SOURCE: Kinney, Arthur F. “Scottish History, the Union of the Crowns and the Issue of Right Rule: The Case of Shakespeare's Macbeth.” In Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice, edited by Jean R. Brink and William F. Gentrup, pp. 18-53. Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Kinney discusses how Shakespeare manipulated the Macbeth story in Holinshed's Chronicles to comment subtly on the political climate surrounding the succession and reign of James I.]

At only one point in the entire sweep of The Historie of Scotlande, conteyning the beginning, increase, proceedings, continuance, Actes and Gouernemente of the Scottish nation, from the originall thereof vnto the yeare. 1571. Gathered and written in the English tongue by R. H. (1577) does Raphael Holinshed disrupt the flow of his narrative and leap centuries forward into his very own time. This unique temporal splicing comes at the point when Macbeth is unable to shake from his mind the words of ‘the three weird sisters’ who prophesy the succession of Banquho's line rather than his own and his attempt to have Banquho and his son murdered. Banquho is slain; as for his son Fleaunce, we are told, ‘wherevpon to auoyde further perill he fledde into Wales’ (sig. Q3v).

But here I thinke it shall not much make agaynst my purpose, if (according to the order which I find obserued in the Scottish historie) I shall in fewe wordes here rehearse the originall line of those kings, whiche haue discended from the foresayde Banquho, that they, whiche haue enioyed the kingdome by so long continuaunce of discent, from one to an other, & that euen vnto these our dayes may be knowen from whence they had theyr first beginning.

(Sigs Q3v-Q4)

Thus he launches the work's longest digression, one which will occupy more than two full folio pages before he is done.

Fleaunce therfore (as before is sayd) fled into Wales, where shortly after by his curteous and amiable behauiour, he grew into such fauour and estimation with the prince of that countrey, that he might vnneath haue wisshed any greater: at length also he came into such familiar acquaintance with the sayd princes daughter, that she of courtesie in the ende suffred him to get hir with childe: whiche being once vnderstood, hyr father the prince conceyued such hatefull displeasure towardes Fleaunce, that he finally slewe him, and helde his daughter in moste vile estate of seruitude, for that she had consented to be on this wise defloured by a straunger.

At the last yet, she was deliuered of a sonne named Walter, who within few yeares proued a man of greater courage and valiancie, than any other had commonly bene founde, although he had no better bringing vp than (by his graūdfathers appointment) amongst the baser sorte of people. Howbeit he shewed euer euen frō his infancie, that there reigned in him a certaine stoutnesse of stomake, ready to attēpt high enterprises.

(Sig. Q4)

But this stout man of courage is also a man quick to anger, and when one of his companions, during an argument, taunts him for being a bastard,

in his raging furie he ran vpō him & slew him out of hād.

Then was he glad to flee out of Wales, and cōming into Scotland to seeke some friendshippe there, he happened into the cōpanie of suche Englishmen, as were come thither with Queene Margaret, & behaued himself so soberly in all his demeanour, that within a while he was highly esteemed amongst them.

Not long after by such meanes atteyning to the degree of high reputation, he was sent with a great power of men into the Westerne Isles, into Galloway, and other partes of the realme, to deliuer the same of the tirannie and iniurious oppression there exercised by diuers misgouerned persons: which enterpryse according to his commission, he atchieued with such prudent policie & manhoode, that immediately vpon his returne to the court, he was made lord Steward of Scotland, with assignmēt to receyue the kings rents & dueties out of the partes of the realm.

(Sig. Q4)

The bastard Walter thus takes up a position at court and, along with it, the new surname of Steward (in time Stewart), begets his son Alan who later journeys with Godfrey of Boulogne and William the Conqueror, king of England, to the Holy Land; and this son, thus redeemed, generates a line that marries into the family of Robert the Bruce who begets in turn Robert II of Scotland. Five generations later, Holinshed reports,

Iames the fourth maried Margaret daughter to king Henry the seuenth of England, and begot on hyr Iames the fifth, who marying firste the Lady Magdalene daughter to Frauncis the French king, had no issue by hyr for that she died in the yeare next after hyr comming into Scotland, and then shortely after the sayde Iames the fifth maried the lady Mary de Lorrain, Duches of Longuile a widow, and by hyr had he issue Marie queene of Scotland, that tooke to husbande Henry Stewart lord Dernly, by whom she had issue Charles Iames, nowe king of Scotland.

(Sig. Q4v)

By 1606, when Shakespeare came to write his own dramatization of Scottish history by choosing the story of Macbeth out of Holinshed and following his 1577 text with detailed fidelity, this son of Mary Stuart, James VI of Scotland, had also, for some three years, been James I of England and the patron of Shakespeare's company of players, the King's Men. It was, I would argue, just this very digression, so singular in the fabric of Holinshed's long history of the Scottish James's nation, that drew Shakespeare to the story of Macbeth as his own singular dramatization of his new king's other country, and it is therefore surprising that no one has yet noticed this connection as a salient factor in Shakespeare's decision to write a play about Scotland.

But there is much more to the matter than simply this: for Shakespeare, unable to provide such a lengthy genealogy, invents his own dramatic alternative in one of his singular departures from the whole tradition of Macbeth through every Scottish history from Hector Boece onwards; he adds to the traditional story ‘A show of eight Kings, the last with a glass in his hand; Banquo following’ (4.1.s.d.111).¹ This dumb show, in imitation of the various Lord Mayor's shows and others which at the time were paying tribute to the new king by displaying his lineage from Brut himself,² completes the anxiety Macbeth shows over ‘The woordes also of the three weird sisters, [which] wold not out of his mind, which as they promised him the kingdome, so lykewise did they promise it at the same time, vnto the posteritie of Banquho’ (sig. Q3v), a part of the story left dangling in Holinshed's account. In Shakespeare's play, it is just this anxiety, moreover, that is at explicit issue. The three ‘secret, black, and midnight hags’ (4.1.48) have just told Macbeth that he ‘shall never vanquish'd be, until / Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him’ (4.1.92-4), and he has just shown momentary relief—‘That will never be: / Who can impress the forest; bid the tree / Unfix his earth-bound root? Sweet bodements! good!’ (4.1.94-6)—when his content is again riven with concern: ‘Yet my heart / Throbs to know one thing: tell me (if your art / Can tell so much), shall Banquo's issue ever / Reign in this kingdom?’ (4.1.100-3). Only his forceful insistence breaks the reticence of the three women and each, in turn, commands the dumb show which follows. In his response, Macbeth encapsulates Holinshed's genealogy, but in a way at once startling and striking.

Thou art too like the spirit of Banquo: down!
Thy crown does sear mine eye-balls:—and thy hair,
Thou other gold-bound brow, is like the first:—
A third is like the former:—filthy hags!
Why do you show me this?—A fourth?—Start, eyes!
What! will the line stretch out to th' crack of doom?
Another yet?—A seventh?—I'll see no more:—
And yet the eighth appears, who bears a glass,
Which shows me many more; and some I see,
That two-fold balls and treble sceptres carry.
Horrible sight!—Now, I see, ‘tis true;
For the blood-bolter'd Banquo smiles upon me,
And points at them for his.

(4.1.112-24)

This must have been a singularly stunning moment at the Globe, at Whitehall or at Hampton Court when, forced by these lines, in the midst of a play about early Scotland, suddenly the representation of the audience's own king appears on stage holding a mirror (showing himself? showing himself to Macbeth? showing the audience themselves so they too are swept into the play?) while the fact that this line will ‘stretch out to th' crack of doom’ announces, as James was himself announcing, with both his sons as heirs (unlike the unmarried Elizabeth), the permanence of the Stuart line upon the English throne.

