Shakespeare: A Life (56 page)

That 'hush, no more' signifies no assault of his robust Scottish
conscience, and Banquo is murdered before he can reveal other 'cursed
thoughts' about his own or his descendants' prospects. Though innocent
of treason he is culpable in condoning Macbeth's rule and guilty in
his desire. This aspect of
Macbeth
is biographically interesting
in that Shakespeare's dramatic interests, his political realism, his
concern for history, psychology, and truth, are really uppermost in
his mind. He does not tailor a Scottish play to suit Scottish James;
he knows he must take risks, and so he takes them without being
foolhardy. Later on, he apparently salutes his patron briefly in Act
IV when the Witches offer a vision of Banquo's heirs (who will include
James 1). Macbeth in horror sees the royal line 'stretch out to th'
crack of doom' (iv. i. 133). That echoes a popular notion of
Shakespeare's time that James's noble line of descendants would endure
to the world's end.

Otherwise
Macbeth
has rather little to do with James I, though his book
Daemonology
( 1597) has remarks on witches similar to Banquo's comments. The
playwright, no doubt, has read his patron's books. But Shakespeare's
Witches are complex, ambiguous creatures who relate to medieval habits
of mind. They undermine Macbeth. In one critic's view they become
'heroines' of the play in subverting the evil order which demonizes
them,
²⁶
fbut they are also mysterious and unknowable icons, images of fate,
demonic tempters, and malevolent, ugly old hags with living
counterparts in the 'wise women', witches, and sorcerers one might
consult for a fee at London Bridge, Whitechapel, or Bankside. The
author used what he saw and heard at Bankside or in the city. His
friend Richard Field, for example, had printed in 1593 the
Sermons
of Henry Smith -- Nashe's superb 'Silvertongued Smith' -- whose
preaching at St Clement Danes in the Strand includes pungent images
which often remind one of the play: 'You are not like hearers, but
like ciphers, which supply a place but signify nothing' -- or, 'As if we
were night-black ravens, which cannot be washed clean with all the
soap of the Gospel' -- or, 'All his lights are put out at once' -- or,
our life has been compared to 'a player which speaketh his part upon
the stage, and straight he giveth place to another'.
²⁷

None of this of course proves Shakespeare had known or read
Silver-tongued Smith, but habits of his own mind are relevant. For all

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his originality, the dramatist had an idiosyncrasy which might be
ascribed to modesty, to caution, or perhaps to his having been a
hireling and then a major actor. He often looked for the grain of sand,
or the phrase, the simple authentic remark or known situation
uninvented by himself on which his imagination could set to work. He
might have found slender hints for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth,
idiosyncratic as they are, even in the eager, aspiring, and slightly
aloof French
émigrés
whom he knew. Supplying Anna at the royal
court, cajoling Shakespeare, and plotting to advance her daughter,
Marie of Silver Street is a far cry from Lady Macbeth. But it is after
he had begun to know the elder Mountjoys well that Shakespeare
created, in part from his whole experience of London, the most
horrifying wedded couple in his dramas.

Nothing he had picked up adventitiously, all the same, really accounts for
Macbeth
's
atmosphere, or its enormous suggestiveness, its stunning compression
and economy of means, and its complex panoply of images. Involved here
is more than its author's prudent husbandry. To a degree this tragedy
was made out of his other plays, such as
Richard II
with its state murders or
2 Henry VI
with its equivocating prophecies and witch-scenes. But in a more subtle
way the author's emotional conservatism, even his constancy, loyalty,
and selfrespect are responsible for
Macbeth
: he kept
continually in touch with his past. He did not ransack his older plays
to make a new one, but had in mind what he had profitably learned
about dramaturgy: the channels to his past experience of the theatre
were wide open and quickrunning.
Macbeth
is the quintessence of his career.

Even for his Scottish usurper, he had one model close at hand, inasmuch
as he himself is in all of his heroes, just as he is, in another sense,
in none of them. Macbeth's own moral awareness is surprising: he is
oddly self-conscious for a rough Scottish field general who, in facing a
rebel, 'unseamed him from the nave to th' chops'(1. ii. 22). With
mayhem in his sword, he has the imagination and critical self-regard of a
model schoolboy, although Macbeth is also that tissue of complexities
which his wife helps to illuminate.

