Shakespeare and Scotland 9781526135100

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Shakespeare and Scotland

Published in our centenary year

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Shakespeare and Scotland

EDITED BY

WILLY MALEY & ANDREW MURPHY

Manchester University Press

Manchester

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2004 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6636 0 hardback EAN 978 0 7190 6636 8 ISBN 0 7190 6637 9 paperback EAN 978 0 7190 6637 5 First published 2004 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset in Minion by Koinonia, Manchester

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Contents

Notes on contributors

page vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: then with Scotland first begin Willy Maley

& Andrew Murphy 1

1

‘Stands Scotland where it did?’ Shakespeare on the march David J. Baker

20

Wrapped in the strong arms of the Union: Shakespeare and King James Neil Rhodes

37

The place of Scots in the Scottish play: Macbeth and the politics of language Christopher Highley

53

4

Macbeth and the rhetoric of political forms Elizabeth Fowler

67

5

Hamlet’s country matters: the ‘Scottish play’ within the play Andrew Hadfield

87

2 3

6

How Scottish was ‘the Scottish play’? Macbeth’s national identity in the eighteenth century Rebecca Rogers

104

7

The Bard: Ossian, Burns, and the shaping of Shakespeare Robert Crawford

124

8

‘Not fit to tie his brogues’: Shakespeare and Scott

Lidia Garbin

141

9

Shakespeare goes to Scotland: a brief history of Scottish editions Andrew Murphy

157

Citz Scotland where it did? Shakespeare in production at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, 1970–74 Adrienne Scullion

172

10

vi

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11

Contents

Local Macbeth / global Shakespeare: Scotland’s screen destiny Mark Thornton Burnett

189

Index

207

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Notes on contributors

David J. Baker is Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i. He is the author of Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford University Press, 1997) and the co-editor of British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queens University, Belfast. He is the author of Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (Palgrave, 2002) and Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (Macmillan, 1997), the editor of The Complete Poems of Christopher Marlowe (Everyman, 2000) and The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Everyman, 1999) and the co-editor of Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle (Macmillan, 2000), Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (Macmillan, 1997) and New Essays on ‘Hamlet’ (AMS Press, 1994). Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature and Head of the School of English at the University of St Andrews. His collections of poetry include The Tip of My Tongue (Cape, 2003); his critical books include The Modern Poet (Oxford University Press, 2001). Among books he has edited are The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (with Mick Imlah, Penguin, 2000) and Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (Edinburgh University Press, 1997). Elizabeth Fowler is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Virginia and the author of Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Cornell University Press, 2003). Lidia Garbin has written a PhD on Scott and Shakespeare. She has given papers and published essays on the subject and on Scott’s influence on his contemporaries and successors. She currently lives and teaches in North Italy. Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He is the author of a number of books, most recently, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (Arden Critical Companions, 2003) and Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Palgrave, 2003). He is currently working on Shakespeare and Republicanism for Cambridge University Press, and editing The History of the Irish Book: Vol. III: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800 for Oxford University Press.

8

Notes on contributors

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Christopher Highley is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Shakespeare, Spenser; and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and co-editor of John Foxe and his World (Ashgate, 2002). He is currently completing a book on Early Modern Catholics and national identity. Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow. His publications include Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Palgrave, 2003) and Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (Macmillan, 1997). He co-edited, with David Baker, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Andrew Murphy is Reader in English at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature (University Press of Kentucky, 1999). He is the editor of The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality (Manchester University Press, 2000). Neil Rhodes is Professor of English Literature and Cultural History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author, most recently, of Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford University Press, 2004). His other publications include (with Jennifer Richards and Joseph Marshall) James VI and I: Selected Writings (Ashgate, 2003) and (with Jonathan Sawday) The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (Roudedge, 2000). Rebecca Rogers is a lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Oxford Brookes University. Her research interests include Shakespeare’s eighteenth-century cultural history and the economic strategies of seventeenth-century playing companies. Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research and teaching interests include Scottish cultural issues (from the eighteenth century to the post-devolution context), dramaturgy and British women playwrights.

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank John Kerrigan for a careful reading of the text. We are fortunate to have been able to draw on his expertise and erudition at a late stage in the project. We are also indebted to Neil Rhodes who, as well as providing us with a sterling essay, acted as an assiduous editor of our Introduction. Thanks finally to Matthew Frost for bearing with us when we needed him to, and bearing down on us when he had to.

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Introduction: then with Scotland first begin WILLY MALEY & ANDREW MURPHY

In 1756, an Edinburgh performance of John Home’s pro-Scottish tragedy Douglas was greeted with an enthusiastic cry from the audience of ‘Weel lads; what think you of Wully Shakespeare now?’1 The question is in Scots, and arguably assumes that Scottish culture ought to measure itself against the best that England had to offer.2 The incident is sometimes taken as evidence for a nationalist resistance to Shakespeare. Such a view finds some support in the fact that a deep-seated anti-theatrical tradition within the Scottish church meant regular performances of Shakespeare came to Scotland relatively late. In the field of publishing, while only one Shakespeare text (an edition of Venus and Adonis) was printed in Scotland in the seventeenth century, by 1755, Shakespeare publishing was well enough established north of the border that the Scottish publishers Hamilton and Balfour excluded Shakespeare from their Select Collection of English Plays, on the grounds that ‘the Works of this Author are presumed to be in every Body’s Hands’.3 Many Scottish writers were, of course, deeply influenced both by Shakespeare’s works and by the ‘Shakespeare phenomenon’ more generally. It is also the case that in recent decades a vibrant tradition of Shakespeare performance has established itself in Scotland. This tradition has extended from the radical to the baldly commercial – ranging from (as Adrienne Scullion indicates in this volume) daring adaptations at Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre to an open-air production of Macbeth at the 1999 Edinburgh Fringe Festival featuring Australian soap star Dannii Minogue as Lady Macbeth.4 If Scotland has engaged with Shakespeare, so too, of course, has Shakespeare engaged with Scotland. An elusive traditional tale suggests that

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2

Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy

Shakespeare once paid a visit to Scotland, in the company of the English comedian Lawrence Fletcher — yet another tantalizing image projected onto the blank screen of the playwright’s ‘lost years’. Whether this particular biographical narrative is true or not, what is clear enough – as Neil Rhodes, Elizabeth Fowler, and a number of the other contributors to this volume make clear – is that Shakespeare did have strong Scottish connections by virtue of his theatre company’s being brought under the sponsorship of the Scottish king James VI immediately after his accession to the English throne in 1603. Jonathan Goldberg and Alvin Kernan have traced the impact of royal patronage on Shakespeare’s work after the Union, finding Scottish themes at play not just (most obviously) in Macbeth, but also in Cymbeline, King Lear, Hamlet, and in other plays.5 In many of these works, Shakespeare concerned himself intimately with what has come to be called ‘the matter of Britain’ – the question of the complex relationship between the constituent elements of James’s multiple kingdom and his project to forge from four nations a single imperial vision and a united polity. This issue has become something of a live topic among historians as well as literary scholars in recent years, as is evidenced by the appearance of a large number of books on the subject of the ‘new British history’.6 Shakespeare, then, served the Scottish king, engaging in his plays with issues central to the monarch’s concerns. But Scotland in its way served Shakespeare also, playing a major role in the establishment of the playwright’s works within the academic realm and, thereby, within culture and criticism more generally. Robert Crawford has credited Scottish universities with the ‘invention of English literature’, noting that St Andrews discussed the possibility of establishing a Chair of Eloquence at St Andrews as early as 1720. More concretely, John Stevenson, as Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, introduced elements of belletrism into his teaching at Edinburgh from 1730 and lecture courses on rhetoric and belles lettres were delivered by Adam Smith at Glasgow (from 1751), Robert Watson at St Andrews (from 1756) and Hugh Blair at Edinburgh (from 1762). These developments serve as signal points of origin for the teaching of English literature as a university subject. Crawford compellingly argues that, in the wake of the Act of Union of 1707, the new subject was installed at the very heart of the mainstream university culture as part of a project that may be seen in part at least as a kind of internal colonialism in which Scots schooled other Scots to conform to an Anglocentric norm in order to advance in Britain and the British Empire.7

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Introduction

3

Shakespeare was central to this project in a variety of ways, not least in the extent to which he was quoted in the various handbooks of rhetoric and criticism which were spawned by these developments in education. These books included Elements of Criticism (1762, running through twelve British editions up to 1839), written by Lord Kames (Henry Homes), who played a major part in the establishment of many of the new chairs mentioned above and in what might be called the Franco-British culture wars of the later eighteenth century. Another work of this kind was Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-lettres (1783).8 Blair’s book had a wide circulation at American universities and thus had a further importance, noted by Esther Cloudman Dunn in her Shakespeare in America: the entrance of Shakespeare into the conservative American stronghold of traditional education, under the respectable aegis of Hugh Blair, is one of the pleasant little jokes of our history. Hugh Blair was a famous Edinburgh preacher and professor; these facts spelled safety for anything he might write and publish ... This Scotch preacher and teacher, friend of Hume and Adam Smith, made frequent use of Shakespeare both in his lectures and in the book for which they furnished the basis ... ‘Touching the heart’, Blair declares, ‘is Shakespeare’s great excellency.’ Shakespeare is a bulwark of virtue and morality instead of a seduction of the devil. His characters make speeches which ‘are at once instructive and affecting’. He is ‘great’ and ‘altogether unrivalled’ in tragedy and comedy. Thus by way of the Scotch Presbyterian, Blair, Shakespeare as ‘great’, as ‘instructive’ and ‘touching the heart’ enters, unchallenged, into the educational scheme of America.9

The links between Shakespeare, Scotland, and education remained strong from these eighteenth-century beginnings. Valuable work on the authorship question around Two Noble Kinsmen was carried out by William Spalding, who, in the mid-nineteenth century, served successively as Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh and Professor of Logic, Rhetoric, and Metaphysics at St Andrews. A later St Andrews professor, Thomas Spencer Baynes (general editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica) was also to publish important studies of ‘What Shakespeare Learnt at School’, anticipating T. W. Baldwin’s William Shakspere’s ‘Small Latine & Lesse Greek’.10 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is striking how many of the major Shakespeareans spent at least part of their careers at the Scottish universities. A. C. Bradley served as Regius Professor of English at Glasgow from 1890 to 1900 (a Chair was also subsequently instituted in Bradley’s honour at the university). His successor in the post was Walter Raleigh, who brought David Nichol Smith

4

Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy

to Glasgow as his assistant – both were later to collaborate on an abortive new Shakespeare edition for Oxford University Press.11 In 1935 a

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Shakespearean native to Glasgow – Peter Alexander

–

took over the Regius

chair, publishing several important bibliographic studies and a highly successful edition of Shakespeare during the long course of his tenure at Glasgow. John Dover Wilson took up the Edinburgh Regius chair in 1935. At the time, the professorship still bore the marks of the eighteenth-century developments discussed earlier, being the Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature.12 Much of Wilson’s work on his important Cambridge edition of Shakespeare was carried out during his period as Edinburgh professor. During wartime in Edinburgh, Wilson was approached by a lawyer friend who observed ‘You’re interested in old books, aren’t you?’ When Wilson answered yes, his friend said ‘Well, come round to my office. I’ve got some to show you.’ In his autobiography, Wilson details what happened next: To my amazement, when I went there I found on a table rows and rows of Shakespearian quartos – most of them late seventeenth-century editions. ‘Good heavens,’ I exclaimed, ‘have you got policemen guarding this building? Some agent from Texas would dearly love to run off with the whole lot.’ The solicitor then told me that they had come from Falkland Place [in Fife], the Hereditary Keeper of which is a Major Crichton-Stuart who belonged to a junior branch of the Bute family. And he, fearing that the palace might be bombed, was negotiating with the National Librarian to have them housed with his rare books in a chosen hide-out.13

After the war, Crichton-Stuart was willing to part with the books on a permanent basis – Falkland Palace was in need of some repair work and the Major was ‘not ... a literary man’. Wilson was instrumental in securing the collection for the National Library of Scotland. Wilson resigned from his professorship in 1945, his early retirement partly subsidized by Cambridge University Press, who were anxious for him to bring the Shakespeare series to completion. He continued living in Edinburgh, however, serving for some years as a trustee at the National Library, and ultimately leaving his papers to the library. We have noted that one of the Shakespeareans who circulated through the Scottish universities was A. C. Bradley. In February of 1903, Bradley wrote to Macmillan in London, as follows: Many thanks for your note, and for the suggestion about my lectures. But this particular book (if indeed I ever get the lectures into a form that satisfies me) I felt at once ought to be published at the Glasgow University Press, unless there are

Introduction

5

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some objections to that. And of course in this case your friend Mr Maclehose there could [do it].14

It seems reasonable to assume that the book of lectures to which Bradley is referring here is his Shakespearean Tragedy, published – in the event by Macmillan’s – in the following year, 1904. What is interesting about this letter, as much as anything else, is the fact that it indicates the power of Scottish publishers during the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As Andrew Murphy indicates in his chapter in this collection, the Macmillans were transplanted Scots, but they retained strong links with Glasgow and Alexander Macmillan maintained particularly close ties with James MacLehose, on whom he repeatedly relied for advice. So Bradley was, in a sense, shuttling Shakespearean Tragedy between two Scottish publishers. As Murphy indicates, it was the Collins firm – significantly of Glasgow and London – that issued Peter Alexander’s highly successful 1951 Shakespeare edition. We have seen, then, that Scotland has helped, in a variety of ways, to promote and sustain Shakespeare’s central cultural position in Britain (and, indeed, beyond).15 But Scotland has also taken Shakespeare into its own native culture, as various of Shakespeare’s plays have been translated into Gaelic and into Scots – the most recent being R. C. Lorimer’s Macbeth: William Shakespeare and David Purves’s The Tragedie o Macbeth, both published in 1992. The following extract from Lorimer’s version gives the flavour of ‘a Scottish play’ of a different kind: MACDUFF Staunds

Scotland whar she stude? puir kintra, scairce bauld eneuch tae ken hersel! She suidna be cried wir mither, but wir graff, whaur nocht but him at kens nocht iver seems tae smile, whaur sechs an grains an skirls at screeds the lift is hard, no harkit, an rank sorra seems a warldlike passion. Thair scairce iver nous the deid-bell speirt at wha it’s jowin for; an guid men’s lives untimeous souchs awa’ afore the plants they weir on their cockadds, díein or they’ve taen ill. MACDUFF O, tale owre trig, an yit owre true!16 ROSS Allace,

Lorimer’s father translated the New Testament into Scots in 1983, and his work is clearly part of a broader commitment to render canonical and classical texts into Scots.17

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6

Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy

Reviewing these two new Scots translations of Macbeth by Lorimer and Purves, Derrick McClure presents Shakespeare as an English nationalist and wonders how Scottish translators can fit his view of Scotland into contemporary Scots. According to McClure, ‘there is a prima facie inappropriateness in using [Scots] to translate the supreme celebrant of the identity of the rival culture’.18 But rival cultures inhabit the host culture. As critics have argued, English republicanism is represented in the Scottish play.19 McClure goes on to say that ‘Macbeth is now often perceived as the last champion of Scotland’s Celtic identity, and by extension of her historic independence and integrity: a simplistic notion but a very appealing one’.20 In other words, despite its alleged anti-Scottishness, translating Macbeth into Scots is a patriotic act on two counts: because of the political commitment implicit in translating from English to Scots (reversing the dominant dubbing practice in films); and because Shakespeare’s tragic hero is heroic from a modern Scottish perspective in a way that he may not have been from a medieval or Renaissance standpoint. (Shakespeare’s position is more complex, as one would expect, since he managed to offer up two king-killers for the price of one.) Of course we might say that if Shakespeare has been translated into Scots, then Scotland has in its turn found itself being translated in Shakespearean terms, as film versions of Macbeth by directors such as Orson Welles (1948), Roman Polanski (1971), Jeremy Freeston (1997) and Michael Bogdanov (1998) have refashioned Scottish culture (and even the Scottish landscape) according to their own Celticist imaginings. Welles’s papier mâché Scotland offers perhaps the most arresting of these visions. Even more strikingly, Akira Kurosawa has fused medieval Scotland with medieval Japan to produce a unique revisioning of Macbeth as Kumonosu-Djo/ Throne of Blood. And, of course, the play’s Scotland has also become other elsewheres in such film adaptations as Joe Macbeth (dir. Ken Hughes, 1955), Macbeth in Manhattan (dir. Greg Lombardo, 1999), Rave Macbeth (dir. Klaus Knoesel, 2001) and Scotland, PA (dir. Billy Morrisette, 2001). Some of these issues are explored in detail in this volume, in Mark Thornton Burnett’s chapter on film versions of the play. Shakespeare rarely employed dialect in his plays, the most famous instances being the four captains scene in Henry V, where the Scottish Captain Jamy speaks in a manner quite distinct from his countrymen in Macbeth. The relative absence of the Scots language in Macbeth gives licence to critics and directors to translate it out of its Scottish context. Shakespeare only occasionally resorts to a Scotticism like ‘cream-faced loon’ (5.3.12.).

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Introduction

7

Welles’s adaptation is one of the few films to employ the Scots language (interestingly with a largely American cast) delivered amidst a host of Scottish signifiers, from tartan capes to Celtic crosses. The choice of supposedly Scottish accents was, however, something of a disaster, for typically Wellesian reasons. Welles had the actors record their lines while rehearsing the play in Utah, then, during ‘the actual shooting of the film, the actors on the set in Hollywood mimed their lines in synch with the speeches that had been prerecorded in Utah’.21 A 1951 review spoke of ‘a sort of plausible Scots accent’.22 The producers disliked the accented soundtrack and ordered that the movie be withdrawn and a standard English soundtrack be substituted. The movie was re-released in 1950, but, in typical Welles fashion, in this new version ‘the original Scots burrs got totally confused with the unaccented and often unsynched voices’.23 Finally, in 1979, a UCLA/Folger Library restoration project reunited the film with its original soundtrack. The resistance to the original version of the film, pointing to the delivery of Shakespeare’s lines in ‘odd Scottish dialect’, falls in line with what has become a filmic tradition which manoeuvres itself awkwardly around an ‘exotic’ Scots dialect, given the status of a language which its champions crave through the use of English subtitles. Coming on, more directly, then, to Macbeth, it is doubtless inevitable that, in a collection such as this, the so-called ‘Scottish play’ should become something of a recurrent touchstone. This is, after all, the only play of Shakespeare’s to be set in Scotland. However, we might note here that it is stage superstition rather than attachment to geography or history which ensures that Macbeth has become known as ‘the Scottish play’, its title taboo, its Scottishness a touchy subject. How ‘Scottish’ is Macbeth, and what happens between page, stage, and screen? The ‘Scottish play’ is, paradoxically, unlikely to be discussed in relation to national identity, and for three related reasons, to do with genre, geography, and history: (1) ever since the First Folio of 1623, Macbeth has been dehistoricized by being classified among ‘Mr. William Shakespeares ... Tragedies’, rather than among his ‘Histories’24 – and, as a tragedy, Macbeth transcends topicality; (2) Scotland’s marginalized role within the British state, and within Renaissance studies, means that most critics lack the information or inclination to situate the play historically; (3) the promotion of Shakespeare as an icon of an imperialist and universal Englishness has meant that the non-English constituents of the Atlantic Archipelago tend to get marginalized.25 Unlike Henry V, Shakespeare’s most English play, where national identity is of the essence, in Macbeth, Scotland is a blot on the landscape.

8

Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy

Emptied of its Scottish context by an earlier critical tradition, Macbeth has been deracinated, denationalized, and devolved. Historicist criticism may be the new orthodoxy, but Scotland remains relatively hidden from view. We know where Macbeth stands on the syllabus, and where Scotland stands on screen, but why are ‘the Scottish play’ and ‘Scotland’ so seldom juxtaposed?26

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While Henry V remains caught up in patriotism and propaganda

–

witness

Olivier’s wartime version (1944) – few film versions of Macbeth locate the drama in Scotland or take patriotism as their theme. For Anne Barton, ‘Macbeth (1606) is surely as much a history play as Richard II’, but its status as a tragedy – a form less likely to be subject to topical readings than the history plays – and its alleged depiction of ‘evil’ circumscribes its critical reception.27 Of course, it would be foolish to complain that when Shakespeare chose to write his one play about Scotland as tragedy he was making life more difficult for historicist critics, and for two reasons. Firstly, Macbeth is emphatically not Shakespeare’s one play about Scotland, and secondly, straitjacket notions of genre, famously parodied in a typically overblown speech by Polonius in another of Shakespeare’s Scottish plays, are the invention of critics, not playwrights. Shakespeare’s plays may not quite transcend history, but they do test the limits of generic boundaries. Ireland looms large in New Historicist and Cultural Materialist readings of Shakespeare, but Scotland is posted missing. While The Tempest may be said to be ‘the Irish play’, attracting increasingly ingenious colonial readings, Macbeth remains Scottish in name only, spared the emphases on nationalism that Henry V attracts.28 In Henry V, an English Lord invokes ‘a saying very old and true, / If that you will France win, then with Scotland first begin’. He goes on to rehearse a standard fear of the time: For once the Eagle (England) being in prey, To her vnguarded Nest, the Weazell (Scot) Comes sneaking, and so sucks her Princely Egges, Playing the Mouse in absence of the Cat, To tame and hauocke more then she can eate.

