( Upbeat folk music plays throughout)
Hello everyone and welcome to the introductory
talk for Macbeth, directed earlier this year
by Cressida Brown for our Playing Shakespeare
with Deutsche Bank programme,
in a production specially created for young people.
We’re all in the middle of a pretty massive
crisis, and I’m absolutely sure that there
will be some incredible responses to this
time in future literature and drama.
The play you’re about to watch was also written in
the aftermath of an emergency
Although in the case of Macbeth it was crisis averted:
the Gunpowder Plot of the fifth of November
1605, when a group of extremists mined the
Palace of Westminster with vast quantities
of gunpowder, planning to blow up King James
and the country’s entire ruling elite at
the state opening of Parliament. As we know,
the plotters were caught, an event we still
mark today (making us one of very few countries
who celebrate the failure of a revolution
rather than the success of one). Shakespeare
and the King’s Men theatre troupe were right
at the heart of the political fall-out of
the Gunpowder Plot,
which is precisely when Macbeth was being written.
And it’s that context of political crisis
that I want to talk about, because the connection
between the distant Scottish past of the play
and Shakespeare’s England isn’t as remote
as we might think. I’m going to suggest
that Shakespeare was very conscious of some
of the political points he was making in his
terrifying tragedy
of the man who did all it took to become King of Scotland…
Look for Macbeth in your collected Shakespeare,
and you won’t find it among the histories.
But for all its tragic heft and its mythic,
magic elements, Macbeth is a history play,
set in 11th century Scotland: the characters
– Duncan, Malcolm, Macbeth and lots of the
other people in the story – are real people
from the Scottish past, a past that had also
become England’s past with the arrival of
King James in 1603
he had been king of Scotland since 1567.
And like his other history plays, Shakespeare
turned to works of historical scholarship
for inspiration: chiefly a massive work called
The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland
by Raphael Holinshed. This was without question
Shakespeare’s favourite history book, and
he often took great sections of it as source
material for his plays. Loads of Macbeth is
familiar in Holinshed: the names of the main
characters, the prophecy of the three weird
sisters in Act 1 Scene 3, Macbeth’s progression
to Thane of Cawdor and then desire for the
kingship, and the killing of Duncan in Act
2. Although Shakespeare takes the
manner of his death from elsewhere in Holinshed’s Chronicles.
But I want to focus on the characters of Banquo,
Macbeth’s friend, and his young son Fleance.
Raphael Holinshed tells us that Banquo is
the point from ‘whom the house of Stuarts
is descended’, that is, the royal family
of Scotland, and by 1603 of England as well.
That’s a key part of the weird sister’s
ambiguous prophecy – that Banquo will beget
kings although not be one himself – and
the reason for the murder of
Banquo and attempted murder of Fleance in Act 3 Scene 3: if Macbeth
is to establish his hold on the Scottish crown, he needs to liquidate the competition.
The King of England, and Shakespeare’s direct
patron, was the Stuart King James.
So all the stress in the play about the rightful
line of Scottish kings, and the ‘show of
eight kings’ that the weird sisters conjure
up in Act 4 Scene 1, are designed to reinforce
the fact that as much as anything the play
is an origin myth for England’s new king,
showing how his strong lineage emerged from
a time of turbulent civil war and bad kings
to prove a successful royal line – the play
suggests that the Banquo/Stuart family is
a root of stability and success running from
the dim pre-medieval past to the present day.
But there’s a problem with this family story:
Banquo never existed, and nor did Fleance.
They were both invented by early sixteenth-century
Scottish historians as a way of giving the
House of Stuart some made-up ancient lineage.
So Shakespeare’s use of Scottish history
begins to take on a slightly more political colour:
like the published histories, the
play is broadcasting fake news about the king
of England and Scotland. Now, we don’t know
if Shakespeare was aware that the story about
the Stuart family’s origin was a myth, but
it shouldn’t
surprise us that he wanted to shore up his patron’s reputation.
The fact is that although King James inherited
the English throne from Queen Elizabeth I
with remarkably little hassle in 1603, it
was by no means a foregone conclusion, and
required a lot of work on the part of the
English and Scottish governments
some overt, some very covert indeed – to make
it an acceptable succession to both populations.
And they did so by appealing to an EMOTIONAL idea
of united ‘Britishness’, even though England
and Scotland had been separate countries pretty
much forever. But England, Scotland and Wales
shared a mythic distant past and so it was
super helpful for James to be able to lay
claim to the lineage of Banquo, because Fleance
was supposed to have grown up and married
a princess of Wales, whose Celtic roots tied
the line of Banquo to the ancient kings of Britain.
So Shakespeare’s presentation of the prophesied
line of kings emanating from Banquo, through
Fleance, as shown to Macbeth by the Weird
Sisters, is actually part of the propaganda
drive to convince the English people that
their new king WASN’T an interloper but
a uniting saviour of a new nation called ‘Great
Britain’. James spent years of his reign
trying to convince the parliaments in London and Edinburgh that
POLITICAL union should follow the union of the crowns, to no avail
– the countries remained separate entities until the Act of Union in 1707.
And that a small group of disaffected Catholic
Englishmen felt strongly enough about their
ill-treatment to attempt a cataclysmic act
of terrorism in 1605 tells us that James wasn’t
100% successful in wooing his new subjects,
which perhaps made Shakespeare’s effort
to show the golden destiny of the Banquo-Stuart
line all the more welcome to the king…
Thank you so much for watching, and enjoy
the show. The Globe is temporarily closed
but our hearts and minds are open. We don’t
receive any regular government subsidy so
please donate if you can to help us continue
to share Shakespeare’s gift of stories
in this Wooden O.
( Upbeat folk music fades up )
( Music ends )
