IT IS REASONABLE to assume that Shakespeare chose the subject of Macbeth because James I was reputed to be descended from Banquo. On 27 August 1605 the King witnessed at Oxford Matthew Gwinn’s playlet in which three sibyls prophesied to Banquo’s descendants ‘imperium sine fine’.1 Three days later, the Queen – but not James – saw a performance at Christ Church of Samuel Daniel’s Arcadia Reformed – published in 1606 as The Queenes Arcadia – which is apparently echoed in Macbeth’s conversation with the Doctor.2 Daphne consults a quack, but afterwards decides that physic can do nothing
to cure that hideous wound
My lusts haue giuen my Conscience.
This, she declares,
keeps me waking, that is, it presents,
Those ougly formes of terror that affright
My broken sleepes, that layes vpon my heart
This heauy loade that weighes it downe with griefe.
(f. 2v)
So Macbeth, before ordering that physic should be thrown to the dogs, asks the doctor if he cannot
minister to a mind diseas’d,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart.
(v. iii. 40–5)
Another slight indication that Shakespeare knew something about the royal visit to Oxford is that among the subjects suggested for debate before James were whether babies were influenced in their characters by their nurses’ milk, and whether tobacco had medicinal uses, two subjects on which the King had strong views.3 Shakespeare seems to have echoed James’s pamphlet against tobacco and the play contains many references to breast-feeding.
Between August 1605 and August 1606, when Macbeth was performed before James I and King Christian of Denmark, perhaps in a shortened form, Shakespeare had familiarized himself with James’s Daemonologie and some of his other works, and he had read the account of Macbeth’s career in Holinshed’s Chronicles. It must have been immediately obvious to him that he would have to depart from the historical facts: he could not have James’s ancestor conspiring with Macbeth to assassinate Duncan. He hit on the brilliant idea of fusing the account of the murder of Duncan, by Macbeth, Banquo, and others, with the account of Donwald’s murder of King Duff. The fusion was made easier by the fact that both Donwald and Macbeth had ambitious wives, and that witchcraft was an element in both stories. The murder of a king while he was a guest of the murderers was a more promising dramatic subject than the assassination of Duncan. Between the story of Donwald (pp. 149 ff.) and the story of Macbeth (pp. 168 ff.), Holinshed tells of a supernatural voice heard by King Kenneth after he has slain his nephew (p. 158) and this may have suggested the voice Macbeth thought he had heard after the murder of Duncan.
There are some indications that Shakespeare consulted two other accounts of Macbeth’s reign,4 by George Buchanan and John Leslie. In Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia the description of the voice heard by Kenneth – ‘whether in truth an audible voice from heaven addressed him, as is reported, or whether it were the suggestion of his own guilty mind, as often happens to the wicked’ (VI. 309–10) – is slightly closer than Holinshed to the passage in the play. Buchanan’s summary of Macbeth’s character resembles Shakespeare’s portrait, though a poet, in creating a tragic hero, would naturally make him as noble as possible, so as to obtain the maximum dramatic contrast between the man and his deeds. Buchanan tells us that Macbeth’s mind ‘was daily excited by the importunities of his wife’, an idea which could readily have occurred to Shakespeare once he had decided to fuse the Donwald and Macbeth stories. Buchanan explains the degeneration of Macbeth’s reign into a tyranny by his feelings of guilt, but here Holinshed seems to be closer to Shakespeare:
For the pricke of conscience (as it chanceth euer in tyrants, and such as atteine to anie estate by vnrighteous means) caused him euer to feare, least he should be serued of the same cup, as he had ministred to his predecessor.
Many editors have compared Macbeth’s lines before the murder:
This even-handed justice
Commends th’ingredience of our poison’d chalice
To our own lips.
(I. vii. 10–12)
Holinshed mentions in the margin of his comment that Macbeth’s cruelty was caused by fear. Perhaps the closest parallel between Buchanan’s and Shakespeare’s words is in the passage describing the elevation of Malcolm to Prince of Cumberland:
The Prince of Cumberland! that is a step,
On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap,
For in my way it lies.
(I. iv. 48–50)
This appointment highly incensed Macbeth, who thought it an obstacle thrown in the way of his ambition, which – now that he had obtained the two first dignities promised by his nocturnal visitors – might retard, if not altogether prevent, his arriving at the third, as the command of Cumberland was always considered the next step to the crown.