(TLN 313–19) William Hazlitt long ago pointed out the hypocrisy in this: “‘The eagle England” has a right to be in prey, but “the weazel Scot” has none “to come sneaking to her nest”, which she has left to pounce upon others. Might was right, without equivocation, in that heroic and chivalrous age.’29 But it was ‘right’ – the right of James VI to the crown of England – that allowed the

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Introduction

9

weasel to suck the eagle’s princely eggs, and the mouse to ‘hauocke more than she [could] eate’. Moreover, the English Lord’s warning against the Scots is weasel words. The famously problematic four captains scene later in the play depicts a Scottish Captain Jamy, pre-Union proof that the Scots could be tamed and made to cry havoc on England’s other traditional enemy, and Scotland’s erstwhile ally, France.30 So, Shakespeare and Scotland conjures up the spectre of ‘the Scottish play’, but there’s the rub. The play most obviously associated with Scotland is also the play that for reasons of genre and history is least likely to give rise to topical readings. G. K. Hunter played down the historical aspect while insisting on the play’s topicality: The ‘history’ of Macbeth is, in fact, moral rather than factual history; just as the ‘Scotland’ of Macbeth is a country of the mind rather than a real geographical location. Those who bring to the play experience of the country or the century, beyond what the play provides, are in danger of distorting what is really there. More relevant is the image of Scottish history that appeared on Shakespeare’s horizon via the mind of the new King of England – James I.31

But Shakespeare’s Scotland was more than a country of the mind, and Scotland plays a part in plays other than Macbeth. James I was more than King of England, of course, but what is interesting here is that Scotland is a country of the mind but the mind we are asked to attend to is that of a newly anglicized Scottish king. Andrew Hadfield usefully recognizes this in his chapter here on Hamlet’s own particular ‘Scottish play’ (as does Neil Rhodes, in reading through a broad range of the history plays). In the conclusion to That Shakespeherian Rag (1986), Terry Hawkes wonders how the rise of Scottish nationalism might affect the academic subject of English and Englishness more generally.32 At the end of Shakespeare in the Present (2002) Hawkes returns to his theme: ‘Could it possibly be that the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish might at a certain point in the future come to regard an involvement with Shakespeare as somehow condoning or even embodying the “Englishing” by which, in some eyes, they were for too long moulded?’33 The question is a good one, but it fails to take into account the degree to which the Americanization of Shakespeare – and of global culture more broadly (as Mark Thornton Burnett touches on here) – has meant that there is more to breaking the mould of British politics than arresting an incorporating Englishness. Moreover, why throw out the Bardic baby with the British bathwater? There is more to Shakespeare’s work than

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10

Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy

the conservative anglocentrism or global capitalism that it has been enlisted to serve. Nor do nationalist political agendas necessarily offer a panacea to cultural imperialism. Scotland, having long had a vexed relationship with Shakespeare studies, is now being recognized as a major player in the game of national identities. This is due in large part to the New British history, and to the interest generated around the quatercentenary of the Union of Crowns, as well as increased activity in early modern Scottish studies. But other developments have contributed to Scotland’s improved standing. Recent cultural and political events, including the setting up of the Scottish parliament and the phenomenal successes of films such as Braveheart and Trainspotting have put Scotland firmly on the map, at least in terms of politics and popular culture. It remains to be seen just how far this raised profile on the international stage, coupled with a renewed national confidence buoyed up by subtler developments within the culture, critical and creative, will affect the ways in which Shakespeare is taught and written about in Scotland, and the ways in which Scotland features in Shakespeare studies. How will the arguments that have been raging for so long (and so acrimoniously) in England play themselves out now in Scotland, postdevolution? If the English argue about the place of Shakespeare in the canon, how will this work in a semi-independent Scotland? The real question it raises is whether Shakespeare is an ‘English’ writer, or a ‘British’ writer (or, to put it another way, whether Shakespeare would necessarily have a place in a ‘Scottish’ national curriculum). Of course, part of the aim of this collection (and part of what we learn from the protracted and problematic history of Shakespeare and education in Scotland) is to suggest that there is no easy answer to this. The implementation of fresh educational initiatives in the wake of devolution, such as ‘Higher Still’ (an effort to broaden the learning base in the latter stages of education in Scottish schools) may also contribute to a rethinking of the place of Shakespeare on a new national curriculum.34 Scotland has arguably never had precisely the same relationship with the Bard as England has – a point made forcefully by Robert Crawford in his contribution to this collection – but has experienced a fraught process of appropriation, incorporation, and resistance. It remains to be seen whether the new political and pedagogical situation will challenge or change the place of Shakespeare studies in Scotland, and change the place of Scotland in Shakespeare studies. It is not a question of dislodging but of a different kind of accommodation. Shakespeare may have been appropriated historically by a

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Introduction

11

monarchist and imperialist tradition, but his dramatic works are more varied in meaning than any such appropriation will allow. The chapters in this volume are located on the border between Shakespeare studies and Scottish studies. Some borders are significant enough to be capitalized. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies three such borders: that marking the partition of Ireland; that dividing Mexico from the USA; and that between England and Scotland. Borders are openings as well as boundaries, and borderlands are crucial to the formation of the early modern British state. In his contribution to this collection, “‘Stands Scotland where it did?” Shakespeare on the march’, David Baker delicately probes the debatable land of England and Scotland, one of the most disputed borders in the period, and shows that however much borders of all kinds – generic, historical, national – can be crossed, they remain crucial in determining the details, and not just the broad outlines, of forms and periods and states. Baker’s conclusion, teasing out the layers around ‘England’ and ‘Inland’, is exemplary of a historical criticism that is textually aware. The Anglo-Scottish border was breached, of course, by the Union of Crowns, and in ‘Wrapped in the strong arms of the Union: Shakespeare and King James’, Neil Rhodes explores the relationship between the personal and the political in James’s promotion of the Union and shows how this is echoed by Shakespeare both before and after 1603. Rhodes argues that Shakespeare, like his Scottish patron, was a Union man. Union brought with it an easing of tensions on the Border but also an increasing anxiety around language and representation. In Shakespeare’s last Elizabethan history play, Henry V, Captain Jamy may be part tribute, part mockery of a monarch-in-waiting, but in what is arguably his first Stuart history play Shakespeare abandons stage Scots for another idiom. In ‘The place of Scots in the Scottish play: Macbeth and the politics of language’, Christopher Highley takes a new look at the language question and addresses the Scottishness of a play whose national context is complicated by the downplaying of dialect in its dramatic diction. Scotland was not a flat homogeneous whole whose main language was so close to English as to make an alliance easy. An internal Highland/Lowland division complicated matters, and linguistic variation was viewed as a barrier to political union, but between Shakespeare’s Captain Jamy and his King Macbeth there is a world of difference. The Scots speech of Jamy in Henry V gives way to a different order of discourse in the Scottish play, but, as Highley reminds us, even James I, who argued for unity of language, struggled to make himself understood south of the Border. Elizabeth Fowler’s chapter, ‘Macbeth and the

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rhetoric of political forms’, takes a different perspective on the play’s dramatic discourse. Where Highley focuses on the absence of dialect forms, Fowler looks at the text through the lens of the language of law and order, namely the three feudal topoi of military service, royal progress, and the need for counsel to be taken by monarchs and husbands. Each of these medieval ‘habitus’ are, as Fowler elegantly illustrates, as important as the ‘treble sceptres’ of Macbeth’s vision. The Scotland prophesied in Macbeth is marked not just by a much-anticipated union of crowns but by an appeal to an early modernity that will transform traditional social practices. In Ulysses Joyce tells us that Shakespeare wrote ‘Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting’.35 In doing so, Joyce reminds us that there is more than one ‘Scottish play’, as Andrew Hadfield demonstrates in his subtle investigation of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy in ‘Hamlet’s country matters: the “Scottish play” within the play’. Hamlet and the Scottish succession is a familiar refrain, played out eighty years ago by Lilian Winstanley and recently revisited by Stuart Kurland.36 Hadfield looks for the fraught, the fragile, and the faulty where other historicist critics may find easy contextual explanations. His reading of the play enriches our understanding by alerting us to anxieties around impending union rather than making one-to-one correspondences. Rebecca Rogers brings us back to Macbeth, but at a juncture when the national status of Shakespeare and the nature of the British state were both being redefined. ‘How Scottish was the “Scottish play”? Macbeth’s national identity in the eighteenth century’ examines Anglo-Scottish reactions to Shakespeare in a period of cultural change and imperial expansion. Another Union, this time of Parliaments rather than Crowns, promised to further erode national distinctions, but conflict persisted, making ‘the Scottish play’ a peculiarly ironic alias for a text that predicted a peaceful resolution at some vanishing point in the future while depicting in graphic detail the vicissitudes of a violent present. Popular prejudices prompted parody, and satire sustained the very stereotypes it sought to send up. Macbeth came to occupy a central role in the interplay of national antipathies. Robert Crawford takes up the baton at this point in order to argue that in Burns Scotland had its own national bard and that this Scottish poet exerted pressure on the Shakespeare industry at a crucial historical moment. ‘The bard: Ossian, Burns, and the shaping of Shakespeare’ reminds us that the forging of a ‘national’ culture was an especially fraught enterprise in an era of

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Empire and in the context of a multination state whose members had competing claims to literary excellence. Crawford’s contribution is crucial in terms of reinstating cultural conflict in the period following this second Anglo-Scottish union, and as a reminder that canon formation was intimately bound up with state formation. By contrast, the next contributor, Lidia Garbin, in ‘“Not fit to tie his brogues”: Shakespeare and Scott’, shows how another major Scottish writer paid homage to Shakespeare. Sir Walter Scott set himself up under the banner of bardolatry rather than against it, and Garbin subtly teases out the cultural and political implications of such a submissive strategy. There is some cross-dressing implicit in Scott’s homage to Shakespeare, and by the end of his literary career, when he had made the historical novel his own, the shoe is on the other foot, and it’s the bard who’s tongue-tied while Scott’s brogue is treading the boards across the Atlantic. In ‘Shakespeare goes to Scotland: a brief history of Scottish editions’, Andrew Murphy traces another way in which Scotland shaped Shakespeare, this time not through the responses of its writers but through the interventions of Scottish editors and publishers. Murphy’s account of the revolution in publishing that allowed an English playwright to be promoted abroad through the conduit of the Scottish publishing industry is an important example of cultural transmission. The question of how texts travel through time and space is further explored in the last two chapters. In ‘Citz Scotland where it did? Shakespeare in production at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, 1970–74’, Adrienne Scullion examines Scottish adaptations of Shakespeare in a vital theatrical location at a moment of radical experimentation, made possible by an innovative and outward-looking company. Scullion demonstrates that a Scottish Shakespeare need not place limitations on his work. On the contrary, Shakespeare at the Citz is a perfect illustration of international theatre at its most dynamic and cosmopolitan. The last chapter in the collection, Mark Thornton Burnett’s ‘Local Macbeth / Global Shakespeare: Scotland’s screen destiny’, looks at how cinematic versions of the ‘Scottish play’ flit between the local and the global, often eliding the national. Burnett illustrates the extent to which film as form contributes to the tendency of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy to transcend its ostensible national context. The editors would endorse Burnett’s closing wish that cinema should retain the freedom to experiment and relocate Macbeth. Let a hundred thistles bloom. Adaptation is a useful antidote against the worst excesses of nationalism. The ‘Scottishing’ of Shakespeare need not follow the narrow path taken by the ‘Englishing’ of Scotland.

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Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy

What happens when you put a playwright in a national context that appears, at first glance, to be foreign to them, or at least unfamiliar? Shakespeare’s Englishness has not been in doubt partly because it has not been addressed or interrogated as thoroughly as other nationalisms. The tendency to see his work as transcending nations and regions has made topical readings difficult. Of course, Englishness is a slippery concept, and one tending towards a universalizing discourse, exactly because of the history of the British Empire. But if England has at times come to represent a kind of cultural Greenwich mean time – or ‘meantime’, to take up a term deployed by Terence Hawkes in his timely mapping of King Lear – then it is worth recalling that part of Shakespeare’s international appeal is a perceived lack of parochialism, a unique translatability, in his work.37 Might the most creative way of responding to a cultural history of ‘Englishing’, to borrow a term used by Terence Hawkes, be precisely to pursue the ‘Scottishing’ of Shakespeare, while recognizing that both strategies are equally problematic? An interest in Scottish identity, far from being a cue to lose interest in Shakespeare, is an opportunity to take a fresh look at texts that participate in exciting ways in a complex process of state formation and deformation. Thomas Cartelli has written of the ways in which ‘Shakespeare is repositioned, as emerging or residually postcolonial cultures seek either to respond critically to the depredations and misrepresentations of colonialism, or to renegotiate Shakespeare’s standing as a privileged site of authority within their own national formations’.38 Cartelli’s work on postcolonial appropriations of Shakespeare is crucial, but in alluding to ‘British political control over a geographically specific place or polity’ he makes a move all too common in postcolonial criticism and naturalizes the British state itself. Postcolonial criticism begins at home. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s English lord, ‘If an understanding of Empire you would win, then with the formation of the British state first begin’. That said, we embrace Cartelli’s creative conception of ‘a decolonized or decommissioned Shakespeare, relieved of his obligation to circulate as a fixed object of scorn or emulation in the orbit of postcolonial applications’.39 But we would add a ‘devolved Shakespeare’, a Shakespeare whose understudied Englishness or problematic Britishness is open to question and subject to scrutiny. ‘Shakespeare’ occupies a place on the global stage quite different from that of ‘Scotland’. The world’s most widely recognized writer overshadows a small country that has been part of a larger political entity, in one form or another, since his plays were first performed. Shakespeare’s concerns –

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empire, identity, monarchy, and war – remain pressing today, in the world and in Scotland. Placing Shakespeare’s work in a Scottish context is not a reductive exercise, as the essays gathered here testify. That Scottish question with which we opened – ‘Weel lads; what think you of Wully Shakespeare now?’ – is here answered with equal enthusiasm. John Horne’s Douglas differed from Shakespeare’s, but the Douglas of 1 Henry IV, though ‘bruised’ in the end, was allowed to go ‘scot free’, and there is a dignity and directness in the dialect of Captain Jamy in Henry V. As for Macbeth, he may be evil incarnate in the moralizing demonology of traditional criticism, but in more recent readings he emerges as a product of his circumstances and a violent man in a violent and hypocritical world.40 Shakespeare may still in some quarters be seen as the epitome of colonial cultural dominance, but we do not believe that the answer to the cultural hegemony of Shakespeare, and of the unexamined England – the most ‘undiscovered country’ of the British state – that he has come to stand for is to bypass Mm, or try to surpass him. We think that Shakespeare, who is the author of a group of challenging and contradictory works, as well as an ideology and an industry, remains relevant and indeed vital for Scottish culture and identity, and we believe that Scotland, early modern and modern, has enriched and enabled the texts of Shakespeare to circulate and generate new readings. New work on early modern Scotland promises to open up this conjuncture further.41 We see this collection as a contribution to Shakespeare studies and to Scottish studies, and we see both as evolving, even as they devolve. But we also see it as an intervention, and not just an overview. The kingdoms that were united in Shakespeare’s day are being shaken up again. This volume offers timely reflections on the ways in which its northern neighbour has shaped, reshaped, and shored up this star of England, ‘Oor Wully’. Stands Scotland where it did? No, nor Shakespeare.

Notes The editors would like to thank Neil Rhodes for reading and commenting on a draft of this introduction. We tried to take on board all of his valuable suggestions, but we jealously retain ownership of any errors, excesses, or oversights. 1 See Neil Rhodes, ‘Shakespeare at St Andrews: Origins and Growth of a Tradition’ in Robert Crawford ed., Launch-Site for English Studies: Three Centuries of Literary Studies at the University of St Andrews (St Andrews: Verse, 1997), p. 36.

16 2

3

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4

5

6

7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15

Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy For early efforts to locate Shakespeare in Scotland, see Sir James Fergusson, Shakespeare’s Scotland (Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1957); Frederick J. Harries, Shakespeare and the Scots (Edinburgh, n.d.); Thomas I. Rae, Scotland in the Time of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965). Edinburgh Evening Courant, 29 May, 1755, quoted in Warren McDougall, ‘Copyright Litigation in the Court of Sessions, 1738–1749, and the Rise of the Scottish Book Trade’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 5th part, 5 (1988), p. 13. The Minogue Macbeth was a joint product of Teatr 77 (from Poland), the Kiev Experimental Theatre and JuJu Space Jazz. As the singer’s own website comments: ‘It could almost be a wind up. MacBeth [sic] with Dannii Minogue. And a load of Ukrainian stilt-walkers. And a soundtrack of trance, soul and Balkan rock’ (see www.dannii.com/acting/macbeth.htm). See Alvin B. Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) and Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and their Contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). Representative titles include: R. G. Asch ed., Three Nations: A Common History? England, Scotland, Ireland and British History, c. 1600–1920 (Bochum: Universitäts verlag Dr N. Brockmeyer, 1993); David Baker and Willy Maley eds, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill eds, The British Problem, c. 1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber eds, Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (London: Longman, 1995); Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer eds, Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London: Routledge, 1995); and Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts eds, British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Crawford, ‘Introduction’ to Robert Crawford ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 8. See Neil Rhodes, ‘From Rhetoric to Criticism’ in Crawford ed., Scottish Invention, esp. p. 28 and also his Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Esther Cloudman Dunn, Shakespeare in America (New York: Macmillan, 1939), pp. 224–5. For Spalding and Baynes, see Rhodes, ‘Shakespeare at St Andrews’, pp. 38, 43. See Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 221–9. See Wilson’s entry in the DNB. See John Dover Wilson, Milestones on the Dover Road (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), pp. 140–4. Macmillan archives, British Library, BL add 55017. Scotland was the venue for another book about Shakespeare and national identity. See Ernesto Grillo, Shakespeare and Italy (Glasgow: R. Maclehose, the University Press, 1949).

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16 R. C. Lorimer trans., Macbeth: William Shakespeare (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1992), pp. 80–1. For another attempt to render the Scottish play into Scots, see Edwin Morgan, ‘The Hell’s-Handsel O Leddy Macbeth’ in Edwin Morgan, Collected Translations (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1996), pp. 227–8. Some translations of the plays into the Irish language have also appeared, including An Brόnchluiche Macbeit (Dublin: Cahill 8c Co., 1925), trans. J. L. O’Sullivan, who, in his preface, observes (in a moment of post-independence high optimism): ‘In a little while, it is our hope, we shall be Irish-speaking, Irishreading’ (p. 4). 17 William Laughton Lorimer trans., The New Testament in Scots (Edinburgh: Published for the Trustees of the W. L. Lorimer Memorial Trust Fund by Southside Publishers, 1983). 18 J. Derrick McClure, ‘When Macbeth Becomes Scots’, Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, 36 (1999), special issue ed. José Roberto O’Shea, Accents Now Known: Shakespeare’s Drama in Translation, p. 33. 19 See David Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’ in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker eds, Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 78–116; Alan Sinfield, ‘Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals’ in Colin MacCabe ed., Futures for English (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 63–77. 20 McClure, ‘When Macbeth Becomes Scots’, p. 34. 21 Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 76. 22 Philip Hope-Wallace, ‘Macbeth’, Sight & Sound, 21, 1 (1951), p. 23. 23 Rothwell, History, p. 76. 24 No quarto edition of Macbeth was published in advance of the First Folio, but it is noteworthy that many of the F1 decisions on genre cut across the classifications offered by earlier quartos. Thus the title page of Q1 Richard II (1597) characterizes the play as a ‘tragedie’, while Q1 Merchant of Venice (1600) is a ‘most excellent historie’. 25 See for example Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley eds, Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534—1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray eds, Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (London: Macmillan, 1997). 26 Notable exceptions include: Philippa Berry, ‘Reversing History: Time, Fortune and the Doubling of Sovereignty in Macbeth’, European Journal of English Studies, 1, 3 (1997), pp. 367–87; Ronald J. Boling, ‘Tanistry, Primogeniture, and the Anglicizing of Scotland in Macbeth’, Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association, 25, 1 (1999), pp. 1–14; Paul A. Cantor, “‘A Soldier and Afeard”: Macbeth and the Gospelling of Scotland’, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 24, 3 (1997), pp. 287–318; Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Speculations: Macbeth and Source’ in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor eds, Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text In History And Ideology (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 242–64; Arthur Kinney, ‘Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the Question of Nationalism’ in Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson eds, Literature and Nationalism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), pp.

