Macbeth

kingcraft and witchcraft
Dr Clare Jackson is Lecturer and Director of Studies in History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and the author of Restoration Scotland 1660-1690. Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (2003). She was invited to talk to the Macbeth company about how the play might have been interpreted by an early 17th-century audience and especially the ways in which kingship and witchcraft could be seen as mutual competitors for supernatural influence. The following is an edited version of Dr. Jackson’s much longer essay, Macbeth, Kingcraft and Witchcraft which appeared in the Macbeth programme [RSC 2004].

The Divine Right of Kings
Shakespeare’s Macbeth presents theatregoers with an absorbing drama of kingship, tyranny, usurpation and regicide. Composed around 1606, Macbeth was performed before the reigning British monarch, James VI & I, who held notoriously specific views about kingship and had written extensively on the theory and practice of royal governance. As James VI of Scotland, he had published two works expounding his belief in the ‘divine right of kings’ before coming to the English throne on Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603. In The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598) and Basilicon Doron (1599), James insisted that monarchs were divinely-ordained and served as God’s representatives on earth. At the same time, however, James recognised a compelling ideological correlation between divinely-ordained monarchy and diabolic prophecy. A monarch who claimed, as James VI & I did, to be the Lord’s Anointed, inevitably became the Devil’s most potent enemy. Promoting kingcraft also entailed confronting witchcraft.

Scotland’s bloody history
In choosing to write a play about Scottish kingship, Shakespeare had to tread sensitively to avoid provoking royal censure, whilst also appealing to an English audience that tended to regard Scotland as an alien, primitive and barbarous backwater. Such popular prejudice was, to some extent, confirmed by the violent and volatile period of medieval Scottish history in which Macbeth is set. Whilst Macbeth ruled Scotland for seventeen years (1040-1057 AD), of his nine royal predecessors who ruled between 943 and 1040, seven were murdered, either by their successors or in royal feuds. The life expectancy of Scots monarchs was correspondingly short. Since Robert III’s accession in 1390, every Scots monarch had succeeded to the throne as a minor, leading to destabilising royal regencies and endemic noble rivalries. James VI had himself been crowned in July 1567, when he was only thirteen months old. His coronation followed the vicious assassination of his father, Henry, Lord Darnley, and the forced abdication and imprisonment of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, who later escaped to English exile, before being executed by Queen Elizabeth in 1587.

James VI and Witchcraft
An aspect of Jacobean kingship theory that would have exerted a particular fascination for a seventeenth-century audience of Macbeth is the relationship between kingcraft and witchcraft. As a divinely-ordained monarch, James acknowledged a sacred duty to prosecute all witches who subversively tried to replace his divine authority in earthly affairs with diabolic influence. In 1597, James published a treatise entitled Daemonology, in which he argued that the potential for witches to harm a monarch varied in direct proportion to that monarch’s vigilance on the grounds that ‘God is very able to make them instruments to waken and punish his sloth’. James had personally presided over a series of witchcraft trials held near Edinburgh, at which over a hundred suspected witches were examined between November 1590 and May 1591, of whom a large number were convicted and put to death. Charges levelled against the suspected witches included treasonable acts directed against James himself, including attempted regicide by melting waxen royal effigies, as well as raising the tempestuous gales that had delayed James and his Danish bride, Anne, from returning to Scotland in the spring of 1590.


			Dr Clare Jackson is Lecturer and Director of Studies in History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and the author of Restoration Scotland 1660-1690. Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (2003). She was invited to talk to the Macbeth company about how the play might have been interpreted by an early 17th-century audience and especially the ways in which kingship and witchcraft could be seen as mutual competitors for supernatural influence. The following is an edited version of Dr. Jackson’s much longer essay, Macbeth, Kingcraft and Witchcraft which appeared in the Macbeth programme [RSC 2004]. Shakespeare’s Macbeth presents theatregoers with an absorbing drama of kingship, tyranny, usurpation and regicide. Composed around 1606, Macbeth was performed before the reigning British monarch, James VI & I, who held notoriously specific views about kingship and had written extensively on the theory and practice of royal governance. As James VI of Scotland, he had published two works expounding his belief in the ‘divine right of kings’ before coming to the English throne on Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603. In The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598) and Basilicon Doron (1599), James insisted that monarchs were divinely-ordained and served as God’s representatives on earth. At the same time, however, James recognised a compelling ideological correlation between divinely-ordained monarchy and diabolic prophecy. A monarch who claimed, as James VI & I did, to be the Lord’s Anointed, inevitably became the Devil’s most potent enemy. Promoting kingcraft also entailed confronting witchcraft. In choosing to write a play about Scottish kingship, Shakespeare had to tread sensitively to avoid provoking royal censure, whilst also appealing to an English audience that tended to regard Scotland as an alien, primitive and barbarous backwater. Such popular prejudice was, to some extent, confirmed by the violent and volatile period of medieval Scottish history in which Macbeth is set. Whilst Macbeth ruled Scotland for seventeen years (1040-1057 AD), of his nine royal predecessors who ruled between 943 and 1040, seven were murdered, either by their successors or in royal feuds. The life expectancy of Scots monarchs was correspondingly short. Since Robert III’s accession in 1390, every Scots monarch had succeeded to the throne as a minor, leading to destabilising royal regencies and endemic noble rivalries. James VI had himself been crowned in July 1567, when he was only thirteen months old. His coronation followed the vicious assassination of his father, Henry, Lord Darnley, and the forced abdication and imprisonment of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, who later escaped to English exile, before being executed by Queen Elizabeth in 1587. An aspect of Jacobean kingship theory that would have exerted a particular fascination for a seventeenth-century audience of Macbeth is the relationship between kingcraft and witchcraft. As a divinely-ordained monarch, James acknowledged a sacred duty to prosecute all witches who subversively tried to replace his divine authority in earthly affairs with diabolic influence. In 1597, James published a treatise entitled Daemonology, in which he argued that the potential for witches to harm a monarch varied in direct proportion to that monarch’s vigilance on the grounds that ‘God is very able to make them instruments to waken and punish his sloth’. James had personally presided over a series of witchcraft trials held near Edinburgh, at which over a hundred suspected witches were examined between November 1590 and May 1591, of whom a large number were convicted and put to death. Charges levelled against the suspected witches included treasonable acts directed against James himself, including attempted regicide by melting waxen royal effigies, as well as raising the tempestuous gales that had delayed James and his Danish bride, Anne, from returning to Scotland in the spring of 1590.