Macbeth; Shakespeare's Gunpowder Plot

MACBETH: SHAKESPEARE’S GUNPOWDER PLOT PLAY Guy Fawkes, the man who was to have set the explosives in the 1605 gunpowder plot to blow up the houses of parliament, has become an American icon of the right-wing—a proponent for blowing up government. Because popular memory has romanticized Guy Fawkes, some of the other folks associated with the plot have been forgotten. Although they appeared in literature of the period, they are rarely noticed today. However, there are at least a half-dozen gunpowder plays. A play attributed to Shakespeare, The Fifth of November or The Gunpowder Plot http://books.google.com/books?id=kzksAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=rho des+gunpowder+plot&lr=&ei=He7QSpG4IJ7CzQTG_c30DQ#v=onepage&q=&f=f alse, however, is unfortunately a forgery by George Ambrose Rhodes from the 1830s. Genuine plays contemporary to Shakespeare that allude to the Gunpowder Plot include Macbeth, John Marston’s Sophonisba, Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon and Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter. Only very recently has it been recognized that the category also includes Robert Burton’s Latin play Philosophaster http://www.northernrenaissance.org/articles/Jesuits-andPhilosophasters-Robert-Burtons-Response-to-the-Gunpowder-PlotbrKathrynMurphy/11, a comedy written in 1606 featuring a pseudo-scholar who is one of the few stage Jesuits of the period. The character’s name is Polupragmaticus, meaning “being a busybody” who claims to be bilingual, ambidexterous, omniscient and, in fact, a Jesuit. It’s not much of a pretense since he also declares himself “a grammarian, a rhetorician, a geometrician, a painter, a

wrestling coach, augur, rope walker, physician, magician. I know it all. Or if you prefer, I am a Jesuit. That sums it up.” To make Polupragmaticus’ identity indisputable, his servant is called Aequivocus, a clear allusion to the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation which allowed one to lie under oath. The rationale for equivocation was spelled out in the manuscript Treatise of Equivocation, http://www.archive.org/stream/treatiseofequivo00jarduoft#page/iv/mode/2up, written by a Jesuit named Henry Garnet. Garnet was the confessor to two of the Gunpowder plotters, and his manuscript was found in their possession, leading him to be tried for treason and hung, drawn and quartered. Appreciating that in the early 1600s, it was not Guy Fawkes but the Jesuit Garnet that attracted literary attention in connection with the Gunpowder plot gives new focus to Macbeth. Why? Because the idea of “double meaning” -- or equivocation -- is central to the play. The standard definition of Equivocale in Florio’s Dictionary http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/florio/ is “of diverse significance, of double meaning”. In Cotgrave’s Dictionary, Equivoque is defined as “a double or divers sense of one word”. Structurally, in the witches’ scenes for example, it’s clear that the knocking and references to “double double” are paralleled by the knocking and references to equivocation during the Porter’s scene. Thus the witches chant “double, double toil and trouble” (4,1,9) is paralleled by the Porter’s “here’s an equivocator…come in equivocator” (2,3,9-11). In the Porter’s scene, the footnotes in the standard Arden edition explain that the characters that the Porter admits to hellmouth are the equivocator (Garnet himself), his alias Mr Farmer, and the Tailor who was associated with the image of Garnet’s face that supposedly appeared miraculously on a bundle of straw after his execution. However the three apparitions in the witches scene -- namely the head, the bloody child and the child holding a tree -- also appear to have been derived from the imagery of Garnet’s portrait on that miraculous straw http://res.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/XVI/61/44 In other words, the apparitions that are summoned by the witches suggest that the 11th century Macbeth is in league with Father Garnet’s 17th century Jesuits. That would be remarkable enough, however the multiple time tracks in the play are even more complex. The “Temple” that Macbeth destroys (2,3,67) accompanied by the extraordinary appearance of a dagger hanging in the air (2,1,.33), strange noises, the earth that did shake (2,3,59) and threats of dire combustion, all correspond in yet another time-track: to the destruction of Jerusalem in the 1st century. In the account of the Roman-Jewish war as recounted in Josephus’ The Jewish War, http://www.ccel.org/j/josephus/works/war-6.htm we are told that a star resembling a sword hung over the city (JW 6,5,289) and that the citizens of Jerusalem “felt a quaking and heard a great noise” (JW 6,5,299) before the temple was burnt . In other words, the destruction of the “Temple” (as Duncan),

is an allegory for that other Temple destroyed by Titus Caesar. By presenting these parallel time tracks, the play offers us two different paradigms for interpreting the character of Macbeth, and invites us to consider how they may be reconciled—and there is a way to do it. In the same way that Anthony & Cleopatra anticipated many filmic conventions— such as very short takes-- Shakespeare’s multiple and interrelated time tracks in Macbeth have remarkable similarities to some modern TV storytelling conventions. These serve to significantly change our understanding of the play. Ironically, the shift of audiences away from theater to TV programs like Lost may be the very thing that teaches audiences the narrative conventions that may allow them to appreciate the real meaning of Shakespeare.

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