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27

28

29

30 31 32 33 34

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Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy 56–75; Arthur Kinney, ‘Scottish History, the Union of the Crowns and the Issue of Right Rule: The Case of Shakespeare’s Macbeth’ in Jean R. Brink and William F. Gentrup eds, Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), pp. 18–53; Stanley J. Kozikowski, ‘The Gowrie Conspiracy Against James VI: A New Source for Shakespeare’s Macbeth’, Shakespeare Studies, 13 (1980), pp. 197–212; Sally Mapstone, “Shakespeare and Scottish Kingship: A Case History’ in Sally Mapstone and Juliette Wood eds, The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998), pp. 158–89. Anne Barton, “‘He That Plays The King”: Ford’s Perkin Warbeck and the Stuart History Play’ in Marie Axton and Raymond Williams eds, English Drama: Forms and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 70. On the ‘Irish Play’, see Paul Brown, “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’ in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield eds, Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 48–71, and David J. Baker, ‘Where is Ireland in The Tempest?’ in Burnett and Wray eds, Shakespeare and Ireland, pp. 68–88. Cited in Michael Quinn ed., Henry V: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 37–8. See also A. C. Calder, “‘The Weasel Scot”: Some Characteristics of Shakespearian Depiction in Henry V and 1 Henry IV’ in J. Derrick McClure and Michael R. G. Spiller eds, Bryght Lanternis: Essays on the language and Literature of Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, 5th International Conference on Scottish Language and Literature, Medieval and Renaissance (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 1987), pp. 459–72. See Andrew Gurr, ‘Why Captain Jamy in Henry V?’, Archiv für das Studium der neuren Sprachen und Literaturen, 226, 141 (1989), pp. 365–73. G. K. Hunter ed., Macbeth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967; 1984), pp. 37–8. Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 121. Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 143. See Colin McArthur’s impassioned plea for the retention of Macbeth as a taught text, ‘Out, out damned Scot? (revision of Scottish higher education curriculum in English Literature)’, New Statesman, 128,4459 (18 October 1999), p. 43. James Joyce, Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, prepared by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984), 9.751–2. See Lilian Winstanley, ‘Hamlet’ and the Scottish Succession: Being an Examination of the Relations of the Play of ‘Hamlet’ to the Scottish Succession and the Essex Conspiracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921); Stuart M. Kurland, ‘Hamlet and the Scottish Succession?’, Studies in English Literature, 34, 2 (1994), pp. 279–300; and Alvin Kernan, ‘Blood Revenge in Elsinore and in Holyrood: Hamlet, Hampton Court, Christmas 1603’ in Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 24–49.

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37 See Terence Hawkes, ‘Lear’s Maps’ in Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 121–3. 38 Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 1. 39 Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare, p. 2. 40 See Norbrook, ‘Macbeth’ and Sinfield, ‘Macbeth’. 41 See for example Jane E. A. Dawson, The Politics of Religion in the Age of Mary, Queen of Scots: the Earl of Argyll and the Struggle for Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Sarah M. Dunnigan, Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002); Julian Goodare, State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); John Kerrigan, ‘William Drummond and the British Problem’ in On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 152–80; Maurice Lee, The ‘Inevitable’ Union: And Other Essays on Early Modern Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2003); Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts eds, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000); Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Theo van Heijnsbergen and Nicola Royan eds, Literature, Letters and the Canonical in Early Modern Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002).

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’Stands Scotland where it did?’ Shakespeare on the march DAVID J. BAKER

When James VI of Scotland came south in 1603 on his way to London, where he would be hailed as James I of Britain, he crossed a border that, to his mind, was no longer a border. Until then, Scotland and England had been divided by the ‘march’, a continuous strip of territory, fortified by castles and towers, which lay alongside their mutual border. England’s marches could be complicated places. Those found in Ireland and Wales were made up of ‘multiple, localized frontiers which were fragmented and fluid ... zones of interaction and assimilation between peoples of very different cultures’. The Anglo-Scottish march, by contrast, was supposed to set a more exclusive limit. Its line was clearly marked and was, at least officially, ‘mutually accepted’.1 But this was really a matter of degree. The ‘laws of the marches’ had been codified by various Anglo-Scottish treaties, but, an historian tells us, the ‘difficulty’ of citing these laws ‘is that some of them seem never to have been written down, but ... are mentioned in the treaties as if well known’.2 In practice, border justice was mostly customary and, on the English side, was often administered in an ad hoc manner by ‘wardens’. ‘March treason’, for instance, was a doubtful category, since ‘[e]ach warden was at liberty to define [it] as he saw fit’.3 Since 1296, these officials had been appointed by the royal government for the defense of England’s northern frontier. Although they had lost some of their influence on cross-border relations during Elizabeth’s reign, they had kept legal authority over the jumble of ‘liberties’ and ‘franchises’ that made up the area. In times of declared peace, these wardens might work together with their cross-border counterparts to enforce a certain order, but, in the sixteenth century, these

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times had been rare. Medieval English kings had claimed suzerainty over Scotland; Scottish kings had their own ambitions. Both James’s grandfather and his great grandfather had attempted invasions, and there had been a number of other conflicts between the kingdoms as well, including the war of 1522–23, fought by Henry VIII over a piece of the march measuring about ten to fifteen by four miles, the so-called ‘Debateable Land’. At such times, cooperation quickly gave way to confrontation. Border raids would be tacitly countenanced by the two governments, or would take place even if they were not. The truth of the matter was that the march was far from London, and though it was less far from Edinburgh, it was only loosely controlled by either. What one observer called the ‘uncerten and tickle governement of Scotland’4 meant that the Stuarts were often too weak to compel obedience in their border subjects, and, in the early years of the century, the Tudors’ government was vacillating. The march, therefore, was in a more or less constant state of low-grade warfare. Borderers on either side of the line made it their custom to harass and despoil one another, creating a permanently militarized frontier and leaving the region in the ‘decayed’ condition that English officials and travellers often noted. James, however, was going to change that. Not only would he unite the two kingdoms under his royal sway, he would forge a new ‘empire’ out of them: ‘Great Britain’. Thereby, he would remake his subjects as well, fashioning ‘Britons’ where before there had been English and Scots. In the closing decade of the sixteenth century, James had ‘made no effort to prevent his borderers from plundering the English wardenries’5 and march relations had deteriorated. As the new century opened, however, the march had been mostly quiet for several years. It was widely anticipated on both sides of the border that James would be the next ‘British’ king. By then the recipient of a pension from the English queen, and hoping to remain in her good graces, James had suppressed the worst raiders among his compatriots. English authorities had sequestered more than a few as well. Shortly after Elizabeth’s death and James’s accession, the march was officially ruled out of existence. Its ‘charge ... was committed to the Council of Scotland resident in Edinburgh’,6 and march law was abolished by royal proclamation. ‘Those confining places which were the Borders of the two Kingdomes,’ James would boast in 1607, ‘that lay waste and desolate, and were habitations but for runnagates, are now become the Navell or Umbilick of both Kingdomes’.7 From one point of view – and certainly it was the view of James I – the history of the march culminates in a moment of achieved unity: Scotland and

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David J. Baker

England are brought together as what has divided them in the past is consolidated within the newly coherent polity that he establishes. After 1603, says D. L. W. Tough, an historian of the border, ‘[t] here is really no more Border history’.8 Or is there? Steven Ellis has pointed out that studying the history of the Anglo-Scottish border as if all that matters is the moment at which that border vanishes has certain historiographical consequences, and, I am going to suggest here, certain literary critical ones as well. Certainly, it is possible to do such history as if these kingdoms were more or less free-standing polities grouped in a discrete array, as James would have wanted to claim, and, as Ellis notes, a good deal of history on both side of the border has indeed been done that way. Such an approach, however, can have the effect of eliding the complexities of England’s and Scotland’s dealings with one another in this period. Prospectively, it can minimize the enormous difficulty of amalgamating the two realms. As we know, James’s larger proposals for a legal and administrative union would be rejected by legislators on both sides of the border, and he would have to content himself with a ‘union of crowns’ established by proclamation. Believing that the ‘Middle Shires’ (as he insisted on calling them) could be made to serve as a ‘microcosm of a united Great Britain’,9 James sought to impose a new order on them. But the English and Scottish commissioners he appointed could hardly agree, and neither the English Parliament nor English borderers themselves were much more cooperative. ‘Scotland will be Scotland, borders will be borders’,10 rejoiced some Northumbrians as the king’s plans for union died. Relative peace on the frontier would not come until the end of the decade. Retrospectively, such an approach might also lead us to assume that the break between the Tudors and the Stuarts was sharper than it actually was. As Ellis argues, the policies by which the royal government dealt with its ‘marginal’ possessions did not emerge ex nihilo in 1603 and were not unrelated to those it pursued afterwards. In fact, it was how ‘the Tudors [had] ruled their internal peripheries’ that ‘shaped’ the official ‘approach to the outward parts of the archipelago’ and to the ‘problems of multiple monarchy [that were] created by the Union of the Crowns’11 in that year. To ignore that prehistory is almost inevitably to slip into anachronism and to treat the entities that confronted one another across the march – ‘Scotland’, ‘England’ – as if they were ‘modern nations, with modern national boundaries’.12 Whereas, as we will see, the history of Anglo-Scottish march militates against such reductions, compelling as they may have seemed in 1603 – or, indeed, as they may seem now.

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In this chapter, then, I want to consider broadly what an account of Anglo-Scottish border relations might be that neither neglects the prehistory of the two kingdoms nor imposes on them a coherence they did not have. Specifically, I want to think about the implications of such an account for one politically savvy Englishman writing at the turn of the seventeenth century, William Shakespeare. If we want to grasp the relation between Scotland and England in the years just before and after the ascension of James I, I propose, we should think of them not so much as the blocks of consolidated geo-political power that we are now accustomed to call British ‘nations’, but as intimately related, geographically interpenetrating domains that, as Ellis says, had been negotiating their discords and ententes for many years across a terrain with a particularly vexed history: the march. As Shakespeare wrote, that history had reached a decisive point: its defining complexities and enduring ambiguities are supposedly undone by the advent of a monarch with a British historiography of his own. James upheld a coherent British polity and had little use for the march or the entangled past that it implied. If Shakespeare did not share this disregard, he did, I think, understand its implications. So, here I will also say that if we want to grasp the stance towards Scotland that is implied in certain of the works of Shakespeare, one way to think of them is as moments in an ongoing meditation on, and even an elaboration of, that royalist historiography. The most obvious place to look for evidence of Shakespeare’s engagement with James I is the so-called (at least, by superstitious actors) ‘Scottish play’, Macbeth. The implications of its Jacobean references will be canvassed in the chapters that follow in this volume. Here, I will concentrate on what came ‘before’ the clearing gesture that James tried to impose. The place to turn for this prehistory of Anglo-Scottish relations, I suggest, is first of all the Henriad,13 where the tensions between a centralizing English monarchy and a disruptive Anglo-Scottish frontier are played out in advance of Macbeth. While the plays of this trilogy look ‘forward’ to the close engagement with the tropes of Jacobean ideology that we see in Macbeth, they also look ‘backward’ to the long history of Anglo-Scottish relations that supposedly vanished in James’s abolition of the march. Both the imperatives that would become so pressing after 1603 and the centuries of preceding march history shaped Shakespeare’s stance toward the northern kingdom, sometimes working in tension. And it is for that reason, I suggest, that the movement this playwright traces from ‘march’ to what James wished to call ‘Great Britain’ both seems to underscore the inevitability of this ‘progress’ and, at times, undercuts its very teleology.

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We have come to think of this sort of historical ‘doubleness’ as typically Shakespearean, but it was also intrinsic to the early modern notion of the march itself. To see why this was so, we need to step back and consider the broader history that situates the march, far enough back that, beyond the specifics of Tudor/Stuart politics, the defining origins of this locale come into view. In a classic discussion, Benedict Anderson once pointed out that the spatial model implied by political sovereignty was changing in the early modern period, shifting from, as he put it, an ‘older imagining, where states were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another’ and towards a ‘modern conception’ where ‘state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory’. As we will see, Anderson was right to say that borders in the period were sometimes vague and fluid, incorporating ‘immensely heterogeneous, and often not even contiguous, populations’. But he was mistaken to imply that one ‘conception’ was inevitably giving way to the next; it wasn’t, at least, not on the AngloScottish march. The history of that borderland can be located along Anderson’s continuum, but it troubles the linearity that he assumes. Not only does the march share traits with both ‘premodern empires and kingdoms’ and ‘modern’14 states, it is, as it develops, intrinsic to the march that it does so. What makes a march a march is precisely that it is the site on which these political ‘imaginings’ take shape and definition as they are juxtaposed against one another, and often within the same period. We can expand on this by turning to a ‘model’ of march history that was being offered by another historian, J. G. A. Pocock, in 1982, at about the time, that is, that Anderson made his remarks. Much of what he alternatively proposed as ‘British’ or ‘archipelagic’ history would chronicle, Pocock said, the expansion of one sector of the easternmost of the ‘British Isles’ – ‘Wessex, Mercia, and East Anglia, with associated earldoms to the north’15 – across the rest of the archipelago after the Norman invasion of the eleventh century. As in the medieval period military adventurers moved out and away from ‘England’, ‘zones of war’ developed beyond the ‘zone of law’ – beyond, that is, the territory that had come to be dominated by the ‘English’ king, who now confronted on his own borders societies that were not always willing to be ruled by his fiat. Nor did these conform, usually, to the ‘world of stable social relationships’ that had grown up under his sovereignty. ‘Very complex cultural and social systems’ emerged in the march. Hybrid types were produced. ‘[P]easant soldiers [might] learn nomad warfare’; displaced nobles

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might become acculturated to life in the borderlands. Inevitably, ‘power structures’ would arise that did not predictably answer to the instruments of royal control. The ‘English’ king, said Pocock, might thus ‘rule a bifurcated realm’, at once the ‘“domain,” where his writ runs and his clerks of justice assert his sedentary authority’, and the ‘“march,” where his power is the sum of his relations with powerful military figures, feudatories or tributaries, subjects or aliens’.16 It was the dialectic between these ‘power structures’ of the margins and those of the putative ‘center’ that defined the politics of the march, but, it is important to say, not of the march only. The interplay of these ‘zones’ presented political actors across the archipelago with choices. The king had to decide whether to try to ‘control [the borderers], to leave them to themselves, or to attempt indirect control’.17 In turn, these marchers must determine whether to resist the king, or obey him, or negotiate some other rapprochement. And Pocock was quite clear that this ‘bifurcation’ had characterized the march from its beginnings. The domain did not necessarily supplant the march; instead, they were often co-definitive and co-existing. If the influence they had on one another was not always equal, it was always mutual.18 The history of the march, therefore, was not incidental to the history of ‘England’. On the contrary, it was integral to the process by which that domain established itself, as was Scotland, a ‘lowland kingdom’ that found its distinction from the ‘uplands of Northumbria’19 only gradually. The borderland that James crossed on his way south, then, was the place on which Scotland and England had once been one, not because they were unified, but because the categories around which they might coalesce as kingdoms were still coming into definition (a form of ‘British history’ this king could not have been expected to appreciate). That the Anglo-Scottish border could still be considered ‘porous and indistinct’ in Shakespeare’s day, as we will now see, and that it was still set over against the domain to the south suggests how long the defining tensions of the march persisted, and how crucial it was for the appearance of the two regions as kingdoms, and, in the longue duree, as ‘nations’. As Shakespeare composed the plays of the Henriad in the waning years of the sixteenth century, Scotland and what the coronation of James would imply was very much on the minds of the English political class, and we might expect Shakespeare to be, at the very least, aware that affairs were tending towards ‘union’ under the aegis of a ‘British’ ruler and that these trends would require some dramatic accommodation from him. A strong case could be made that Shakespeare incorporated aspects of the king’s conception

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of ‘Britain’ into his works in advance of his actual arrival on the English scene. After all, the concluding play, Henry V, celebrates a king who not only triumphs over enemies both foreign and domestic, but who does so in part by assembling an army that includes, as recent criticism has often noticed, representatives of each of the British peoples: Fluellen the Welshman, MacMorris the Irishman, and Jamy the Scot. Still, it would be a mistake, I think, to regard this playwright’s engagement with the historical mythology underwriting this king’s reign as the simple adoption of its teleology. True, this teleology provides the Henriad with its overall structure. Hal does transmogrify into Henry V, uniting a British kingdom and, as we will recall, overcoming, together with his royal father, a cabal of rebellious marcher lords: Northumberland, Owen Glendower, and, foremost of all, that scion of the Percies, Hotspur. But at the same time, this teleology is internally ruptured, co-existing at many points with not just an other time scheme, but multiple time schemes, the presence of which belie the closure towards which that teleology supposedly tends. Another way to put this is that the historiography that is tacit in much of the Henriad is very much that of the march: it assumes that the sovereignty of the southern and eastern ‘zone of law’ (that is to say, ‘England’) will be constituted out of its dealings with the borderland to the north, and that this borderland implies the constant copresence of Scotland across an uncertain line where ‘sovereignties fade ... imperceptibly into one another’. It also partakes of the historical overlaps that the march implies. In this trilogy, the origins of the English state in its agon with its own borders are played out as if this were a matter of contemporary politics (as indeed it was).20 Simultaneously, though, the history of the march is just what is being superseded by the rise throughout the plays’ action of the transcending figure of Hal. The result is a kind of split time, moving toward a culmination that, as we will see, never quite arrives. The opening colloquy of Henry V, for example, will suggest how multifarious the history of these plays can be and how complex is their mapping of inter-kingdom relations. ‘Scotland’ is certainly present here; its coordinates, though, must be checked and rechecked. As the king and his advisers contemplate an invasion of France, their thoughts turn towards their ‘giddy neighbor’21 to the north. Henry remembers that often in the past England’s excursions outside its borders have been met with countervailing incursions from that direction. For you shall read that my great-grandfather Never went with his forces into France But that the Scot on his unfurnished kingdom

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Came pouring like the tide into a breach, With ample and brim fullness of his force, Galling the gleaned land with hot assays, Girding with grievous siege castles and towns, That England, being empty of defence, Hath shook and trembled at th’ill neighborhood

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(1.2.146–54) Others on the war council calculate the Scottish menace differently, however. For the bishop of Ely, Scotland is not an invading country, but a country to be invaded, a stopover on the route to France that must be secured lest ‘the weasel Scot/ Come ... sneaking’. For ‘there’s a saying very old and true, / If that you will France win, / Then with Scotland first begin’ (1.2.166–8, 70–1). For the duke of Exeter, Scottish infiltration poses a risk, but not a consequential one. England’s internal defences are more than enough to hold and neutralize the ‘ample and brim fullness’ that the king fears, for ‘we have ... pretty traps to catch the petty thieves’ (1.2.176–7). The Archbishop of Canterbury concurs; England itself is well protected, and besides, he tells the king, They of those marches, gracious sovereign, Shall be a wall sufficient to defend Our inland from the pilfering borderers. (1.2.140–2)

What is Scotland, then? A puissant and autonomous kingdom whose military might must be respected and whose alliances can alter the balance of power? A negligible principality whose interests will inevitably be subordinated to greater rivals? Or simply a haven for brigands whose depredations can be repulsed by a strong enough guard at the border? As Ellis might point out, some of the polities that appear in this passage might seem to us, anachronistically, to be ‘nations’ in the ‘modern conception’: England, France, and, at moments, Scotland. But this is partly an illusion, an effect of the debate whereby the names of kingdoms take on solidity as strategic possibilities are rapidly counterpoised and reconfigured. The terrain on which Henry V plays out is also, but not only, that of the dynastic realms of Anderson’s ‘older imagining’. That borders might be truly delimiting and that territory might be securely held – these concepts are only somewhat plausible to this war council. Henry V, of course, plans to invade France because, as he allows himself to be convinced in this scene, it makes up part of his inheritance and has since the eleventh century. He and his cohort are

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‘Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!’ (3.5.10), as one of the French nobility declares. They are assimilated invaders themselves. Scotland features in Henry’s dynastic ambitions mostly as it stands in relation to the mobile ‘centre’ that reconstitutes itself wherever he is, and he assumes that Scotland, like his own realm, is an heterogeneous affair dispersed across a haphazard map, ‘where sovereignties fade ... imperceptibly into one another’. The march, the boundary along which England and Scotland touch, is precisely not a border in the modern sense, but a region where the two comingle. And though Canterbury reminds them that the march is meant to defend England’s northern frontier against the Scots, the king’s memories testify that it has done so with mixed success. In a sense, thus, English and Scottish kingdoms are adumbrated by the dramatic geography of this scene, but they are not separate from and opposed to one another in the ways that we might expect. Instead, they are defined by the actualities of march politics: low intensity conflict, mutual adaptation, and, in general, pervasive interpenetration.22 Scotland, as this kingdom emerges here, is potentially hostile but not distinct enough from England to be an ‘enemy’ state. It is rather a somewhat nebulously defined elsewhere, the locale that lies on the ‘other’ side of the march. Perhaps it was the ambiguities of passages such as this that convinced Pocock, for one, that Shakespeare made a poor chronicler of march history and of its larger consequences for the two realms. The ‘conspiracy of Glendower, Percy, and Douglas against the English king Henry IV’ that drives so much of the narrative of Shakespeare’s Henriad took place, Pocock observes, at a defining moment in that history. Had this conspiracy succeeded, ‘a belt of marcher principalities, running from Wales through Northumbria to southwestern Scotland, might have fragmented the advance of both’ Scotland and England and retarded their emergence as ‘centralized kingdoms’. But Shakespeare, that ‘English nationalist poet’, thought this eventuality ‘absurd’;23 he celebrated the collapse of the plot and the alternative alignment of geo-political power that it had almost brought into being. This is a shrewd observation. In the Henriad, Shakespeare does present the triumph of royal English government over the more distributed and diverse marcher regions as inevitable. He puts much of his invention in the service of the historical credo that, as Pocock puts it, ‘[e]mpire ... [is] an affair of marches first and polities after’.24 As well he might, since this progression was a tenet of Jacobean ideology as well. James I annulled the Anglo-Scottish march, as we’ve seen, as a means of inaugurating a ‘British Empire’. But to

