Devils and porters

Those of us who doubt that "the Stratford man" wrote the works of Shakespeare, and who prefer the candidacy of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, are frequently confronted with the objection that some of Shakespeare's plays postdate de Vere's death in 1604. The two plays most commonly cited in this respect are The Tempest and Macbeth. The case for a late date for The Tempest has gotten a lot weaker in recent years, thanks to some first-rate scholarship. But how about the Scottish play?

Conventional wisdom holds that Macbeth was written to flatter King James, the king of Scotland who assumed the English throne after Elizabeth's death. This in itself is not fatal to the Oxfordian hypothesis, since Oxford did live long enough to witness the earliest part of James I's reign.

In passing, however, I can't help noting that the best way to flatter a Scottish king might not be to put on a play about the assassination of a Scottish king and the murder (by his own rebelling subjects) of his successor. It is usually argued that James would have been pleased by the inclusion of Banquo, his distant ancestor, in the story - but since Banquo is brutally killed by Macbeth's henchmen and is then seen as a blood-dripping wraith, it is uncertain if James appreciated the compliment. It's also odd that Banquo's moral stance relative to Macbeth's regicide is left ambiguous. You'd think a flatterer would want to make Banquo's motives as pure as possible, instead of leaving them in doubt - especially when said motives pertained to the murder of a king, the worst conceivable offense in the Elizabethan-Jacobean imagination.

Regardless of the flattery issue, there is no problem for Oxfordians in saying that the play was written in James's reign. This would make it one of the last plays Oxford/Shakespeare ever wrote – perhaps not an implausible assumption, given the play's brevity and some rather odd story problems, which may suggest a not-quite-finished piece of work.

The real problem is that some scholars have identified in Macbeth numerous references to the Gunpowder Plot, a scheme hatched by the infamous Guy Fawkes and other Catholic recusants – people who clung to the dream of driving the Protestants from power. To this end, the plotters stashed a huge quantity of gunpowder in the cellar of Parliament, intending to blow the whole building sky high when James addressed the peers. The death toll would have been staggering, and the English government would have been toppled at a stroke. The plot was foiled at the last minute, the plotters were executed, and the Catholic cause was damaged beyond repair.

Garry Wills wrote a whole book, Witches and Jesuits, arguing that Macbeth is a "Gunpowder play," and others have agreed. But the Gunpowder Plot took place in 1605, the year after de Vere's death. If Macbeth really is inspired from start to finish by the actions of Guy Fawkes et al, then Oxford could not have written it, and could not have been Shakespeare.

Before we give up the Oxfordian cause in despair, it's worth asking whether Macbeth really is as saturated with Gunpowder allusions as some critics maintain. No doubt the play contains references to treachery, but treachery is a standard theme of Shakespeare's, and indeed of all drama. There are also hostile references to the Jesuits, but Jesuit-phobia had been rampant in England for decades, fueled by Protestant propaganda.

In her worthwhile book Shadowplay, Clare Asquith summarizes what she sees as Gunpowder elements in Macbeth. Many of these connections seem like a stretch. They include:

The line "the crow makes wing to the rooky wood," supposedly a reference to Ambrose Rookwood, one of the plotters.

Lady Macbeth's advice to look like a flower "but be the serpent under't," supposedly alluding to a Gunpowder Plot commemorative medal.

The fact that "images of dead children and murdered boys fill the play," supposedly inspired by young Prince Henry's close call.

The line "Let this pernicious hour stand aye accursed in the calendar," supposedly a nod to the inauguration of Guy Fawkes Day.

Various references to eyes and eyeballs, supposedly a reference to the fact that one of the conspirators was blinded when some of the gunpowder went off by accident.

The alleged inclusion of mystery-play motifs in the drama, which would point to Catholic rituals.

To me, these claims seem rather thin. Asquith spends most of her time on the mystery play idea, but the parallels between Macbeth and the old religious melodramas are doubtful. Among other things, Asquith wants us to see the ghost of Banquo as a stand-in for the resurrected Christ - a hard sell, given that Banquo, unlike Jesus, appears as a gory, grinning ghoul.

But there is one point raised by Asquith and many other critics that is harder to dismiss. This involves the famous "devil porter" interlude. Asquith writes,

In a curiously comic scene immediately after Duncan's murder, often thought to be a later interpolation, the castle porter struggles to answer a knocking at the gate, parodying stock characters from mystery plays, the minor devils who keep the gates of Hell. A famous sequence of references to the trial of Henry Garnet [executed as part of the Gunpowder conspiracy], including a play on his alias, 'Farmer', and on his defense of equivocation, make it clear that the porter expects Garnet to join him in Hell ...

As Asquith and others have said, the allusions to Garnet would have been clearly understood by the audience of the day. There is no way around it; the porter's monologue was undoubtedly inspired by the Gunpowder Plot. What's an Oxfordian to do?

The simplest way out is to assume that the porter material was a later addition to the play, inserted for reasons of topicality. Asquith herself notes that the scene is "often thought to be a later interpolation," and there are good reasons to believe that it is.

For one thing, the scene does not advance the plot and can be excised without affecting the narrative flow. In fact, it was omitted in standard 19th century productions because it was deemed in bad taste. It is almost always retained in modern productions, probably because the juxtaposition of low comedy with high drama appeals to postmodern sensibilities; but this artistic choice is not necessarily wise. The punning, preening porter has a tendency to stop the show.