That this appearance, that this reference, are both meant by Shakespeare to incorporate James—in what has recently been argued to be a play either praising or attacking the king³—is verified by the reference to the new ‘two-fold balls and treble sceptres’ which James introduced into world history in 1603. The ‘coronation emblems’⁴ grew directly from the accessionary formula drawn up by England's ‘Great Council’ in a draft written and corrected by Robert Cecil and published in London on 24 March 1603—the day following Elizabeth I's death—as A Proclamation, declaring the undoubted Right of our Soveraigne Lord King James, to the Crowne of the Realmes of England, Fraunce, and Ireland.:

Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to call to his mercy out of this transitory life our Soveraignty Ladie, the High and Mightie Prince, Elizabeth late Queene of England, France, and Ireland, by whose death and dissolution, the Imperiall Crowne of these Realmes aforesaid are now absolutely, wholly, and solely come to the High and Mightie Prince, James the sixt King of Scotland, who is lineally and lawfully descended from the body of Margaret, daughter to the High and Renowned Prince, Henrie the seventh King of England, France, and Ireland, his great Grandfather, the said Lady Margaret being lawfully begotten of the body of Elizabeth, daughter to King Edward the fourth (by which happy conjunction both the houses of Yorke and Lancaster were united, to the joy unspeakable of this Kingdome, formerly rent & torne by the long dissention of bloody and Civil Warres) the same Lady Margaret being also the eldest sister of Henry the eight, of famous memorie King of England as aforesayd:

We therefore the Lords Spirituall and Temporall of this Realme, being here assembled, united and assisted with those of her late Majesties Privie Counsell, and with great numbers of other principall Gentlemen of quality in the Kingdome, with the Lord Maior, Aldermen, and Citizens of London, and a multitude of other good Subjects and Commons of this Realme, thirsting now after nothing so much as to make it knowen to all persons, who it is that by Law, by Lineall succession, and undoubted Right is now become the onely Soveraigne Lord and King of these Imperiall Crownes.⁵

This catalogue of supporters shows the Council's urgency in putting forth a united front to insure a peaceful succession to the English throne, so that the insistent tone here, which might seem heavyhanded to us, makes good sense. What is not so necessary, and surely more surprising, is the double use of ‘imperial’, a word introduced by Henry VIII when he proclaimed his title as King of England and France, but a word used infrequently by Elizabeth (in reference to her peaceful rule of Christendom, after her English predecessor Constantine) and even more rarely by Mary I. Even more surprising yet, there is Shakespeare's use of the word, but not in connection with the eighth king in the dumb show of Act 4, nor in connection with Banquo, but by Macbeth himself in relation to his first meeting with the three sisters. Of the truth of their predictions that he will be both Glamis and Cawdor, Macbeth remarks in an aside early in the play that these ‘Two truths are told, / As happy prologues to the swelling act / Of the imperial theme’ (1.3.127-9). In Shakespeare's play, that is, the thought of imperialism, of empire, is not only a demonic response by a man who will soon turn regicide; it is also the very motive that will cause Macbeth to assassinate Duncan. ‘The imperial theme’ is, in Macbeth, self-aggrandizement turned evil.

Shakespeare's play thus links Macbeth to James VI and I long before it makes a connection between the new British king and his ancestry, between James and the line of Banquo which Holinshed singularly points out. Perhaps more forcible for Shakespeare's Jacobean audiences, however, was the connection between the idea of imperialism and prophecy. As long ago as 1922, Lilian Winstanley, in an early study of topicality in Shakespeare, noted that the imperialism realized (and proclaimed) by and for James was the culmination of the traditional British prophecy of Merlin. ‘According to the Merlin prophecies’, she writes, ‘as interpreted by the Tudor bards’,

the Arthurian Empire was to be restored and the unity of Britain to be achieved when the true British line succeeded to the English throne. Both the Tudors and the Stuarts claimed descent from the ancient British line. The Tudors, as their genealogy by Camden shows, claimed descent from Prince Llewelyn and, through him, from Brutus the Trojan. The Stuarts were similarly derived through Fleance the son of Banquo.⁶

This fact was broadcast, in 1603, by Robert Walgrave, the printer to His King's Majesty, in his book Scottish Prophecies. The collections include a prophecy given by one ‘Sibylla Regina’: according to Walgrave's book,

she maketh mention of two noble princes and emperors the which is called Leones, these two shall subdue and overcome all earthly princes to their diadem and crown, and also be glorified and crowned in heaven among saints. The first of these two is Magnus Constantinus. The second is the ninth king of the name of Steward of Scotland, the which is our most noble king,⁷

while another prophecy from Thomas the Rymer reads,

Where dwells thou or in what country, or who shall rule the Isle of Britain From the North to the South Sea? a French wife shall bear the son. Shall rule all Britain to the sea, that of the Bruce's blood shall come, as near to the ninth degree.⁸

At the same time as Cecil's proclamation and Walgrave's book, James was, according to an entry in the State Papers, Venetian for 17 April 1603, authorizing and promulgating just such an interpretation: ‘He will stay a few days in Berwick’, the correspondent writes to Italy,

in order to arrange the form of the union of these two crowns. It is said that he is disposed to abandon the titles of England and Scotland, and to call himself King of Great Britain, and like that famous and ancient King Arthur to embrace under one name the whole circuit of one thousand seven hundred miles which includes the United Kingdom now possessed by His Majesty in that island.⁹

Wherever Shakespeare and his audience first heard of James's own imperial plans, it was surely common enough knowledge throughout England by 20 October 1604 when James himself issued from Westminster ‘A Proclamation concerning the Kings Majesties Stile, of King of Great Britaine, &c.’, which begins,

As often We call to minde the most joyfull and just Recognition made by the whole body of our Realme, in the first Session of our High Court of Parliament, of that blessing which it hath pleased God to reserve many yeeres in his Providence to our Person, and now in the fulnesse of the time of his Disposition, to bestow upon Us; Namely the blessed Union, or rather Reuniting of these two mightie, famous, and ancient Kingdomes of England and Scotland, under one Imperiall Crowne: So often doe We thinke, that it is our duetie, to doe our uttermost endeavour, for the advancement and perfection of that woorke.¹⁰

But the idea of the Union of the Crowns, so beloved by James,¹¹ was not universally favoured. Lord Cranbourne writes from Whitehall to Mr Winwood on 23 October 1604, audibly clucking his tongue, ‘I do send you here a Proclamation, published this day, of his Majesty's changing his Title, and taking upon him the name and stile of “King of Great Britaine, France, and Irelande, &c.” by which henceforth he desires to be acknowledged, both at home and abroad’—that, Camden adds wryly in his Annals—‘the name of England might be extinct’.¹²

But while to some this seemed a sudden seizure of extended power and notorious self-promotion, to others the realization at long last of a mythic tradition from antiquity found deep-rooted popular appeal. Anthony Munday, for one, made it the subject of ‘The Triumphes of Re-United Britania’, the show he wrote to honour Sir Leonard Holliday, Knight, and to ‘solemnize his entrance as Lorde Mayor of the Citty of London, on Tuesday the 29th of October 1605’. The pageant central to Munday's show is set

On a mount, triangular as the Island of Britayne it selfe is described to bee, [where] we seate in the supreme place, under the shape of a fayre and beautifull Nymph, Britania hir selfe, accosted with Brute's devided Kingdoms, in the like female representations, Leogria, Cambria, and Albania.¹³

Britannia insists on calling herself Albion even when Brute shows her how he has saved her from ‘Goemagot and his barbarous brood’ and teaches her modesty and ‘the means how to raigne as an Imperial Lady’ (p. 568). But her three daughters, jealous of Brute's preference for his sons, divide Britannia into ‘three several estates, the hurt and inconvenience whereon ensuing, each one of them modestly delivered unto him’. Brute then

staies their further progres in reproofe, by his and their now present revyved condition, beeing raised againe by the powerfull vertue of poesie (after such length of time) to behold Britaniae's former felicity againe, and that the same Albania, where Humber slew his son Albanact, had bred a second Brute, by the blessed marriage of Margaret, eldest daughter to King Henrie the Seaventh, to James the Fourth King of Scotland, of whom our second Brute (Royall King James) is truely and rightfully descended; by whose happye comming to the Crowne, England, Wales, and Scotland, by the first Brute severed and divided, are in our second Brute re-united and made one happy Britania again. Peace and quietnesse bringing that to passe, which warre nor any other meanes could attaine unto. For ioy of which sacred Union and combination, Locrine, Camber, and Albanact, figured there also in their antique estates, deliver up theyr Crownes and Sceptres, applauding the day of this long-wisht coniunction, and Troyanova (now London) incites fair Thamesis, and the rivers that bounded the severed Kingdoms (personated in faire and beautifull Nymphs) to sing Paeans and Songs of Triumph, in honor of our second Brute, Royall King James.