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say that Shakespeare promoted that agenda is not the same as saying that he was at all insensible to the subversive possibilities that the rebellion of Hotspur and his alliance opened up, or, more to the point, that he failed to realize that, according to the logic of march history, the authority of the English ‘zone of law’ could be expected to develop in close and dialectical relation with the Anglo-Scottish ‘zone of war’ that persisted on its borders. Indeed, much of the Henriad recounts the ‘triumph’ of the crown over that march without ever managing to suggest that the one could take shape without the other or that this ‘triumph’ was in any sense final. The trilogy begins, we will remember, with the English king, Henry IV (himself a recent claimant to the throne), not only at war along his borders, but in league with ‘they of those marches’ against their own near neighbours. From the first, Scotland, and the threat it poses to the English polity, is crucial to the conflict. News of a defeat along the Welsh march at the hands of the ‘irregular and wild Glendower’, who has ‘A thousand of [Mortimer’s] people butcherèd’, is ‘matched with other’ news from the march to the north that Hotspur has ‘discomfited’ the Scottish Earl of Douglas and left ‘Ten thousand bold Scots, two-and-twenty knights, / Balked in their own blood’. That Hotspur is ‘Young Harry Percy’25 is, of course, greatly relevant. In the early fifteenth century, the time in which these three plays are set, the Percies dominated Northumberland and had since the previous century, when they had been entrusted by the crown with the defence of the AngloScottish frontier. ‘A Percy was warden of a march in Northumberland for almost 60 of the years between 1377 and 1485.’26 This policy of granting autonomy in exchange for security lasted until the middle years of the reign of Henry VIII, when a more assertive royal government, in the person of Cardinal Wolsey, decided it should assume the management of the border. Elizabeth I displaced the earls of Northumberland altogether (precipitating a revolt in 1569) and replaced them with wardens of her own choosing, drawn from the local gentry. In the event, such absentee governance proved mostly ineffectual. ‘[T]he queen and her principal advisers came to regard Northumberland as a backwater which could safely be left under the control’27 of her appointees, an obliviousness that was periodically disrupted by Scottish raiding parties. By the concluding years of the sixteenth century, then, when the Henriad was first performed, the presence of the Percies among the king’s entourage and his use of them as a bulwark against the Scots would have recalled a mode of border government that had once been traditional, that had, within living memory, been discarded by the house of

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the present ruler, but without any appreciable increase in the authority that accrued to it. As Ellis notes, ‘the reorganization [of the marches] of the 1530s ... inaugurated a more interventionist, centralizing phase in relations between the crown and the provinces’, but the ‘reduction of the great magnates who had ruled the borders with royal support’ – such as the Percies – ‘simply reduced the capacity of royal government in these regions and created more problems than it solved’.28 It is hardly surprizing, then, that as Shakespeare and his audience faced yet another shift in the organization of the AngloScottish march, this time to be instigated by the British aspirations of James I, he chose to return to this earlier moment to (re)stage the problems of that locale. Not only should we expect to see the domain played off the march in these plays, but to witness the Percies in the midst of the longstanding and mutually defining contest that they chronicle. And, of course, so we do. No sooner has Hotspur done the English king some service by defeating his Scottish enemies than he, jealous of his border prerogatives, demands the keeping of his own prisoners. According to the king, Hotspur’s main stipulation is that his brother-in-law, Mortimer, be ransomed from ‘that ... damned Glendower’ (1.3.82), who has him prisoner in Wales. We soon learn that Hotspur believes that Henry should not be king at all, and that his family has been desperately wronged by him. Significantly, though, Hotspur’s stated reason for refusing to comply with this traffic across England’s boundaries is that he wasn’t asked in the right way. ‘But I remember when the fight was done’, and, he says, ‘When I was dry with rage and extreme toil’, he was approached by a ‘certain lord, neat and trimly dressed’ and ‘perfumèd like a milliner’, who ‘smiled and talked; /... as the soldiers bore dead bodies by’, and then, ‘With many holiday and lady terms ... demanded / My prisoners in your majesty’s behalf’. Whether or not this man is the ‘popinjay’ (1.3.29–30, 32, 35, 40–1, 45–7, 49) Hotspur chooses to make him, he does represent a sensibility that is out of joint with his own. More than that, he represents an institution – the court, and specifically the English court – that has developed a code of conduct – ‘courtesy’ – that he cannot help but find alien, and this for reasons that ultimately, if rather comically in this case, are geo-political. As Ellis points out, by the end of the sixteenth century relations between the crown and marcher lords had reached something of a crisis. There was ‘growing acceptance in official circles of the lowland English model of a service nobility as the one true expression of aristocratic values’, but border magnates, who often needed to remain on the frontier for its defense, ‘could not hope to answer the revised

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expectations of the state’.29 Also, marcher societies were ‘habituated to war’, which meant that border magnates lived differently from their peers in the lowland. For instance, their dwellings were ‘fortified ... although Englishmen elsewhere were increasingly building country houses’.30 To English eyes, they and the territory from which they hailed were ‘at once uncivilized, unruly, and not fully English’.31 (To other eyes, of course, the service nobility was equally outlandish. Ellis notes, in language Hotspur would approve, that ‘this emasculated breed of aristocrat was seldom sighted much outside lowland England’.32) Shakespeare’s handling of Hotspur evinces the official ‘idée fixe’33 of marcher propensities, though, as we might expect, he does not rehearse that ‘idée’ in any simple fashion, but instead elaborates the many and contradictory affiliations that it could imply. To others onstage, Hotspur’s irascibility and almost unstoppable grandiloquence do not immediately set him off as a marcher, but only one too lost in his own conceits to fix his mind on promoting himself at the royal court, or, for that matter, staging a revolt against it. (‘He apprehends a world of figures here, / But not the form of what he should attend,’ (1.3.207–8) says Worcester.) Even the English king thinks Hotspur a paragon and envies Northumberland his son, whom he believes to be the ‘theme of honour’s tongue’ (1.1.80). But Hotspur himself is quick to mark his distinction from the decorum of the king’s domain. It’s not clear whether he loathes Henry more because he has a crown that should have gone to ‘my brother Edmund Mortimer’ (1.3.154) or because, in suing for that crown, Henry once offered him a ‘candy deal of courtesy’ (1.3.246). Hotspur, for his part, will take his behavioural cues from the ‘zone of war’. By denigrating the king’s messenger, he is not only rejecting the authority represented by him; he is opposing himself to the whole ethos that has arisen under that authority. The ‘popinjay’ at whom he sneers is, under another description, nothing more or less than a courtier, whose skill in the techniques of self-fashioning and social presentation, though caricatured by Hotspur, nonetheless stands him in good stead at the nexus of power. That Hotspur has demonstrably not mastered those techniques, but also finds them odious, measures his distance from that nexus, even as it announces his origins on the dangerous periphery that locates and defines England and Scotland both. It was just to remove this danger and to combine those kingdoms that James I would abolish the march in 1603, and the Henriad, to one way of thinking, appears as a long demonstration of how this will come about. In this trilogy, the center not only holds, but it smoothly integrates its edges. As

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it does so, an assortment of power not organized by but around the domain of the English king is vanishing. The failure of the revolt of bumptious Hotspur and his marcher allies, as Pocock argues, recalls the eclipse of the extraEnglish, anti-royal politics that their revolt might have opened up in the fifteenth century. In The First Part of King Henry IV, as we might anticipate, the dissidents move to the marches and then across them in order to consolidate their forces. Hotspur will return his Scottish prisoners to their native kingdom and then link up with ‘the Douglas’ son your only mean / For powers in Scotland’ (1.3.256–7). Later, his father, Northumberland, will proceed south with a contingent of the] very Scotsmen that before he, as a marcher lord, had fought to repel. At the same time, Glendower will drive up from Wales. By the third act, the conspirators are imagining how they will divide England between them – and quarrelling over the shares. In the event, their scheme comes to nothing, ostensibly because they do not coordinate their troops and thus meet Henry IV undermanned, but actually, as any playgoer will recognize, because their plot has been doomed from the start by the sure ascendancy of Hal, the English prince who is as much in control of history as they are its victims. By the time Hal and Hotspur confront one another in the final act, and Hotspur learns, at the point of death, that life (and he) are alike ‘time’s fool’ (5.4.80), we have already seen Hal prophesy] his own ascent to kingship, ‘Redeeming time when men think least I will’ (1.2.177). Nothing in the trilogy impedes this ‘progress’ for long. At the conclusion, Henry V’s borders, including the Anglo-Scottish march whose violation he had once feared, are secure. He commands, as we’ve noted, a British army and is in possession, by implication, of a British kingdom (plus France). This ‘Britain’ also anticipates, though not by ] much, events after the ascension of James I, when this king would move decisively, if not always successfully, to subordinate the kingdoms of ‘Britain’ within one domain. ‘The worke we have presentlie in hande is utterlie to extinguishe as well the name, as substance of the bordouris,’ declared James in 1604, ‘For doing quhairof,’ he thought, ‘it is necessarie that ... no factions be forstered among thaime ... and ... that that pairt of the kingdome maye be maid as peacable and ansourable as any other pairt thairof.’34 Taken as a whole, though, and in the context of James’s entire reign, the Henriad also registers the interminability of march history, which, after all, had been going on since the eleventh century and would continue, as it transpired, after 1603. Some of this interminability can be seen in the cyclic time scheme of the plays, whereby no ending seems final. Having dispatched

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the conspiracy of the marcher lords in The First Part of King Henry IV, that king must face yet another crew of rebels in Henry IV, Part 2, one of whom is ‘th’enraged Northumberland’,35 set upon avenging the death of Hotspur. The conquests of his son, Henry V, end, not with triumph over the French, but the reminder that his own son, Henry VI, had in turn ‘lost France and. made his England bleed’ (Henry V, 5.epilogue.12). One of the more suggestive divergences from the time line that James would have imposed, however, is signaled for me by a typographical error. As we’ve seen, Henry V begins with the king and his advisers pondering an invasion of France. The ‘Scot,’ says Henry, ‘will make rode vpon vs with all aduantages.’ Not so, counters a bishop, for ‘The Marches gracious soueraigne, shalbe sufficient / To guard your England from the pilfering borderers.’36 Or, at least, so he says in the quarto of the play, published in 1600. In the folio of 1623, the archbishop of Canterbury instead assures the king that ‘They of those marches’ will preserve ‘Our inland’ from the Scottish foe – ‘coursing snatchers’, as Henry calls them – who might otherwise ‘make road’ (or raid) from the north (1.2.138,140,142). That ‘England’ appears in the earlier text and ‘inland’ in the later may be the result of an auditor’s mistake in 1600, as T. W. Craik thinks,37 or perhaps a compositor’s error in 1623, as Andrew Gurr speculates.38 We can’t know, of course, whether Shakespeare intended ‘England’ or ‘inland’ to appear in the line, and, indeed, in this place he is not the ‘author’ at all. That role was assumed, perhaps, by a preoccupied actor or a hasty typesetter. More important than what Shakespeare may have meant, though, is that these terms could have been so easily substituted for one another by the Englishmen who heard or transcribed or printed this play, whether in 1600 or 1623. Because what is most arresting about this textual crux, beside the way that ‘England’ drops in and out of the line, adumbrating a kind of sporadic ‘nationalism’, is how sharply it reverses the direction in which we expect the history of this ‘nationalism’ to proceed. ‘Inland’ and ‘England’ suggest quite different conceptions of the polity that, by Shakespeare’s day, had emerged from ‘Wessex, Mercia, and East Anglia, with associated earldoms to the north’. ‘Inland’ implies the more ancient understanding, and Canterbury’s use of the term conveys a sense of an AngloScottish politics that is almost hydraulic in its fluidity. Scotland threatens England because the border they share – the march – is permeable. Like the king (whose language, in this reading, would echo his), he thinks of the Scots as a liquid force, ‘pouring like the tide into a breach’, filling the southern land ‘full’ (1.2.149–50) with their displaced numbers. What must be protected,

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according to this conception, is lowland England, the ‘inland’ that locates the true seat of civility and that lies at a distance from its own all too accessible boundaries. ‘England’, on the other hand, suggests a morel coherent kingdom, and today we will probably hear this bishop announcing his allegiance to and calling for the defense of the domain that has been assembled within Henry V’s borders. But ‘inland’ appears in 1623, twenty years into James’s reign, and ‘England’ in 1600, three years before he is on the throne. It is not, of course, that the kingdom of England is ‘there’ in 1600 and ‘gone’ in 1623, but that, as Shakespeare’s Henriad suggests, the history that can be traced from the older conception of that kingdom to the newer is uneven and multi-directional. Well into the seventeenth century, ‘England’ could be apprehended as ‘inland’ – or was it the other way around? And at no point was Scotland absent from that history. Despite James’s hopes that he could ‘utterlie ... extinguishe as well the name, as substance of the bordouris,’ and thus the ‘difference betwene thaime and other pairts of the kingdome,’39 that difference persisted, marking the Anglo-Scottish dis-union in the space of one syllable.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: The Making of the British State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 18,19. D. L. W. Tough, The Last Years of a Frontier: A History of the Borders During the Reign of Elizabeth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), p. 96. S. J. Watts with Susan Watts, From Border to Middle Shire: Northumberland 1586–1625 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1975), p. 33. Simon Musgrave, quoted in Tough, The Last Years, p. 174. Watts and Watts, From Border to Middle Shire, p. 116. Tough, The Last Years, p. 278. Watts and Watts, From Border to Middle Shire, p. 133. Tough, The Last Years, p. 277. Watts and Watts, From Border to Middle Shire, p. 148. Ibid., p. 151. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers, p. x. Emphasis mine. Ibid., p. vii. It could be questioned whether ‘modern boundaries are, in practice, as clearly demarcating as Ellis implies. Although I will be concentrating on the Henriad here, we should keep in mind that the border connections that Shakespeare was exploring in these three plays also extend to Richard II, where the king’s and the rebels’ manœuvrings shift among England and its Irish and Welsh marches, as well as to Macbeth, where England and Scotland are interlinked in a complex dialectic. One place to start tracing this dialect as it plays out spatially might be the third scene of

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16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23 24 25

26 27

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J the fourth act, from which I take the question of my title (A. R. Braunmuller ed., Macbeth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4.3.166.) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 1983; 1991), p. 19. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject’, The American Historical Review, 87 (1982), p. 321. Ibid., p. 322. Ibid. It is important to note, then, that Pocock’s was not a model like that of Michael Hechter, who argued for the subordination of the ‘Celtic’ ‘periphery’ to the English ‘core’ and for their clear distinction from one another. See Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development (London: Transaction Publishers 1975; 1999). Pocock, ‘Limits and Divisions’, p. 321. This is the burden of Ellis’s argument in Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: ‘The ways in which the core region, lowland England, dominated and controlled the borderlands was of central importance’ in its emergence as a state, as well as ‘in shaping the government’s response to the problems of union and ... to the development of a strategy of expansion which later created the first British Empire’ (Ellis, Tudor Frontiers, p. 17). T. W. Craik ed., King Henry V (London: Routledge, 1995), 1.2.145. Further references to this work will be given parenthetically in the text. Despite the endemic violence, the Anglo-Scottish march was also a place of much mixture and exchange in the sixteenth century. Scots and English sometimes played ‘football’ together – and quarrelled over it (‘The game’, we are told, ‘was very rough and had no regular rules’ (Tough, The Last Years, p. 54)). They quarrelled, moreover, in much the same tongue. Andrew Boorde, an English physician who had lived and worked in Scotland, observed in 1547 that ‘the South part of Scotland, and the usual speech of the peers of the realm is like the Northern speech of England. Wherefore if any man will learn to speak some Scots – English and Scots doth follow together’ (Tough, The Last Years, p. 58). Many Scots worked over the border as ‘shepherds, salmonfishers, colliers ... pedlars’ (Tough, The Last Years, p. 52), and many lived there as well. ‘[T]hroughout Northumberland in 1586 every third man within ten miles of the border was reputably a Scot’ (Ellis, Tudor Frontiers, p. 32). The ‘surnames’ (clans) that straddled the border, notes Ellis, were almost ‘[c]ulturally... indistinguishable .... The respective central governments might classify them as English or Scots depending on which side of a notional border line they resided, but this did not make them act any differently. Instead, they pursued their own interests in collaboration with other clans, English or Scottish’ (Ellis, Tudor Frontiers, p. 63). J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History, 47 (1975), p. 609. Pocock, ‘Limits and Divisions’, p. 327. Herbert Weil and Judith Weil eds, The First Part of King Henry IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1.1.40, 42, 49, 53, 67–9. Further references to this work will be given parenthetically in the text. Watts and Watts, From Border to Middle Shire, p. 55. Ibid., p. 95.

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Ellis, Tudor Frontiers, pp. 268,269. Ibid., p. 266. Ibid., pp. 30,41. Ibid., p. 260. Ibid., p. 266. Ibid., p. 259. Watts and Watts, From Border to Middle Shire, p. 204. Rene Weis ed., Henry IV, Part 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1.1.152. Anon, The Chronicle History of Henry the fift (London: 1600), A3. See Craig’s edition of King Henry V, Appendix 1, p. 375. 37 See the note to 1.2.142 on p. 140 in Craik’s edition. 38 See the note to King Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1.2.142, and also the ‘Textual Analysis’, p. 214. Unlike most editors, Gurr opts for ‘England’ rather than ‘inland’ in his text. 39 Watts and Watts, From Border to Middle Shire, p. 134.

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Wrapped in the strong arms of the Union: Shakespeare and King James NEIL RHODES

Writing about relations between the English national poet and Scotland at the start of the twenty-first century will inevitably be shaped by the developments of the 1990s: the rise of nationalisms throughout Europe and the flourishing of identity politics, the academic debate about the British problem, and in the political sphere the devolution of government within the British state. Specifically, the issue of the union between England and Scotland, half begun in 1603 and half undone in 1998, is bound to colour the discussion. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, as now, a momentous shift in relations between the two countries prompted new reflections about national identity on both sides of the border.1 For Shakespeare himself, supported in the later part of his career by Scottish patronage in the person of King James, who was busy promoting that union, the issue would clearly have been of some significance. It is most obviously reflected in the fact that Shakespeare wrote his English plays in Elizabeth’s reign and his British plays after 1603, though Henry V, first performed in 1599, might be regarded as a proto-British play. The complex relationship between Scotland, England, and the British state is often misunderstood or misrepresented, so it is worth beginning with one simple statement: Scotland is not Ireland. Scotland has never been colonized. When a reluctant and impoverished kingdom was bought into the Union in 1707, it nevertheless retained the markers of national identity – a separate church, a separate legal system, and distinctive educational traditions evidenced by its four universities as opposed to England’s two. Far from being a colonized people, in the second half of the eighteenth century, and onwards, Scots became enthusiastic partners in the British imperial

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enterprise, very much at the forefront of the colonial expansion overseas. And unlike Ireland, it has never been possible to characterize Scotland as a maiden ravished by an invading colonial power. Where Seamus Heaney imagined an Ireland penetrated by its masculine neighbour in his poem ‘Act of Union’, it was a Scottish king who presented himself as husband to ‘the whole Isle’ of Britain in his speech to parliament of 1603.2 The original act of union was a fact of James’s accession to the English throne in 1603, but that was all it was.3 The Union existed only within the person of James himself, hence the marital analogy. What we have in view, then, is both the broader political and historical picture and the specific individual, the person and personality of James Stewart. One aspect of that personality is of particular significance here. If current writing about Shakespeare and Scotland is bound to be coloured by the issues of union, empire, and devolution, it is bound also to reflect the fact that James himself was a writer, and a published writer at that, like so many other common professionals, Shakespeare included. Indeed, no other British monarch, Scottish or English, has published so extensively. The English Short Title Catalogue records some seventy separate editions up to 1640. This gives any discussion of Shakespeare and Scotland a distinctive inflection. It is not so much a matter of the king’s two bodies J as of the king’s two voices; while he may have seen the work of his pen as an extension of government, as well as a public relations exercise, it also provided him with an opportunity for self-reflection. It is hardly surprizing that there is a high degree of self-consciousness in James’s writing. As royal author, his position was unique: here was a writer of incontestable authority. In the case of James the very word ‘sentence’ has to be understood not just as a linguistic unit, but as an expression of real and effective J power. So what I want to do in the remainder of this chapter is to address the issue of Shakespeare and Scotland through the writing of James himself and, in particular, through his manual of kingship, Basilicon Doron, his ‘royal gift’ to Prince Henry, and the speech to parliament of 1603. It is this particular coupling of texts that best allows us to hear the king’s two voices. They combine statements of policy on Scotland and the union with much more personal meditations on kingship and authorship, and together they present James’s private and public roles in sharp relief. At the same time these texts can be seen to interact in significant ways with Shakespeare’s own representation of union and kingship, most obviously in the second tetralogy of history plays and King Lear.

