(It is best to read ‘Macbeth’ Decoded. Parts One, Two, Three and Four first).
THE STORY THUS FAR…..
The Gang of Four – the Earls of Southampton and Essex, Lady Penelope Rich and her lover, Lord Mountjoy – have commissioned Shakespeare to write The Tragedy of Macbeth.
Its purpose is to persuade King James VI of Scotland to invade England and seize the throne from Elizabeth. By doing so, James would…
1. Ensure his Succession.
2. Destroy the power of The Fox and The Ape (Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Robert Cecil).
3. Free the Earl of Essex from house arrest, and..
4. Free England itself from the ‘tyrannous’ reign of Elizabeth Tudor.
King James is to ride to the border of England at the head of the Scottish army. Mountjoy is to join him there with half the English army which he will bring over from Ireland.
They will then invade England…
●
The main problem with the plan was James himself.
Timid and shy, he would scream if anyone drew a sword in his presence….
So, Shakespeare’s aim in writing Macbeth was to show King James that war was glorious, and that an invasion of England would be morally correct…
Shakespeare had written Henry V earlier in the year (1599) and Macbeth does for Scottish patriotism what Henry V had done for English patriotism.
The play is not only set in Scotland: events themselves are seen from a Scottish perspective. The Norwegians are the enemy and anyone who opposes the Scottish King Duncan is automatically a ‘rebel’…
This confirms The Code’s conviction that the play was first written for a Scottish audience.
(No mention is made, of course, of King Duncan’s other true-life enemy, Denmark, as James now had a Danish wife.)
War is shown in the play as an opportunity to display both bravery and loyalty.
Macbeth the soldier……
……without hesitation, ‘unseams’ the rebel Macdonwald ‘from the nave to the chops’ [navel to chin] then cuts off his head and fixes it on the castle’s battlements.
For this he is rewarded by King Duncan with a new title and he enjoys (briefly, before he enters the world of politics) the ‘golden opinions’ of his countrymen and women…
By implication, these ‘golden opinions’ would also be won by King James if he were to invade England…
But Shakespeare needs to convince James of the rightness of the action: Queen Elizabeth, after all, was related to James through King Henry VII….
Elizabeth herself was also an anointed monarch and James believed in the Divine Right of Kings.
Shakespeare sets about his task by employing one of his codes…
Although Macbeth is set in the past, it is really about the present…
Scotland is really England. And England is really Scotland…
The murder of the saintly King Duncan, when a guest in the home of the Macbeths, is a coded re-run of the execution of James’s mother, the bewitching Mary Queen of Scots….
…..when she had been a ‘guest’ in the land of Queen Elizabeth.
Lord and Lady Macbeth, as the play progresses, begin to embody many of the characteristics of Queen Elizabeth which James would have recognised instantly…
1. Her hesitation….
Macbeth hesitates before killing Duncan, weighing up the pros and cons……
He’s here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then as his host,
Who should against his murtherer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself….
Elizabeth, described by contemporary historian, William Camden, as ‘a woman naturally slow in her resolutions’….
…..dithered about the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in the same way…
In the midst of these doubtful and perplexed thoughts, which so troubled and staggered the Queen’s [Elizabeth] mind that she gave herself over wholly to solitariness, sat many times melancholic and mute and frequently sighing muttered to herself, ‘Aut fer aut feri’ – either bear with her or smite her… And ‘ne feriare, feri’ – Strike lest thou be stricken….
2. Her assumption of a masculine role…
Lady Macbeth asks the ‘spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts’ to ‘unsex’ her and ‘fill’ her
…from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty…
Elizabeth would often refer to herself as a ‘Prince’ and in 1560 said to the Swedish Ambassador…
I have the heart of a man and I am not afraid of anything….
Camden describes how, at the time of the Armada, ‘with a masculine spirit’ she…
….. took a view of her army and camp at Tilbury, and riding about through the ranks of armed men drawn up on both sides her, with a Leader’s truncheon in her hand, sometimes with a martial pace, another while gently like a woman, incredible it is how much she encouraged the hearts of her captains and soldiers by her presence and speech to them….
3. Her belief in fortune-telling…
Macbeth seeks out the witches to ask them more about the future….
He ends up by believing in their predicitons completely…
Elizabeth, to learn about the future, would often consult the Mortlake Magus, Dr. John Dee….
He calculated the most auspicious time for her coronation….
…and interpreted her dreams for her.
In 1577 (the year he predicted the founding of the ‘incomparable British Empire’) he protected Elizabeth from the Tudor equivalent of voodoo magic.
A Roman Catholic priest-cum-sorceror from Islington had been sticking pins into a wax image of the Queen…
4. Her blame-shifting….
Lord and Lady Macbeth put the blame for Duncan’s murder on the two innocent grooms who were guarding the King…
Elizabeth put the blame for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots on her innocent secretary, William Davison…
5. Her use of hit-men….
Macbeth hires two, then three, murderers to kill Banquo.
Elizabeth ordered Sir Amias Paulet and Sir Drue Drury to murder Mary Queen of Scots in secret.
The gentlemen declined, to Elizabeth’s fury…
She claimed they were lacking in ‘zeal and care’.
6. Her fear of loud noises….
Lady Macbeth is terrified by the shrieking of an owl and Macbeth by the knocking at the gates.
He asks…
How is’t with me when every noise appals me?
Alison Weir, Elizabeth’s brilliant biographer, tells us the Queen was startled by ‘loud noises’.
(Elizabeth the Queen, p. 231.)
7. Her propensity to fits….
Macbeth suffers a fit when he sees the ghost of Banquo at the feast….
