by David Hewson
Still, he stands and shouts, “The sisters of Iona are holy, blessed creatures, saints who’ve served this land for centuries. What use have they for black-hearted crones like you?”
The silence chills them. First, the young one laughs, then the others. And all are wracked with mirth now as they weep and shake their heads.
The oldest rises on her crutches, comes round, and takes his arm. “We three are sisters of Iona, sonny,” she says. “We birth kings and we bury ’em. Now get your scrawny arse hence before our patience fails.”
They watch him limp and stumble round the ragged hill of Dunsinane.
“A cart,” the burly sister says. “I long for home.”
“For sleep and silence,” the old woman adds. “For peace.”
The girl’s eyes will not leave the camp below her, with its fluttering flags and drunken men, crowing about their prowess in the field.
“Peace?” she murmurs. “Peace?”
Haughty and as stupid as a peacock, he struts around them, monarch and coward, oblivious to their truculent, wary mood.
She points across the vale with her long finger, fixing her eye on the lanky, swaggering figure there. “Malcolm, Malcolm,” the child says in a low, hard whisper. “I never met a man I liked called Malcolm.”
Authors’ Notes
The Play
We first came to this story—like most readers will—through Shakespeare’s version of it, and while ours deviates in certain crucial details, much of what we have done is more about embroidery of the play, filling out what is passed over there and occasionally bringing a different perspective to the events and people that comprise Shakespeare’s account. It makes sense, then, to begin this reflection on our own work with a consideration of the play.
The play was probably written in 1606 or 1607 for the theater company known then as the King’s Men. We know that it continued to be staged for several years, but the first printing seems to have been for the 1623 collected works of Shakespeare known as the First Folio, which was compiled seven years after the playwright’s death. The play is short for a tragedy, and it contains elements almost certainly not written by Shakespeare alone, probably the result of either collaboration with or borrowing from Thomas Middleton, another playwright who also worked for the King’s Men. This is not unusual for the period, but it does raise questions about whether Shakespeare wrote material for the play that did not appear in the Folio text. There is no evidence for such lost material, so it is fruitless to speculate on whether the play was rethought or censored in the seventeen years or so between its composition and its publication.
Censorship is a possibility, however, because the play as it stands is so clearly topical in its politics. King James I, who had assumed the English throne upon Elizabeth’s death in 1603, was a Scot who traced his lineage through Banquo. He believed in witchcraft and had written about personal encounters with people he believed had magical abilities, and he was fierce on the idea of kings as the right hand of God. In one of his published works he makes it clear that a legitimately crowned king cannot be removed by his people, regardless of his tyrannous actions. Rather, the tyrant must be left to the judgment of God.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth raises all of these issues; though, as is usual with Shakespeare, the play’s final position seems uncertain, and we think the old idea that the play was a compliment to James is, at best, inadequate. Shakespeare’s Banquo is carefully washed of his historical complicity in Duncan’s death, but Fleance, through whom James was descended, is pointedly left off the throne at the end of the play. Most problematically, Scotland is only reclaimed from Macbeth through the regicide James would surely have deplored. The English were skeptical of their imported king whose Catholic mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been executed by her English cousin Elizabeth for plotting against England with Spain. James’s own behavior didn’t help, and if there’s a picture of him in Shakespeare’s play, it might be the portrait of debauchery sketched by Malcolm in his curious test of MacDuff. Regicide, it should be remembered, was in the air, not just in the assassination attempts that Elizabeth and James survived, but in the formal trial and execution of James’s son, Charles I, on the charge of tyranny thirty-five years later.
For all its political weight, however, subsequent periods came to see Macbeth as a primarily domestic play, one driven uniquely in Shakespeare by the terrible collusion of a husband and wife. For the theatrical medium, which was not capable of representing large-scale conflict, the focusing onto the central couple is, perhaps, inevitable, as perhaps is the misogyny that drove much of the interpretation of Lady Macbeth. For many, she was the demon at the story’s core, the driving force that (like the witches) somehow absolved Macbeth of culpability. More recently, productions have found in her a new complexity and a crippled sense of loss speculatively deduced from her childlessness. Scholars have come to see the play as crucially about gender, a play in which masculinity is defined by violence and aggression, femininity by a doomed and grieving passivity, and between these two extremes are the sexually ambiguous witches with their beards and Lady Macbeth, who tries—and, it seems, ultimately fails—to rid herself of the weakness she sees in her sex.
Shakespeare’s Sources
Shakespeare rarely invented plots. He drew heavily on sources that he tweaked and augmented to suit his purpose, and Macbeth is no exception. His primary source was Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England Wales (1587) in which he found not just the story of Macbeth, but also the story of King Duff, who was slain by Donwald, from which Shakespeare also seems to borrow. The historical Macbeth, according to Holinshed, slew Duncan in a dynastic feud, aided by Banquo, after which he became not just a successful king, but a good king for over a decade before lapsing into paranoia and tyranny. Shakespeare condenses the action for dramatic effect so that the play feels like it spans no more than a few days or weeks, each act having significant consequences that escalate the tension and move toward the play’s dreadful climax. Because of his condensing of events, much that Holinshed raises has to be left out. One key instance is that Shakespeare collapses into a single reported battle the two separate encounters with MacDonwald and Sueno. The latter encounter, against the Norwegian king’s army, is sketched in Holinshed much as we have rendered it here, Macbeth’s advantage achieved by the secret drugging of Sueno’s army with the mekilwort (deadly nightshade), which grew thereabouts.
