Four Brief Reviews

I have been reading rather a lot of history lately, and have decided to write four mini-reviews, if even that small term is not too great for what I intend, in today's post.  While the books were all published a decade or more ago, I think they are still of great interest, one more than the others, as you shall see if you read on.

The first book is not, strictly speaking, history.  It is Garry Wills' Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth, which is Wills' response to the New York Public Library's and Oxford University Press' invitation to give lectures on any topic, which then becomes a book.  The result was this book which is literary criticism, certainly, but historic literary criticism; that is, criticism which makes its points by reference to history.  Wills' book was published in 1995 and would not disappoint an historicist.  Aside from Wills' ridiculous contention that Macbeth is a broken play (it so often fails, he says) that only his latter day clear-eyed prescience has at last delivered, he makes three main contentions, buttressed by historical arguments: 1) Macbeth is a Gunpowder play, deeply influenced by three other plays written near the same time, all of which, not coincidentally, contain elements of witchcraft; 2) Macbeth becomes a male witch, knowing incanting within his charmed circle upon the model of Medea inspired by Ovid and Seneca, akin to Dr. Faustus; and 3) all of the references the porter makes in his famous scene (2.3) are to Father Henry Garnet, the man vilified by Coke, James and the collective protestant Lords as the arch-plotter of the Powder Treason.  There are other points made in the book, slender as it is (though it is remarkably well documented), with the usual comments on the irresistably intriguing Lady Macbeth, Hecate and the interpolated scenes, and Malcolm's puzzling role.  There is nothing much new in these observations, however.

The first of these key arguments is undoubtedly true.  There were certainly other plays vitally concerned with witchcraft around the time of Macbeth (1605-1606).  Wills cites three he thinks were key:  John Marston's Sophonisba (actually, The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba), Thomas Dekker's The Whore of Babylon, and Barnabe Barnes' The Devil's Charter.  Now, it is undoubtedly true that these plays appeared near the same time aimed at flattering the new King's self expressed "expertise" in witchcraft.  It is also undoubted, and hardly an original observation, that Macbeth is colored by the sensational events of the recently resolved Gunpowder Plot, with its dark forboding, paranoid plots, and evil intentions for Protestants from highest to low, as the Protestants saw it.  It does not follow, however, that Macbeth was influenced in any direct way by the three plays named, and the parallels Wills draws are hardly convincing. These parallel passages and similar events arguments are usually weak and unconvincing, and so it is here.  Too much ink is spilled to say, simply, that the Powder Treason was in the air.

Wills argument about Macbeth becoming a male witch is also weak.  Shakespeare leads Macbeth into unconscious actions that imitate those of a witch, like the overt actions of Dr. Faustus, but the point is that it is an unconscious descent, where Wills would make it conscious.  James as auditor would undoubtedly have recognized Macbeth's actions in imitation of witchcraft, but he is still a tragic hero, dark certainly, more the victim of ambition than necromancy.

The best part of Wills' argument has to do with the porter scene, where he argues convincingly that the porters three references, to "a farmer that hanged himself on th' expectation of plenty;" to "an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale;" and "an English tailor come hither for stealing out of a French hose;" all refer to the late Father Henry Garnet, late head of English Jesuits hanged as the supreme plotter behind the Powder Treason (though Garnet, in fact, in actuality attempted to prevent the execution of the plot--see my review of Antonia Fraser's Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot).  The first two of these references had always been clear to commentators, Farmer being one of Father Garnet's aliases, and Garnet being the author of the Treatise on Equivocation, but the third is more glancing.  Wills explains it as a reference to an English tailor who took Garnet's straw (a stalk of grain onto which Garnet's blood splashed at his execution, supposedly in an image of Garnet's face which had miracle working powers) to his wife.  I won't attempt to reproduce the argument here in all it's complexity.  It can be found on p. 103 of Wills' book.  I find it convincing because the subject of Garnet and the Powder Treason was THE topic of the day, and people, especially the court, were intimately familiar with its many intricacies.  Wills point is that the porter is really greeting Garnet to hell--Macbeth's abode--in the name of the devil--by three different names, joining the necromantic sets of three which inform the play.

Secondly, I have recently read Anne Somerset's Unnatural Murder: Poison at the Court of James I.  It is a much longer work than the Wills book, and was published in 1997.  The book tells the story of Frances Howard, daughter of Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, James' Lord Chamberlain and, after Northampton, head of the powerful Howard clan of crypto Catholics.  Frances was married at the age of thirteen to Robert Devereus, third Earl of Essex and son of Shakespeare's Essex of Henry V fame.  The marriage, at Frances' urgent behest, was annulled in a famous hearing conducted by the archbishop of Canterbury--who strongly opposed the annulment--so that Frances could be freed to marry James' homosexual favorite, Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester and later Earl of Somerset, the most powerful courtier in the country--until his downfall, brought about primarily by Frances' murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, Carr's once fast companion, but fallen friend who had been imprisoned by James for refusing an ambassadorship and who was there cruelly abandoned by Carr and poisoned through the machinations of Frances Howard (then Countess of Somerset) and a network of middle and low-life accomplices.

The book is rich in detail and well written.  If not quite a page turner, it retains the reader's interest to the end with a compelling story, with many elements of a murder mystery, and certainly engaging characters.  The book suffers from the author's unwarranted outbursts of sympathy of the historically vilified Frances Howard and other unnecessary displays of partisanship.  These are relatively minor blemishes, however, and I can strongly recommend this book for those interested in the Overbury affair, the most sensational court happening during James' reign after the Gunpowder Plot. 

My third book is Cavaliers and Roundheads: The English at War 1642 - 1649, by Christopher Hibbert.  Admittedly, this one is straying outside of Shakespeare's lifetime by a stretch, but certainly is very relevant to the destruction of the theaters, the rule of Cromwell and the Puritans, and the eventual restoration of Charles II, along with the restoration of the English theater.

Hibbert is a great popular historian, who has written prolifically across a wide range of historical topics.  This is a non-polemical history of the Civil War, "concentrating upon what happened rather than upon what brought it about."  Because it is meant to be as entertaining as it is informative, it dwells (perhaps overmuch) on "little-known, curious and illuminating detail."  I found the book, as one would expect from Hibbert, fulfilled this formulaic plan, but became in many places a tedious census of murders, plunderings and outrages committed by both factions.  A grander overview would have served in place of much of the pillaging of so many very specific items.  The best scenes of the book have to do with the exchanges between Charles I and Prince Rupert, Pym, Parliament and Waller, Essex and Fairfax (the same Essex, in fact whose first marriage was annulled in Unnatural Poison, the book reviewed above), and in the cryptic pronouncements of Cromwell in his more apocryphal moods.  For those eager to gain an overview of the Civil War, the Prologue and Epilogue read in sequence is a remarkable summary.

One cannot accuse my final book of too much detail.  It is an exquisite history of the trial and execution of Charles I, taught, elegant, without a word wasted.  It is A Coffin for King Charles, by C. V. Wedgewood, published in 1964 and, in the words of A. L. Rowse in his introductory essay, "It is...a rare kind of historical work that is also a perfect work of art."  Indeed.  The book is out of print now, and more's the pity.  It is a great reading experience, whose final pages have been mimicked by many other historians in their telling detail of the final hours of Charles I, who comes off in a much stronger, clearer light than he does in Hibbert's book.  The book does justice to the Parliamentarians as well, but paints them as more aware of the illegality of their actions, while firmly convinced of its necessity, than is sometimes the case.  The style is elegant, the notes complete, and the story engaging.  Get a copy of this one while you can.