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The story of the publication of Basilicon Doron is itself an instance of James’s double voice, since it began as an intensely private affair but ended up very much as a public statement.4 Written in 1598, it was printed by Robert Waldegrave in Edinburgh the following year in an edition of seven copies. In the address to the reader in the 1603 edition James describes this as one of his ‘secret actions’ and explains that the number of copies was limited ‘for the more secret and close keeping of them’. But when the book was reissued in London after Elizabeth’s death around 14,000 copies were printed; it was translated into most of the major European languages, a Latin version was published in 1604 and a partial Welsh translation in the same year. Starting life as a clandestine text, ‘dispersed among some of my trustiest servants, to be keeped closely by them’ (p. 203), Basilicon Doron ended up as a royal self-proclamation with a pan-European audience. And there was another transformation along the way. The original text of the work, written in James’s own hand and with extensive alterations, is in Middle Scots. The printed version of 1599, however, is Anglicized, as are both the Edinburgh and London versions of 1603, of course. So we also have a work that is Scottish in origin, a personal document written ‘for exercise of mine owne ingyne’ (p. 202), which rapidly becomes a British text, published with an eye to the Union of the Crowns. James’s address to the reader is exceptionally interesting in the way that it frets about the conflict between secrecy, so much desired, and the fact of publicity. His statement that kings ‘are as it were set (as it was said of old) upon a publike stage’ (p. 202), is well known. He returns to it later in the book: ‘a King is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly doe behold’, where the point is now made as a reminder to his son. James was to witness this in a literal sense in 1604 when Shakespeare’s company performed The Tragedy of Gowrie, a play based on the mysterious events of August 1600 when James was seemingly kidnapped by the Gowries at their home in Perth. The play was hastily suppressed and does not survive, but the sense James had of his own life as public theatre remains suggestive: it provides royal authority, as it were, for political readings of Shakespearean drama, but at the same time it reinforces our perception of James’s acute anxiety about privacy. The first mention of the stage in Basilicon Doron is surrounded by an almost obsessive number of references to secrecy: ‘spoken in the eare in secret place ... warie in all their secretest actions ... since the deepest of our secrets, cannot be hidde ... the least circumstance of their secretest drifts ... carefull not to harbour the

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secretest thought ... the Printer being first sworne for secrecie ...’ (pp. 202–3).5 His citation of Scipio Africanus in the letter to Prince Henry, ‘nunquam minus solus, quam cum solus’ (‘never less alone than when on his own’) also sounds heartfelt (p. 201). Basilicon Doron is possibly the first work to address those issues of privacy and the media that have now become so familiar, and the mixture of royal complaint and media manipulation strikes an equally modern note. James’s peculiar situation also affected his concept of authorship. Books are ‘vive Idees of the authours minde’ and although this one was ‘written in secret... it must be taken of all men, for the trew image of my very minde’ (p. 207–10).6 James means that Basilicon Doron should be understood as a policy statement, but he is also aware that any publication involves a degree of selfrevelation. His awareness that the medium of print lays open the author to the common gaze is obviously an extension of the theatrical metaphor, and this sense of a life lived in the glare of publicity is intensified by his awareness, too, of God’s all-seeing eye. Since even the ‘secretest of my drifts’ is visible to the Almighty it is important that they should be able ‘some day [to] bide the touchstone of a publike triall’, he remarks in an eerie anticipation of the events that his second son would experience in January 1649 (p. 202). All this leads James to claim for himself the expressive values of directness and transparency. In what sounds like a defensive version of the simple sword of truth (of more recent notoriety), he explains that to the ‘Hydra of diversly-enclined spectatours, I have no targe [shield] to oppone but plainnesse, patience, and sinceritie’ (p. 208), and he advises Prince Henry ‘to be plaine and sensible in your language’ and in writing ‘use a plaine, short, but stately stile’ (pp. 251, 252).The claim to openness in expression is repeated in his first speech to the Upper House of the English parliament in March 1604 when he ends by promising that ‘it becommeth a king, in my opinion, to use no other Eloquence than plainnesse and sinceritie. By plainnesse I meane, that his Speeches should be so cleare and voyd of all ambiguitie, that they may not be throwne, nor rent asunder in contrary sences like the old Oracles of the Pagan gods’ (p. 305). This announcement was meant to contrast with the style of the previous regime. The policy statements outlined come with the guarantee that this sovereign’s ‘tongue should be ever the trew Messenger of his heart’ (p. 306).7 It is significant that he presents transparency in speech in defensive terms, as a shield. There is a whole series of linked concerns here, from publication to exposure to openness and sincerity, which end in the crucial matter of security.

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It is the security issue that gives the personal impetus to his promotion of the Union. James began his speech to the Lords by presenting himself as a

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man of peace and then moved quickly on to the subject of the Union

–

not,

in fact, the union of England and Scotland, but ‘the Union of the two Princely Roses of the two Houses of LANCASTER and YORKE’ represented in James himself. This was a deft move. Reminding the Lords that ‘the Civill and bloody dissention betwixt these two Houses was so great and so late, as it need not be renewed unto your memories’ (p. 295), he invokes the bloody spectacles of Shakespeare’s histories, staged in the London theatres over most of the previous decade, to suggest that England and Scotland now have the status of two families in one kingdom. James’s case for a British Union is based specifically on an appeal to English national memory: ‘the Union of these two princely Houses, is nothing comparable to the Union of two ancient and famous Kingdomes, which is the other inward Peace annexed to my Person’ (p. 295).8 He follows up this disarming opening stategy with some more general reflections on the benefits of union and on the natural homogeneity of the two nations: Hath not God first united these two Kingdomes both in Language, Religion, and similitude of maners? Yea, hath hee not made us all in one Island, compassed with one Sea, and of it selfe by nature so indivisible, as almost those that were borderers themselves on the late Borders, cannot distinguish, nor know, or discerne their owne limits? (p. 296)

This elision of difference, and smoothing or blending of sharp edges, frames the union within a broader strategy of pacification. That is also evident from Basilicon Doron. If the character of this work might be said to move from Scottish to British in linguistic terms, the same might be said of its political content.9 In Basilicon Doron James’s views on borderers have a specifically Scottish application. He divides the people themselves into the Highlanders and Islanders and the Borderers proper. As far as the Highlanders are concerned, those living on the mainland ‘are barbarous for the most part, and yet mixed with some shewe of civilitie: the other, that dwelleth in the Iles ... are alluterly barbares, without any sort or shew of civilitie’ (p. 222). James thinks that the mainland Highlanders can be controlled by legislation affecting the clan chiefs, but the only way of dealing with the offshore fringes is colonization: ‘planting Colonies among them of answerable Inlands subjects, that within short time may reforme and civilize the best inclined among them: rooting out or transporting the barbarous and

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stubborne sort, and planting civilitie in their roomes’. In fact, in the ‘secret’ 1599 text the Islanders are completely dehumanized, in terms that echo English accounts of the Irish, as ‘Wolves and Wilde boares’; this is prudently omitted in the more public 1603 version. So what James was proposing was a policy of colonization within Scotland, and such an enterprise was already underway as James was writing. From 1595 a group calling themselves the ‘Gentlemen Adventurers of Fife’ had been attempting to colonize the island of Lewis.10 The scheme was unsuccessful, and had been abandoned by the time James ascended the English throne, but its implications are significant. Scotland itself is not a homogeneous entity. It has outlying parts, its own borders even. This is illustrated in John Speed’s The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine where the ‘southern people’ of Scotland are said to be ‘from the same Original with us the] English, being both alike the Saxon branches’, and where the ‘Highland man’ is differentiated from the ‘Scotch man’, with pictures to prove the point. According to Speed, Scotland is actually a divided kingdom: ‘The whole Kingdome is divided in two parts ... the South whereof is the more populous and more beautified in manners, riches and civilitie: the North more rude, retaining the customes of the Wild Irish, the antient Scot’.11 Like John Major before him, James and his loyal cartographer spoke for a union with England at the same time as they attacked the barbarous elements on the margins of Scotland itself.12 For James, writing only as the King of Scotland, the prospect of a unified British state was imagined as a solution to problems within his present kingdom. This was a prospect that involved some major geographical realignment. When James considers the Borders themselves he turns to the comforting thought of British insularity, as he does in the 1604 speech. He reminds Prince Henry of his likely inheritance: ‘if ye enjoy not this whole Ile, according to Gods right and your lineall discent, yee will never get leave to brooke this North and barrennest part thereof’ (p. 222). Here the Union is seen specifically as an answer to Scottish problems. Once it has been achieved, the ungovernable borderers ‘will be the middest of the Ile, and so as easily ruled as any part thereof’. These violent, lawless territories would become the ‘middle shires’, transformed by geographical and lexical sleight of hand into happy rural somnolence as a part of a unified British isle.13 So what James suggests in Basilicon Doron is that the Union project will heal not only a divided Britain, but also a divided Scotland. The Borders will become the centre, not the margins, while the Western and Northern extremities will be subdued by a process of internal colonization. It is a graphic illustration of the point,

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sometimes made in the context of Ireland, that British union and colonization go hand in hand.14 From the standpoint of James’s written word it looks very much as though the projected Scottish colony in the Western Isles was a prototype for the more permanent Anglo-Scottish venture in Ulster in 1609. The passage most often chosen to illustrate Shakespeare’s patriotic fervour is John of Gaunt’s speech on ‘this sceptred isle’ in Richard II. The fact that Gaunt imagines England to be an island has enabled critics to charge Shakespeare with Anglocentricity and a poor grasp of geography. Such a charge is, of course, no different from the assertion, much favoured by Tory politicians, that Ulysses’s speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida is evidence of Shakespeare’s conservative sympathies.15 In the case of Richard II what we have is a rhapsodic elegy for an ideal kingdom from a dying man, and it has the same status as other eloquent but illusioned speeches in the play, most of which are uttered by Richard himself. Gaunt’s speech is constructed from some traditional expressions which are quite adaptable. They were, in fact, adapted by James himself in his 1604 address to the Lords. Immediately after the passage on ‘the two kingdoms ... compassed with one Sea’, and just before his well-known claim that ‘I am the Husband and all the whole isle is my lawfull Wife’, he tells the Lords that the union of crowns ‘in my person’ has meant that the new British state ‘is now become like a little World within it selfe, being intrenched and fortified round about with a naturall, and yet admirable strong pond or ditch’ (p. 296). It is possible that James is alluding to Shakespeare’s play here, Richard II being of some political notoriety as far as James’s predecessor was concerned; it certainly shows that the image of the island fortress is easily transferable from little England to little Britain. The antithesis of the island fortress is the fissured kingdom, traversed by boundaries and borders, and populated by a worrying diversity of ethnic groups – not unlike James’s Scotland, in fact. But the situation Shakespeare describes in 1 Henry IV, almost exactly contemporary with Basilicon Doron, is much more desperate. Gaunt’s sceptred isle is replaced by Bolingbroke’s broken body politic, torn between what James was to refer to as the ‘Civill and bloody dissention’ between two dynasties, and penetrated from both the North and the West by invading armies. As the state threatens to implode, three characters sit over a map and propose a division of the kingdom. The scene, which derives from Holinshed, is set in the house of the Archdeacon of Bangor in North Wales, and the participants are Harry Percy (Hotspur), Owen

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Glendower and Edmund Mortimer whom Shakespeare wrongly identifies with the Earl of March, a claimant to the English throne. Mortimer has previously been Glendower’s prisoner, but is now married to his daughter, so cementing an Anglo-Welsh alliance against King Henry. Shakespeare builds extensively on what was available to him in Holinshed and makes this a central scene in, the play. The scene also enables him to show that he does not shall Gaunt’s somewhat mystical vision of the isle of Albion, as Glendower spells out the geography of the three nations with scrupulous accuracy: Where is he living, clipp’d in with the sea That chides the banks of England, Scotland, Wales, Which calls me pupil or hath read to me?16 (3.1.42–4)

The allies then begin to argue about the size of the territories which have been divided up for them by the Archdeacon, with the rivers acting as boundaries. Hotspur complains that a bend in the Trent deprives him of J his best land and proposes a dam, while Mortimer argues that the course of the river actually disadvantages him. When Glendower intervenes, the argument suddenly collapses into abusive comment, from Hotspur, on language and cultural difference. So much for Gaunt’s sceptred isle. So much, too, for the view of Shakespeare as a little Englander. The scene is a rehearsal for the more famous one involving a map and a division of the kingdoms in King Lear, a division that is actually put into practice, as this never is, and the prominence Shakespeare gives it suggests that the subject was as important to him as a political dramatist and a dramatist of monarchy as it was J to James himself.17 The plan to carve up England and Wales in I Henry IV, 3.1 does not involve Scotland, but Scotland has a significant role in the play as a whole through the figure of Douglas. The play opens with an account of Mortimer’s capture by Glendower and the mutilation of English corpses by Welsh women. This is immediately followed by news from the North where Hotspur has defeated an army of Scots led by Archibald, Earl of Douglas: On Holy-rood day, the gallant Hotspur there, Young Harry Percy, and brave Archibald, That ever valiant and approved Scot, At Holmedon met, Where they did spend a sad and bloody hour ... (1.1.52–6)

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Shakespeare distributes the honour evenly between Hotspur and Douglas. They are both representatives of a chivalric ideal and it is immaterial which side they are on. After this battle Douglas joins forces with Hotspur, as Mortimer has done with Glendower, to create a complementary AngloScottish alliance against Henry. It is this army that Henry confronts at the Battle of Shrewsbury in Act 5, where Percy and Douglas, ‘a right stout and hardie captaine’, Holinshed says, ‘pressing forward togither bent their whole forces towards the kings person’.18 In Shakespeare’s play, after killing a knight who has disguised himself as the king (Sir Walter Blunt), Douglas confronts Henry himself and is only prevented from killing him by the intervention of Prince Hal. This episode of single combat between the representatives of two nations reinforces Douglas’s role as the ‘noble Scot’, as both Hotspur and Prince Hal call him, and reminds us that there are indeed two nations involved here. It is a minor oddity of the Oxford Shakespeare that Douglas appears in the list of characters under ‘rebels’. Or perhaps not so minor. Douglas is captured while trying to escape after falling and crushing one of his testicles, a detail recorded by Holinshed but not by Shakespeare, who presumably does not want to detract from Douglas’s dignity. And while the English rebels are consigned to traitors’ deaths, Douglas is delivered ‘ransomless and free’ by Prince Hal, who has been allowed to dispose of him, adding that ‘His valours shown upon our crests today / Have taught us how to cherish such high deeds’ (5.5.30–1). It is perhaps only a coincidence that James’s illegitimate son by the daughter of his former tutor, Sir Peter Young, was also called Archibald Douglas, but there is no doubt that Shakespeare’s portrayal of the character and his nation was intended to be complimentary and that it recognizes an independent kingdom, in his own and in Douglas’s day, with its own traditions of honour and chivalry. Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV are concerned with the state of the kingdom, with questions of union and division, and with the monarchy itself; they are also very much concerned with the relationships between fathers and sons both in the context of monarchy and on a more personal level. Here too, Shakespeare and the James of Basilicon Doron engage with each other. Basilicon Doron is part of the ‘advice to princes’ tradition and also that of ‘advice to a son’, the son in question being another Prince Henry. The sub-title of the work is ‘His Majesties Instructions to his Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince’. For most of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy the parental theme focusses on ungovernable sons who will therefore (notably in the case of Hal) be unfit to govern. The theme is amplified by comparisons between

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obedient and disobedient offspring, Aumerle and Hotspur, Hotspur and Hal – and Bolingbroke himself is initially cast in the role of unruly son. His own experience of fatherhood is one of constant despair over Hal’s delinquency, relieved only at his death when Hal kneels by his sickbed and hears ‘the very latests counsel / That ever I shall breathe’. Shakespeare turns here to the ‘advice to princes’ tradition, King Henry’s own royal gift to his son being the advice that he should ‘busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels’, using adventures abroad to stifle dissention at home (2 Henry IV, 4.3.310–11, 342– 3). This is exactly what happens in Henry V. As well as opening lines of engagement between James’s writing and Shakespeare’s history plays, the father-son theme acts as a bridge between the personal and the political. Private fatherly chats alternate as public policy statements, and vice versa. In the case of Basilicon Doron its strange publication history also underlines the sense of a private and a public voice, while in Henry V James’s two voices are echoed in Henry’s thoughts on the tension between the king’s unique responsibilities and his ordinary humanity. This tension is at the centre of the play’s reflections on monarchy. ‘All [the king’s] senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man’ (4.1.103–5), Henry says, in an uncanny anticipation of Lear. Later in the scene he soliloquizes, and he also prays. Here, in disguise, he addresses a group of common soldiers. It is a personal statement, but there is also an element of policy in it which sounds not unlike James’s advice to his own Prince Henry: Be homely with your souldiers as your companions, for winning their hearts; and extreamly liberall, for then is no time of sparing. Be cold and foreseeing in devising, constant in your resolutions, and forward and quicke in your executions ... Be curious in devising stratagems, but alwayes honestly: for of any thing they worke greatest effects in the warres, if secrecie be joyned to invention. (p. 231)

This mixing of the common touch with Machiavellian ruthlessness, camaraderie with calculation, is very Henry V; looking elsewhere in Shakespeare, it combines the opposites of an Antony and an Octavius. With regard to James himself the passage also seems to be psychologically revealing. Beneath the cool, business-like advice we may detect that combination of affection-seeking and obsessive self-protection which is so evident in other aspects of his personal life. When Shakespeare’s Henry wants to be personal he still sounds political; when James is political we can still see the personal colouring.