(Pp. 568-9)

But this citizen's pageant by Munday, draper of London (as he styles himself), merely reflected the large number of pamphlets that, doubtless under James's orchestration, were flowing forth from Scotland and England alike from 1604 onwards. Thus in Of the Union of Britayne (1604), Robert Pont notes of this ‘civill union’ that

The first fruit springing out of this roote, as to me seemeth, is the enlarging of the empire: that is, a compacting of all the British isles and reducing them within the circle of one diadem, whereby the renown and safety of the inhabitants and free denisons is encreased, the enemie's feare augmented, and his pride abated. For whom should the Britons dread (if God be favorable) being made one entire bodie undevided.¹⁴

John Russell, meantime, writes concurrently in A Treatise of the Happie and Blissed Unioun (also 1604),

It is now ane great comfort, that qhairas the subjectis of this ile remanit of befoir in ane sea of discordes, dissentiones and civill uearis, againes the law of God and Christiane cheritie, now in the fulnes of tyme sal be perfytlie and hairtlie unitit forevir,¹⁵

while an Englishman, the Oxonian John Doddridge, writes in A Breif Consideracion of the Unyon (also 1604) that ‘such unyon is necessary, and the fruite thereof is tranquilitie, peace and future felicite of government, when bothe people shal bee equallie respected by the lawes’.¹⁶ Together, such a play and such pamphlets would seem to mount an effective counterargument to Macbeth's imperial theme and together align themselves with the show of eight kings culminating in the triumph of the eighth king, James himself, which is for Macbeth a most ‘Horrible sight!’.

Such public performances and writing were nevertheless at sharp odds with other facts surrounding James in London, facts that caused Sir Thomas Edmonds, for one, to write nervously to the Earl of Shrewsbury from Whitehall on 5 December 1604 that Scots were now enjoying new power in London trade and were more and more manifest in England. And so they were: James arrived in England with his own large Scottish entourage; in 1604 he built his own forces by lavishly giving out an unprecedented number of new titles—1,161 new knighthoods in that year alone—and surrounded himself in his privy chamber and bedchamber almost exclusively with Scotsmen, strangers and aliens to England who seemed alone to share the secrets and exercise the power of this strange and somewhat alien king who still persistently styled himself a king of Peace.

Indeed, James had already empowered himself theoretically in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (Edinburgh, 1598; London, 1603), in which he attempted to answer the opposition to his rule from the recalcitrant Scottish Kirk by giving his own royal position a special divine sanction independent of the church.

Kings are called Gods by the propheticall King Dauid, because they sit vpon God in his Throne in the earth, and haue the count of their administration to giue vnto him. Their office is, To minister Iustice and Iugement to the people, as the same Dauid saith: To aduance the good, and punish the euill, as he likewise saith: To establish good Lawes to his people, and procure obedience to the same, as diuers good Kings of Iudah did: To procure the peace of the people, as the same David saith: To decide all controuersies that can arise among them, as Salomon did: To be the Minister of God for the weale of them that doe well, and as the minister of God, to take vengeance vpon them that doe euill as S. Paul saith. And finally, As a good Pastour, to goe out and in before his people as is said in the first of Samuel: That through the Princes prosperitie, the peoples peace may be procured, as Ieremie saith.¹⁷

The difficulty (as in Macbeth) is that such a sense of divine right and unlimited authority can lead to a sense of absolutist power inherent in tyranny. For James seems clearly to theorize what Macbeth enacts in a work King James himself saw published in England just three years before Shakespeare's play.

The kings therefore in Scotland were before any estates or rankes of men within the same, before any Parliaments were holden, or lawes made: and by them was the land distributed (which at the first was whole theirs) states erected and decerned, and formes of gouernement deuised and established: And so it followes of necessitie, that the kings were authors and makers of the Lawes, and not the Lawes of the kings. …

And according to these fundamentall Lawes already alleged, we daily see that in the Parliament (which is nothing else but the head Court of the king and his vassals) the lawes are but craued by his subiects, and onely made by him at their rogation, and with their aduice: for albeit the king make daily statutes and ordinances, enioyning such paines thereto as hee thinkes meet, without any aduice of Parliament or estates; yet it lies in the power of no Parliament, to make any kinde of Lawe or Statute, without his Scepter be to it, for giuing it the force of a Law. … And as ye see it manifest, that the King is ouer-Lord of the whole land: so is he Master ouer euery person that inhabiteth the same, hauing power ouer the life and death of euery one of them.

(Sigs R5-R5v)

In a later speech to the Star Chamber, he would add, ‘That which concernes the mysterie of the Kings power, is not lawfull to be disputed; for that is to wade into the weaknesse of Princes, and to take away the mysticall reuerence, that belongs vnto them that sit in the Throne of God’ (sig. Aaa3).

Once in England, James combined such ideas with his understanding of the ancient Roman lex civile, preserved and codified in Justinian's Institutes and Digest—quod principi placuit legis vigorem habet (the ruler's will has the force of law): civil law derived not from republican but from imperial Rome. In due course, he would also add further miraculous force to his power which he puts forth most clearly in his Meditation upon the Lord's Prayer—

I know not by what fortune, the dicton of Pacificus was added to my title, at my coming into England; but that of the Lion, expressing true fortitude, having been my dicton before: but I am not ashamed of this addition; for King Salomon was a figure of Christ in that he was a king of Peace. The greatest gift that our Saviour gave his Apostles, immediately before his Ascension, was that he left his Peace with them¹⁸—

thus lending to his imperial sense of rule the elements of absolutism, morality and magic not unlike the power Macbeth assumes (1.3.107).

Macbeth is not the only character in Shakespeare openly concerned with the imperial theme. It is employed one other time in the play—by Malcolm, who says of himself that ‘A good and virtuous nature may recoil, / In an imperial charge’ (4.3.19-20). Both times the word imperial strikes a bold anachronistic chord. It is a term foreign to the fabric of Scottish history, unknown during the reign of Macbeth (1040-58), and nowhere to be found in Holinshed. Like the ‘show of eight Kings’ it ruptures the earlier history with contemporary relevance and application; it forces Shakespeare's audience to put their own king into this play of Scottish history. Whatever imperialism comes to mean in Macbeth, it is thus clear that the ‘imperial theme’ is the signifying subtext of this very political play and that somewhere between ‘the imperial theme’ and ‘an imperial charge’ there lies encoded Shakespeare's real purpose in writing his only Scottish play.

II

Holinshed's Historie of Scotlande was, in English hands, the Scottish national history, their national epic. Attentively researched, compiled and written, later expanded by a host of successors to Holinshed in 1587, it was widely disseminated and, so far as we can tell, widely respected even as it was clearly made to serve the Tudor regime under whose rule it was both begun and completed. ‘Holinshed's Historie demonstrated most fully the idea that history could be written by agglomeration’, F. J. Levy writes in Tudor Historical Thought. ‘Holinshed's wide reading in the sources of English History was used not to determine the truth in matters doubtful but merely to add more and more detail’,¹⁹ and the same is true of the Scottish chronicle although it relies most heavily on the romantic telling—even fictionalizing—of the earlier sixteenth-century history of Scotland by Hector Boece. But Holinshed's relentless accumulation of stories and details and that history's easy surrender to more than one version if more than one had come down, was especially propitious for men like Shakespeare, as Levy also contends: ‘In a way, this made him the ideal source for the playwrights; everything needful (and a great deal more) was included, but the “construction,” the ordering of events, was left to others, who thus could make of the multitudinous facts what they would’ (p. 184).

Rereading the entire 1577 Historie now, we can see how closely Shakespeare's Macbeth captures the character of Scotland portrayed in Holinshed's chronicle and in William Harrison's prefatory description of the country. For Harrison, at the outset, the Highlands (including Forres, Inverness, Cawdor and Glamis) as well as the Lowlands and border country are wild, often barren and noted for the cruelty and savagery of geography and human behaviour.

For not only in Anandale, but in all the Dales or Vales afore rehearsed, are many strong theeues, which often spoile the countrey, and exercise much cruel slaughter vpon such as inhabite there, in any troublous time. These robbers (bicause the English do border vpō their dry marches, & are their perpetual enimies) do oftē make forcible rodes into their English boundes, for their better maintenaunce and sustētation, or els they pilfer priuily from them, as men leading in the meane season a poore beggerly & very miserable life. In the time of peace also, they are so iniured to theft and rapine, that they cānot leaue off to steale at home: & notwitstāding that they be often very sore handled therefore, yet they think it prayse worthy to molest their aduersaries, as they call the truer sort, whereby it cōmeth to passe, that many riche & fertile places of Scotlād lie wast & voyde of culture for feare of their inuasion.