The “Real” Macbeth
We have only a hazy picture of the Scotland of the eleventh century. There is little doubt it was a wild and savage place where the crown was passed from one warlord to another, often on the basis of power and brute violence. Scandinavian powers laid claim to the northern parts of the country and frequently raided those areas they failed to control. Savage vendettas between rival clans were commonplace and bloody.
While we may be uncertain of much detail, it is clear that Shakespeare’s portrayal of Macbeth—which has now become, in some ways, the man’s historical record—is grossly inaccurate. This may be for purely dramatic reasons, but whatever the reason, the play’s portrayal of Macbeth bears little resemblance to what scant facts we possess.
Macbeth—Mac Bethad mac Findlàech in Gaelic—was born in 1005 and died in 1057. He was the son of the “mormaer” (a kind of regional king) of Moray, a region covering Inverness, parts of the Great Glen, and other surrounding areas beyond the borders of the modern Moray Council in Scotland. Macbeth’s father was murdered in 1020, probably by relatives later killed by Macbeth, who then became mormaer himself. As a member of the Moray “royal” line, he was involved in Scottish politics from an early age. In 1031, he attended a meeting between then Scottish monarch Malcolm II and England’s King Canute.
Three years later, the despotic Malcolm died—perhaps murdered—at the age of eighty in Glamis. He was succeeded by his own son, Duncan, not the gray-haired ancient of Shakespeare, but a young and inexperienced man of thirty-three. Macbeth was listed as Duncan’s “dux,” or
lord, suggesting Macbeth, who had a royal claim of his own, was a principal supporter.
In 1039, Duncan led a Scottish army south into England in a disastrous expedition that ended in defeat in Durham. After relations between he and Macbeth worsened, the young king then unwisely led a second expedition north the following year, to attack Moray. He was killed in battle, not in bed, near Elgin in August 1040, and Macbeth was crowned king of Scotland at Scone shortly afterward.
Macbeth spent seventeen years on the throne, a period some Caledonian historians say was the most peaceful and prosperous of medieval times. There are no contemporary records that paint him as a tyrant. In 1050, he made the long and dangerous journey to Rome as a pilgrim, a sure sign that he felt confident of his political strength at home. Four years later, however, an invading English army defeated Macbeth’s forces at Dunsinane. Macbeth escaped and returned north to Moray. There, Malcolm’s forces attacked him three years later, finally hunting the king down at Lumphanan, near Aberdeen, where, several chroniclers claim, he was beheaded by Malcolm himself.
It was Macbeth’s son or stepson Lulach, however, who was crowned king of Scotland at Scone the following month, only to be assassinated by Malcolm’s agents the following March. His murderer finally ascended the throne as Malcolm III, reigning for thirty-five years until, in 1093, he was slain during an expedition into Northumbria. He was succeeded by his brother Donalbain (Donald III), who spent a year on the throne before being killed by an invading English army led by his own nephew, Edgar.
Of all Scotland’s eleventh-century monarchs, only Edgar was to die of natural causes. He is buried in Dunfermline Abbey. The remains of Duncan I, Macbeth, Lulach, Malcolm III, and Donald III were all, after various journeys around Scotland, interred on the island of Iona.
Where We Diverge from Shakespeare and History
In approaching this project, we tried to keep a few ideas uppermost, not least of which is that our book, like a stage production or film of the play, must be a new artistic product in its own right and not simply a slavish “translation” of Shakespeare’s original. We have done what Shakespeare did, adapting and rethinking his source text to suit what he thought interesting or effective, a practice followed by any subsequent staging of the play. There can be no “straight” or definitive production that grows out of nothing but the playwright’s words, performance being generically different from the script, which seems to originate it, or all stagings would be the same.
We, too, had to face up to a shift in genre—in our case, from play to novel. These two forms build meaning differently, they communicate differently, and they act upon the imagination differently. And while we could have simply tried to fill in the blanks inevitably left by a play script (what characters look like, what they can see around them, and so forth), this seemed inadequate. We wanted to make real use of the novelist’s ability to represent more than dialogue, and to do so in a language readers would find more approachable than Shakespeare’s, but we also did not want to simply render a pale imitation of the play. We wanted to wrestle with it, tug at it, mold it, and even, from time to time, tear it. Though we bow before Shakespeare’s genius and freely acknowledge that nothing we have done here could have existed without his words as a starting point, we wanted to make the story—not the play, but the story—our own.
