The Shakespeare Code

(It’s best to read ‘Macbeth’ Decoded. Parts One, Two  and, especially, Three first).

THE TRIXIE LECTURES (II)

People often condemn King James VI and I for having an obsessive, prurient and superstitious interest in  witchcraft…

But when he returned to Scotland with his new Danish wife, Anne, he had to investigate it.

Otherwise he might have died….

Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, had paid witches to assassinate him, not only with magic (which might or might not have worked) but with poison as well (which certainly would!)

The riotous, drunken, Hallowe’en Sabbat at North Berwick (see Part Three) had been reported to the authorities and the usual suspects were rounded up to appear before James at Holyrood House.

Led, of course, by the oldest witch in the business, Agnes Sampson…

She denied everything, till she was stripped, shaved and tortured…

After that she would agree with anything anyone said….

At one point her confession became so ‘miraculous and strange’ that James refused to believe it, but….

….taking his Majesty a little aside, she declared unto him the very words which passed between the King’s Majesty and  his Queen at Upslo [Oslo] in Norway the first night of their marriage, with their answer each to other; whereat the the King’s Majesty wondered greatly , and swore by the living God that he believed all the Devils in Hell could not have discovered the same, acknowledging her words to be most true…

The very fact that Agnes could take the King of Scotland ‘a little aside’ shows the power she had over the young man…

Later she went on to butter him up by saying that he….

..had never come safely from the sea, if his faith had not prevailed above their intentions’…

….and that she had…

…..resolved never to confess, were [it] not [for] his Majesty’s speeches which had moved her, whereof she praised God that had wrought a repentance in her and a sense and feeling for her sins…’

Agnes played the repentance card too late. She was strangled and burned on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh on 28th January, 1591.

She knew far too much about the King’s private life to be allowed to live…

But the King ‘took a great delight to be present’ at the examination of Agnes. He even asked the witches to perform the reel they had danced at the Sabbat.

The main reason for becoming a witch, as we have seen, was the economic benefit. But there was a fun, anti-establishment side to ‘the craft’ as well – not to be sniffed at in dour, Calvinistical Scotland…

James became fascinated by witchcraft and even wrote a pamphlet about it…

 

Published in 1597, but probably written before then, it shows how witches are slaves to Satan, who, being a spirit…

….easily spies our affections, and so conforms himself thereto, to deceive us to our wrack.

James supported the witch hunts in Scotland – indeed, Demonlogie states quite clearly that witches should be burnt…

However, in 1597, the year of the publication of Demonologie, everything changed…

In April James stopped the trial of two suspected witches in Aberdeen and in August disbanded all commissions set up to try witchcraft….

What had happened?

Margaret Aitken, ‘the great witch of Balwery’, claimed to be able to spot another witch, simply by looking in her eyes. The authorities took this turncoat ‘witchfinder’ at her word and she was…

….carried from town to town to make discoveries in that kind…’

She caused the deaths of many women in Glasgow – but here she was exposed as a fraud. She was presented with the same woman on two successive days and declared her guilty on one day and innocent the next…

James, to his credit, immediately closed the entire ‘witch industry’ down. He spent the rest of his reign trying to expose the human trickery associated with witchcraft.

 But his belief in the prophetic potency of witches never left him….

●

When William Shakespeare arrived in Edinburgh in October, 1599 (see Part One. What really happened in 1599. ) he had three sources to draw on to create the witches in Macbeth.

(1) A 1592 pamphlet, News from Scotland, which gave a detailed account of the North Berwick sabbat.

(2.) King James’s own book, Demonologie, published two years before.

(3.) Oral history. (Agnes had been executed in the town only eight years before).

As a consequence, all the witches in Macbeth behave as though they were Agnes Sampson.

1. They sing and dance.

2.They use ‘familiars’ (cats and the like!) to create spells.

3. They are poor.

(One witch looks on enviously at a sailor’s wife who ‘mounch’d, and mounch’d and mounch’d’ chestnuts in her lap).

4. They sail in sieves.

5. They create storms at sea…

 

6. They use bits of human and animal remains for their spells.

But the Macbeth witches do some things that Agnes never did…

1.  They own their own winds which they buy and sell… 

(Agnes had to create storms by – shudder! – drowning cats).

2. They pervert the meaning of language…..’Fair is foul’ to them and ‘foul is fair’….

(Agnes, to give her her due, was completely direct in her statements).

3. They vanish ‘into the air’ and melt ‘as breath into the wind’.  

(Poor old Agnes couldn’t do that. If she could, she would have avoided execution…)

What – or who – is this fourth source for the witches in Macbeth?

Step forward Thomas Nashe….

As Brothers and Sisters of The Code well know, Nashe collaborated with Christopher Marlowe on Dido Queen of Carthage and with Ben Jonson on the lost Isle of Dogges…

The Code is of the firm opinion that Nashe also collaborated with Shakespeare on Macbeth especially on the witch scenes because…

HE HAD EXPERIENCED (AND WRITTEN ABOUT) WITCHES BEFORE!

The Code believes that while staying with the Earl of Southampton’s family in Hampshire, Nashe had encountered the famous ‘Witch of Upham’ who conned money out of men and humiliated them by riding on their backs..

Nashe had also encountered the case of a local Titchfield farmer who had experienced visions of demons and succubi in his bedroom….

(For a more detailed account of both examples, please see The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis )

Nashe believed (as much as he believed anything!) that….

1. Witches for gold will sell a man a wind

Which in the corner of a napkin wrapt

Shall blow him safe unto what coast he will…’

Summer’s Last Will and Testament, 1592.

2. Everything [a witch says] must be interpreted backwards as witches say their Pater Noster [Lord’s Prayer] good being the character of bad, and bad good…’

Terrors of the Night 1593.

3.  [Witches could be]…spirits of the air, which have no other bodies or forms, but such as by the unconstant glimmering of our eyes is begotten; they are, in truth all show and no substance, deluders of our imagination and nought else….to make it fair or foul when they list….to stir up tempests round about and replenish heaven with prodigies and wonders…’

From Terrors of the Night…

It is The Code’s belief that Nashe’s view of witches – that they are insubstantial spirits of the air who can delude but not control us – has profoundly influenced the portrayal of witchcraft in Macbeth.

Nashe, as we have seen, even writes that witches….

make it fair or foul when they list….

But, as we have also seen, the ‘North Berwick’ witches, the ‘Nashe’ witches and the ‘Macbeth’ witches all have one thing in common – they can predict, with complete accuracy, what is going to happen..

James firmly believed that witches had this power.

Shakespeare (with Nashe) expolited the King’s belief for political ends…

How they did this,  the  Agents of The Code will explain in their next post…

 

‘Bye now….

(It’s best to read ‘Macbeth’ Decoded . Part Five now.)