Posts Tagged ‘MacBeth’
“Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back, / When gold and silver becks me to come on”*…
via Wikimedia Commons
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.
Greasepaint and Brine…
The legendary songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David once stated that “what the world needs now is love, sweet love.”
I beg to differ.
What the world needs– nay, rightfully deserves– are 1950s advertising photos of clowns eating pickle products.
More, at Armagideon Time’s “Greasepaint and Brine.”
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As we tickle our tastebuds, we might recall that it was on this date in 1057, at the Battle of Lumphanan, that King Macbeth of Scotland was slain by Malcolm Canmore– whose father, King Duncan I, was murdered by Macbeth 17 years earlier.
(Shakespeare’s MacBeth is based on Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which in turn borrows from Boece’s 1527 Scotorum Historiae– which was crafted to flatter Duncan, an ancestor of Boece’s patron, King James V of Scotland. Accounts now considered more historically-accurate– and fairer to MacBeth– can be found in the novels of Dorothy Dunnett and Nigel Tranter… though of course the Bard’s tale is still the rippingest.)
Imagined 19th century portrait of Macbeth
Pride of ownership…
While the earliest known marks of ownership of books or documents date from the reign of Amenophis III in Egypt (1391-1353), bookplates (also known by their usual inscription, “ex libris”) date from the post-Gutenberg period when books were (still) things of value, but were widely-enough available to be circulated. In their modern form, they evolved from simple inscriptions in books which were common in Europe in the Middle Ages, when various other forms of “librarianship” became widespread (e.g., the use of class-marks, call-numbers, or shelf-marks). The earliest known examples of printed bookplates are German, and date from the 15th century.
By the 19th century, books had become more common and bookplates– while still attesting to ownership and thus establishing provenance– had begun to become ways for owners to underscore their personalities, or in the case of celebrities, their images.
Author Simon Rose, writing in the ever-illuminating Dark Roasted Blend, surveys the now-nearly-lost art of the bookplate. His piece is filled with wonderful examples, e.g.:
Enjoy many, many more at “The Extraordinary World of Ex Libris Art”
As we open to our inside front covers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that then-21-year-old Orson Welles took his curtain call at the fifth-and-final performance of MacBeth in Bridgeport. Connecticut. The Federal Theater Project production was Welles directing debut, and that start of his collaboration with producer John Houseman. In a foreshadowing of the creative risk taking that would characterize Welles’ career, he cast MacBeth with African-American performers in all the roles; the setting shifted from Scotland to the Caribbean, and the witches became Haitian witch doctors. (His 1948 film version of “The Scottish Play” returned the action to the Highlands, but retained some of the dramatic elements of his inaugural outing.)
Production photo (Library of Congress)
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