So we expanded the initial battles to show a Scotland under siege, a Scotland saved by the courage and heroism of the man who gave the story its name. We gave his wife a name pulled from the records of ancient Scotland, because we liked the sound of it and because we thought it suited the woman we had started to build. Most importantly, we decided to like the Macbeths, not to excuse their actions, but to try to explain them, to afford them an inner life that went beyond whatever the play could tell us, and then to watch them make a series of bad choices that escalate till they are dragging tragedy at their heels. We kept the porter (though we nearly cut him) and made him an icon of Macbeth’s journey and decline. We painted the witches in ways quite different from the play, making them central but—we hope—at least as enigmatic, striking, and unsettling. We make no apologies for any of this. We have not violated Shakespeare’s play, as the playwright would (we’re sure) be the first to admit. We haven’t destroyed it. It’s still there for you to read and enjoy.
The Scottish Locations
Did Shakespeare visit Scotland? The truth is...no one knows. City annals in Perth record a visit by an English theater company in 1599, possibly at the invitation of King James VI (shortly to be James I of England, too). This was probably the same group, later known as the King’s Men, that Shakespeare had worked with for most of his adult life. James I was a great fan of the company, giving them a royal patent in 1603 that named them the King’s Men. The first player named on that charter, Lawrence Fletcher, is cited in the Perth records. But there is nothing to indicate that the second name, Shakespeare, was among the company traveling north.
Nevertheless, there is a strong tradition that Shakespeare did, indeed, visit Scotland and, there, gathered inspiration for future plays. Some authors have even suggested that he preceded Dan Brown to the famous Rosslyn Chapel and Castle as a guest of the St. Clair family and visited Glamis Castle along the way. They cite the bucolic paradise pictured in As You Like It and its key character, Rosalind, as evidence of the links. Did Shakespeare also pick up threads of the darker story that would become Macbeth? One can only guess, but whether through reading history books such as Holinshed’s or through personal acquaintance, he certainly had a grasp of Scottish geography.
In our interpretation of the story, we have placed much of the tale in the Moray area, running from Forres to Inverness and then to the western reaches of the Great Glen in Lochaber, where our version of the story begins. Anyone wishing to find traces of the real Macbeth in modern Scotland will be sorely disappointed for the most part. Though historians may acclaim him as one of the nation’s greatest kings, the public perception is largely shaped by Shakespeare’s fictional portrayal. The ancient castle of Inverness has long been lost, and its Victorian replacement, by the river, is probably not in the same position.
A few miles from Inverness, beyond the bleak battlefield of Culloden, lie the Balnuaran of Clava, a set of prehistoric burial cairns half hidden in woodland. They do not feature in Shakespeare any more than our invented meeting between the witches and Lady Macbeth. But anyone hunting the atmosphere of Macbeth in the Highlands will surely find it here. A little farther east, Forres, cited as a royal palace by Shakespeare and here, has no great remains from the eleventh century, though it does possess Sueno’s Stone, which features in our version of the story. An imposing and bloodthirsty monument that probably predated Macbeth, it now stands protected in a glass case on a hill at the edge of this small, pretty town.
Glamis Castle is a popular destination, for its beautiful building and royal connections, though the links with Macbeth are, frankly, flimsy. Scone, not far away to the southeast, is still visibly part of the story of Scottish kings. The “moot hill” or “hill of credulity” can be seen in the grounds of Scone Palace. Scottish monarchs were crowned here from the ninth century on. A replica of the Stone of Scone marks the site of the original today, in front of a small Gothic chapel. The last monarch to be crowned on the site was Charles II, who took the throne of Scotland in 1651, nine years before he was restored to the English throne.
Fifteen miles north lies the charming old capital of Dunkeld, which Duncan used as a base. On the outskirts lies Birnam and its wood, still green and leafy, and an ancient hilltop fort. Duncan’s father, Crinan, was abbot of Dunkeld and was killed by Macbeth when he rose up against his forces after Duncan’s death. Malcolm’s use of branches from the wood for camouflage is taken straight from the pages of Holinshed.
Dunsinane is thirteen miles as the crow flies from Birnam, but more like twenty by circuitous roads. It is, as befits the story, a bleak spot, a bare, lone crag rising to 1,012 feet above the hamlet of Collace. It�
�s a stiff and steep walk to the top, once the site of an ancient fort going back to the Iron Age. Shakespeare’s Macbeth died here. The real-life Macbeth survived for another three years before succumbing to Malcolm’s forces close to Aberdeen.
Which one is more real? Stand breathless on the summit of Dunsinane, listening to the wind whistling, gazing across the valley of the Tay toward the green forest of Birnam in the distance and you can only wonder.
About the Authors
Photograph by Bill DeLoach
British-born author A. J. Hartley is the Russell Robinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and works as a scholar, screenwriter, dramaturg, and theater director. In addition to seven best- selling novels, he is the author of The Shakespearean Dramaturg; an upcoming performance history of Julius Caesar; a book on Shakespeare and political theatre; and numerous articles and book chapters. He also edits the performance journal, Shakespeare Bulletin, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He is married with one son and lives in Charlotte.
Photograph by Mark Bothwell
David Hewson is the author of seventeen novels that have been published in twenty different languages. His first book, Semana Santa, was transformed into a movie, and his nine-book, Rome-based Nic Costa series is currently in development for television. Before devoting himself full-time to writing, he worked as a journalist for the London Times, the Sunday Times, and The Independent.