Asquith observes that the scene is "curiously comic," and indeed its tone is markedly different from the rest of the play. Following directly on the murder of Duncan, the effect is jarring. Of course this may have been Shakespeare's intention. But it may also reflect the uneasy congruence of different authors' sensibilities and styles.

If Macbeth were a text in pristine condition, then claims of later interpolations would be harder to justify. But the consensus of scholarly opinion is that the play has been worked over by more than one hand. Continuity lapses suggest the possibility that some material was cut. Some of the witch scenes, including the appearance of Hecate, queen of the witches, have been attributed to Thomas Middleton and may have been added to pad out an unusually short play or to capitalize on the later popularity of masques (Hecate leads the coven in a dance). There is no reason why Middleton or some other hired hand could not have added the porter scene as well - perhaps in an effort to provide comic relief for what is otherwise an exceptionally grim afternoon at the theater.

All in all, the porter scene is certainly expendable and its artistic merits are debatable. Indeed, traditionally critics and producers alike regarded the scene as unworthy of Shakespeare, though this view has fallen out of favor today.

If we add the drunken porter to the list of scenes usually accepted as interpolations, then the alleged Gunpowder elements in Macbeth are reduced to a few cryptic lines that may or may not have anything to do with the scandal. Which means the play, in its original form, could have been written before 1605 – perhaps even many years before, if we reject the notion that it was meant as royal flattery.

None of this proves that Oxford wrote it. It only suggests that nothing in the play rules him out as the author. The positive case for Oxford as the real Shakespeare has been made elsewhere, notably by Mark Anderson in his book "Shakespeare" By Another Name. But that's another story.

Comments

[Luis Fonseca]

This is a very interesting topic which I've been curious about for years. While I come mostly for your comments on the paranormal (I'd really like to see you write a book about it! - you make more sense than most anyone on either side of the fence), I highly enjoy reading your views about the Shakespeare authorship issue. Thanks for another highly informative post!

[Richard M. Waugaman, M.D.]

Another thought about what you call "the Scottish play." To this day, there exists a name taboo regarding this play in the theatrical community. Actors still believe that saying "Macbeth" will bring bad luck, so they use circumlocution. I suspect this taboo has a long history, but has undergone a shift since the original taboo against speaking aloud the name of the actual playwright. Think of how the "children's" community still "remembers" the Black Death of the 14th century every time they recite "Ring around the Rosey."

[Tony M]

No one would think Macbeth was about the Gunpowder Plot if they weren't trying to combat the Oxford argument. Gary WIllis is a brilliant writer (read his incredible book on the Gettysburg Address for example) but to call his Macbeth book weak is an understatement.

By the way, the idea that the play contains material from another hand is not scholarly supposition. It is indisputable. The famous "Boil, boil toil and trouble" song of the witches is from another play, for one example.

The Stratford scholars never ask why a play written after the Gunpowder plot should be so obviously unfinished and cobbled together on their man's death in 1616? They don't ask because the answer is obvious: Macbeth is in the shape it is in because the author died in 1604 and others completed it.

[Benign Brodwicz]

As Goethe said, Michael, the only consolation of mediocrity is that genius is not immortal.

[Michael Prescott]

>As Goethe said ...

?

I don't get it.

[Hope Rivers]

What's with that benign comment.. ;-)

[Hope Rivers]

Benign are your quoting from
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe the german writer?

He also said this upon his deathbed;

"I have found no confession of faith to which I could ally myself without reservation. Now in my old age, however, I have learned of a sect, the Hypsistarians, who, hemmed in between heathens, Jews and Christians, declared that they would treasure, admire, and honour the best, the most perfect that might come to their knowledge, and inasmuch as it must have a close connection to the Godhead, pay it reverence. A joyous light thus beamed at me suddenly out of a dark age, for I had the feeling that all my life I had been aspiring to qualify as a Hypsistarian. That, however, is no small task, for how does one, in the limitations of one's individuality, come to know what is most excellent?

– from a letter to Sulpiz Boisserée dated 22 March 1831[22]

[Mark Anderson]

Thanks for the tip o' the pen, Michael. The porter scene is the only part of Macbeth that has any unambiguous relevance to the Gunpowder Plot -- and this is to the *trial* of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. They invoked a Catholic doctrine called Equivocation, a doctrine that was dreamed up in the early 1580s in Spain and caused no small amount of consternation on English shores. Edward de Vere's father-in-law wrote about Equivocation in a treatise for Queen Elizabeth in 1584. (Equivocation also came up in a trial of the Catholic agent Robert Southwell in 1595.)

In 1587, there was an actual state-sanctioned assassination of a Scots monarch. King James's mother. (So all this business about James descending from Banquo holds for Mary Queen of Scots too.) This was a particularly bloody bit of regicide, incidentally, involving a botched beheading that had to be executed twice because the axeman didn't quite finish his bloody work in one stroke. Incarnadine indeed. In any event, the Queen of England had Scots royal blood on her hands, as did her jury that delivered the pro forma treason verdict that sentenced Mary Queen of Scots to death. On that jury sat Edward de Vere. Thereby hangs a tale.