(VII. 331)
Buchanan mentions that Macbeth invited Banquo and Fleance to supper, in a friendly manner (‘familiariter’), and this may have suggested Shakespeare’s treatment of the invitation.5
The other account is by Bishop John Leslie, whose De Origine, Moribus, et Rebus Gestis Scotorum (1578) Shakespeare probably read.6 Leslie says that it was devils disguised as women (‘seu potius Daemonorum qui mulierum personas ementiti’) who told Macbeth that Banquo’s descendants would be kings.
Leslie makes no mention of Macbeth’s having accomplices in the murder of Duncan – presumably because he, like Shakespeare, wished to hush up Banquo’s part in it – but he stresses Lady Macbeth’s influence and how she overcomes her husband’s fears by producing a practical plan. He refers to Duncan as ‘most holy’ and gives a vivid account of Macbeth’s reign of terror, after he had begun by ‘indulging the common people with beneficial laws’;
In the end, however, the conscience of his hideous deeds so worked upon him and caused him such fear for his life from those about him, that his mildness changed to ruthlessness. He began either openly to execute his nobles or to induce them by his cunning to intrigue one another’s deaths… In short, like any tyrant, he went in fear of all men, and all men of him.
(tr. Collard, NA, p. 189)
The last sentence is a variation on a famous line of Seneca’s.
The strongest reason, however, for believing that Shakespeare had read Leslie’s book is the genealogical tree of Banquo’s descendants, with roots, leaves, and fruit, which appears to have left its mark on the imagery of Acts III and IV.7
There is a good deal of evidence that Shakespeare had been rereading some of Seneca’s plays. There are a number of echoes from Hercules Furens8 – ‘three pairs of neighbouring passages paralleling three pairs of neighbouring passages’ in Seneca’s play. One of the echoes, indeed, is closer to the original than to Jasper Heywood’s translation, and it is fused with an echo from Hippolytus in which Tanais is mentioned too.
It has been suggested that the contents of the witches’ cauldron were derived from classical sources – Lucan, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VII. 262 ff.) or Studley’s version of Medea. Here there is a herb ‘snepped of in depe of sylent nyght’, ‘the squesed clottered blood/Of serpentes’, filthy birds, and the ‘durtye stynkyng guttes’ of a screech-owl, and Medea invokes Hecate. Professor Inga-Stina Ewbank has persuasively argued9 that Lady Macbeth’s invocation of evil spirits, her desire to be unsexed, and her attempt to stiffen her husband’s resolution by declaring that she would have dashed out the brains of her babe, were influenced by Medea’s invocation of Hecate, her actual murder of her children, and her desire before the murder to be unsexed.
If ought of auncient corage still doe dwell within my brest,
Exile all foolysh Female feare, and pity from thy mynde….
What euer hurly burly wrought doth Phasis vnderstand,
What mighty monstrous bloudy feate I wrought by Sea or Land:
The like in Corynth shalbe seene in most outragious guise,
Most hyddious, hatefull, horrible, to heare, or see wyth eyes,
Most diuelish, desperate, dreadfull deede, yet neuer knowne
before,
Whose rage shall force heauen, earth, and hell to quake and
tremble sore …
sith my wombe hath yeelded fruict, it doth me well behoue,
The strength and parlous puissaunce of weightier illes to proue.…
How wilt thou from thy spouse depart? as him thou followed hast
In bloud to bath thy bloudy handes.
(Tenne Tragedies (1927), II. 57)
As Professor Ewbank says:10
Medea’s thoughts move from witchcraft, to royal murder, and to the slaying of her own children, with the courage and cruelty which this requires. The key-line comes in her desire to lose her woman’s nature – stressing the ‘feare, and pity’ which we know are thematic words in Macbeth – and a little later this recurs in the cruel paradox that the very fact of her having been the source of life … is being turned into a further reason to kill. But before then we have heard how, unsexed and tigerish, she will do bloody deeds, too terrible (as is the case with both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth) to ‘see wyth eyes’, and how these deeds ‘shall force heaven, earth, and hell to quake and tremble sore’, in the kind of universal confusion which Macbeth envisages in the witch-scene (IV. i. 50 ff.). The Medea passage leads up to the central Macbeth image of hands bathed in blood.
