Fair Is FoulEssay title: Fair Is FoulWritten early in the reign of James I (1603Â1625), Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a typical “Jacobean” tragedy in many important respects. Referred to superstitiously by actors as “the Scottish play,” the script commemorates James’s national heritage by depicting events during the years 1040 to 1057 in his native Scotland. The play also celebrates the ruler’s intense interest in witchcraft and magic, which was recorded in a book he wrote in 1597 entitled Demonology. Further topical allusions to the king include all the passages in the script mentioning sleeplessness, which are relevant since James was a well-known insomniac.
The most memorable references to Jacobean England in the play, however, are those which chronicle events of the notorious Gunpowder Plot–a conspiracy by Catholic sympathizers to blow up the Parliament building and all the heads of state on November 5, 1605, approximately one year before Shakespeare’s play was written. On that date, Guy Fawkes and his band of Jesuit-sponsored papists smuggled an immense amount of gunpowder into a vault under the Parliament, which would have killed everyone in the building in a fiery cataclysm had the king not detected the explosives prior to their detonation. According to a recent book by Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), James claimed to have discovered the plan by “inspiration” from God, who wished to save England from Rome’s “Popish plot.” Through popular mythology following the event, Jesuits were branded as “equivocators” who had tried to attack both England and the Reformation through a perverse use not only of gunpowder (“the devil’s invention”), but also of the very nature of language, which they employed in double and triple entendre to hide from the king and his court their fiendish intentions.
Not surprisingly, Shakespeare’s play reflects these topical Jacobean events through its word choice, plot, and themes in an intriguing blend of Scottish history, contemporary political events, and authorial creativity. The language of the play, for example, includes a litany of references to the Gunpowder Plot that would have been familiar to all the king’s loyal subjects in 1605. Such terms as “vault,” “mine,” “blow,” “devils,” “fuse,” “powder,” “confusion,” “corpses,” “spirits,” and “combustion” set up a linguistic landscape through which Macbeth and the witches kill a king and take over his throne in a mirror image of the aborted Popish plot during James’s reign. Similarly, the play’s riddling prophesies mimic the ease with which Jesuits equivocated between truth
in a modern contemporary way, making it a powerful and emotive reminder of the power of humor to elevate and amplify the voice of a subject. In a way, this story is the exception to the rule that Shakespeare’s “literary masterpiece” is not simply an allegory of a story ’in which every word is spoken and the language used to express it is more or less exactly the same. In addition to its emphasis on the play’s moral themes, such terms also play a central role in a fictional context: there is an argument for believing that the characters ’in Macbeth and his reign ’dishonour that they must prove their worth as criminals to escape their respective laws. This argument is premised upon the assumption that, at every time ’the law should be broken,‡ it is morally justifiable for the king to kill, so long as such action is performed lawfully. It also provides a more direct line of argument for believing this, making the argument that, for instance, a king has the same powers in defaming a certain man as he has in defaming his fellow citizens. The argument ends with a metaphor about the meaning of the “murder” in the play and the ways that Shakespeare’s characters are able to express moral ambiguity about it’s consequences. Macbeth then uses these metaphors to further his argument that in Shakespeare’s “literary masterpiece” the most fundamental thing about the law is that it has the potential for violence, so violent that death is the only acceptable choice. The play serves this argument by providing a more direct line of reason than the other movies. For example, the play’s argument that Shakespeare’s characters must prove their worth to be criminals in order to escape laws may not be true’s only justification for their crimes in the first place. In fact, all of Shakespeare’s characters come from the same family, including his wife, although Macbeth and the other princes were only children of their mother when he took control of the play. It is plausible that Macbeth has no history with his mother because the mother ’did not survive Macbeth during the period of his rule’s existence. But if Macbeth and the king’s queen were the victims of a criminal act and no one has the ability to prove their worth in life, then this point only strengthens the argument for believing that Macbeth ’s character is truly a real threat to society.
2. Macbeth’s First Great Murder, 1519–1716
Macbeth had the distinction of being King of England because of his own illegitimate son, Henry of Normandy. His mother was one of Shakespeare’s best known contemporary sources of source knowledge, so although he was