The Shakespeare Code

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

The Scottish army were to join forces with the English army….

The Scottish King James VI and the English Lord Mountjoy were to invade England together…

The Scottish King would seize the crown from the English Queen…. 

And then unite Scotland and England under one flag…

This was the 1599 plan of The Gang of Four – the Earls of Essex and Southampton, Lady Penelope Rich and her lover Lord Mountjoy.

It had a serious weakness.

The English and the Scottish hated each other….

They had been at war for centuries….

 Just three years before King James had complained to Queen Elizabeth that English actors and dramatists were mocking both him and the Scottish people on the public stage…

So what did William Shakespeare do when he wrote Macbeth – a play commissioned by the Gang of Four to persuade King James to act on their plan?

He wrote about a time in the past when the two countries , he claims, ADORED one other!

And if they adored each other in the past, they could adore each other in the present.

The opening scene of the play is full of Tudor/Stuart Political Correctness. Army captains usually get a rough ride in Shakespeare’s plays – they are drunken rogues out for all they can get, willing to change sides at a moment’s notice.

Indeed there was a captain employed in real life by the Essex/ Southampton entourage (Captain Edmones) whose sole purpose was to provide gay sex for m’Lords…

In carriages and tents…

No so the Scottish Captain in the first scene! He is brave, articulate, loyal and witty…a tribute, in fact, to the entire Scottish nation…

Shakespeare goes on to flatter the Scottish countryside. The Macbeth’s castle was in Strathmore where, Duncan says….

..the air

Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself

Unto our gentle senses…

And Banquo, King James’s ancestor, then elaborates on the theme…

…..This guest of summer,

The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,

By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath

Smells wooingly here…

But it’s not enough for Shakespeare to flatter the Scots about Scotland and the Scottish…

He’s got to SELL them England and the English!

England is TWICE desribed as ‘gracious’ – and becomes a refuge for Scottish patriots forced to flee the tyranny of Macbeth…

Malcolm, the son of Duncan, is welcomed into the English Court by the English King, ‘pious Edward’ (The Confessor)…

…..with such grace

That the malevolence of fortune nothing

Takes from his high respect…’

When Macduff, Duncan’s loyal henchman,  visits the English court to persuade the English to invade Scotland, it is presented as an angelic mission…

Shakespeare’s coded implication is that James’s putative invasion of England would be an angelic mission as well…

More, by gaining the throne of England, James would gain spiritual power…

Malcolm, at the end of Macbeth, sets off to be crowned in Scone – a monastery near Perth where the Stone of Destiny was guarded by monks….

 It was reputed to be the pillow on which Jacob slept when he had his famous dream….

 …..and the stone which St. Columba used as a travelling altar when he converted the Scots…

From the eleventh century, Kings of Scotland sat on the Stone when they were crowned: but in the thirteeneth century, Edward I of England invaded Scotland and took the Stone to England..

By King James’s time the Stone had been placed under the seat of the English Coronation throne….

So, by being crowned on the English throne, James would be combining mystically with all the Scottish Kings who had sat on the Stone of Destiny…

James, as King of England, would also inherit Edward the Confessor’s gift for healing scrofula…

Malcolm describes how….

……strangely-visited people,

All swol’n and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,

The mere despair of surgery, he [Edward] cures;

Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,

Put on with holy prayers…’

Malcolm then adds….

….’tis spoken,

To the succeeding royalty he leaves the healing benediction….’

Queen Elizabeth had revived the custom of healing ‘the Evil’ and this gift was waiting for King James to claim as his own…

But how could James be certain that the invasion would be successful?

This is where the Witches….and Trixie the Cat come in….

The Trixie Lectures (III)

(It’s best to read Trixie’s I and II Witch Lectures first. Trixie has insider knowledge…)

First, Brothers and Sisters of The Code, can I bring up the tricky subject of Hecate, Queen of the Witches?

Every English schoolboy and schoolgirl used to be taught that Shakespeare did NOT write the Hecate scenes in Macbeth….

They were later additions by an ‘inferior hand’….probably Thomas Middleton.

Now, The Code firmly believes that additions were made to the play after its premiere in 1599 for a revival in 1606….