(Sig. *a2)

Their life was, as Shakespeare notes elsewhere, barren and hard.²⁰

Their apparell was not made for brauery & pōpe, but as should seeme best to couer their bodies & serve their appointed vses, their hosen were shaped also of linnen or wollen, whiche neuer came higher than their knees, their breeches were for the most part of hēpe, clokes also they had for winter made of course wooll, but in the sommertime they ware of the finest that coulde be gotten. They slept moreouer eyther vpon the bare floore or pallets of straw, teaching their childrē euen from theyr infancy to eschew ease, & practise the like hardnesse: & sith it was a cause of suspitiō of the mothers fidelity towarde hir husbande, to seeke a strange nurse for hir childrē (although hir milke fayled) ech womā wold take intollerable paines to bring vp & nourish hir owne children. They thought them furthermore not to be kindly fostered, except they were so well nourished after their birthes with the milke of theyr brestes, as they were before they were borne with the bloud of their owne bellies, nay they feared least they should degenerate & grow out of kinde, except they gaue them sucke themselues, and eschewed strange milke, therfore in labour & painfullnesse they were equall, and neither sexe regarded the heate in sommer or cold in winter, but trauailed barefooted, & in time of warres the mē had their cariages & victuals trussed behinde thē on their horses, or els vpon their owne shulders without refusall of any labour, enioyned vnto them by their Captaines. If it hapned them at any time to be vanquished, they fled with such speede to the mountaines, that no horse might ouertake thē, & very often escaped. … Their light armour in those dayes consisted of the launce, the bow, the long sword which hanged at the side of the owner, & therto a buckler, but afterward heauier armour came into generall vsage. In these dayes also the womē of our country were of no lesse courage than the men, for al stout maydēs & wiues (if they were not with childe) marched so wel into the field as did the men, & so soone as the army did set forward, they slew the first liuing creature that they foūd, in whose bloud they not onely bathed their swordes, but also tasted thereof with their mouthes, with no lesse religiō & assurance conceyued, than if they had already bene sure of some notable & fortunate victory: when they saw their owne bloud run frō them in the fight, they were neuer a whit astonnied with the matter, but rather doubling their courages, with more egernesse they assailed their enimies.

(Sigs *b3v-b4)

In such a primitive and savage environment, the narrative which Holinshed (following Boece) constructs almost invariably takes on the rhythm of bad men alternating with good, evil kings alternating with admirable ones. Natural or military deaths, too, alternate with regicides, beginning early when, according to a marginal note, ‘Feritharis suddainly died’: ‘Feritharis lyued not passing a three moneths after this business, but died sodenly in the night, the trueth not beyng knowen whether by naturall death, or through treason of Ferlegus and certaine of his complices, (whereof there was no small suspition) for that he togither with them found meanes to flee first to the Pictes, and after to the Brytaines, where he passed the residue of his lyfe in great shame and ignominie’ (sig. A6v). Such sudden deaths, often early in a reign, create the need for a new means of succession called tanistry, such as we find in Shakespeare's play:

This ordinance also they decreed to be obserued as a lawe from thence foorth euer after, that if the king died leauing no issue, but suche as were vnder age to succeede him, then shoulde one of his nearest Cousins, such as was thought moste meete to occupie the roome, be chosen to raigne as king during his life, and after his deceasse the crowne to reuerte vnto his predecessors issue without controuersie, if the same were ones growne vp to lawfull age.

(Sig. A6)

Also, almost invariably, the transfer of reigns is depicted by strange sights and visions in what appears, therefore, to be a highly superstitious culture.

A little before hys falling into the handes of the Romaines, there were sundrye straunge syghtes seene in Albion, as fighting of horsemenne abroade in the fieldes, wyth greate slaughter, as seemed on both partyes: and forthwyth the same so vanyshed awaye, that no appearaunce of them coulde any where bee perceyued.

Also a sort of Woolues in the night season set vpon suche as were keeping cattayle broade in the fieldes, and caried away one of them to the woodes, & in the morning suffered him to escape from amongst them againe.

Moreouer at Carrike there was a chylde borne, perfit in al his limmes, sauing the head, whiche was like to a Rauens. These vnketh sightes and monsters put the people in no small feare: but after that Caratake was restored to his libertie and countrey, all was interpreted to the best.

(Sigs C4v-C5)

But the significance is usually not so clear: visions, omens, prophecies and magic are often debatable, confusing, terrifying, inscrutable.

It hath bene reported, that as hee marched foorth towardes his enimies, sundrie straunge sights appeared by the way. An Egle was seene almost all a whole day, flying vp and downe ouer the Scottishe armie, euen as though she had laboured hyr selfe weary.

Also an armed man was seene flying round aboute the armye, and suddenly vanished away.

There fell in lyke manner out of a darke cloude in the fieldes through the whiche the armie shoulde passe, diuers kindes of birdes that were spotted with bloud.

These monstruous sightes troubled mennes mindes diuersly, some construing the same to signifie good successe, and some otherwise. Also the chiefest captaynes amongst the Scottes were not all of one opinion, for some of them waying the great force of the Romaine armie, beyng the greatest that euer had bene brought into thyr countrey before that day, counselled that they shoulde in no wise be fought withall, but rather to suffer them to weary themselues, till vitayles and other prouisions shoulde fayle them, and then to take the aduauntage of them as occasion serued: Other were of a contrarie minde, iudging it beste (sith the whole puissaunce of the Realme was assembled) to giue battayle, least by deferryng time, the courage and great desire which the people had to fight, should waxe faynt and decay.

(Sig. C8)

Such calamitous indecisiveness—not uncommon in Holinshed's account—is captured precisely by Shakespeare in the extended debate between Malcolm and Macduff (4.3), while the expectation of visions and the need to fathom their significance begins as early as Macbeth and Banquo's first encounter with the three weird sisters (1.3). It also helps to explain, in 4.1, Macbeth's second visitation to the sisters, the mysterious display of ‘an armed head’ (4.1.s.d.68), ‘a bloody child’ (4.1.s.d.76), and ‘a child crowned, with a tree in his hand’ (4.1.s.d.86), and Macbeth's fearful and hopeful responses to the prophecy that ‘Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be, until / Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him’ (4.1.92-4) at the very edge of the Highlands, just beyond Perth and the palace at Scone (on the site of Scone Abbey in Macbeth's time) within the very boundaries of Fife itself. And that Shakespeare consulted the 1577 text of Holinshed's Historie is indisputable, since he would have found, and seen, there the stone of Scone where Macbeth and Malcolm are crowned: ‘This stone was in fashion like a seate or Chayre, hauing such a fatall destinie, as the Scottes say, following it, that wheresoeuer it should be founde, there shoulde the Scottish men raigne and haue the supreme gouernance’ (sig. A2). Shakespeare would have also seen and read about the ball and sceptre, along with the sword and (royal, note, but not imperial) crown:

After Feritharis with the full consente of al the people was thus elected king, hee was inthronized with all solempnities in receiuing his kingly ornamēts, as his two edged sword, his Scepter royal, & his crown of gold fashioned in forme of a rampire made for defence of a towne or fortresse, signifying that hee tooke vppon him to preserue the libertie of his countrey to see offendours duely punished, and the execution of lawes with equall iustice truely ministred.

(Sig. A6)

Also pictured there are two woodcuts of slaughtered heads placed on poles, rather than on the towers along London Bridge or outside Parliament as in Shakespeare's day (5.8.26) and, quite astonishingly, a dagger floating in the air. These two last images, in fact, striking as they are in Macbeth, can be found nowhere else in the sources I have examined that lie behind Shakespeare's play; such essential illustrations were inexplicably omitted from the 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles.

Given such assurance of a text behind Shakespeare's play, it is especially instructive to examine all the details he thought suitable for his own art, as well as subtle changes and omissions that are clearly Shakespeare's own. Where Holinshed normally presents strange visions, at the interstices of reigns, in the case of Macbeth they take the form of ‘women in straunge & ferly apparell’ (sig. Q2). This is the account given by Holinshed at nearly the precise centre of his Scottish history.

