black.”
In New York, Jamie Clifton’s condo is in a real building that now stands on the spot of the Astor Place Opera House: ground zero of the 1849 riot. A large Starbucks on the ground floor gives the public access to at least a portion of the building. Up in riverdale, Edwin forrest laid the cornerstone of fonthill Castle in 1848 as a token of love for his wife, Catherine, but by the time it was finished, the couple had split in a scandalous divorce. The oculus and the cross in the floor of the central octagonal hall are remarkable design features. I have added, however, the Shakespearean scenes sculpted on the walls, as well as the secret hiding place in the floor. The name—and certain design elements—were indeed borrowed by the forrests from William Beckford’s fonthill Abbey in England. The castle is now the admissions building of Mount Saint Vincent College.
As Kate notes, the saga of Edwin forrest and Catherine Sinclair reads like a Shakespearean tragedy; his behavior toward his once adored wife seems as irrational, unjust, and toweringly egotistical as Othello’s. Forrest at least opted to end the marriage in divorce rather than his wife’s death. On the other hand, his cruelty to her remained implacable. He never seems to have experienced even the small surge of repentance and grace that Shakespeare granted to Othello. Catherine forrest, after losing four children and then the husband that she loved, took back her maiden name of Catherine Norton Sinclair and went west to make her own way in the theater, leaving a lasting mark of sophistication on the dramatic tastes of gold-rush California. After touring Australia and then England, she retired to New York, where she quietly lived out the remainder of her days, first with a sister and then with a nephew. She never remarried. I know of no record that says she returned to London to see Ellen Terry in Macbeth in 1889, though she lived long enough to have done so. Her earlier journey to Loch Bruiach and acquisition of a Macbeth manuscript are fictional.
Haunt Me Still Page 33