In Act IV, as Professor Ewbank points out, there is a scene ‘in which a mother’s breast is linked with the massacre of her own tender children’. Medea ‘sheds her own blood as a sacrifice to Hecate, so that she may harden herself to that massacre’:
With naked breast and dugges layde out Ile pricke with sacred
blade
Myne arme, that for the bubling bloude an issue may bee made,
With trilling streames my purple bloude let drop on Th’aulter
stones
My tender Childrens crusshed fleshe, and broken broosed bones
Lerne how to brooke with hardned heart.
(Tenne Tragedies (1927), II. 90)
Another of Seneca’s plays, Agamemnon, gave Shakespeare another model for Lady Macbeth in the shape of Clytemnestra. Her adage –
The safest path to mischiefe is by mischiefe open still –
is echoed by Macbeth:11
Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.
(III. ii. 55)
The Nurse’s adage –
The thing he feares he doth augment who heapeth syn to syn –
(Tenne Tragedies, II. 108)
might almost be taken as an epigraph for Macbeth. Cassandra’s foreseeing of the future in Act V has affinities with two memorable passages in Macbeth: the aside in which he describes the onset of temptation and the soliloquy about the imaginary dagger:
my prophesying spright
Did neuer yet disclose to mee so notable a sight:
I see the same…
No vision fond fantasticall my senses doth beguile …
shiuering heere I Stande.
O shall a King be murthered…?
The gubs of bloude downe dropping on the wynde shall powred
bee.
(Tenne Tragedies, II. 133)
So Macbeth conceives the murder of Duncan:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man …
(I. iii. 138–9)
and in the later soliloquy he addresses the dagger:
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind… ?
I see thee yet…
Mine eyes are made the fools o’th’other senses,
Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still;
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood.
(II. i. 36 ff.)
in between these passages Macbeth surmises that Pity
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.
(I. vii. 24–5)
Cassandra, who sees gouts of blood ‘dropping on the wynde’, speaks of the murder of Agamemnon as a ‘detestable deed’. Apart from these passages, Shakespeare seems to have been influenced by the first chorus of the play, which contains possible germs of ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ (‘To morrow … One clod of croked care another bryngeth in’); of ‘When the hurly-burly’s done’ (‘One hurly burly done’); of ‘the way to dusty death’ (‘downe in dust to lye’), and of several other phrases. It is possible that Shakespeare reread Seneca’s plays with the intention of writing a more classical play than his previous tragedies had been and (in Sidney’s phrase) to write a play which would make kings fear to be tyrants.12
There are some resemblances between Arden of Feversham and Macbeth.13 The conscience-stricken soliloquies of Michael before the murder of Arden, Mosbie’s soliloquy before the murder (III. v), and the knocking (v. i) were doubtless known to Shakespeare and may have influenced his treatment of Duncan’s murder. It has often been pointed out that there are echoes of earlier works of Shakespeare himself in Macbeth: parallels have been noted between the stanzas describing Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece and Macbeth’s murder of Duncan – Macbeth himself makes the comparison;14 between 2 Henry VI and several passages in Macbeth – here the link was the theme of witchcraft;15 and between Richard III and Macbeth, both of whom wade through slaughter to a throne, and both of whom are overthrown by the forces of liberation.16
But, when all is said, Shakespeare’s main source was Holinshed. The major alterations he made are easily explicable on dramatic grounds. Once he had decided to graft on the story of Donwald, he would make Duncan more virtuous and deprive Macbeth of a legitimate grievance. Banquo’s innocence was determined by both poetic and politic necessity. Several changes can be explained by reasons of dramatic economy: the battles at the beginning and end of the play are condensed, though it is possible that the confusion in the second scene is due to abbreviation. The ten years of good rule by Macbeth, which earned the praise of the judicious Hooker, are omitted; Macduff offends Macbeth by not attending the coronation and by refusing to come to Court, not as in Holinshed by his refusal to assist in the building of Dunsinane Castle; and the prophecies in Act IV are economically ascribed to the weird sisters, not to ‘a certeine witch, whom hee had in great trust’ nor to ‘certeine wizzards, in whose words he put great confidence’.
Law lists17 thirty-five incidents not to be found in Holinshed, but most of these resulted inevitably from a dramatization of the story – the initial appearance of the weird sisters, Macbeth’s letter, Lady Macbeth’s welcome to Duncan, and Banquo’s suspicion that Macbeth had murdered Duncan. Others are more significant. According to Holinshed, Macduff comes to England, knowing that his family have been murdered. By making Ross bring the news after the testing of Macduff by Malcolm, Shakespeare makes the scene more plausible, since Malcolm could hardly suspect Macduff of being a spy if he knew that Macbeth had murdered his wife and family.