Shortly after happened a straunge and vncouth wonder, whiche afterwarde was the cause of muche trouble in the realme of Scotlande as ye shall after heare. It fortuned as Makbeth & Banquho iourneyed towarde Fores, where the king as then lay, they went sporting by the way togither without other companie, saue only thēselues, passing through the woodes and fieldes, when sodēnly in the middes of a laūde, there met them.iii. women in straunge & ferly apparell, resembling creatures of an elder worlde, whom when they attentiuely behelde, wondering much at the sight, The first of them spake & sayde: All hayle Makbeth Thane of Glammis (for he had lately entred into that dignitie and office by the death of his father Synel.) The.ii. of them said: Hayle Makbeth Thane of Cawder: but the third sayde: All Hayle Makbeth that hereafter shall be king of Scotland.

Then Banquho, what maner of women (saith he) are you, that seeme so litle favourable vnto me, where as to my fellow here, besides highe offices, yee assigne also the kingdome, appointyng foorth nothing for me at all? Yes sayth the firste of them, wee promise greater benefites vnto thee, than vnto him, for he shall reygne in deede, but with an vnluckie end: neyther shall he leaue any issue behinde him to succeede in his place, where contrarily thou in deede shalt not reygne at all, but of thee those shall be borne whiche shall gouerne the Scottishe kingdome by long order of continiuall discent. Herewith the foresayde women vanished immediatly out of theyr sight. This was reputed at the first but some vayne fantasticall illusion by Makbeth and Banquho, in so muche that Banquho woulde call Makbeth in ieste kyng of Scotland, and Makbeth againe would call him in sporte likewise, the father of many kings. But afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the Goddesses of destinie, or els some Nimphes or Feiries, endewed with knowledge of prophesie by their Nicromanticall science, because euery thing came to passe as they had spoken.

For shortly after, the Thane of Cawder being condemned at Fores of treason against the king committed, his landes, liuings and offices were giuen of the kings liberalitie vnto Makbeth.

The same night after, at supper Banquho iested with him and sayde, now Makbeth thou haste obtayned those things which the twoo former sisters prophesied, there remayneth onely for thee to purchase that which the third sayde should come to passe.

Wherevpon Makbeth reuoluing the thing in his minde, began euen then to deuise howe he mighte attayne to the kingdome: but yet hee thought with himselfe that he must tary a time, whiche shoulde aduaunce him thereto (by the diuine prouidence) as it had come to passe in his former preferment.

But shortely after it chaunced that king Duncane hauing two sonnes by his wife which was the daughter of Sywarde Earle of Northumberland, he made the elder of them cleped Malcolme prince of Cumberlande, as it were thereby to appoint him his successor in the kingdome, immediatly after his deceasse.

Makbeth sore troubled herewith, for that he sawe by this meanes his hope sore hindered, (where by the olde lawes of the realme, the ordinance was, that if he that shoulde succeede were not of able age to take the charge vpon himselfe, he that was nexte of bloud vnto him, shoulde be admitted) he beganne to take counsell howe he might vsurpe the kingdome by force, hauing a iuste quarell so to do (as he tooke the mater,) for that Duncane did what in him lay to defraude him of all maner of title and clayme, whiche hee mighte in tyme to come, pretende vnto the crowne.

The woordes of the three weird sisters also, (of whome before ye haue heard) greatly encouraged him herevnto, but specially his wife lay sore vpon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious brenning in vnquenchable desire to beare the name of a Queene.

At length therefore communicating his purposed intent with his trustie frendes, amongst whom Banquho was the chiefest, vpon confidence of theyr promised ayde, he slewe the king at Enuernes, (or as some say at Botgosuane,) in the. vj. yeare of his reygne.

Then hauing a companie about him of such as he had made priuie to his enterpryce, he caused himselfe to be proclaymed king, and foorthwith went vnto Scone, where by common consent, he receyued the inuesture of the kingdome according to the accustomed maner.

(Sigs Q2-Q2v)

Clearly Shakespeare builds his portrait of the three weird sisters on the vision in Holinshed. But it is Shakespeare's own addition to insert Macbeth's response concerning the ‘happy prologues to the swelling act / Of the imperial theme’ (1.3.128-9), a crucial decision, as we have seen, which suddenly invites an analogy between Macbeth's aside and James's apparent purpose in both treatise and proclamation. Just as importantly, Shakespeare omits any reference to Banquho's open collusion and the wide support Makbeth receives upholding his regicide, as if anyone with imperial ambitions—for Shakespeare, anyway—would be acting alone; he effectively displaces Banquho's support with extended support for Macbeth from his wife. The change is crucial: for while it seems clear enough that, by analogy, Shakespeare would not wish to implicate in the sense of imperialism the Stuart English Parliament, we know from Cecil's own manuscript, and from the proclamation instantly issued in London to secure a peaceful succession to the English throne, that in fact the central council of government did forward the notion of James's imperial claims. We also know that the large numbers of Scots who accompanied James in his long triumphal progress from Edinburgh to Westminster were staunch supporters (if only by silent assent) of his imperialist claims, and where Holinshed allows similar companions for his Makbeth, Shakespeare has him working largely alone. It is as if Shakespeare wishes to locate imperialist—and, by extension, absolutist and tyrannical—actions only in Macbeth and, by such a verbal connection, only in James. It is as if, then, Shakespeare is using his play to warn James VI and I of the inherent dangers of imperialist and absolutist thought.

This conscious political subtext is inescapable, particularly when we add to the relationship between Holinshed and Shakespeare the associated changes in the portrait of Duncan. Holinshed records that

After Malcolme succeeded his Nephew Duncan, the some of his doughter Beatrice: for Malcolme had two daughters, the one which was this Beatrice, being giuen in mariage vnto one Abbanath Crinen, a man of great nobilitie, and Thane of the Isles and west partes of Scotlande, bare of that mariage the foresayd Duncan: The other called Doada, was married vnto Synell the Thane of Glammis, by whom she had issue one Makbeth a valiant gētleman, and one that if he had not bene somewhat cruell of nature, might haue bene thought most worthie the gouermēt of a realme. On the other parte, Duncan was so softe and gentle of nature, that the people wished the inclinations & maners of these two cousins to haue bene so tempered and enterchaungeably bestowed betwixt them, that where the one had to much of clemēcie, and the other of crueltie, the meane vertue betwixt these twoo extremities, might haue reygned by indifferent particion in them bothe, so shoulde Duncan haue proued a worthy king, and Makbeth an excellent captaine.

(Sig. P8)

For Shakespeare's Macbeth, Duncan's soft and gentle nature recommends against regicide in some of the play's most memorable (and apocalyptic) lines:

                    Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu'd, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's Cherubins, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

(1.7.16-25)

As a result, he argues with himself, ‘I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent’ (1.7.25-6), except, he says, imperialistically (in this play, but also in Shakespeare's own age by analogy) ‘Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself’ (1.7.27). (Indeed, the allusion by way of metaphor to horsemanship is especially telling in its appropriateness to James VI.) Holinshed goes on to hold Duncan accountable for the continual insurgences he suffers: ‘it was perceyued how negligent he was in punishing offenders, many misruled persons tooke occasion thereof to trouble the peace and quiet state of the common wealth’ (sig. P8). He also notes of Duncan that Makdowald's rebellion ‘put him in wonderfull feare, by reason of his small skill in warlyke affayres’ (sig. P8v); eventually, after a battle with Makbeth, Makdowald ‘first slew his wife & children, and lastly himselfe’ (sig. P8v). As for the quite separate invasion of the Norwegian Sueno, he avoids battle by drugging the invading forces: ‘The Scots herevpon tooke the iuyce of Mekilwort beries, & mixed the same in theyr ale and bread, sending it thus spiced and confectioned in great abundance vnto their enimies’ (sig. Q1v). Shakespeare pointedly shows Duncan more in command (1.2) and omits Banquo's complicity in the assassination of Duncan; in both these subtle adjustments to a complex historical situation Shakespeare simplifies the narrative so that the imperial-minded Macbeth is, more and more, singularly responsible for the regicide and for its bloody aftermath. Under the permissible, even traditional, revenge plot of Tudor and Stuart drama, then, in which Macbeth's crime is punished by Macduff and the united Scottish and English forces under the command of Malcolm (as well as the death of Lady Macbeth, perhaps by suicide), what Shakespeare actually crafts is a pointed study of the dangers of imperialist thinking, of even the ‘prologues’ to an imperialist theme.

