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During the reign of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare’s theater company was under the patronage– and protection– of Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain (a series of nobel appointees over the years of her reign). In 1594, one of those Chamberiains– Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon— oversaw the formation of that troupe, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. But with Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Shakespeare and his colleagues switched their allegiance to her successor, James (or more formally, James VI and I).

Emily Zarevich suggests that one of the impacts of that change was the creation of one of theater’s most memorable trios, arguing that the ever-pragmatic Shakespeare added witches to the Scottish play to please his new patron…

If you’ve ever worked as a freelance creator, you might understand the importance of constructing your material to meet your client’s tastes. It was no different in the early seventeenth century.

[In 1603] James VI of Scotland traveled to England to claim the throne as James I of England, following the childless Elizabeth I’s death. James brought with him a wife, three children, a court of Scots, and a lot of eccentricities. One of those eccentricities was James’s obsessive fixation on witches. Star playwright William Shakespeare saw a golden opportunity to get into the king’s good graces and wrote a play with witches as a main plot driver.

The dark, starkly political story of the tragedy Macbeth wouldn’t go anywhere without the three spooky witches, as Shakespeare scholar George Walton Williams outlines. The witches predict Macbeth’s ascension to the Scottish throne and launch him on a campaign of treachery and bloodshed, though they don’t help him perform his evil deeds. This was Shakespeare’s unique take on witches, who were usually cast in literature as more active villains. From Shakespeare’s perspective, an individual’s own decisions determine their destiny, not necessarily the interference of black magic.

Williams draws on the research of other drama critics to expand on this, proposing that “we must listen to the prophecy: the witches prophesied that Macbeth should be king hereafter. There is nothing here that indicates, as the late Professor Harbage has well said, that in order to be king hereafter Macbeth must be murderer first.”

Shakespeare presented Macbeth to a superstitious king who feared magic and tended to blame witches for many of the ills that fell upon both his home and adopted country. Macbeth, also an unstable Scottish king, blames the witches for the ills caused by his own murderous decisions. According to historian Howell V. Calhoun, James I spent his own literary career defaming witches and accusing them of supposed crimes.

“James had firsthand experience with the malign activity of witches, and he left a careful record of it in his pamphlet Newes From Scotland declaring the damnable life and death of Doctor Fian, a notable Sorcerer, which appeared in 1591,” Calhoun documents. “The whole affair hinged about the evil activities of Dr. Fian (alias John Cunningham), Agnis Sampson, and the North Berwick witches, in their attempt to destroy the ship on which James was returning from Denmark with his bride [Anne of Denmark].” James’s collection of “evidence” led to the violent persecution of accused party.

And then there was James I’s three-book treatise Daemonologie, his magnum opus. As Calhoun summarizes, the first part “takes up the subject of magic and necromancy, the second treats of witchcraft and sorcery, and the third discourses of all kinds of spirits and specters. The king’s intention in this work was to prove two things, “the one, that such diuelish artes haue bene and are,” and the other, “what exact trial and seuere punishment they merite.”

Though Shakespeare certainly appealed to James’s interests with the Scottish play, the two men held divergent views on what witches did and not do. If James I of England had written Macbeth, the three witches would have met a rather grisly end. Shakespeare, however, leaves their fates unknown…

“Double, double toil and trouble,” indeed…

Whence the witches: “King James I and the Macbeth Witches,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.

* Shakespeare, King John

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As we watch the fire burn, and cauldron bubble, we might recall that it was on this date in 1601, not long after the ascension of James, that William’s father, John Shakespeare, was buried at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. His son joined his father there 15 years later.

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