MACBETH: SHAKESPEARE’S GUNPOWDER PLOT PLAY

Guy Fawkes, the man who was to have set the explosives in the 1605
gunpowder plot to blow up the houses of parliament, has become an American
icon of the right-wing—a proponent for blowing up government. Because popular
memory has romanticized Guy Fawkes, some of the other folks associated with
the plot have been forgotten. Although they appeared in literature of the period,
they are rarely noticed today.

However, there are at least a half-dozen gunpowder plays. A play attributed to

Shakespeare, The Fifth of November or The Gunpowder Plot
http://books.google.com/books?id=kzksAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=rho
des+gunpowder+plot&lr=&ei=He7QSpG4IJ7CzQTG_c30DQ#v=onepage&q=&f=f
alse, however, is unfortunately a forgery by George Ambrose Rhodes from the
1830s. Genuine plays contemporary to Shakespeare that allude to the
Gunpowder Plot include Macbeth, John Marston’s Sophonisba, Dekker’s The
Whore of Babylon and Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter. Only very recently
has it been recognized that the category also includes Robert Burton’s Latin play
Philosophaster http://www.northernrenaissance.org/articles/Jesuits-and-
Philosophasters-Robert-Burtons-Response-to-the-Gunpowder-PlotbrKathryn-
Murphy/11, a comedy written in 1606 featuring a pseudo-scholar who is one of
the few stage Jesuits of the period. The character’s name is Polupragmaticus,
meaning “being a busybody” who claims to be bilingual, ambidexterous,
omniscient and, in fact, a Jesuit. It’s not much of a pretense since he also
declares himself “a grammarian, a rhetorician, a geometrician, a painter, a
wrestling coach, augur, rope walker, physician, magician. I know it all. Or if you
prefer, I am a Jesuit. That sums it up.”

To make Polupragmaticus’ identity indisputable, his servant is called Aequivocus,

a clear allusion to the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation which allowed one to lie
under oath. The rationale for equivocation was spelled out in the manuscript
Treatise of Equivocation,
http://www.archive.org/stream/treatiseofequivo00jarduoft#page/iv/mode/2up,
written by a Jesuit named Henry Garnet. Garnet was the confessor to two of the
Gunpowder plotters, and his manuscript was found in their possession, leading
him to be tried for treason and hung, drawn and quartered. Appreciating that in
the early 1600s, it was not Guy Fawkes but the Jesuit Garnet that attracted
literary attention in connection with the Gunpowder plot gives new focus to
Macbeth. Why? Because the idea of “double meaning” -- or equivocation -- is
central to the play. The standard definition of Equivocale in Florio’s Dictionary
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/florio/ is “of diverse significance, of double
meaning”. In Cotgrave’s Dictionary, Equivoque is defined as “a double or divers
sense of one word”.

Structurally, in the witches’ scenes for example, it’s clear that the knocking and
references to “double double” are paralleled by the knocking and references to
equivocation during the Porter’s scene. Thus the witches chant “double, double
toil and trouble” (4,1,9) is paralleled by the Porter’s “here’s an
equivocator…come in equivocator” (2,3,9-11). In the Porter’s scene, the
footnotes in the standard Arden edition explain that the characters that the
Porter admits to hellmouth are the equivocator (Garnet himself), his alias Mr
Farmer, and the Tailor who was associated with the image of Garnet’s face that
supposedly appeared miraculously on a bundle of straw after his execution.
However the three apparitions in the witches scene -- namely the head, the
bloody child and the child holding a tree -- also appear to have been derived from
the imagery of Garnet’s portrait on that miraculous straw
http://res.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/XVI/61/44 In other words, the
apparitions that are summoned by the witches suggest that the 11th century
Macbeth is in league with Father Garnet’s 17th century Jesuits.

That would be remarkable enough, however the multiple time tracks in the play
are even more complex. The “Temple” that Macbeth destroys (2,3,67)
accompanied by the extraordinary appearance of a dagger hanging in the air
(2,1,.33), strange noises, the earth that did shake (2,3,59) and threats of dire
combustion, all correspond in yet another time-track: to the destruction of
Jerusalem in the 1st century. In the account of the Roman-Jewish war as
recounted in Josephus’ The Jewish War,
http://www.ccel.org/j/josephus/works/war-6.htm we are told that a star
resembling a sword hung over the city (JW 6,5,289) and that the citizens of
Jerusalem “felt a quaking and heard a great noise” (JW 6,5,299) before the
temple was burnt . In other words, the destruction of the “Temple” (as Duncan),
is an allegory for that other Temple destroyed by Titus Caesar. By presenting
these parallel time tracks, the play offers us two different paradigms for
interpreting the character of Macbeth, and invites us to consider how they may
be reconciled—and there is a way to do it.

In the same way that Anthony & Cleopatra anticipated many filmic conventions—
such as very short takes-- Shakespeare’s multiple and interrelated time tracks in
Macbeth have remarkable similarities to some modern TV storytelling
conventions. These serve to significantly change our understanding of the play.
Ironically, the shift of audiences away from theater to TV programs like Lost may
be the very thing that teaches audiences the narrative conventions that may
allow them to appreciate the real meaning of Shakespeare.

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