III

Holinshed notes only that Makbeth ‘slewe the king at Enuernes, (or as some say at Botgosuane,) in the. vj. yeare of his reygne’ (sig. Q2v), and scholars have traditionally turned to the neighbouring story of the regicide of King Duff, murdered in his bed, to find a source for Shakespeare. But this is, in a real sense, arbitrary, since from the time of King Feritharis, such acts of regicide have formed a continual motif in the long prose epic of Scottish history according to Holinshed. And there was, in fact, a much closer and more striking analogy—at least for Shakespeare and his first audiences, if not for critics of subsequent generations—in the attempt to assassinate King Henry Darnley, James's own father, in Kirk o' Fields (in present Edinburgh). That death, similar to the one provoked by Lady Macbeth, was thought to have been engineered by Darnley's wife, James's mother, Mary Queen of Scots (who appears as a shadow in Shakespeare's ‘show of eight kings’ if the numbers are to work out since she is the seventh in the historical line of eight rulers, but is seen here as king not queen). Influenced by that near-fatal attempt, but even since childhood, James had a life-long fear that he would be killed in his own bed, a private fear that Shakespeare might well have known since by 1605 Sir Christopher Piggott (with some exaggeration, to be sure) was telling Parliament that only two Scottish kings had died peaceably in their beds in the last 200 years. At that time arguments were mounting (of which this was a part) that the Union of the Crowns urged by James was such an audacious act of imperialism that it might indeed be dangerous to the king's own person.²¹ Again, at the Globe, at Whitehall and at Hampton Court, this play of remote Scottish history clearly raised potential references to the new Scottish king of England.

But most importantly, what this new relationship between Shakespeare and Holinshed, and Shakespeare and his own times, reveals is the reasoning behind—and I think the best justification for—Macbeth 4.3, that long and apparently digressive scene between Malcolm and Macduff in England which has been so puzzling to critics and so awkward for directors. It is this scene that transfers the play, in its fundamental meaning and application, from the ‘imperial theme’ to ‘an imperial charge’. This is, in short, the crucial scene of the play.

The scene takes its basic form (and much of its force) from the classical structure of political treatises on right and wrong rule (here, too, the subject), that of debate, taught to Shakespeare and his fellow Elizabethans as the basic form of learning in the humanist grammar schools and, in the earlier Tudor period, the basic form of plays and of theatre itself. Macduff and Malcolm begin with nearly identical interpretations of Scotland under Macbeth's rule, but there is a significant difference in their reactions. Macduff's is an anguished, spontaneous cri de coeur:

                    Bleed, bleed, poor country!
Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure,
For goodness dare not check thee!

(4.3.31-3)

while, with the identical image, Malcolm's reply is more thoughtful and more calculating:

I think our country sinks beneath the yoke;
It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash
Is added to our wounds.

(4.3.39-41)

But Malcolm, in selectively gathering forces to combat the tyrant, must test the certain loyalty of his followers in an alien land and an uncertain world. He therefore defines what he proclaims to be the constituents of good rule while professing his own denial of them. He claims

I have none: the king-becoming graces,
As Justice, Verity, Temp'rance, Stableness,
Bounty, Perseverance, Mercy, Lowliness,
Devotion, Patience, Courage, Fortitude,
I have no relish of them; but abound
In the division of each several crime,
Acting it many ways. Nay, had I power, I should
Pour the sweet milk of concord into Hell,
Uproar the universal peace, confound
All unity on earth

(4.3.91-100)

to Macduff's horrified response, and proceeds to take on instead Macbeth's evil characteristics to an even greater degree:

                    I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name; but there's no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons, and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust; and my desire
All continent impediments would o'erbear,
That did oppose my will: better Macbeth,
Than such a one to reign.

(4.3.57-66)

In these very lines—and throughout this scene—Shakespeare is once again deliberately implicating James, but not by the anachronistic and divergent uses of Holinshed; rather, he is drawing on the better-known works of another Scottish historian, George Buchanan, widely known as James's personal tutor from 1570 until Buchanan's death in 1582 and the most influential basis of James's own moral and political thought. Our current understanding of Buchanan has actually skewed his intentions and misread his works, so that we have lost touch with a source which Shakespeare would have seen far differently. According to the most recent authority on Buchanan, Roger A. Mason,

The political thought of George Buchanan has almost invariably been studied solely from the standpoint of its radical content. Such a perspective is perhaps inevitable and is certainly not unjustifiable. After all, Buchanan wrote both his brief tract De Jure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus (published in 1579) and his much longer historical work, the Rerum Scoticarum Historia (published in 1582), to justify the revolutionary upheavals that occurred in Scotland in the 1560s [that is, crucially, as an attack on Mary Stuart but in some ways principally to teach corrective lessons to her son James]. Moreover, as an apologist for resistance and tyrannicide and an advocate of elective, limited monarchy, Buchanan was a major contributor to the development of a radical political ideology in sixteenth century Europe. As such he fully deserves the attention bestowed upon him by modern historians.²²

But, Mason continues, ‘an over-exclusive concern with Buchanan the revolutionary monarchomach, the herald of popular sovereignty and modern constitutionalism, has obscured as much of his thought as it has illuminated. Indeed, the tendency of modern historians to concentrate on the nature and sources of his more radical ideas has led both to distorted characterizations of his theory as a whole and to misleading assumptions about its location in the main streams of early modern thought’ (p. 9). What Mason reveals, in a painstaking review of Buchanan's best-known works (in Jacobean Scotland as well as in Tudor and Stuart England), is a political theorist who advocates a limited monarchy grounded in natural law and guided by an inner reason that promotes private Stoicism and public justice—that is, the portrait of an ideal ruler that comes very near to, and may even wholly agree with, the portrait of the ideal king that Malcolm paints for Macduff in Shakespeare's play.

Buchanan's earliest work to develop this theory, his play Baptistes, was a work popular among Tudor grammar schools such as Stratford's as a set text for learning Latin as well as studying political thought. The work was dedicated to James, and pointedly so; Buchanan tells his pupil—by the time of Macbeth, Shakespeare's king—that this work

may seem of particular interest to you as it clearly displays the torments and miseries of tyrants even when they seem to flourish the most. This I consider not only useful but also necessary for you to understand, so that you may begin at once to dislike that which you must always avoid.²³

This play (written in 1540, when Buchanan was on the Continent) centres on John the Baptist, the innocent victim of royal tyranny (like Malcolm; like Macduff). He is confronted by ‘the weak-willed and vacillating Herod, his scheming counsellor the high priest Malchus, and his evil wife Herodias’, as Mason puts it (p. 13)—that is, prototypes in many ways of Shakespeare's Duncan, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. According to Mason,

It is Herodias who gives fullest expression to the essential attributes of tyranny as conventionally perceived. Firstly, she puts the personal interests of the ruler above the common good of the subjects:

Let him that on his head once puts a Crowne, put from him all degrees of Common Duty; let him judge all things honest that conduce to a King's benefit, and hold no fact to be unseemly, that he shall affect for his own safety.

(25)

Secondly, she advocates rule by force and fear:

Now shall we vindicate our royal dignity in future times to be of none derided, now I'll force the stubborne people to speake well of Kings or learne it to their grief, and make them hold that all their Kings commands they gladly must beare and obey though never so unjust.

(25)²⁴

Her effect on Malchus, as well as her arguments, anticipate very closely the language and effect of Lady Macbeth on her husband in Shakespeare's play (1.5.7). As Mason says of Buchanan's central idea, ‘Conceived exclusively in terms of personal character traits, kingship and tyranny were invariably defined in accordance with the moral predilections of the prince himself—in terms, that is, of his propensity to virtue or to vice’ (p. 13), in a play directed initially (in published form) at the young James. The central passage of the play, too—when Herod's daughter requests the head of John the Baptist on a plate—returns to this essential and singular message.