The Porter scene, for example……….

……. is a satire on the trial of the Jesuit Father Garnet (codename ‘Farmer’)  which alludes to  his famous ‘equivocations’  during the Gunpowder Plot trial.

The Code also believes that Shakespeare was an arch-collaborator – especially with Thomas Nashe who has contributed to the nature of the Witches in Macbeth…

But Your Cat is of the firm opinion that Shakespeare oversaw (at least) the Hecate scenes…

By having a ‘boss’ over the witches, Shakespeare is showing that the power of the Witches was circumscribed….

One witch wants revenge on the ship’s pilot whose wife refused to share her chestnuts with her…

But admits that even though his ship can be ‘tempest-tost’ it cannot be ‘lost’

Similarly, the witches can only play with what they know to be in Macbeth’s mind already…

They cannot create his ruthless ambition from nowhere…

An idea first put forward by Nashe in his pamphlet, The Terrors of the Night…

This is in keeping with the experience and philosophy of King James….

The midwife Agnes Sampson had  ‘read his mind’: she had told him what had passed on his wedding night with his teenage bride, Anne of Denmark…

Also, in Demonlogie James writes that witches are simply ‘slaves of Satan’ – as the Witches in Macbeth are slaves of Hecate…

Scholars also assert that the song and dance of the witches in the coven scene are also by ‘another hand’: but as we have seen, when they were questioned by James at Holyrood House, the North Berwick witches performed for the King the reel they had danced at their Hallowe’en Sabbat….

The odds are that the first performance of Macbeth was also given at Holyrood House – possibly in the same hall where James had interrogated the original witches…

Also, when Hecate says to the witches…

But make amends now; get you gone,

And at the pit of Acheron

Meet me ‘’th’morning….

It sounds to Your Cat much like the words of another bossy supernatural, Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream…

Trip away, make no stay,

Meet me all by break of day…’

 

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The main purpose of the coven scene…..

…… is to convince James that an invasion of England would be successful and that he would establish a perpetual dynasty in Britain…

(Both James and Elizabeth thought that end of the world was coming soon – so a ‘perpetual dynasty’ might not be that long…)

The first apparition Hecate and the witches summon up for Macbeth is an armed head….

This would immediately remind James of the apparition of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots’s head which was seen floating in the air before her execution…

The other apparitions, although they mislead Macbeth through the words they say, are speaking the truth about what will happen in the future: Birnam wood does come to Dunsinane and Macbeth is killed by a man not born of woman…

This confirms James’s experience that, though they are full of trickery, witches can foretell the future. It also prepares for the political coup in the play: the speechless vision of the Kings…

The bleeding captain has said ‘Mark, King of Scotland, mark’  directly to Duncan– and obliquely to the present King of Scotland who was in the audience…

Duncan, as a former King of Scotland, was James’s spiritual ancestor.

But with Banquo, Shakespeare was writing about James’s flesh-and-blood ancestor who had founded the Stuart line….

In a vision that the witches conjure up, Macbeth sees the future and James sees the past – eight Kings all looking like Banquo….

The eighth King holds a mirror which Banquo points to and Macbeth, to his horror, sees ‘many more’ some of whom carry ‘two-fold balls and treble sceptres…’

The ‘balls’ were coronation orbs – and represented the monarch’s spiritual power. The TWO orbs represent Protestantism and Roman Catholicism which, it was hoped, James would unite or at least allow to co-exist.

The treble sceptres represent the thrones of England and Scotland. The Scottish King was always crowned with one sceptre, the English King with two…

So, along with prophesies in the play that prove to be true, Shakespeare has added a prophesy about life itself ….

That James’s invasion of England would be victorious, that he would unite England with Scotland and Protestantism and Roman Catholicism and the Stuart line would stretch to the end of time…

But canny James was buying none of it!

He was in his early thirties: the Queen was in her late sixties and in poor health.

James knew that by waiting a few years he would have the throne of England without risking a hair of his head.

An invasion was much more in the interests of the Gang of Four than it was for him…

As indeed proved the case….

Just over a year later the Earl of Essex lost his head…. 

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© Trixie the Cat. October, 2011.