The year of lear, p.19
The Year of Lear, page 19
Though Garnet was dead, the doctrine closely identified with him remained a threat. The drumbeat of condemnation lasted through August before gradually abating. Coke made much of it when addressing the Norwich Assizes on August 4, a speech considered significant enough to merit publication. Unlike many of those who trained at the Inns of Court, Coke seems to have shown little interest in playgoing (and that very day at Norwich he had encouraged local authorities to crack down on “stage players, wherewith I find the country much troubled”). But five years earlier Coke had closely read Richard the Second. He had done so in the aftermath of Essex’s uprising, on the eve of which the Chamberlain’s Men had been paid forty shillings by some of Essex’s supporters for a command performance of that old play. Essex’s followers were eager to wrest Shakespeare’s words to their own political ends and hoped that playgoers would recognize the obvious parallels between Richard II and their own childless monarch, surrounded by flatterers, burdened with an Irish war, who needed to be deposed for the nation’s good. In the course of investigating the failed uprising, Coke questioned one of Shakespeare’s fellow shareholders, read the offending play, and determined that the Chamberlain’s Men were not to be prosecuted. One of Richard the Second’s great speeches had stuck with him. John of Gaunt’s prophecy about the dangers besetting the English nation. Gaunt had memorably described the wonders of the land—
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea . . .
(2.1.40–46)
—before warning that all this was now threatened. In the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Gaunt’s vision of the endangered kingdom had taken on new meaning for Coke, who here threads the speech into a fresh political reading. Coke spoke of how this “sea-environed island” had faced grave danger during “the last horrid treason, by inhuman savages complotted”:
I know not what to speak, because I want words, to describe the traitorous, detestable, tyrannical, bloody, murderous villainy of so vile an action. Only this had their horrible attempt taken place. This sea-environed-island, the beauty and wonder of the world. This so famous and far-renowned Great Britain’s monarchy, had at one blow endured a recoverless ruin, being overwhelmed in a sea of blood, all those evils should have at one instant happened, which would have made this happiest kingdom of all kingdoms, the most unhappy. Our conquering nation conquered in her self: her fair and fertile bosom, being by her own native (though foul unnatural children) come in pieces, should have been made a scorn to all the nations of the earth. This so well planted, pleasant, fruitful, world’s-accounted Eden’s Paradise, should have been by this time, made a place disconsolate, a vast and desert wilderness.
Shakespeare’s words continued to redefine the ways in which the English made sense of their world. What had changed was the source of danger to the nation: for Gaunt, in Shakespeare’s original, it was a feckless King Richard; for Essex’s followers, it was a queen manipulated by flatterers; for Coke, it was the Jesuits’ “hellish sophistry, equivocating.” Coke described how the plotters “had practiced a most hellish attempt, wherein their devilishness brought itself nearest to the nature of the devil, making fire and brimstone the instruments of our destruction. And though the principal actors of that evil have thereby themselves destroyed, yet the former experience of their continual attempting may give us warning.” The destructive plot may have been foiled, but the diabolic threat posed by the doctrine of equivocation remained.
10
ANOTHER HELL ABOVE THE GROUND
Not long after these traumatic events, Francis Bacon gently admonished an imprisoned friend, Tobie Matthew, who had chosen this dangerous year of 1606 to convert to Catholicism, for which he would soon be exiled. Bacon urged him to consider how “this last Powder Treason” was “fit to be tabled and pictured in the chambers of meditation, as another hell above the ground.” Bacon was prescient, for it would be memorably pictured, not just in the imagination, but also, and vividly, in a print called “The Powder Treason,” executed by Michael Droeshout (father of the artist responsible for Shakespeare’s portrait in the 1623 folio). The large sheet is crammed with words and images, including a central panel of King James seated before Parliament, the scene of the crime, its intended victims going about their business unaware of the forces of good and evil arrayed around them. Above, angels hover protectively beneath the watchful eye of God, while below, Guy Fawkes is paired with the barrels of gunpowder in the vault beneath the House of Lords. On the lower left a priest swears to secrecy those planning the explosion; on the lower right we see the plotters’ grisly executions. Between these two scenes is the print’s most arresting image: Garnet and a dozen of his accomplices are depicted as spectators who witness their own terrifying fate—arriving at hellmouth, where devils await their traitorous souls. Illustrative lines, lifted from the broadside Princeps Proditorum, confirm the message: “their lives heathenish, practice devilish, the deeds damnable, their ends miserable.” The print invites us to reflect on that which is never actually represented but is described at the very top of the page: the treasonous killing of the king, an action “propounded by Satan” and “founded in hell.”