There is nothing in Holinshed to suggest Lady Macbeth’s invocation of the murdering ministers, her sleep-walking, or her death; but, as we have seen, the first of these was probably suggested by Seneca’s Medea, interfused with ideas of demonology suggested by James I’s book and Holinshed’s account of the weird sisters. Holinshed has nothing about the knocking on the gate or about the Porter, who doubtless originated in the Porter of Hell Gate,18 while his references to the trial of Father Garnet and to the practice of equivocation were topical at the time Shakespeare was writing.19
Holinshed does not mention the appearance of Banquo’s ghost and this may have been suggested by Le Loier’s Treatise of Specters, the English translation of which was published in 1605.20 He tells us that after tyrants have put to death ‘men of noted vertue and honestie’ they are ‘perplexed and terrified with a million of feares’ (p. 112). Such murderers
haue bin troubled and tormented with most horrible phantosmes and imaginations, which do com into their heads both sleeping and waking… How often haue they supposed and imagined, that they haue seene sundry visions and apparitions of those whom they haue murthered, or of some others whom they haue feared?
(p. 112)
Le Loier gives as an example how King Thierry, having slain Simmachus, saw
on an euening as hee sate at supper … the face of Simmachus in a most horrible shape and fashion, with mustachoes, knitting his browes, frowning with his eyes, biting his lippes for very anger, and looking awry vpon him.
(p. 112v)
From this anecdote and from the invitation of Banquo to the solemn supper, mentioned by Holinshed and Buchanan, Shakespeare created the banquet-scene, but adding the arrival of the murderer, the pledging of the absent guest, the double appearance of the ghost, Lady Macbeth’s attempt to control the situation, and the exhaustion of the guilty pair after the departure of the guests.
The testing of Macduff by Malcolm is given in full by Holinshed, following Boece, Bellenden, and Stewart; but Shakespeare omits the fable of the Fox and the Flies and adds other vices to Malcolm’s selfaccusation, so as to provide contrasting pictures of the good and bad ruler.21 The passage about Edward the Confessor’s touching for the King’s Evil comes from the English section of the Chronicles and this provided Shakespeare with a good supernatural to contrast with the evil of the weird sisters, as well as a holy king to contrast with the ruler of Scotland. As James I was beginning reluctantly to ‘touch’22 the episode had a topical interest; and dramatically it was a useful bridge between the distrust of Malcolm and Macduff, and the news of the killing of Macduff’s family which converts him into an avenger.
James I’s Daemonologie has clearly left its mark on all those scenes in which the Weird Sisters appear, although Shakespeare probably derived some of his information from Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (1584). He would naturally have paid particular attention to his royal patron’s views.23 He would have read that ‘as to the diuells foretelling of things to come, it is true that he knows not all things future, but yet that he knowes parte’ (Bk I, Cap. 1); that witches might ‘foretell what commonweales shall florish or decay; what persons shall be fortunate or vnfortunate, what side shall winne in anie battell’ (Bk I, Cap. 4); that the Devil makes himself ‘so to be trusted in these little thinges, that he may haue the better commoditie thereafter to deceiue them in the end with a tricke once for all; I meane the euerlasting perdition of their soul and body’ (Bk I, Cap. 5); that ‘he will make his schollers to creepe in credite with Princes, by foretelling great thinges; parte true, parte false. For if all were false he would tyne credite at all handes; but alwaies doubtsome, as his Oracles were’ (Bk I, Cap. 6); that ‘at their thirde meeting, he makes a shew to be carefull to performe his promises’ (Bk II, Cap. 2); and that he is able to ‘decaue vs to our wracke’ (Bk I, Cap. 2). So Banquo explains that
oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence.
(I. iii. 123–6)
The richness of Macbeth depends partly on the fact that Shakespeare was making use of deeply rooted ideas and images – recalling his earliest experiments as a poet and dramatist, his school reading, and his long familiarity with the Bible. All these things combined with the programme of reading he carried out for the specific purpose of writing the play. He may have read several of James I’s works,24 but his instinct led him to borrow only what he needed for his play. Not the least remarkable thing about Shakespeare’s method is that one can always find a good dramatic reason for the inclusion of material that critics have ascribed to the demands of patronage.