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The root of the matter, for James, and perhaps also for Shakespeare, lies in James’s own phrase ‘in my Person’, which has particular resonance in the present series of contexts. As I noted earlier, the Union project, and the very concept of Britain, though supported by Brutish mythologies, rested almost entirely in the person of the monarch himself. It was a fragile, vulnerable thing. For James, union was the answer to his feelings of vulnerability and insecurity in personal matters as well, and the metaphor of his being husband to the whole isle may have had more significance than is sometimes supposed. This is suggested by the letter that he wrote to the Scottish people at the time of his marriage to Anne of Denmark, another very public, private document which echoes the language of Shakespeare’s isolated kings: ‘I was alone, without father or mother, brother or sister, king of this realm and heir apparent of England. This my nakedness made me to be weak and my enemies stark. One man was as no man’.19 He goes on to describe the violent storms that threatened the consummation of this union. These had been stirred up by witches against his own person, James later decided, and his horror at what had been attempted prompted his treatise on witchcraft, Daemonologie. There were other, less phantasmal attacks upon him, in the Ruthven raid of 1582, ‘the first rebellion raised against mee’ (p. 234), he writes in Basilicon Doron, and later in the Gowrie conspiracy. James’s views on the role of the monarch were formed by his experiences in Scotland, where he ruled for longer than he did in England, and these experiences made him highly sensitive about his personal security. It is an issue that is always just below the surface of Basilicon Doron. In England it took the material form of heavily padded clothing designed to resist an assassin’s dagger, but in the book dedicated to his son there is an intriguing observation on hidden armour which suggests a rather ambiguous attitude towards personal protection: ‘bannish not onely from your Court, all traiterous offensive weapons, forbidden by the Lawes, as guns and such like (whereof I spake alreadie) but also all traiterous defensive armes, as secrets [my emphasis], plate-sleeves, and such like unseene armour’ (p. 250). This takes us back to his earlier remark about the shield of sincerity and openness as defence. Secrecy is a security issue, and if the king can have no secrets then nor should his courtiers. Reading James’s own thoughts on monarchy constructed as advice to his son is a slightly odd exercise in double focus, which is inevitably reflected in the present chapter. We read him both as an ordinary individual, revealing ‘the trew image of my very minde’, and as a king making a public pronouncement where that image is to be understood as a projection of his

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rule. Setting these thoughts against Shakespeare’s English history plays might seem to complicate the picture still further, but the dialogue this opens up between the texts is a rewarding one. Both explore the relationship between the personal and the political and the relationship between the constituent parts of ‘Britain’ within the context of monarchy. James’s fears about personal security nourished his fears about national security, and the union between the two kingdoms was a way of healing divisions and pacifying barbarous elements within the two kingdoms. This was an immediate problem for James and for Scotland but a largely historical one for England, which is why James tried to make it seem contemporary in his reference to the Wars of the Roses in his Union speech of 1603. It was of course already contemporary, since Shakespeare had restaged the terrible events of the fifteenth century in a series of eight plays occupying most of the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, when the success sion was still unresolved. These are very much plays about England; when] Scotland appears, as it does in I Henry IV, it does so in the form of an honourable opponent. Henry V is rather different. After three plays – seven, if we include the first tetralogy – in which England has torn itself apart, this play is about synthesis, resolution, union and conquest. There are certainly complications, not least in the person of Henry himself, but it is a play that lends itself to triumphalist spectacle, which is why it was chosen as the inaugural production for the new Globe theatre in 1599 and why it was made to serve as nationalist propaganda in Olivier’s film of 1944. Henry V is also different in the way it moves from an English to a British perspective. The flag of St George which the chronicles describe as; shining victoriously over the Scots at Holmedon is now made a rallying point for Scots, Welsh and Irish. Henry’s rousing appeal to ‘England and St George’ is addressed to people who are not English. It would not bel unreasonable to lay the blame for all subsequent use of the name ‘England’ to mean ‘Britain’ on this play. The proto-Britishness of Henry V is striking and rather odd. It is rehearsed in the different characters – Jamy, Fluellen, MacMorris – as, carefully as Glendower spells out the boundaries of of the island in I Henry IV. James was not yet on the English throne or Shakespeare’s official patron, yet it looks almost as though the latter was writing to a royal, unionist commission. One way in which he tries to forge a sense of British national identity is through language. James had made a common language one of the bases for political union in his speech of 1603, implicitly accepting the term ‘English’ or ‘Inglis’, which was sometimes used by Scots to refer to the language spoken in the

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Lowlands.20 In Henry V it is assumed that the ‘British’ characters all speak English, albeit in various comic versions, whereas in I Henry IV the linguistic diversity of Britain is put on display. Mortimer’s wife speaks to him in Welsh, and Mortimer explains that ‘My wife can speak no English, I no Welsh’ (3.1.189). In Henry V the other language is French. The point of the scene between Henry and Kate, apart from its sexual innuendo, is to use the language lesson to suggest that Henry now rules a reunited Britannia speaking a common language and that the real foreigners lie across the Channel. Henry V is both the last of Shakespeare’s English histories and the first of the British plays, a somewhat premature welcome to the Scottish king. When James did arrive in London he was greeted by much British and Brutish mythopoeia.21 King Lear is a late addition to this and would not, anyway, have been a very cheerful greeting to the new monarch. Yet some of the 1603–4 literature did dwell upon the division of the kingdom that followed the death of its founder, Brutus, or ‘Brute’. Edward Wilkinson writes in Isahachs Inheritance that ‘now new Britaines bounds/Must be divided into sundry shares’ and recounts the disastrous outcome of this: Scarce ages two in such disorder wasted, But middle Britaine swaide by womans beck, The fruites of her division too soon tasted, When neighbouring kingdomes sought to breake her neck, Albany, Camber, Cornewall hether hasted, To spoil her of her plumes themselves to deck ...22

‘Middle Britain’ sounds rather like James’s ‘middle shires’, but Wilkinson and others, including Shakespeare, would have found other resonant matter in Basilicon Doron, where James advises Henry to follow the example of Isaac’s inheritance: And in case it please God to provide you to all these three Kingdomes, make your eldest sonne Isaac, leaving him all your kingdomes; and provide the rest with private possessions: Otherwayes by deviding your kingdomes [my emphasis], yee shall leave the seed of division and discord among your posteritie; as befell to this Ile, by the division and assignement thereof, to the three sonnes of Brutus, Locrine, Albanact, and Camber, (p. 239)

It was James who provided Shakespeare with a text on the perils of dividing the kingdom, just as the subject matter of Shakespeare’s history plays had provided James with a text for the blessings of Union. Shakespeare does not allude to Abraham and Isaac, that most testing of father-son relationships, in

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King Lear, where the sons become sons-in-law. But the significance of the names Albany and Cornwall would have been widely understood. James’s father, Lord Darnley, had held the title Duke of Albany and it had passed to James’s second son, Prince Charles, at birth, while Prince Henry was Duke of Cornwall as well as (from 1610) Prince of Wales.23 Albany was a Stewart and therefore specifically Scottish title. In 1 Henry IV the one Scottish prisoner that Hotspur grants to the king is Mordake, Earl of Fife, who is described as Douglas’s son but who was actually the son of the Duke of Albany, Regent of Scotland, as] Holinshed records. In Lear Albany is moved to the camp of virtue, and in the earlier version of the text he adopts a regental role as he invites Kent and Edgar to ‘Rule in this kingdom’ before speaking the closing lines of the play. Lear is about the evils of Brute’s legacy and the blessings of Isaac’s inheritance, while its British context provides a contemporary, Unionist dimension to those themes. Shakespeare’s political drama moves from a sense of England and Scotland as independent kingdoms into an alignment with the views of the Unionist King James. In James’s own writing, personal anxieties about privacy, exposure and ‘nakedness’ enabled him to conflate issues of personal security with those of national security in his idea of ‘union’ and this is reflected in Shakespeare’s focus on isolated or vulnerable monarchs. There is a circulation of the personal and the political between the writings of the royal author and the plays of the King’s Man.

Notes 1 2

3 4

5

See especially Roger Mason ed., Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). King James VI and I, Selected Writings, ed. Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards and] Joseph Marshall (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 297. (All references are to this edition.) James’s speech was delivered on 19 March, thus 1604 in new dating, but I shall refer to it as the speech of 1603 since that is how it is described in its originally published form. See especially Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland and the Union 1603–1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 1–30. See Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation’ in Linda Levy Peck ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 36–54, citing unpublished research by Peter Beal. On secrecy see also Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 55–111; and, with

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7

8 9

10

11

12

13

14 15

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reference to Shakespeare, Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘The “Heart of the Mystery”: Hamlet and Secrets’ in Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning eds, New Essays on Hamlet (New York: AMS Press, 1994), pp. 21–46; and John Kerrigan, ‘Secrecy and Gossip in Twelfth Night’ in On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 89– 112. James Doelman gives this an interesting twist by showing that English readers used the work ‘to advise and direct James by quoting the book back to him ... [they] attempted to govern the King by his own words’, “‘A King of Thine Own Heart: The English Reception of King James VI and I’s Basilikon Doron, The Seventeenth Century, 9 (1994), pp. 1–9. On James’s plain style see Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 111–12. James is of course making the comparison, so ‘nothing comparable’ presumably means ‘far surpassed by’. James himself described the book as being of particular relevance to Scotland in the Meditation on Matthew; see Rhodes, Richards, and Marshall, Selected Writings, p. 360. See Christopher Highley, ‘The Place of Scots in the Scottish Play: The Politics of Language’, qv; also Maurice Lee Jr, James VI and I in his Three Kingdoms (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 200–1, 212–15; Jane H. Ohlmeyer, “‘Civilizinge of those rude parts”: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s’ in Nicholas Canny ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 135,138. John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London, 1611), p. 131; on Speed and the divided Scotland see Christopher Ivic, ‘Mapping British Identities: Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine’ in David J. Baker and Willy Maley eds, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 135–55. Major distinguishes between the ‘wild Scots ‘ and the ‘householding Scots’; see A History of Greater Britain, trans. Archibald Constable, Publications of the Scottish History Society, 10 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1892), pp. 48–9. On the idea of the ‘middle shire’ see S. J. Watts with Susan J. Watts, From Border to Middle Shire: Northumberland, 1586–1625 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1975), especially pp. 133–57. One step towards this ideal state of affairs was taken with the abolition of Border law in 1603; see Levack, British State, p. 47. See Willy Maley, ‘“Another Britain”? Bacon’s Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland (1609)’, Prose Studies, 18 (1995), pp. 1–18. See Willy Maley, “‘This Sceptred Isle”: Shakespeare and the British Problem’ in John J. Joughin ed., Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 83–108. Though some of its assertions are questionable, this is an important, pioneering essay. References to Shakespeare are to The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

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17 On Lear’s maps see Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 121–40. 18 Geoffrey Bullough ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1962), IV, p. 190. 19 ‘To the People of Scotland’, 22 [?] October 1589, in Letters of King James VI and I, ed. G. P. V. Akrigg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Pressa 1984), p. 97. 20 As John Major does; see A History of Greater Britain, pp. 48–9. For a fuller discussion of the issue see Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politick of Language in Renaissance Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 152–65. 21 See, as a representative work, Anthony Munday’s The Triumphs of Re-United Britannia in Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 22 Edward Wilkinson, Isahachs Inheritance (London, 1603), lines 129–34. Wilkinson goes on to celebrate a British kingdom united under James. For other contemporary literature on the Union in the context of King Lear see Annabel Paterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 58–73, and, more generally, Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, pp. 148–59. 23 See Christopher Wortham, ‘Shakespeare, James I and the Matter of Britain’, English 45 (1996), 97–122; Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 89–105.

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The place of Scots in the Scottish play: Macbeth and the politics of language CHRISTOPHER HIGHLEY

In an article (1999) about the aesthetic and political complications of translating Macbeth into modern literary Scots, J. Derrick McClure mentions ‘a recent experimental drama called An Gaisgeach (“The Hero”), which embodies a sympathetic presentation of Macbeth against a highly imaginative reconstruction of his military, political, and cultural background, Malcolm’s lines are in English, the rest of the cast speaking literary Scots, North-East dialect or Gaelic’.1 What seems to us a radical appropriation and reconstruction of Shakespeare’s ‘sacrosanct’ text is perhaps no more so than his own original dramatic reworking of earlier versions of the Macbeth narrative. But An Gaisgeach, of course, attempts something more innovative than Shakespeare by transforming a linguistically unified source into a new multi-lingual version. My claim in this chapter is that an awareness of the role of language in shaping ideas of national and cultural identities, so forcefully rearticulated for a postmodern audience in An Gaisgeach, was already latent in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and in the cultural contexts from which it emerged. In March 1604 in a speech to the English parliament, James I declared (not for the first or last time), that God had united the kingdoms of England and Scotland ‘in Language, Religion, and similitude of manners’.2 The idea that England and Scotland shared one language had long been asserted by those on both sides of the Tweed who supported closer ties between the two countries. Once Anglo-Scottish integration moved to the centre of the political agenda after 1603, the discussion of linguistic similarities became a standard element in contributions to the union debate. As Sir Henry Saville declared, ‘we have by good fortune that band of community of language to

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strengthen our union, both nations using one and almost the same dialect, to wit the Saxon language’.3 Saville knew that he was talking only about the language spoken in the Scottish lowlands, J language known by the sixteenth century as ‘Scotis’ (Scots) or ‘Inglis’. ‘Scotis’ had traditionally meant ScotsGaelic, ‘the ald scottis toung’ and the dominant language of Highland and much of Lowland Scotland. But beginning around the twelfth century, Gaelic began to lose its cultural authority and was increasingly confined to the Highlands and Wester Islands. By the sixteenth century the term ‘Scotis’ had become a synonym for ‘Inglis’ while the language of Gaeldom was referred to as ‘Irish’.4 To many of James I’s new English subjects after 1603, however, the unfamiliar idioms and accents of the king and his Scottish followers surely made claims about a community of language between England and Scotland ring hollow. James, once established in England, set about Anglicizing his own writings, republishing his Basilikon Doron in 1603 in an edition that eradicated all vestiges of the Scots vocabulary and forms that had characterized earlier versions.5 His speech, however, remained stubbornly northern; from now on ‘the King’s [spoken] English’ would remain an odd variant of his southern subjects’ speech. According to Francis Bacon, James’s speech was ‘swift and cursory, and in the full dialect of his country’, while Thomas Fuller observed that: ‘His Scotch tone, [James] rather affected than declined; and though his speaking spoiled his speech in some English ears, yet the masculine worth of his set orations commanded reverence if not admiration in all judicious hearers; but in common speaking as in his hunting, he stood not on the clearest but nearest way.’6 James’s difficulties in being clearly understood by his English subjects were compounded by the fact that, as Anthony Weldon put it, ‘his tongue [was] too large for his mouth, which ever made him speak full in the mouth, and made him drink very uncomely, as if eating] his drink, which came out into the cup of each side of his mouth’.7 The Scottish aristocrats who accompanied James to England, much to the chagrin of English observers, came to dominate the most privileged positions at the new court and proclaimed their stranger-status whenever they opened their mouths.8 ‘They have an unhappy tone’, observed an English visitor to Scotland in the later seventeenth century, ‘which the gentry and nobles cannot overcome, tho’ educated in our schools, or never so conversant with us; so that we may discover a Scotchman as soon as we hear him speak’.9 As Keith Brown notes, ‘the association of accent with authority’ was

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crucial, and English observers were willing to deny the northern newcomers authority and respect on the basis of their speech. The English Earl of Suffolk noted of the Scotsman Sir Robert Ker that ‘the king teacheth him Latin every morning, and I think some one should teach him English too; for, as he is a Scottish lad, he hath much need of better language’.10 Another Scot, Sir James Hay, took it upon himself to acquire this ‘better language’ but in so doing he proved an exception to ‘most Scottish courtiers [who] refused to be ... amenable to Anglicization’. According to Weldon, Hay won ‘greater affection and esteem with the whole English nation than any other of that [Scottish] country by choosing their [English] friendships and conversations, and really preferring it to any of his own’.11 The range of voices and accents to be heard around James’s Londonbased British court, however, was not limited to English/Scots. English-born courtiers and servants spoke in an array of non-London dialects; Sir Walter Ralegh, for example, was noted and ridiculed for his pronounced Devonshire accent.12 Of the courtiers who accompanied James from Scotland, several had been educated in France and would have spoken with French accents. And then there were those nominal Scotsmen who, James himself complained, spoke ‘neither Scottish nor English’ but some sort of hybrid patois.13 The varied human soundscape of James’s court was a far cry from the kind of monophone courtly environment imagined by George Puttenham in his famous prescriptions regarding the kind of English that poets were to prefer.14 Puttenham urged writers to shun ‘the termes of Northernmen, such as they use in dayly talke, whether they be noble men or gentlemen ... [as well as] any speech used beyond the river of Trent’. Puttenham’s standard for proper English was ‘the usuall speech of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within Ix. Myles, and not much above’. After 1603, ‘the termes of Northern-men’ were no longer a distant threat but had infiltrated the court, unsettling the unified linguistic ideal implied in Puttenham’s ‘usuall speech of the court’.15 Thomas Fuller’s curious observation that James ‘rather affected than declined’ ‘his Scotch tone’ suggests that the king, even if he had been able, did not wish to tone down his Scottish accent and Scots locutions from his speech, but rather cultivated them. He resisted, in other words, the urge to ‘knap suddrone’ (to speak in a southern, i.e. English, dialect).16 As well as conveying a certain ‘masculine worth’, James’s distinctive speech could be admired as representing a less corrupted version of an Old English vernacular. Through contact with Danish, Norman French and other invaders’ languages,

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southern English was widely recognized as being ‘more mingled and degenerate from the ancient tongue’.17 Far from signalling rudeness or cultural inferiority, then, Inglis/Scots, in both its spoken and written forms, could be seen as preserving a pristine Anglo-Saxon Englishness. Even Puttenham was forced to admit that northern English, if ‘not so courtly nor so currant as our Southerne English’, is nonetheless ‘the purer English Saxon at this day’.18 In the early years of James’s reign, then, there was intense sensitivity, in and around London and the court especially, to regional accents: before the invention of clan tartans or other outward indicators of local identity, speech was the one way by which Englishmen could recognize the newly arrived Scots in their midst.19 The playwrights of the day were not slow in exploiting public fascination with the presence of unfamiliar accents.20 Sensationally in 1605, Eastward Ho!–a collaborative venture by Jonson, Chapman, and Marston – had the character of an anonymous English gentleman gratuitously mention the controversial topic of James’s inflation of honours in a voice that comically mimicked the king’s brogue: ‘I ken the man weel; he’s one of my thirty pound knights’ (4.1.167–8). How the play, or this line at least, ever made it into print is a matter of speculation J Together with other antiScottish jibes, this perceived slur aroused the anger of one of the king’s Scottish followers, Sir James Murray, and landed Jonson and Chapman in prison.21 Performed, according to the quarto title page, ‘in the Black-friers. By the Children of her Majesties Revels’, Eastward Ho! was part of a repertoire that specialized in scandal, satire, and obscenity.22 John Day’s The Isle of Gulls, another Blackfriars play first staged in 1606, contained unmistakable and unflattering allusions to James and his countrymen. But the play may have gone even further than this in terms of theatrical daring. Sir Edward Hoby reported that: ‘At this time there was much speech of a play in the Black Friars, where in the “Isle of Gulls,” from the highest to the lowest, all men’s parts were acted of two diverse nations: as I understand sundry were committed to Bridewell.’ The implication is that the boy actors had systematically employed English and Scottish accents to distinguish the Arcadian characters from the Lacedemonians.23 The scandals surrounding Eastward Ho! and The Isle of Gulls would have been familiar to Shakespeare and his company as he worked on Macbeth in 1605—6, and perhaps alerted the King’s Men and their leading playwright to the risks involved in tackling a Scottish topic. Plays about Scotland had invariably met with trouble in late Elizabethan and early

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Jacobean London. The Tragedy of Gowrie was performed twice before being suppressed, while Robart the second Kinge of scottes tragedie (1599) is known today only as a title in Henslowe’s diary. In a brilliant piece of historical reconstruction, James Shapiro argues that the plot of the play, whether depicting ‘Robert II as inept monarch, revenger of English wrongs and exploiter of Richard II’s nonage, or the potential source of illegitimacy and incest at the root of the Stuart dynastic tree’, offered ‘a portrait of the Scottish monarch that would have displeased James VI’.24 Although Shakespeare had not handled a Scottish topic before Macbeth, he had experimented with the English speech of a Scotsman in the provocatively named Jamy of Henry V. When Henry V was first printed in quarto in 1600, Jamy’s voice was expunged along with that of the Irish Macmorrice: a judicious act of self-censorship, perhaps, on the part of a playwright and company alert to the dangers of alienating a ruler-in-waiting.25 In Macbeth Shakespeare uses the occasional and unexceptional Scotticism like ‘loon’ for ‘rogue’ in ‘thou cream-faced loon’, and ‘filed’ in ‘filed my mind’, but otherwise avoids linguistic markers of Scottish identity (5.3.11; 3.1.66).26 How Macbeth sounded in early performances is far more difficult to determine; although there is no evidence that actors adopted Scottish accents, we cannot rule out the possibility that they took unscripted and impromptu liberties in this regard. Shakespeare relies on other theatrical devices to signal his characters’ Scottishness. Judging from Malcolm’s remark in England when he sees an approaching visitor, ‘My countryman, but yet I know him not’, actors wore an item of costume associated with Scotland, probably a blue flat cap (4.3.162).27 Also, as David Norbrook suggests, Shakespeare imbues the action with ‘a sense of geographical remoteness’ not by resorting to potentially laughter-provoking ‘Scottish words and accents’ but by use of a ‘heightened, quasi-epic diction’.28 While Shakespeare had little choice but to shun the use of extensive Scots in Macbeth, the spectacle of Scottish characters on the London stage in 1606 using Shakespeare’s standard East Midland dialect of English may have performed a kind of ideological work that has gone unnoticed by recent critics preoccupied with the play’s treatment of conspicuous topical issues like regicide and resistance.29 On the London stage of the early seventeenth century the unionist fantasy that ‘in tract of time ... all the inhabitants of this empire will be fashioned to the same manners, lawes, and language’ was in part realized.30 I say in part because we do not

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know how a production of Macbeth would have actually sounded. We can only speculate as to whether individual actors disguised their native accents in favour of a company standard of pronunciation. When Shakespeare acted, for example, did he modulate his local Warwickshire accent to resemble the accent of a London-born actor like Richard Burbage? What we do know is that the Globe audience was both socially and linguistically diverse. London was a city of immigrants and hence the point of convergence for a rich assortment of accents, dialects, and languages from different regions of England, from the margins of the British Isles, and from overseas.31 Along with Scots, the other non-English tongue that Macbeth needed to suppress was Scots-Gaelic, or ‘Irish’ as it was known in the Scottish Lowlands and England. Shakespeare fills the play’s early scenes with references to places – ‘the Western Isles’, ‘Fife’, ‘Forres’ etc. – that locate the action in parts of Scotland that were predominantly Gaelic-speaking both in the late eleventh-century when the play is set and at the beginning of the seventeenth. Historically, Macbeth and his fellow Scots in the play had all been Gaelic speakers, a fact that Shakespeare would have known from reading Holinshed.32 In 1606 when the play was first performed, the clannish Gaelic society of the Highlands and western islands of Scotland represented for James and his administration an ongoing cause for concern and, like the Anglo-Scottish borders, a zone of resistance to the king’s vision of a culturally homogeneous Great Britain. Andrew Hadfield has recently argued that in Macbeth ‘the ungovernedl sections of Scotland ... could easily stand for Ireland’. But this critical elision of Scotland and Ireland overlooks the fact that at the time Shakespeare was at work on the play – following the nominal subjugation of Ireland by English forces in 1603, and before the beginnings of the transformative Ulster Plantation in 1609 – the very regions of Scotland referred to in the dialogue themselves conjured for the King and for a public increasingly familiar with his opinions and prejudices, fears of ‘disorder, madness, and [apocalyptic] certainty’.33 Historically, the denigration of Scottish Gaeldom by Anglicized lowlanders can be traced to the late fourteenth century when John of Fordun drew the classic distinction between two cultures within Scotland: while southerners displayed ‘domestic and civilized habits’, northern Scots were ‘a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, easeloving, ... hostile to the English people and language’. The ensuing; disdain for Gaeldom among lowlanders was often focused on what one observer called the Highlander’s ‘unchristiane language’.34 During the Reformation in

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Scotland, which had little effect in the Highlands, the Gaelic language came to symbolize both barbarism and popery. Official policy considered ‘the Irish language’ ‘one of the chief and principal causes of the continuance of barbarity and incivility among the inhabitants of the Isles and Highlands’, and urged that it ‘be abolished and removed’ (from an extension of the Statutes of Iona in 1616). Yet Robert Pont, a supporter of Anglo-Scottish union, astonishingly claimed early in the seventeenth century that even in the remotest regions of Scotland the English language was starting to take root. A speaker in Pont’s dialogue recalls that ‘being on a time in Zetland [the Shetlands], driven thether by tempest, I heard the ministers preach in the English tongue, well understood by the whole auditory as a language familiar unto them’.35 Another Scottish unionist, Sir Thomas Craig, echoed Pont’s sanguine view: I myself remember the time when the inhabitants of the shires of Sterling and Dumbarton spoke pure Gaelic. But nowadays that tongue is almost relegated to Argyll and the Orkneys, so that one rarely comes upon any who speak it. There is not a single chieftain in the Highlands and Islands who does not either speak, or at least understand, English; and even in the Orkneys and Shetland, where in the course of this very century nothing but Norse was spoken, the ministers of God’s word now use English in church and are well enough understood.

