Fair Is Foul

Written early in the reign of James I (1603­1625), Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a typical “Jacobean” tragedy in many important respects. Referred to superstitiously by actors as “the Scottish play,” the script commemorates James’s national heritage by depicting events during the years 1040 to 1057 in his native Scotland. The play also celebrates the ruler’s intense interest in witchcraft and magic, which was recorded in a book he wrote in 1597 entitled Demonology. Further topical allusions to the king include all the passages in the script mentioning sleeplessness, which are relevant since James was a well-known insomniac.

The most memorable references to Jacobean England in the play, however, are those which chronicle events of the notorious Gunpowder Plot--a conspiracy by Catholic sympathizers to blow up the Parliament building and all the heads of state on November 5, 1605, approximately one year before Shakespeare’s play was written. On that date, Guy Fawkes and his band of Jesuit-sponsored papists smuggled an immense amount of gunpowder into a vault under the Parliament, which would have killed everyone in the building in a fiery cataclysm had the king not detected the explosives prior to their detonation. According to a recent book by Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), James claimed to have discovered the plan by “inspiration” from God, who wished to save England from Rome’s “Popish plot.” Through popular mythology following the event, Jesuits were branded as “equivocators” who had tried to attack both England and the Reformation through a perverse use not only of gunpowder (“the devil’s invention”), but also of the very nature of language, which they employed in double and triple entendre to hide from the king and his court their fiendish intentions.

Not surprisingly, Shakespeare’s play reflects these topical Jacobean events through its word choice, plot, and themes in an intriguing blend of Scottish history, contemporary political events, and authorial creativity. The language of the play, for example, includes a litany of references to the Gunpowder Plot that would have been familiar to all the king’s loyal subjects in 1605. Such terms as “vault,” “mine,” “blow,” “devils,” “fuse,” “powder,” “confusion,” “corpses,” “spirits,” and “combustion” set up a linguistic landscape through which Macbeth and the witches kill a king and take over his throne in a mirror image of the aborted Popish plot during James’s reign. Similarly, the play’s riddling prophesies mimic the ease with which Jesuits equivocated between truth