HEROD:
Thou demand'st a gift that ill becomes a Virgin.
DAUGHTER:
To destroy an enemy is no uncomly deed.
HEROD:
Is therefore he an enemy and worthy of a Kings wrath?
DAUGHTER:
He's worthy of such wrath who by his deeds deserves it.
HEROD:
What redresse may I then purchase for the people's hate?
DAUGHTER:
The people must obey and Kings command.
HEROD:
'Tis a Kings duty just things to command.
DAUGHTER:
Kings by commanding, may make those things just which were before unjust.
HEROD:
But Kings command, the Law doth moderate.
DAUGHTER:
If that be right, which pleases Princes, then they rule the Lawes, not the Lawes them.
HEROD:
Then for a King, a Tyrant the people will divulge me.(25)

This is a particularly revealing passage, because it resonates both with Lady Macbeth's promptings to her husband (1.7.47-59; 60-73) and with James's own concept of law preceding the voice of the people in his Trew Law of Free Monarchies.

Buchanan's De Jure Regni (‘Of Kingship’, also directed at James) is more difficult to follow, but the occasion which explicitly gives rise to it again implicates James and makes him its obvious central focus. From the beginning of the De Jure Regni, Mason writes that monarchy and its ‘degenerate form’ tyranny were at issue. According to Maitland, who had just returned from France, the monarchy had been unduly implicated in Darnley's death and unrightfully deposed; Buchanan, thinking her complicit, argued a crime results in punishment. The people, unsure of what constitutes tyranny—and thus punishment—are baffled. In answer,

Buchanan proposes to set up tyranny and kingship as opposites [much as Malcolm does for Macduff] and, by explaining ‘the origin and reasons for the creation of kings’, by contraries, reveal what constitutes a tyrant (1-7). … Pressed by Maitland to clarify his conception of this natural force, Buchanan calls [the natural impulse (vis naturae) implanted in all men] ‘a light divinely infused in our minds’, a light which he further identifies with the law of nature, the ability to distinguish base from worthy things (turpia ab honestis), and finally, with wisdom (sapientia) (10-11). This said, he feels able to conclude that it was neither orators nor lawyers who were the authors of human society but God himself, and that, ‘following Cicero's opinion, I think nothing on earth is more pleasing to God, than associations of men under the law which are known as states (civitates)’ (11). …

But the art of government requires special skills, particularly that prudence or practical wisdom (prudentia) ‘from which, as from a fountain, all laws that are useful for the conservation of human society must proceed and be derived’ (18). A man possessed of the utmost prudence would be ‘a king by nature, not by election’ to whom unlimited power might safely be entrusted. Such paragons, however, are rare and the people are generally obliged to make do with lesser men who, only approximating to the ideal, may not be sufficiently strong to resist the pressures of their own affections. To ensure, therefore, that the less prudent king does not act capriciously, the law is set up as ‘his colleague, or rather as a restraint on his appetites (moderatrix libidnum)’ (18). … The king cannot be set free of the law, Buchanan tells us later in the De Jure Regni, because ‘within a man two most savage monsters, lust and rage (cupiditas & iracundia) [Malcolm's fundamental forms of evil in his debate with Macduff] wage perpetual war with reason (ratio)’ (32). … [Thus for Buchanan] the ideal ruler [is] possessed of perfect reason or prudence—‘steadfast against hatred, love, anger, envy and the other perturbations of the mind’ (31) … [and] Buchanan's ideal king, the prudent ruler impervious to the demands of his passions, is ‘Rex Stoicus, the Stoic King’.²⁶

Such ideas lie behind Malcolm's catechism to Macduff, by way of debate, taking on both the sides of the evil and the good ruler. In concluding he suggests how his own intention, as a good ruler to lead an attack on Macbeth, is from his perspective the will of a ruler who relies on the cooperation and respect of others; not working alone, he is unable to be tyrannical:

                                        Devilish Macbeth
By many of these trains hath sought to win me
Into his power, and modest wisdom plucks me
From over-credulous haste: but God above
Deal between thee and me! for even now
I put myself to thy direction, and
Unspeak mine own detraction; here abjure
The taints and blames I laid upon myself,
For strangers to my nature. I am yet
Unknown to woman; never was forsworn;
Scarcely have coveted what was mine own;
At no time broke my faith: would not betray
The Devil to his fellow; and delight
No less in truth, than life: my first false speaking
Was this upon myself. What I am truly,
Is thine, and my poor country's, to command:
Whither, indeed, before thy here-approach,
Old Siward, with ten thousand warlike men,
Already at a point, was setting forth.
Now we'll together, and the chance of goodness
Be like our warranted quarrel.

(4.3.117-37)

The role he assumes is central, pivotal, to be imitated; but it is not autocratic, absolutist, tyrannical. The final power is God's; Malcolm is merely the leader who will with the help of Siward and his forces, and Macduff, restore Scotland to good (but limited) rule. This idea, of course, has no place in Holinshed's history, but it is basic to Buchanan's. So is the sense of the leader as figurehead in a meaningful and positive way. As Mason comments,

Although bereft of all judicial and most governmental responsibilities, according to Buchanan the king retains in his own person a source of authority that quite transcends the domains of routine justice and administration. For the king is the supreme public figure, always on display and always under the watchful eyes of his subjects. His is the example which the people will follow and on him, therefore, rests responsibility for the moral bearing of his subjects.

(P. 21)

And as if following Buchanan's argument to its very end, Malcolm concludes his presentation with a particular example of just such a ruler—not himself, modestly enough, but Edward the Confessor, whose power comes from God and is released, through the king as agent, to all his people who need him. ‘A most miraculous work in this good King’, Malcolm tells Macduff, setting this miracle against the evil visions of the weird sisters, or the haunting nightmares of Macbeth,

Which often, since my here-remain in England,
I have seen him do. How he solicits Heaven,
Himself best knows; but strangely-visited people,
All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,
The mere despair of surgery, he cures;
Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,
Put on with holy prayers: and 'tis spoken,
To the succeeding royalty he leaves
The healing benediction.

(4.3.147-56)

That he is meant by Shakespeare to be the instructive antitype to the weird sisters and to the prophecy-haunted Macbeth is underlined by Malcolm:

                    With this strange virtue,
He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy;
And sundry blessings hang about his throne,
That speak him full of grace.

(4.3.156-9)

Much of Shakespeare's dialogue between Malcolm and Macduff hovers very closely to the apposite passage in Holinshed, but it is the way in which this whole scene also finds congruence with the ideas of Buchanan on right rule that gives it special force and that may have caused Shakespeare to indulge in such a long dialogue even as his play is gathering momentum towards its denouement. But Edward the Confessor, here Malcolm's clinching argument, is in neither Holinshed or Buchanan at this point²⁷; yet it might have been the most familiar, and most comforting, part of the scene for Shakespeare's own audiences. For the Royal Touch of the English king, performed perfunctorily by Henry VIII, more seriously by Mary I and with some hesitation by Elizabeth I, was being continued by James as part of the legacy of his Union of the Crowns. So James, who was in 1604 invested with the very robes and crown of Edward the Confessor, is again at the forefront of Macbeth, and this time—if this is part of ‘an imperial charge’—he is shown how to rule rightly himself: not to insist that the king makes and breaks laws but to appreciate that his power, and more miraculous touch especially, is given him only as an agent of God and only so long as his attention is not on himself, nor his own authority or aggrandizement, but rather on the general health of his own people. That is the way—Malcolm is explicit—that ‘sundry blessings [will] hang about his throne, / That speak him full of grace’.