Craig predicted that if London companies developed trading posts in Skye and Lewis, and if settlers, soldiers, and schools were to follow, then by the end of the century ‘Gaelic will no longer be spoken on the mainland and islands of Scotland’.36 Such fanciful accounts would no doubt have pleased King James who expressed both before and after 1603 an implacable hostility toward his Gaelic subjects – ‘barbarous cannibals’, he called them – and their language.37 James’s attitudes were widely disseminated among his new subjects in the English language version of his Basilikon Doron published in 1603. In that text, James divides Scottish highlanders into two groups, ‘the one, that dwelleth in our maine land, that are barbarous for the most part, and yet mixed with some show of civilitie: the other that dwelleth in the Iles, and are alluterly barbares, without any sort or shew of civilitie’.38 Already by 1596 James had begun to deal with both groups.39 As Neil Rhodes also shows in his chapter in this collection, James sent forces to exact the submissions of recalcitrant chiefs and inaugurated a policy of plantation which involved ‘rooting out or transporting [usually to Ireland] the barbarous and stubborn sort, and planting civilitie in their rooms’. The Scottish crown, because its own resources were limited, engaged certain gentlemen adventurers to carry

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out the plantation scheme in exchange for land rights. The most notorious of these syndicates were the Fife Adventurers who, under the leadership of James’s cousin and favourite Ludovic Stuart, 2nd Duke of Lennox, occupied the Isle of Lewis off the extreme north-west coast of Scotland.40 The colony, faced with the violent opposition of local clans, including the Macdonalds of Sleat, barely survived into the early seventeenth century. But James persisted with his policy of plantation, renewing the settlement of Lewis in 1605 and finally licensing a huge military invasion of the area in 1608.41 The show of force was enough to subdue the local chiefs who were made to subscribe to the Statutes of Ocolmekill or Iona, which now aimed to reform rather than to eradicate (as had been the plan earlier) Gaelic culture and language. Stipulating that the chiefs submit to royal authority and follow the reformed religion, the statutes also required ‘that every gentleman or yeoman [of the Highlands and Islands] ... shall put at the least their eldest son, or having no children male their eldest daughter, to the schools on the lowland, and entertain and bring them up there till they may be found able sufficiently to speak, read, and write English’.42 In a curious way, this impulse to Anglicize the ‘Irish’ speech of the outlandish Highland Scots was already being performed through the magic of theatre in plays like Macbeth in which the ancestors of contemporary Highland clansmen speak in the measured and dignified cadences of English. At performances of Macbeth, audiences heard highlanders and lowlanders, as well as Scotsmen and Englishmen (namely Siward and young Siward) speak one and the same tongue. In Macbeth, Shakespeare chooses a moment from the Scottish past that, like the present, represented a turning point in Anglo-Scottish relations. ‘Cheeflie about the daies of Malcolme Canmore’ (1058–93) writes Boece/Holinshed, the Scottish ‘manner began greatly to change and alter. We began through our dailie trades and conversation with [the English], to learne also their maners, and therewithal their language.’43 Specifically, Anglicizing influences arrived with the Anglo-Saxon refugees who settled in and around Malcolm’s court after fleeing the Norman invaders.44 If Shakespeare does not differentiate among his Scottish thanes in terms of how they speak, he does suggest their varying cultural affiliations in other ways. Malcolm, effectively adopted by the saintly Edward the Confessor and equipped by him with ‘ten thousand warlike men’, embodies a civilizing mission identified with England (4.3.134). Malcolm is both Anglicized and de-Gaelicized: Shakespeare drops Malcolm’s Gaelic epithet ‘Cennmor’ that Holinshed repeatedly uses.45 His kinship with the Siwards (‘His uncle Siward’, 5.2.2), the only Englishmen to appear in the play, is also reiterated (4.3.134, 5.6.2). Of course, Malcolm’s most obvious Anglicizing act is when he grants his

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supporters the English title of Earl, ‘the first that ever Scotland / In such an honour named’ (5.9.30–31). Malcolm’s rejection of Gaelic culture for Englishidentified practices extends his father’s earlier innovations. When Duncan nominates his eldest son to be Prince of Cumberland he is rejecting the traditional Gaelic system of elective inheritance known as tanistry in favour of primogeniture. The title ‘Prince of Cumberland,’ moreover, is an honour modelled after the custom of bestowing the title ‘Prince of Wales’ upon the heir to the English throne.46 While Malcolm and his new regime are insistently Anglicized and hence legitimized, Macbeth’s isolation and descent into tyranny is presented as a process of Gaelicization.47 At the beginning of the play, Macbeth fights on Duncan’s behalf against an explicitly Gaelic enemy: ‘the merciless Macdonald ... from the Western Isles / Of kerns and galloglasses is supplied’ (1.2.9–13). Indeed, in 1606 the name Macdonald retained powerful contemporary resonances for members of Shakespeare’s audience. One of the most powerful clans and often Lords of the Isles during the Medieval period in south western Scotland, the Macdonalds remained in the words of one early seventeenth century observer a ‘pestiferous clan’.48 By the end of the play, however, Macbeth is no longer fighting against the kerns and gallowglasses – the mercenary fighters synonymous in the English popular imagination with Gaelic barbarism generally – but alongside them (5.7.18). Macbeth has become a new Macdonald.49 English and lowland objections to the Gaelic tongue were predicated on the connection between what was perceived as the disorderly and impenetrable nature of the language and the disorderly, irrational behavior of its speakers. As Paula Blank and others have shown, this same associative logic applied to other outlandish dialects, including underworld cant – the putative language of a deviant subculture made up of thieves, prostitutes, and vagabonds.50 ‘Witches’ talk’ was another early modern outlandish dialect or what Patricia Fumerton calls ‘“low” or “sub”-discourses’ that stood in opposition to an emerging standard of spoken and written English.51 In Macbeth it is the witches who constitute a self-contained community of errant and disorderly speakers. The witches are ‘weyard’ or wandering not just in their undomesticated and unsupervized condition but also in the notoriously elusive, equivocal quality of their language. These ‘imperfect speakers’ occupy a place in the play’s linguistic economy that obliquely suggests the position of the ‘Irish’ speaking ‘barbaric’ Highlanders in James’s conception of a nascent British empire. Although the state-sponsored witch

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hunts of early modern Scotland took place predominantly in lowland areas where ecclesiastical and secular authorities had most control, in the popular imagination witches were closely identified with the extreme northerly regions of the realm. James was confirming a cultural commonplace when he claimed that witchcraft ‘is thought to be most common in such wild places of the worlde as Lap-land and Fin-land, or in our North Islea of Orkney and Schetland ... because where the devil findes greatest ignorance and barbaritie, there assayles he grosseliest’.52 The label of ‘barbarian’ that James and like-minded southerners routinely used for the Highlanders and Islanders of northern Scotland had at least two etymologies in the Renaissance. In a fanciful folk etymology related by Gerald of Wales, ‘barbarian’ was derived from ‘barbaros’ or bearded, a meaning activated when Banquo exclaims upon first encountering the witches: ‘you should be women / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so’ (1.3.43–45). Another more authentic etymology traced ‘barbarian’ to the Greek for a non-Greek speaker: a barbarian, in other words, was someone whose language sounded strange, literally ‘stammering’.53 In Ireland, as Patricia Palmer points out, English commentators equated what they considered the unintelligible ‘stammering’ of native speakers ‘with bestial utterance — and, more specifically, with the metaphorically beastly dialect of the ungodly: of heathens, witches, papists’. Barnaby Rich, a New English settler in Ireland, describes how the mourning of Irish women resembled ‘the houling of dogges ... the croaking of ravens ... the shrieking of owls, fitter for Infidels and Barbarians’. As Palmer notes, Rich ‘opens up the possible comparisons between Irish ... and witchcraft. Not only was it imagined that Ireland “aboundeth with witches” but the voices of the possessed were known to issue as the “croaking of frogges, hissing of snakes, crowing of cockes, barking of dogges, garring of crowes”‘.54 Macbeth exploits a similar mingling of cultural categories when the witches speak a bestial language. Not only is their discourse around the cauldron a richly allusive litany of animals both familiar and harmless (‘Eye of newt, and toe of frog, / Wool of bat, and tongue of dog’) as well as dangerous and exotic (‘Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf... tiger’s chawdron’ [entrails]), but the witches seem ‘tuned in’ to the actual ‘languages’ of beasts (4.1.14–15, 22, 33). The witches’ very incantations around the cauldron, in fact, seem to depend upon first hearing the signal that ‘the brindled cat hath mewed’ and ‘the hedge-pig whined’ (4.1.1–2). The witches share with animals and spirits a single universe of communication.

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Shakespeare’s witches, then – both stubbled and stammering – can be seen as conjuring up the archetypal figure of the barbarian, a figure menacingly instantiated in the Gaelic Highlander at the time of Macbeth’s early performances. Looked at thus, the witches’ presence severely strains whatever fantasies about de-Gaelicization and uniformity of speech throughout the British Isles-the play may have made available. As is often noted, the witches remain at liberty at the play’s end and their prophecies remain only partially realized. Moreover, their linguistic power circulates throughout the play, infiltrating the speech of others as Macbeth’s own imitative speech patterns reveal. Just as James could never finally extirpate the Highlanders and their barbarous dialect from his realms, or discipline his own alien accent, so Macbeth – despite the apparent restoration of political order – does not quite succeed at eradicating or containing its own ‘withered and wild’ Scottish barbarians (1.3.38).55

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6

J. Derrick McClure, ‘When Macbeth Becomes Scots’, Ilha do Desterro, A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, 36 (1999), pp. 29–51.1 thank Willy Maley for bringing this article to my attention. Johann P. Sommerville ed., King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 135; also p. 59. Henry Saville, ‘Of the Community of Language’, Historical Collections in The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604, ed. Bruce R. Galloway and Brian P. Levack (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1985), p. 213. Kenneth McKinnon, The Lion’s Tongue: The Story of the Original and Continuing Language of the Scottish People (Inbhirnis [Inverness]: Club Leabhar, 1974), pp. 24, 22–3; Nancy C. Dorian, Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), pp. 15–16, 20; Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Roudedge, 1996), p. 153 nn. 79–80; Patricia Fumerton, ‘Subdiscourse: Jonson Speaking Low’, ELR (1995), p. 76. As well as Neil Rhodes’s chapter in this volume, see Sommerville ed., King James, pp. 268–9; Blank, Broken English, pp. 156–7; and especially Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation’, in Linda Levy Peck ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 50ff. Bacon is quoted in David Harris Willson, James VI and I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), p. 166; Fuller is quoted in Marjory A. Bald, ‘The Pioneers of Anglicised Speech in Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review, 24 (1926), p. 187.

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7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24 25 26

Christopher Highley Weldon wrote after being rejected by James and hence his descriptions of the king have been seen as heavily biased and unfavourable; A. W. Beasley, however, cautions against dismissing Weldon’s descriptions out of hand since they are often corroborated by other less suspect sources. ‘The Disability of James VI & I’, The Seventeenth Century, 10 (1995), p. 153. Once in England, James surely had difficulty in living up to the ideal of clarity of expression that he recommended to his son in his Basilikon Doron (Sommerville ed., King James, p. 53). See also Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I: Two Kings or One?’ History: The Journal of the Historical Association, 68 (1983), pp. 191,205. See Neil Cuddy, ‘The Revival of the Entourage: The Bedchamber of James I, 1603–1625’ in The English Court From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Starkey (London: Longman, 1987), pp. 173–225. R Hume Brown ed., Early Travellers in Scotland (Edinburgh: R Douglas, 1891), pp. 272–3. Keith M. Brown, ‘The Scottish Aristocracy, Anglicization and the Court, 1603–38’, The Historical Journal, 36 (3) (1993), p. 549. Brown, ‘The Scottish Aristocracy’, pp. 548–9. See Blank, Broken English, p. 80. Bald, ‘Pioneers’, 188; Brown, ‘Scottish Aristocracy’, p. 550. See Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999). Quoted in Blank, Broken English, p. 17. Quoted in Gordon Donaldson, ‘The Foundations of Anglo-Scottish Union’ in S. T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams eds, Elizabethan Government and Society (London: Athlone Press, 1961), p. 291. Saville, Historicall Collections, p. 213. Quoted in Blank, Broken English, p. 153. See Maurice Lee, Government by Pen: Scotland Under James VI and I (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 36–9. On stage dialects, see Blank, Broken English, pp. 128ff, 159–61,167. Jonson, Chapman, and Marston, Eastward Ho! ed. C. G. Petter (London: Ernest Benn, 1973), Appendix 3. Also A. R. Braunmuller, A Seventeenth-Century Letter-Book A Facsimile Edition of Folger MS. V.a.321 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), p. 453; Joseph Quincy Adams, ‘Eastward Hoe and its Satire against the Scots’, Studies in Philology, 28 (1931), pp. 157–69; Janet Clare, Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 118–24. See Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage; (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 33–5. Quoted in Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 267–8. See also Raymond S. Burns ed., The Isle of Gulls: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1980), pp. 12—14. See James Shapiro, ‘ The Scot’s Tragedy and the Politics of Popular Drama’, ELR, 23 (1993), p. 446. Shapiro, ‘The Scot’s Tragedy’, pp. 430–1. See A. R. Braunmuller ed., Macbeth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). All references are from this edition. Braunmuller comments that the anonymous play Edward III, ‘very unlike Macbeth, draws attention to

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29

30 31

32 33

34

35 36

37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44 45

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Scottish speech, using such conventional stage-Scots as “whinyards” ... “Jemmy” ... and “Bonny”’ (pp. 9–10 n. 5). On Highland dress, see also Braunmuller ed., Macbeth, p. 244. David Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’ in,Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker eds, Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 107. Braunmuller ed., Macbeth pp. 9–10 n. 5. For a recent contextual study of Macbeth, see Arthur F. Kinney, Lies Like Truth: Shakespearey Macbeth and the Cultural Moment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). Robert Pont, ‘Of the Union of Britayne’ in The Jacobean Union, ed. Galloway and Levack, p. 23. William Matthews, ‘The Vulgar Speech of London in the XV–XVII Centuries’, Notes and Queries (January 1937), pp. 2–5; Andrew Gurr, ‘Other Accents: Some Problems with Identifying Elizabethan Pronunciation’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 7.1 (2001), 5.1–5: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/07-l/gurrothe.htm. The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587) p. 22. “‘Hitherto she ne’re could fancy him”: Shakespeare’s British Plays and the Exclusion of Ireland’ in Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 63. Arthur H. Williamson, ‘Scots, Indians, and Empire: The Scottish Politics of Civilization 1519–1609’, Past and Present (1996), p. 61, and Dorian, Language Death, pp. 16–17. Robert Pont, ‘Of the Union of Britayne’ in The Jacobean Union, p. 23. Sir Thomas Craig, De Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractus, ed. and trans. C. Sanford Terry (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1909), pp. 288–9. See also Marjory A. Bald, ‘Contemporary References to the Scottish Speech of the Sixteenth Century’, Scottish Historical Review 25 (1928), p. 174. Maurice Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 215. Somerville ed., King James, p. 24. Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon, p. 199. On Lennox, see Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon, p. 109, and Brown, ‘Scottish Aristocracy’, p. 548. Lennox, as Arthur F. Kinney points out, was ‘by title a descendant of the Lenox in Macbeth’. It is hard to tell whether a contemporary audience would have made anything of this coincidence of names because in the earliest printed version of the play (the First Folio) Lennox is never named in the dialogue. In performance, of course, the actors could easily have made Lennox’s identity known to an audience (Kinney, Lies Like Truth, p. 77). Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon, p. 214. Gordon Donaldson ed., Scottish Historical Documents (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), p. 174. Quoted in Roland J. Boling, ‘Tanistry, Primogeniture, and the Anglicizing of Scotland in Macbeth’, Publications of the Arkansas Philological Society, 25 (1999), pp. 1–2. Dorian, Language Death, pp. 12, 15—16. Derick S. Thomson ed., The Companion to Gaelic Scotland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 193.

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46 See Boling, ‘Tanistry, Primogeniture’, pp. 1–14. 47 For a more sceptical view of the play’s legitimization of Malcolm, see Alan Sinfield, ‘Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals’, in Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 95–108. 48 Quoted in Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon, p. 217. 49 On the associations of the names kern and gallowglass among the New English settlers in Ireland, see Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 ), p. 87. ‘Those who left a performance of Macbeth interested enough to pursue the study of Scottish history’, writes Michael Hawkins, ‘would soon discover that Malcolm’s son is murdered by the Donalbain who disappeared to Ireland in Act II. The despised “kerns and gallowglasses” of the Celtic reaction thus got some revenge on the Anglo-Scottish political establishment, but not even Shakespeare would have dared to show that in the decade of the Plantation of Ulster’, ‘History, Politics, and Macbeth’ in John Russell Brown ed., Focus on Macbeth (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1982), p. 182. 50 Blank, Broken English, pp. 18ff. 51 ‘Subdiscourse: Jonson Speaking Low’, p. 85. 52 Quoted in Williamson, ‘Scots, Indians, and Empire’, p. 48. On the geographical distribution of witchcraft persecutions in Scotland, see Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London: Chatto and Windus, 1981), esp. p. 80. 53 Michael Cronin, ‘Rug-headed Kerns Speaking Tongues: Shakespeare, Translation and the Irish Language’ in Burnett and Wray eds, Shakespeare and Ireland, p. 203. 54 Palmer, Language and Conquest, p. 92. 55 For similar readings of the witches’ ‘uncontained’ power, see Hadfield, “‘Hitherto she ne’re could fancy him’”, pp. 61–3.