'I fear thy nature', Lady Macbeth tells him goadingly. 'It is too full
o'th' milk of human kindness' (1. v. 15-16). Not only her sexuality
but

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his own yieldingness abet their role-playing in Act I as they collude
to realize themselves. Shakespeare seems to have known such
interdependence. Lady Macbeth is at first the more compelling player
with her lurid charm, but Macbeth's empathy gives her leave to act out
his zealous discontent -- which is of a kind which might drive a man
to unusual crime, political victory, or success in some nearly
impossible double endeavour in a profession. For all her nerve at
first, Macbeth's wife is lacking in vanity as if she had little to
gain in becoming queen. Her feeling for her husband is nearly that of a
mother living almost wholly for her child.

Still, one need not look for developed autobiographical patterns in a
drama which so transforms its major materials. Shakespeare subordinated
most of the figures to an extent that they barely step out of written
sources. But he depicted Macbeth's psyche with such interior pressure
that this, and not the usurper's outward action, is what is mainly
dramatized. The 'milk' or sensitivity of Macbeth's nature is not
annulled by his bloodiness, but feeds his active conscience until he
cannot bear his own lucidity. He is, indeed, ground down, torn, and
stripped. His crimes annihilate his wife, and part of his punishment is
to report on his destruction with an accuracy that complicates one's
feelings for him, extends one's knowledge of human life, and gives the
text a richness infinitely beyond that of any morality drama even in
his casual admissions:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been my senses would have cooled
To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in't. I have supped full with horrors.
(v. v. 9-13)

That not Macbeth's but Banquo's heirs will 'get kings' robs him of
any consolation, and as the riddling Witches tell him nothing of use he
loses his ability to interpret time. Yet his lucidity is unaffected.
Macbeth understands his hard, gnawing obsession with Banquo's heirs,
and that topic relates indirectly to Shakespeare's personal abiding
concern with matters of inheritance.

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Among actors such a concern was not unusual. Members of the King's
men, for instance, typically named their fellows among their heirs.
Augustine Phillips, who died in May 1605, had lately left 30s. in gold
to Shakespeare, as well as bequests to others in the troupe. The
valuable 'share' left by a leading actor could itself provoke hopeful
inheritors, cause litigation, and embarrass the company.

But then the poet's concern with inheritance -- which links
Macbeth
with
King Lear
-- runs unusually deep. He shows in these works 'futures equivocally
offered, by prediction and by action, as actualities', notes a
perceptive critic, 'and the disastrous attempt to impose limited
designs upon the time of the world'.
²⁸
That does not quite impute to Shakespeare a moralistic aim, and
Macbeth and Lear in turn are involved in nightmares of inheritance,
and also in violently disruptive engagements, not only with time but
with a civic polity and the inner self.

Though it could have been tried out earlier at the Globe,
King Lear
was acted before the court at Whitehall on St Stephen's Night, 26
December 1606. This work pleased its patron, supposedly, by showing
King Lear
's
division of the kingdom to be gross folly. By means of proclamations,
coinage, pageantry, and even ships' flags, James's parliaments were
being urged to accept Anglo-Scottish union -- a matter which in the
end required a hundred years -- and James styled himself 'KING OF
GREAT BRITTAINE'. Yet one doubts that Shakespeare's tragedy includes
royal propaganda, and in showing Lear's aim as the opposite of James's
the play distances itself from him. Perhaps it had to do so, since
King Lear
was a dangerous work. Its upstarts and courtiers could evoke James's
much-detested Scottish favourites, just as its two vicious daughters
might be taken for those who with the court's connivance were then
snatching at monopolies, and its views of predatory royalty and a
decaying order were not bound to delight the Stuart entourage.
Censorship or self-censorship could account for some of the extensive
revisions in the play's Folio version, as has been suggested.

