Shakespeare

The wealthy player is described as “weary of playing,” too, which confirms the evidence that Shakespeare had retired from the stage by 1603 or 1604. The purchase of tithes, as we have seen, ensured that he had an annual and independent income larger than that of a player. It is doubly unlikely, then, that he was on tour with the King’s Men in autumn and winter of this year. They were travelling again out of necessity, since a new onset of the plague meant that the theatres were closed from the middle of October to the middle of December. Among the plays they took with them were Othello and Measure for Measure as well as Ben Jonson’s Volpone. They seem to have travelled as far west as Barnstaple, taking in Oxford and Saffron Walden enroute, and may indeed have stayed in the provinces until the Globe was reopened on 15 December. Just eleven days later, they performed before the king.

They were playing in uncertain times, and to a king who was reported to be in a state of alarm and anxiety. In early November the conspiracy popularly known as the “Gunpowder Plot” was revealed to the world, with its ambitious and unprecedented attempt to blow up king and Parliament. It led to renewed suspicion and persecution of Roman Catholics, of course, nowhere more fiercely than in Stratford and Warwickshire. The leading conspirator, Robert Catesby, was a Warwickshire man. The conspirators met in that county, and one of them had even rented Clopton House just outside Stratford to be close to his colleagues. In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of 5 November the bailiff of Stratford seized a cloak-bag “full of copes, vestments, crosses, crucifixes, chalices and other massing relics.” It was supposed “to be delivered to one George Badger there.”³ George Badger was the woollen-draper who lived next door to the Shakespeares in Henley Street. Shakespeare knew him very well indeed, and would have quickly been informed by his family of the calamity that had fallen upon him.

New legislation was passed by the Parliament against Catholic recusants, and the king himself, according to the Venetian ambassador, declared: “I shall most certainly be obliged to stain my hands with their blood, though sorely against my will …”⁴ For the Shakespeare family in Stratford, it was an uncertain time. In the spring of the following year, Susannah Shakespeare was cited for her failure to receive holy communion that Easter. She is listed with some well-known Catholic recusants in the town, among them Shakespeare’s old friend Hamnet Sadler – the godfather of his dead son. The danger of her position must have been emphasised to her by someone close to her, since the word “dismissa” was later placed against her entry. She must have outwardly conformed by taking communion. Three years later, however, Richard Shakespeare, the dramatist’s brother, was taken before the bawdry court at Stratford for some unspecified offence; he was fined 12 pence, for the use of the Stratford poor, which suggests that he was found guilty of breaking the Sabbath.

The response of Shakespeare to the turbulent events of 1605 was to write a play of apparently conservative and orthodox intent. Macbeth was concerned with the terrible consequences of murdering a divinely appointed sovereign, and within the drama itself there are even references to the trials of the conspirators in the spring of 1606. There are allusions to “equivocation,” a concept which appeared at the trial of the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet, who was subsequently hanged. When Lady Macduff remarks, on the subject of treason, “every one that do’s so, is a Traitor, and must be hang’d”(1512) there may have been applause and cheers among the audience of the Globe. In Macbeth, too, there is an invocation of the Stuart dynasty, with reference to the kings who will rule England as well as Scotland. Since the play is also steeped in King James’s favourite subject, witchcraft, there can be no doubt that it was purposefully designed to appeal to the new monarch. The witches of Macbeth can be said to plot against the lawful king, with their intimations of Macbeth’s greatness, and just fifteen years previously some Scottish witches had been tried for conspiring against James himself. The parallel is clear. In the previous year, too, King James had been greeted by three sibyls at the gates of an Oxford college and hailed as the true descendant of Banquo. That is no doubt why Shakespeare, in direct contrast with the source, refuses to connect Banquo with the Macbeths’ plot against Duncan. Shakespeare was adapting James’s own suppositions and beliefs into memorable theatre. He was in a sense sanctifying them and turning them into myth.