When audiences first saw Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the spring of 1606, they may have been surprised that they didn’t get to witness the play’s central action, on which everything turns: the murder of King Duncan. Locating the killing offstage is an unusual decision, given what audiences craved and what Shakespeare had offered them in all of his previous tragedies. Over the years, playgoers had watched Titus kill Tamora, Romeo stab Tybalt, the conspirators butcher Julius Caesar, Hamlet stab and then poison Claudius, Othello smother Desdemona and then stab himself, and Edgar fight and mortally wound the bastard Edmund. Because Duncan was a Scottish monarch, it may simply have proven impolitic to stage the scene, especially at this fraught moment (though if so, the entire plot, which also ends with the killing of a King of Scots, again—surprisingly—offstage, invited censorship). For Shakespeare to write a tragedy so fixated on a regicide and its repercussions yet not let playgoers see the act itself suggests instead that it was for him a deed—like the detonation that would have killed King James and devastated Britain—more powerfully “tabled and pictured in the chambers of meditation.” But where Shakespeare’s play differs from Droeshout’s propagandistic print is in its cosmology, its refusal to portray hell as subterranean. The nightmarish tragedy that Shakespeare creates in Macbeth is all the more terrifying for taking place, to borrow Bacon’s words, in “another hell above the ground.”
In the immediate aftermath of Duncan’s offstage murder we are offered by way of compensation one of the most incongruous scenes in all of Shakespeare, so atypical that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other early critics suspected that it was “written for the mob by some other hand.” A hungover and garrulous Porter, whose job is to admit visitors, slowly responds to repeated knocking at the castle’s gate. The role was probably first made famous by Robert Armin, the company’s witty comic star for whom Shakespeare had most recently written the Fool’s part in King Lear. The knocking begins before his entrance. It’s Macbeth who first hears it—“Whence is that knocking? / How is’t with me, when every noise appalls me?” (2.2.61–62)—at the very moment that Lady Macbeth is offstage smearing Duncan’s blood on the sleeping grooms. Reentering, Lady Macbeth hears it too and tells her husband: “I hear a knocking / At the south entry. Retire we to our chamber” (2.2.69–70). The persistent knocking is heard yet again, at which point they hurriedly exit.
A few years after Coleridge questioned Shakespeare’s authorship of the ensuing scene, Thomas De Quincey defended it in an inspired essay, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”: “Another world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is ‘unsexed’; Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed.” Even as Shakespeare refuses reductive explanations of the diabolic, he allows us to reflect on the living hell that the Macbeths will henceforth experience—and impose on Scotland. He does so by having the Porter imagine that he’s a “porter of hell gate” (2.3.2) in the tradition of the devil porters who had been a fixture of medieval England’s now barely remembered mystery plays. Through this conceit Shakespeare offers us, in the most down-to-earth scene in the play, the closest thing to an evocation of hell itself. As he had in Lear, Shakespeare invokes the supernatural while steering clear of the moral certitude that staging the demonic typically invites.
More knocking follows, and more complaining, as the Porter invokes hell’s chief devil and wonders what lost and self-justifying soul has now come knocking: “Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ th’ name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer, that hanged himself on th’ expectation of plenty. Come in time! Have napkins enough about you; here you’ll sweat for’t” (2.3.2–6). While “farmer” is a common enough word, it’s one that Shakespeare almost never used. But he may have heard about Garnet passing under the alias of “Farmer,” one of several pseudonyms mentioned at his trial. While it’s the only time that this alias appears in the public record or in surviving English correspondence, it was what Garnet was called within his close-knit circle, as we know from the letters of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, a confidante of the English Jesuits who was living at the time in the Spanish ambassador’s residence in London. She writes home to a friend in Spain less familiar with the English Jesuit that “Mister Farmer . . . is Father Garnet.” It may simply be a coincidence that the Porter uses this word, or else Garnet’s alias may have been more widely known at the time than surviving evidence suggests.
The Porter next imagines greeting another arrival in hell, an unnamed equivocator: “Knock, knock! Who’s there, in th’ other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. Oh, come in, equivocator” (2.3.7–11). It’s as if Shakespeare had heard the joke making the rounds that spring—that the treasonous Garnet “will equivocate at the gallows”—and taken it a step further, inviting us to imagine the Jesuit arriving at his next and final destination, hell itself, having failed to equivocate his way to heaven.
It’s no one-off topical allusion, for the Porter is not yet done with equivocation, explaining to Macduff, who finally enters, why it took him so long to respond to his knocking: “Faith, sir, we were carousing till the second cock: and drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things” (2.3.23–24). When Macduff rises to the bait and asks, “What three things does drink especially provoke?” the Porter answers:
Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes: it provokes the desire but it takes away the performance. Therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him and disheartens him, makes him stand to and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.