IV

But if Shakespeare means the political subtext of Macbeth to be clear to James VI and I (and to his own audiences), it has not been especially clear to playgoers since his time, and it is not especially clear to Macduff in the play. Confronted by an evil and then a good Malcolm, he does not know whom, or what, to believe: ‘Such welcome and unwelcome things at once, / 'Tis hard to reconcile’ (4.3.138-9). These words, firm and sensible as they are, seriously mitigate the force of Malcolm's argument and may be what calls forth Malcolm's reassuring, perhaps urgent, confirmation of his position by analogizing it to Edward of the Royal Touch whose English forces, like Malcolm's Scottish ones, were to deliver Scotland from the tyranny of Macbeth. That may be the way we read Macbeth now, but it was not a possibility in Shakespeare's time: James may have performed the Royal Touch but he did not believe in it, and this was an open secret by 1606; as one observer put it, ‘“he said … he could not see how he could heal the sick without a miracle; but miracles had ceased—they no longer happened.”’²⁸ According to our best (and most exhaustive) scholar on the Royal Touch, Marc Bloch, ‘The accession of James I in 1603 came near to dealing it a mortal blow’ (p. 191). For one so thoroughly aware of Calvinism, James looked at such an event as ‘sheer superstition or imposture’ (p. 191). Bloch notes of James that

At first he expressly asked to be excused from this ceremony. But he subsequently resigned himself to it when his English advisers remonstrated with him, though not without some repugnance. A spy from the Roman Curia has left us a piquant account of the king's first ceremony of touching, which must have taken place in October 1603. The rite was preceded by a sermon from a Calvinist minister. Then the king himself, who despised neither theology nor the art of oratory, proceeded to take up the word. He explained the cruel dilemma confronting him: he was faced with either performing an act that might well be superstitious, or breaking an ancient custom, formerly instituted in order to benefit the subjects of his kingdom. He had therefore decided to make the experiment, but he wished to consider the rite he was about to perform as no more than a kind of prayer addressed to Heaven for the healing of the sick, a prayer in which he invited all those present to join him. At this point, he began to touch the scrofulous; ‘and [our informer slyly adds] during the whole of this speech it was noticeable that the king several times looked towards the Scottish ministers by his side, as though expecting some sign of approval, since he had previously discussed the matter with them’.

(P. 191)

This scepticism is in sharp contrast with the Edward portrayed by Shakespeare. There, as the English Doctor tells Malcolm and Macduff, ‘there are a crew of wretched souls, / That stay his cure: their malady convinces / The great assay of art; but at his touch, / Such sanctity hath Heaven given his hand, / They presently amend’ (4.3.141-5). There is not a whisper of doubt in the Doctor; there is not a whisper of satire in Shakespeare. So the current king of England in 1606, the date of Macbeth, who proposed ‘the imperial theme’ in his persistence on the style of his title and his insistence on the Union of the Crowns, is a man who has superstition rather than faith and who dismisses, unlike his Tudor predecessors—his own cousins, as he repeatedly says in announcing his pedigree—the possibility that the Royal Touch will add to the spiritual, and perhaps the physical, health of his people.

And it is not because James was shy of spectacle with himself in the starring role; to the contrary, the public appearance, rather than the substance, was for him not merely a royal prerogative but a principle of rule. He says as much in his new prefatory letter of 1603 to the English reader of Basilikon Doron, the book of advice to the prince as ruler which he had written some years before for his son Prince Henry: ‘Kings being publike persons, by reason of their office and authority, are as it were set (as it was said of old) vpon a publike stage, in the sight of all the people’ (Workes, sig. M5) and he reiterates it more fully in the body of his text:

It is a trew old saying, That a King is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly doe behold; and therefore although a King be neuer so praecise in the discharging of his Office, the people, who seeth but the outward part, will euer iudge of the substance, by the circumstances; and according to the outward appearance.

(Sig. P6v)

If James were willing to see the Royal Touch in connection with such a philosophy of rule, as Malcolm seems to urge, then the other lines to which this theory becomes applicable are Macbeth's: ‘mock the time’, he tells his wife, ‘with fairest show: / False face must hide what the false heart doth know’ (1.7.82-3). But as Macbeth tells us when considering the ‘swelling act / Of the imperial theme’ (1.3.128-9), such ‘Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings’ and these lead to thought that ‘Shakes so my single state of man, / That function is smother'd in surmise, / And nothing is, but what is not’ (1.3.137-8, 140-2). Clearly, that is the legacy of ‘the imperial theme’, but in this play that way madness, and tyranny, lie.

We are better off, Shakespeare seems to be saying, thinking rather of the ‘imperial charge’ (4.3.20) that examines the rights and responsibilities of good rule and that sees in such proper miracles as the Royal Touch ‘sundry blessings … / That speak him full of grace’ (4.3.158-9). But if this directs Malcolm into war with Scottish forces under Macbeth, he has, at play's end, learned nothing from his father—and that has had dire consequences throughout the play. For once the forces of Macbeth have been defeated, he is quick to seize the rule:

We shall not spend a large expense of time,
Before we reckon with your several loves,
And make us even with you. My Thanes and
          kinsmen,
Henceforth be Earls; the first that ever Scotland
In such an honour nam'd.

(5.9.26-30)

The title of ‘earl’ is, of course, as anachronistic as the word ‘imperial’, but it is also employed, in this instance, by Holinshed. Yet it was the precipitous giving away of titles by Duncan, in naming Malcolm the Prince of Cumberland, that first aroused Macbeth and so initiated the whole tragedy. The play has come full circle; Malcolm seems to have learned nothing. This is surely meant to be the case in Holinshed, where in time Donalbain will attack his brother and seize the throne and new cycles of bloodshed and regicide will take over the annals of Scottish history once again. In the play, though, we are not told that. We are only told that Malcolm will now follow Macbeth to be ‘crown'd at Scone’ (5.9.41). But this final speech in the play could not have been so final—or was it?—in the Globe, or Whitehall, or Hampton Court. For the man who so lavishly, so impulsively gave away titles, including that of earl, was James himself. That act, thought rash by those in Shakespeare's time, was meant by James merely to secure a new government clearly his own and shore up his beloved plan for an imperial Union of the Crowns, but in this play it reverts ‘the imperial charge’ to ‘the imperial theme’. The play's warning is clear enough, but the consequences of the warning remain to be seen. The final political meaning of Macbeth, then, is not in the play, or in any performance of it, but well beyond the stage, in the palaces of Whitehall and of Hampton Court.

Notes

1. All citations of Shakespeare's Macbeth are to the New Arden text, ed. Kenneth Muir (rev., London: Methuen, 1982).

2. For texts and commentaries, see John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities, of King James the First (London, 1828), vol. I; and David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642 (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1971).

3. For example, praise: Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of ‘Macbeth’ (New York: Macmillan, 1950); attack: David Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’ in Politics of Discourse, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 78-116.

4. The phrase is from Sylvan Barnet in his edition of Macbeth for The Signet Shakespeare (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 99n. Henry Cunningham, in the (Old) Arden edition of the play (London: Methuen, 1912) notes: ‘The “two-fold balls” are usually construed as referring to the double coronation of James, at Scone and at Westminster. The “treble sceptres” are in all probability those of England, Scotland and Ireland; but the expression may refer to the title assumed by James on 24 October 1604 viz. “The Most High and Mightie Prince, James, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith”’ (p. 103n.).

5. Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2 vols, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 1:1-2.

6. Macbeth, King Lear and Contemporary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 39-40.

7. Quoted by Winstanley, p. 50.

8. Quoted by Winstanley, p. 50.

9. Quoted by Winstanley, p. 42.

10. Larkin and Hughes, 1:94-5.

11. See my essay, ‘Shakespeare's Macbeth and the Question of Nationalism’ in Literature and Nationalism, ed. Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), pp. 56-75.

12. Both quotations are from Nichols, 1:464.

13. Quoted by Nichols, 1:568.

14. In The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604, Scottish History Society, ed. Bruce R. Galloway and Brian P. Levack (Edinburgh: C. Constable, 1985), p. 17.

15. In Galloway and Levack, p. 137.

16. In Galloway and Levack, p. 143.

17. The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, Iames (London, 1616), sig. R1v.

18. Quoted by Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-1642 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981, 1985), p. 21.

19. (San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1967), p. 184.

20. Dromio in Comedy of Errors, New Arden edition, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1962), 3.2.118.

21. W. Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Normans … to the Year 1803, 36 vols, (London, 1806-20), 1:1097. See Public Record Office, State Papers, 14/7/59 for the argument about the king's person, cited by Brian P. Levack in The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union, 1603-1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 58 n.97.

22. Roger A. Mason, ‘Rex Stoicus: George Buchanan, James VI and the Scottish Polity’ in New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland, ed. John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), p. 9. The bracketed comment is mine.

23. Quoted by Mason, p. 11.

24. Mason, p. 13.

25. Quoted by Mason, p. 14.

26. Mason, pp. 15-18. The interpolated remarks on Macbeth are mine.

27. He is, however, mentioned briefly in Holinshed's history of England.

28. Quoted by Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York: Dorset Press, 1989), p. 188. Bloch gives the original Italian text of the spy's report on p. 388 n.81.