On stage
King Lear
demanded much. One hears that Burbage so excelled as the hero that
old Lear 'lived in him', and the quick, dwarfish, and charmingly ugly
Robert Armin had talent to excel as the

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Fool.
²⁹
There is no denying their success, but to stress that is probably to
mistake Shakespeare's mind. One reason, as directors say, why good
(let alone truly outstanding) productions of
King Lear
have been fairly infrequent in modern times is that its title-role is relatively less important than the Prince's in
Hamlet
or the usurper's in
Macbeth
. Peter Brook finds in
King Lear
'eight or ten independent and eventually equally important strands of
narrative' besides the principal one, so that the three-dimensional
roles of Edgar, Kent, Goneril, Regan, and others, rather than the
storm scenes, are the play's major challenge.
³⁰
Or again what Peter Hall calls
King Lear
's 'physical marathon' taxes many almost equally.
³¹
The terrain is very difficult; the runners are in a group; none can
afford to stumble. The play distributes its great complexities. In 1605
or 1606, it would seem, Shakespeare relied on two major actors rather
less exclusively than is usually supposed, and in writing
Lear
and, later,
The Tempest
he attended the most closely and boldly to a troupe's potential. With
Lear
he is less concerned to sculpt a star part for Burbage than to enlist
a group's whole power -- and also to explore entirely new kinds of
relationships.

For example, the
lunatic King in Act III holds a mock-trial in which one of his vicious
absent daughters is indicted. 'Arraign her first', cries Lear in
extreme torment, ''Tis Goneril. I here take my oath before this
honourable assembly she kicked the poor King her father.'

FOOL. Come hither, mistress. Is your name Goneril?
LEAR. She cannot deny it.
FOOL. Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool.
( 1608 quarto, xiii. 4-2-7)

Unencumbered by time, madness of this kind has a double focus.
Goneril's crime, in Lear's view, is only that she 'kicked the poor King
her father' -- and one recalls the poet Wilkins, whose 'kicking' of
women was an index of his nature. In reducing his daughter's crime,
Lear suggests its specific, painful cruelty, as well as its perpetual
meaning as a sign of man's bestiality. And the Fool's impudent
proverbial confusion of Goneril with a joint-stool befits a drama
concerned with strange relations between the physical and
non-physical, as in the force of the storm, or in Lear's speeches over
Cordelia's dead body.

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Shakespeare prepared for
King Lear
with a studious elaborateness, a range of reading wide and intense
even for him. Even in a brief consideration of a few of his sources --
which will be the focus of my remarks here -- one begins to see the
grandeur of his conception. He enriched his outlook and even his
vocabulary by reading Florio's vigorous translation of Montaigne (
1603), and borrowed a number of Florio's words for the play. Among
other versions of the 'King Leir' story he probably knew, he read
Holinshed's and the brief, elegant one in Spenser
Faerie Queene
, Book II and made some initial use of the anonymous
King Leir
published in 1605. Written in stilted couplets, this may be the same
'king leare' play which the Queen's and Sussex troupes, at their last
gasp, had put on near the end of the plague outbreak of the 1590s. At
its outset, King Leir plans to trick his beloved Cordella into
marrying a ruler of Brittany. Alert to his whims, his daughters
Gonorill and Ragan both pledge to wed anyone he chooses; but Cordella
refuses to flatter and so, without banishing her, Leir divides the
kingdom between the evil sisters. Shakespeare condenses seven scenes of
that play in writing only a part of his own first scene.

No version of the tale implied that the fated king went mad, but a
modern scholarly quest for sources (or is it a wild-goose chase?) has
unveiled an odd case about insanity. Around 1603 two sisters, Lady
Sandys and Lady Wildgoose, had tried to get their old father, Annesley, a
gentleman-pensioner, certified insane. Annesley had a third daughter,
Cordell, who urged Lord Cecil to put her father and his estate under
care of a benign protector. The Wildgooses contested the old
pensioner's will, and at last Cordell Annesley in 1608 was to wed Sir
William Harvey, the Earl of Southampton's stepfather -- who some would
say is 'M r. W. H.' or the dedicatee of
Shake-speares Sonnets
. A helpful case, but one wonders if the poet needed to know any of it to think of Lear's madness.

Two sources, though, are especially intriguing. From Sidney's prose tale of the Paphlagonian King in the
Arcadia
,
Shakespeare derived what has been called 'a perfect parallel to the
Lear story' or the underplot in which Gloucester, when tricked by his
bastard son Edmund and still blind to Edgar's constancy, has his eyes
put out by

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