New legislation was passed by the Parliament against Catholic recusants, and the king himself, according to the Venetian ambassador, declared: “I shall most certainly be obliged to stain my hands with their blood, though sorely against my will …”4 For the Shakespeare family in Stratford, it was an uncertain time. In the spring of the following year, Susannah Shakespeare was cited for her failure to receive holy communion that Easter. She is listed with some well-known Catholic recusants in the town, among them Shakespeare’s old friend Hamnet Sadler — the godfather of his dead son. The danger of her position must have been emphasised to her by someone close to her, since the word “dismissa” was later placed against her entry. She must have outwardly conformed by taking communion. Three years later, however, Richard Shakespeare, the dramatist’s brother, was taken before the bawdry court at Stratford for some unspecified offence; he was fined 12 pence, for the use of the Stratford poor, which suggests that he was found guilty of breaking the Sabbath.
The response of Shakespeare to the turbulent events of 1605 was to write a play of apparently conservative and orthodox intent. Macbeth was concerned with the terrible consequences of murdering a divinely appointed sovereign, and within the drama itself there are even references to the trials of the conspirators in the spring of 1606. There are allusions to “equivocation,” a concept which appeared at the trial of the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet, who was subsequently hanged. When Lady Macduff remarks, on the subject of treason, “every one that do’s so, is a Traitor, and must be hang’d”(1512) there may have been applause and cheers among the audience of the Globe. In Macbeth, too, there is an invocation of the Stuart dynasty, with reference to the kings who will rule England as well as Scotland. Since the play is also steeped in King James’s favourite subject, witchcraft, there can be no doubt that it was purposefully designed to appeal to the new monarch. The witches of Macbeth can be said to plot against the lawful king, with their intimations of Macbeth’s greatness, and just fifteen years previously some Scottish witches had been tried for conspiring against James himself. The parallel is clear. In the previous year, too, King James had been greeted by three sibyls at the gates of an Oxford college and hailed as the true descendant of Banquo. That is no doubt why Shakespeare, in direct contrast with the source, refuses to connect Banquo with the Macbeths’ plot against Duncan. Shakespeare was adapting James’s own suppositions and beliefs into memorable theatre. He was in a sense sanctifying them and turning them into myth.
Yet Shakespeare wrote with only one eye upon the king. Macbeth was also designed to entertain everyone else. It ushers on to the stage ghosts as well as bloodshed and magic. What could be more appealing to an early seventeenth-century audience than royalty and mystery combined? The scene at the banquet, in which Banquo’s ghost appears to Macbeth, mightily impressed itself upon Shakespeare’s contemporaries. It is a play that acquired an almost Celtic sense of doom and the supernatural. That is why actors refuse to name it Macbeth, but to this day continue to call it “the Scottish play.” It is as if Shakespeare, deep in his Scottish sources, was possessed by a new form of imagination; it is a tribute to his extraordinary sensitivity and to his unconscious powers of assimilation.
Macbeth is one of the shortest plays that Shakespeare ever wrote — in fact only The Comedy of Errors is shorter — and has a playing time of approximately two hours. It is also remarkably free of oaths and profanities, as a result of a measure passed by Parliament in March 1603; a parliamentary act to “restrain the abuses of players” forbade irreverence or blasphemy on the public stage. It has been suggested that the relative brevity of the play is an indication of the king’s span of attention, but this is unlikely. It may have been the result of cuts by the Master of the Revels. More likely, however, is that the play itself demanded this length. The intensity and concentration of the fatal action require a series of drumbeats. Although the slight ambiguity in the respective roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth suggests that Shakespeare may have begun the play without knowing which of them would kill the king, there is a consistency of effect. The verse is shaped and pared down so that it becomes echoic; it is almost relentless in its pace, and there are images throughout of rushing action. “Time” is mentioned on forty-four occasions. There are no puns, and only one “comic” scene in which the Porter responds to the knocking at the gate; it is hardly comic, however, since the Porter is modelled upon the keeper of Hell’s gates and the elaborate references in the Porter’s monologue to the details of the recent conspiracy are pervaded by a chilling gallows’ humour.
The Porter is indeed an image of the Hell Porter in the mystery plays, and it has been well observed that the banqueting scene in the play is related to the scene of feasting in that part of the mystery cycle entitled “The Death of Herod.” The death and doom of the ancient plays survive in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, as another layer of darkness and supernatural fear. Shakespeare is much more concerned with the ancient forces of the earth than with the omens of the sky. Macbeth is a poem of the night. Yet, in any discussion of Macbeth himself, the concept of darkness is not required. He is the most vital and energetic character within the play, a natural force, surpassing any conventional notion of good and evil. He partakes of the sublime. Like many of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, he seems actively to seek out his fate.
Since the play is mentioned in a production by the Children of St. Paul’s in early July 1606, it must have been performed at the Globe before that date. So Macbeth was played during the season that ran from Easter on 21 April until the middle of July, when once more the playhouses were closed as a result of the plague. The King’s Men remained in the neighbourhood of London for a short period, however, in order to entertain King Christian of Denmark, who was the brother-in-law of James; he remained in England from 15 July to 11 August, and Heminges was paid for “three playes before his Majestie and the kinge of Denmarke at Greenwich and Hampton Court.” It has plausibly been asserted that one of these plays was Macbeth, performed before the royal parties in the early days of August.
It is not at all clear, however, that King Christian and his hosts attended to the great drama. The Danish king was a heavy drinker, who on one evening was carried out of the entertainments in a state of insensibility. Everyone seemed to follow his example, according to Sir John Harington, and the English nobles “wallow in beastly delights” while their ladies “roll in intoxication.” He added that “I ne’er did see such lack of good order, discretion and sobriety. The Gunpowder fright is got out of all our heads …”5 The men fell down and the women were sick, an apt token of the change that had taken place since the days of Elizabeth. If it was a new society, it was not necessarily a more decorous one.
After their royal performances the King’s Men began a season of touring in Kent, where they played at Dover, Maidstone and Faversham. They also journeyed to Saffron Walden, Leicester, Oxford, and Marlborough. It is tempting to believe that Shakespeare was with them when they visited Dover, at the beginning of October, if only because of the important presence of that town in his next play. But such explicit connections are dangerous. There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare travelled with them, and every reason to believe that he was engaged elsewhere. In the course of this year, after all, he completed the writing of King Lear.