Lady Macbeth says to the guests…
…My Lord is often thus,
And hath been from his youth: pray you, keep seat;
The fit is momentary; upon a thought
He will again be well…
Elizabeth suffered, from youth, from similar fits. She would lie, unconscious and speechless, for hours on end and would often swoon through sheer rage…
On 30 June, 1586, the year before the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the Spanish Ambassador reported to Philip II how…
…when the Queen was going to Chapel, as usual in full magnificence, she was suddenly overcome with a shock of fear, which affected her to such an extent that she at once returned to her apartments, greatly to the wonder of those present…
8. Her bad dreams….
Macbeth talks about…
…these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly….
…and Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, trying to wash Duncan’s blood from her hands as she exclaims….
Out, damn’d spot….
Elizabeth suffered from ‘terrible dreams’ before the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.
After she had sent orders to Paulet to murder the Scottish Queen….
…..she was awakened by a violent shriek from the lady who always slept in her bedchamber. The Queen asked her ‘what ailed her?’ She answered, ‘I dreamed that I saw the hangman strike off the head of the Queen of Scots; and forthwith he laid hands on Your Majesty, and was about to behead you as well, when I screamed with terror.’ The Queen exclaimed, ‘I was at the instant you awoke me, dreaming the very same dream’…
[From The History of the Life and Death of that Excellent Princess, Queen Elizabeth; to which is added the Trial, Sufferings and Death of Mary Queen of Scots’. Quoted by the Victorian historian, Agnes Strickland.]
10. Her isolation and depression…
Macbeth seperates himself more and more from his fellow beings – even his wife – and on hearing of her death, utters words of overwhelming despair…
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing…
Elizabeth (who would these days be described as an ‘abused child’) suffered severe bouts of depression all her life. She would stay alone in her room trying to ‘shun melancholy’ by playing the lute…
….or the virginals, which, she claimed, she had never played before a man…
After the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587 and the deaths, in the following year, of her lover, the Earl of Leicester….
……and the only man who could ‘un-dumpish’ her, her jester, Richard Tarleton….
……Elizabeth’s depressions became acute.
Lord Burghley, on one occasion, had to smash down the doors of her bed-chamber to get her to eat…
And for the next seven years, Foreign Ambassadors were banned from the Court.
They might have reported on the true state of the Queen’s health….
11. Her propensity to ‘play-act’…
When the murder of King Duncan is discovered, Lady Macbeth, feigning grief and surpise, exclaims…
What! in our house?
….a response so unnatural that a suspicious Banquo remarks…..
Too cruel, anywhere…’
Lady Macbeth then proceeds to suffer a fainting fit…
Elizabeth had knowingly signed Mary Queen of Scots’s death-warrant. She had even joked about it with her secretary, Davison.
But, according to the Regency historian, Lucy Aikin, Elizabeth…
….heard the news of Mary’s death with great indignation, her countenance altered, her speech faltered and failed her and through excessive sorrow she stood in a manner astonished; insomuch that she gave herself over to passionate grief, putting herself into mourning habit and shedding abundance of tears….
The same day that the people of London heard that this Queen [Mary Queen of Scots] had been beheaded, they made bonfires as though England had gained some victory. Elizabeth, having put her head out of the window, demanded to know what the bonfires meant. She was told it was because of the death of Queen Mary; to which she replied with strange hypocrisy and as though greatly surprised. ‘What, is the Queen my sister dead? And who has put her to death? They have deceived me then’….
Kendra Baker (who gets his information from the seventeenth century satirist, Gregorio Leti) writes:
One nobleman who was present [at Elizabeth’s reaction to the execution] could not help saying, ‘See, there, the very trick of a play-actress’…
And even the loyal Camden admits he doesn’t know if Elizabeth’s tears were feigned or not.
Neither, probably, did Elizabeth…
12. Her tyranny…
Macbeth is referred to as a ‘tyrant’ FIFTEEN TIMES in the play…
Elizabeth was also accused of ‘a barbarous and cruel tyranny’ by an anonymous notice placed on Mary Queen of Scots’ s tomb in Peterborough Cathedral.
But, most important, Elizabeth is described as a ‘tyrant’ by Shakespeare himself…
In Sonnet 107 Shakespeare describes how ‘the mortal moon’ [Elizabeth] has ‘endured her eclipse’ [died]…
The Earl of Southampton, however, made immortal by Shakespeare’s verse, will still have a ‘monument’…
When tyrant’s crests and tombs of brass are spent…
Elizabeth’s tomb in Westminster Abbey was surrounded by brass railings. She was certainly one of the ‘tyrants’….
12 (a). Her contempt for conventional medicine…
Macbeth asks the doctor about the state of health of his wife, the Queen….
The Doctor replies that it is her ‘thick-coming fancies’ that keep her from sleeping.
Macbeth then asks the Doctor whether he can…
….minister to a mind diseas’d,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And cleanse with some sweet oblivious antitdote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
To which the Doctor replies:….
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself…
Macbeth responds by saying…
Throw physic [medicine] to the dogs…’
Elizabeth used to say that…
Abstincence [from rich food as well as wine] was the noblest part of physic…
She refused all ‘purgations’ (a standard treatment for women) and even in her final illness, William Camden tells us that….
….she refused all use of physic as she had always done…..
●
The action of Macbeth shows that Lord and Lady Macbeth are bloodthirsty usurpers of the Scottish throne who deserve to die…
The implication is that Elizabeth is a bloodthirsty usurper of the English throne who deserves to die as well.
She had usurped it from Mary Queen of Scots…
But James not only needed convincing that an invasion of England would be morally right….
He also needed convincing it would be successful and advantageous as well….
●●●
(It’s best to read ‘Macbeth’ Decoded. Part Six‘ now.)
Why not subscribe to The Shakespeare Code and be first with the updates?
The Shakespeare Code 
Leave a Reply