(2.3.27–35)
His joking about lechery, drink, and equivocation likely doubles as another dig, linking the Jesuit equivocator’s excessive drinking to his reputed philandering (even Salisbury couldn’t resist teasing Garnet about this).
Yet the Porter’s lines about equivocation are themselves equivocal. As much as they seem to repeat contemporary gossip about Garnet, they also can be read as sympathetic to the infamous equivocator. While many no doubt accepted official claims that he was implicated in the plot, for others he was a devout figure who “committed treason enough for God’s sake” rather than for any personal gain, and deserved clemency. Though he might have equivocated under duress and perhaps even torture, he “could not equivocate to heaven,” for God himself knew what was in his heart when he practiced mental reservation under such trying conditions. Context matters too. How seriously are we to take the word of a drunken porter who imagines himself an agent of the devil? And the imagined equivocator who had been knocking turns out to be Macduff, hardly a man we think of as a traitor who swears and lies.
The most consequential act of equivocation in the play occurs when Macbeth and Banquo first encounter the Sisters (we never hear them referred to as “witches,” only as Weird or Weyard Sisters). The first hails Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, the second as Thane of Cawdor, and the third promises him he “shalt be king hereafter”; they then tell Banquo, “Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none” (1.3.50, 67). All true, but equivocal, insofar as they withhold vital information (they don’t tell Macbeth that he’ll have to kill to do it, or Banquo that he won’t be alive to see it). Equivocation makes following Macbeth’s dialogue a mentally exhausting experience, for playgoers—much like those conversing with equivocators—must decide whether a claim should be accepted at face value, and, if not, must struggle to reconstruct what may be suppressed through mental reservation. But with equivocators, one never knows what, if anything, is left unspoken. The meaning of the seemingly paradoxical phrase “Fair is foul . . .” (1.1.11) becomes clear only when we learn to finish the thought: “ . . . once we look past false exteriors.”
Equivocation permeates the play. When Macbeth writes to his wife he withholds from her the prophecy that Banquo’s heirs will be kings. He equivocates again when justifying why he killed Duncan’s guards: “Who could refrain, / That had a heart to love, and in that heart / Courage to make’s love known?” (2.3.118–20). Mental reservation becomes second nature to him. He chooses not to tell the pair of murderers he dispatches to kill Banquo and Fleance that a third will join them. And when Lady Macbeth then asks him “What’s to be done?” he demurs: “Be innocent of the knowledge” (3.2.48). It’s ironic that the doomed Banquo offers the best description of the pretense at the heart of mental reservation, insisting that God can read the minds of men and see through their treasons: “In the great hand of God I stand, and thence / Against the undivulged pretense I fight / Of treasonous malice” (2.3.132–34).
The more that equivocating becomes habitual for Macbeth, the more reassurance he demands from the Sisters, who in turn play upon his hopes and further equivocate, summoning apparitions who urge Macbeth, “Be bloody, bold, and resolute,” since “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth,” while assuring him that he shall never be vanquished until “Great Birnam Wood” shall come to Dunsinane (4.1.79–81, 93). By play’s end, as he watches in disbelief as the branches cut from Birnam Wood are carried by an approaching army to Dunsinane, a shattered Macbeth fully grasps the destructive consequences of the “equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth” (5.5.43–44). At the last, after learning that Macduff is not of woman born (that is, he had a Caesarian birth so was from his mother “untimely ripped” [5.8.16]), Macbeth reflects a final time on how equivocation has destroyed him: “Be these juggling fiends no more believed / That palter with us in a double sense, / That keep the word of promise to our ear / And break it to our hope” (5.8.19–22). We follow Macbeth’s descent into a despairing world, a hell on earth: “I ’gin to be aweary of the sun,” he says, “And wish th’ estate o’ th’ world were now undone” (5.5.49–50). Unlike most other tragic heroes in Shakespeare, Macbeth is denied a dying, self-revealing speech; the last we hear from him in way of reflection are these hard-earned insights into the workings of equivocation.
Equivocating breaks Lady Macbeth as well. In her efforts to deflect attention from her own complicity, and that of her husband, in the murder of Duncan, she becomes adept at it, especially during the banquet where Macbeth is so shaken by the sight of Banquo’s ghost. She effortlessly equivocates, reassuring their guests that “my lord is often thus, / And hath been from his youth. Pray you, keep seat; / The fit is momentary; upon a thought / He will again be well” (3.4.53–56). That equivocal “well” will echo a couple of dozen times through the rest of the play. Perfectly exemplifying the division between that which is spoken and that which is suppressed in the act of equivocating, the maddened and sleepwalking Lady Macbeth is compelled to write down then compulsively reread the “undivulged pretence” that cannot openly be spoken: “I have seen her rise from her bed,” her gentlewoman reports, “throw her nightgown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon’t, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep” (5.1.4–7).