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Macbeth and the rhetoric of political forms ELIZABETH FOWLER

Decorum and social person For the various rhetorical genres, one standard is the moral goodness demanded by Cicero and Quintilian, who called for rhetor-statesmen with profound knowledge of and lived experience of moral goodness. Another standard is the truth and justice held forth by the Platonic Socrates in his trenchant criticism of sophistic rhetoric, and in his description of a philosophical rhetoric grounded upon true knowledge and always striving for justice.1

Literary forms are fully social forms and invite an assessment that is both ethical and political. Despite much attention to history and politics in the past decade of Renaissance studies, we still struggle when we try to describe fiction’s participation in political thought and when we attempt to avoid translating poems and plays into propositional statements that ignore their literary forms. We need to find ways to recognize the forms language takes as crucial to the cognitive, philosophical processes that are the practice of literature. This chapter attempts to extend rhetorical notions of decorum into a political sphere by considering how the constitutional relation between people and governance is subject to the criterion of decorum, or, as we shall see early modern political philosophers formulate it, the criterion of fit. There are three modes of political thinking that can be differentiated according to the classical division of oratory into three modes: the deliberative, the forensic, and the epideictic. Each displays a different aspect of the constitutional criterion of fit. It is with the first two modes that I will be primarily concerned here. Political forms themselves constitute a system susceptible to rhetorical analysis. The most important such form for the question of fit is one I shall

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call the social person.2 Social persons are abstract figurations of the human, figurations that attain recognizable, conventional status through use. The category of the social person includes many kinds: for instance, the corporation, the criminal, the privy council are technically ‘legal persons’ and, more broadly considered, social persons. So are civic roles such as mayor, guild, alewife; kinship designations such as mother, family, heir; races and ethnicities such as Moor, Scythian, Briton; literary characters such as senex amans, vice, narrator; economic persons (individual and collective) such as buyer, labour, market. Social persons provide a shorthand that allows enormous leverage in reference. Indeed, literary characters are largely cobbled together out of allusions to a number of social persons. In this way, social persons are like genres: they are abstract conventions that never actually ‘appear’ in any pure form. They are the collective imaginative technology that allows language to make a literary character (as well as to make the figures familiar in other discourses and disciplines), but, like chisels, scaffolding, and plans that leave their marks without standing in for the monument, social persons must be inferred from their artifactual traces if characterization is to be understood. The tricky relation between social persons and human beings gives rise to part of the problem of fit. Each social person has its own set of attributes or qualifications: these function as descriptions of what is necessary for particular human beings to accede to that social person. When someone qualifies for and ‘becomes’ a king or a wife, for example, a process of accession and certain credentials are required. Deposition from social persons is an opposite and equally important event that hinges on the criterion of fit. The accession and deposition of characters from social persons provide favourite plot devices for literary texts and, of course, are common events in the political world. A catalogue of a society’s dominant forms of social person would describe not only its members but also its constitutional shape, because the forms are fitted to one another and to the institutional arrangements of the polity. Jurisprudence itself relies heavily on those forms: Western legal treatises begin with a large section entitled ‘the law of persons.’3 I shall argue that legal persons, like other social persons, are best understood as personifications of social relations, as abstractions of social bonds that have been elaborated and given discursive life. Their primary reference is not to their occupants but to a position in the networks of social relations they personify. That reference holds even though many things that are not human are considered legal persons and given rights or accorded agency in early

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modern legal discourse: for example, the crown, god, a ‘homicidal’ ox or dog, the brewers’ guild, the city of London, parliament. Abstract, collective, animate, or corporate, these legal persons also stand for social relations rather than for particular people. The crown stands n,ot for a particular James I, but for a particular set of negotiated institutional arrangements, for the set of relations between the particular James I and the particular people who are, for example, his councillors, his tenants, the bishops, the City of Westminster, his subjects. Personification has, in all these cases, practical purposes besides verbal ornamentation. By means of a charter of incorporation, a guild could enjoy certain rights and privileges perpetually rather than needing to bargain for them with the king or the aldermen every time it gained or lost a member and became different people. Similarly, its rights as conveyed by the crown would continue uninterrupted despite the death of the conveyor and the accession of a new monarch. The legal fictions that incorporate the crown and the guild allow the fit between the two social persons to endure and maintain its shape in the face of the inevitable death or deposition of their vulnerable human occupants. The relational nature of social persons makes personification instrumental in the process of building social structure and distributing capacities and faculties across the culture. The legal persons ‘wife’, ‘parson’, ‘baron’, ‘master’, and ‘ward’, for example, point to established models of affiliation in English society, defined respectively in the legal ‘coverture’ established by marriage, the forms of ecclesiastical corporations, and the feudal relations of tenure, of indenture, and of wardship. These relations, like many others, involved a specially structured agency in which the ability of one human being to act or intend was in many or all of its capacities transferred to another. The second person, by a kind of conceptual incorporation, stood for the first in a political and social sense: the husband for the wife, the baron for the tenant, the master for the indentured servant, the lord for the ward. The rights of one to the use of the labour, property, or body of the other, along with certain responsibilities towards him or her, were granted to some definite extent in all these cases. Those rights and responsibilities were passed on to the next occupant of the social person in the case of the lord who held tenants and wards, and to a lesser extent in the cases of husbands (children complicated matters) and of masters of indentured servants. Legal persons serve many purposes in juridical practice: they can perpetuate social structures, facilitate judicial decisions, apply doctrines to particular people and so naturalize adjudication, or avoid decision and dislodge

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an act from its conventional penalties. In all these actions, legal persons are the means of fitting people into the structures of the polity. The ability to place people is a primary feature of social persons; it expresses their deeply embedded political nature. They are the product of habitus: the system of practices that constitutes the habituation of bodies to social persons.4 In a given historical moment, dominant social persons can be seen to arise out of particular institutions, lexical groups, conventional discourses, cultural practices, and disciplines. Literary fiction tends to represent such nurseries of social persons by means of genres or of topoi: evocations of commonplaces or scenes that embody little conventional worlds of practices, ideals, and often characters. A topos fashions readers’ expectations and so guides our assessment of how characters live up to the ideal social persons that inhabit it. The social persons of merchant father and amorous knight evoke conflicting ethical standards that are matched by the conflicting social practices represented by the two topoi. Each social person carries within it the social relationships naturalized in the topos, personifying a position in the bonds and exchanges of social life. When we make the ethical and political assessments that are urged by the complement of social person and topos, we are invited to see each little world as a kind of philosophical thought experiment, where we consider fairness from the point of view of each social person, but always in conjunction with justice as it is exemplified by the entire system of social life. Rather in the way that the demande d’amour leads us to deliberate about the amusing situations hypothesized in romance, all literary fiction puts its readers in the position of evaluating the social persons that fashion its characters, the means of accession and deposition available, and the practices and structures of social life as it is refracted through the topos. By means of rhetoric, fiction tests the forms of social life, both ethical and political, and offers us a means of employing the criterion of fit. This cognitive, moral process, I submit, gives fiction its political force.

Developing the criterion of fit: Smith, Spenser, Shakespeare Social persons figure the relationship between the law, considered as an expression of governance, and ‘the people’, a phrase that mixes character, habits, beliefs, social practices, and all the things usually included in our present uses of the word ‘culture’. Early modern English ideas on this topic express a clear principle: there should be a close fit between the people and the law. It was a commonplace of political thought that the form of

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government should be matched with the nature of the people. For example, Thomas Smith tides a section of De republica anglorum (written 1562–65), ‘That the Common Wealth or Policie Must Be According to the Nature of the People’: And that according to the nature of the people, so the commonwealth is to it fit and proper. And as all these iii. [the Aristotelian] kindes of common wealthes are naturall, so when to ech partie or espece and kinde of the people that is geaven which agreeth as ye would putt a garment fyt to a man’s bodie or a shoe fyt to a man’s foot, so the bodie politique is in quiet, and findeth ease, pleasure and profit thereby. But if a contrary forme be given to a contrary maner of people, as when the shoe is too litle or too great for the foote, it doth hurt and encomber and letteth the convenient use thereof, so that free people of nature tyrannized or ruled by one against their willes, were he never so good, either faile of corage and wexe servile, or never rest while they either destroie their king or them that would subdue them, or be destroyed themselves.5

Early modern constitutional theorists like Smith have in mind colonial enterprise as much as the domestic problems of Westminster, though the importance of this colonial interest has been little recognized by historians of constitutional thought. Smith’s prescription for the fit between the people and the law says that it should proceed in one particular direction: that the law should fit the people, not the other way around. The constant changes of ‘nature’ and law that European peoples experienced throughout this period made the direction of the fit a particularly urgent problem. In Edmund Spenser’s Vewe of the Present State of Ireland, Irenius, the most single-minded speaker in the prose dialogue, addresses the colonial violence in Ireland with the principle of fit in mind: I see, Eudox: That youe well remember our firste purpose and do rightelie Continewe the Course theareof/ ffirste thearefore to speake of lawes since we firste begane with them I doe not thinke it Conveniente (thoughe now it be in the power of the Prince) to Chaunge all the Lawes and make newe for that shoulde brede a greate trouble and Confusion aswell in the Englishe theare dwellinge and to be planted as allsoe in the Irishe for the Englishe havinge bene trayned vp allwaies in the Englishe Gouernement will hardelie be inevrde vnto anye other, and the Irishe will better be drawen to the Englishe then the Englishe to the Irishe gouernemente, Therefore sithens we Cannot now applie Lawes fitt to the people as in the firste institucion of Comon wealthes it oughte to be we will applie the people and fitt them to the Lawes as it moste Convenientlye maye be.6

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In his provision of excuses here, Irenius, or at least Spenser, seems conscious of contradicting Smith’s prescription for the direction of the fit between laws and people. Both military violence and Aristotelian ethics are implied in Irenius’s position, and they look incompatible; Spenser gives him a metaphor that works against him: clothes are cut to fit the person and not the other way around. The language of ‘applying’ and ‘fitting’ the people invites us to think about the most familiar dilemma of English colonial policy – whether to ‘reform’ or ‘reduce’ the Irish – in terms of the principle of fit between the people and the laws. The expression ‘trayned vp’ clarifies the metaphor of clothing (or ‘habit’) by drawing on the Aristotelian notion of habituation: the process of bodies becoming fit for social persons. Habituation was an important interest of Spenser’s, notable in the famous term ‘fashioning’ that appears in his letter to Walter Ralegh, a text published in the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene. The notion is much complicated by a colonial setting.7 One may relatively easily pronounce on the question of fit in relation to a hypothetical commonwealth and its native inhabitants considered as ‘a people’ and having a kind of natural closure by virtue of geography, race, custom, or culture; the pronouncement is harder to make if the inhabitants are substantially divided. The population of Ireland, though bounded by water, was politically and culturally riven by dozens of regional lordships, by disparities in status and levels of subsistence, and by the results of centuries of invasion. As the Vewe points out, England was equally mixed in its ‘racial’ composition, but the legal centralization begun by William the Conqueror in the eleventh century had been widely successful by the sixteenth so that the status of England as a nation was conceptually defensible on the grounds of national institutions that had accommodated or vanquished variances of custom. Unlike Ireland, for instance, Wales had submitted to settlement within the system of English law and government by the 1530s. What could it mean, in Irenius’s words, to ‘apply’ the people and ‘fit’ them to the laws? The project is strangely suited to the English language’s premier allegorist because it relies upon the personification of ‘the Irish’, an easy (to us now) collective locution that nevertheless covers, as the Vewe continually reminds us, a multitude of difficulties. The ethical or military metamorphosis of the Irish called for by Irenius must confront an ideal expressed, or perhaps merely conceded, in the same passage: ‘Therefore sithens we Cannot now applie Lawes fitt to the people as in the firste institucion of Comon wealthes it oughte to be ...’The recommendation of an ideal relation

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between the form of the laws and the character of people is the commonplace that Irenius’s concession implies it is, yet the political conclusions that writers draw from such an axiom vary. Irenius finds it contradictory (he offends by using the technical term ‘inconvenient’) to fit the laws to the people and resolves to reform the people by measure of the law. Though Thomas Smith and Edmund Spenser’s Irenius oppose each other on an important question (the direction in which fit should proceed), nevertheless they share a conviction in the criterion of fit and a largely normative mode in which description persistently develops into something close to policy. Both texts explicitly take place in an environment of political debate that spreads itself in the grey area between principle and policy. Spenser’s Vewe is particularly directive to its audience in this way: a dialogue between fictional speakers with different kinds of experience but no official authority, it presents itself as above all deliberative – as debating and evaluating possible courses of action for the future. It invites the reader to engage in the dialogue and suggests that its own dramatis personae occupy habitus and epistemological standpoints that require political analysis. They are as flawed as the shepherds of the Shepheardes Calender or the knights of The Faerie Queene and, like those more famous characters, Irenius and Eudoxus become a means for our cognitive introduction to the fact that political truths are not absolute but embodied ones: the desirability and justice of political forms depends on fit. Whereas Smith and Spenser’s deliberative mode generates normative description that leans towards future-oriented policy statements, the evaluation of tragic actions in the distant past marks Macbeth’s dominant mode as forensic. The important moment (4.1) in which the play breaks into an epideictic reference to the time of its early production before James has been long recognized, but even this epideictic moment serves to underline the forensic treatment of the play’s hero. The forensic mode helps us to focus upon the origins and consequences of a breach of fit in the polity and to see fit as tested by the twin actions of accession and deposition. Characters are deposed from and accede to social persons at all junctures of the plot: the play begins with the Thane of Cawdor’s attainder and execution and the consequent accession of Macbeth to the title, only to end with Macbeth’s attainder and execution and the consequent acclamation of Malcolm as the new king. Murder is the main means of deposition, and proclamation is the main means of accession, but the play’s point is to show, as we shall see, that

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successful transit out of and into social persons involves much more than death or speech acts. In both their nature and actions, candidates for accession must be suited to the social persons they aspire to occupy. This suitability is what I have been calling the habitus, the system of practices that constitutes the habituation of bodies to social persons and is the product and the source of fit. The political notion of fit provides Shakespeare with his most important criterion for the arraignment of Macbeth. The poor fit between Macbeth’s tyrannical style and Scottish kingship is expressed in part according to the imagery that Smith and Spenser had elaborated. Throughout the play, as has often been noticed, images of illfitting clothing help to point out to the audience where there has been unmerited accession to social persons. Shakespeare links this image of political fit to the notion of investiture, enriching the image by drawing upon the monarchy’s rituals of accession and the importance of clothing in them. In the play, investiture is troubled from the first act to the last–from the ‘borrowed robes’ Macbeth worries the witches have given him by means of new titles (1.3.8) to the habits described in Caithness and Angus’s indictment of the tyrant Macbeth has since become: CAITH. He cannot buckle his distemper’d cause Within the belt of rule. ANG. Now does he feel His secret murthers sticking on his hands; Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach; Those he commands move only in command, Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe Upon a dwarfish thief. (5.2.19–22)8

Angus’s diagnosis is correct: in this play, the poor fit of the ill-gotten robe ironically causes pain not only to the state, but to the thief himself, whose habitus and its most primitive bodily functions (sleeping, eating, sexual behaviour) are disturbed. However effective the imagery of clothing is in directing our political assessment of the characters, that imagery does not represent the polity in a way that allows the audience to recognize the play’s strong version of the criterion of fit. The imagery of clothing can represent the office; it cannot easily represent the forms of social life and the nature of the people. In fact clothing does not constitute the dominant verbal imagery of the play; neither

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does the scene of investiture take place onstage: the audience never travels to Scone to see new monarchs dressed in their robes of state. Fit is not merely the possession of objects. Instead, the play occupies itself with the broad process that supplements and undergirds accession and deposition, the process of the habitus. What are the practices that support or impede a fitting investiture of the social person? For Shakespeare, these are overwhelmingly relational acts. They occur between characters – within social bonds – and in Macbeth, they are characterized by means of three habitus, three feudal topoi. Feudal social life is, in the imagined world of Macbeth as in many other accounts of medieval history, built up of exchanges between lords and servants. Acts of exchange are the rituals out of which feudal social persons are created and ‘grow’, to use Duncan’s term (1.4.29). Three topoi involving such exchange – military service, the progress, and counsel – represent the forms of medieval social life in the play and, as three habitus, provide the proper ground for the social persons that fit them. Military service is a codified exchange of duties between legal persons: the force of knighthood is given in exchange for the rewards (including title and land tenure) offered by the king. In act one, exchanges of praise between Duncan and Macbeth and between Duncan and Banquo (1.4) economically portray military fealty, a relationship at the heart of feudal institutional arrangements. Ritual exchange is also embodied in the second topos: the monarchical progress through the great castles of the magnates, where the roles of guest and host are reversed from those at court in order that the reciprocity between the king and his chief tenants may be expressed and reinforced. The exchange of praise between Duncan and Lady Macbeth upon his arrival under her battlements (1.6.10) represents this well-codified aspect of the feudal disposition of power.9 The third important topos, counsel, is another feudal custom, in which kings and husbands are required to take advice and barons (or thanes) and wives to give it.10 All Duncan’s appearances in the play portray him as soliciting intelligence through conversations with his liegemen. Evoked by Shakespeare out of the visual and ideological repertory of his culture, each topos comes with its own verbal and visual vocabularies, its own implicit ideals and values, and its own complement of social persons. Our evaluation of the scenes before us is powerfully shaped as we measure the characters and events on stage against those we expect in scenes of military service, the progress, and counsel. First, knight service during a lord’s war is staged at the edges of both the opening and closing of the play. Second, the progress controls the scenes (1.5–2) at Inverness and haunts the

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scenes (between those at the castles at Forres and Dunsinane, 3.5–4) that take place upon the heath, in a vague civic Scotland, at Fife, and in England: a kind of anti-progress geographically discovers to the audience the ill effects of Macbeth’s rule. Third, the topos of counsel interlocks with the two more geographically fixed topoi and provides a thematic backdrop that is sustained for nearly the entire play, with its culmination in the council assembled in the banquet scene at Forres. The audience is invited to judge what goes wrong in Scotland by calling to mind the ideals that the topoi embody. The opening topos of feudal knight service promotes bravery, cunning, and brutal strength in killing others, ideals that are wrenched from their controlling social persons when the Macbeths butcher their sworn lord in order to take his place. The topos of the progress praises the monarch’s extravagant indulgence in the local hospitality of his magnates; Macbeth fortifies himself in his own strongholds and sends agents out to kill his thanes and their families and followers. The reciprocal vows of loyalty we saw in Duncan’s ceremonial progress are conspicuous in their absence during Macbeth’s deranged reign: two telling moments are Macduff’s refusal to be called to court (3.6.40) and Macbeth’s complaint that all he stands to receive is ‘mouth-honor and curses’ (5.3.20). The ways in which counsel goes wrong for Macbeth are worth treating at more length. Counsel is a topic well developed in the discourses of philosophy, law, and history; in all, it includes scenes of both marriage and the court. The primary figures of Macbeth – the monarch, the lord, the wife – are social persons indigenous to the topos; all take on the role of adviser in various instances. Bad counsel is hauntingly given by Lady Macbeth and by the witches, whom Macbeth wrongly consults in the place of the lords of the realm. Counsel in the court is evoked powerfully by the failed banquet at the king’s castle at Forres, where the status of each peer of the realm is figured in his place at the table.11 The banqueting table is a triple symbol in this scene: it is the seat of the council of state in deliberation; it is the judicial bar before which the forensic witness of the ghost indicts Macbeth’s murder of Banquo; and it is the site of the king’s epideictic distribution of the fruits of the realm. Instead of deliberating with his councillors and tenants-in-chief upon matters of state, Macbeth tellingly spends the first part of the scene receiving intelligence from a suborned killer. When he finally turns to his proper role at the table, he is prevented from taking his seat: Banquo’s ghost bars him because he does not deserve his ‘place’ or ‘seat’: his ill-gotten social person. He is not able to sit and enjoy the fruits of the realm because his seat of

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power has been disturbed not by the future, as Macbeth thinks (where Banquo’s progeny will reign), but by his own past actions. The satisfactions of kingship are social and cannot be enjoyed if the king’s bonds to others are not observed. In a variation on the topos of counsel, medical doctors are consulted by Macbeth and Malcolm in order to call our attention to the bodily nature of what goes wrong in the tragedy. We are used to seeing how as moral, psychological beings, Macbeth and his lady suffer deep disturbances that are a punishment for evil. Lady Macbeth uses the word ‘fit’ in a medical sense (3.4.54) to explain the ‘strange infirmity’ that prevents Macbeth’s assumption of his honour at the banquet. This moment of disjunction between his body and his social person (he is moved, beside himself) helps us to interpret their distress in another, political sense: their bodies physiologically experience the disturbances suffered by the social persons they occupy. The injuries they inflict upon kingship rebound upon them, because they have now become their own objects: the king’s thane Banquo is murdered on his way to the banquet by the king’s order, and Macbeth cannot now take his own place at the table; the two murder the king in his sleep and cannot thereafter sleep; Lady Macduff too is murdered and Lady Macbeth cannot remove the blood from her own hands. This rebounding of injuries to the polity upon the monarchs’ most primitive bodily processes renders them incapable and progressively impairs kingship itself, which must be thoroughly reinvented by Malcolm when he takes it up at the end of the play. When Macbeth exclaims, ‘Throw physic to the dogs’ because it cannot ‘Raze out the written troubles of the brain’ (5.3.47,42), it is not because medicine has no access to the moral self, but because it cannot treat social persons: Doctor, the thanes fly from me. – Come, sir, dispatch. If thou couldst, doctor, cast The water of my land, find her disease, And purge it to a sound and pristine health, I would applaud thee to the very echo, That should applaud again. (5.3.49–54)

Medicine cannot turn the thanes from their flight to Macbeth’s enemies; he himself has, by means of tyrannical actions, severed his bonds to them. The audience discovers with Macbeth that even the most powerful of Scottish

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social persons, the king and queen, are precarious – sustained only by unstable bonds to others and subject to the practical actions of human beings. Yet, paradoxically, the hold social persons have upon the body is extremely powerful: the collaborative acts of imagination that make up social life are invested with material force. The sceptical Lady Macbeth sees that the force of imagination is all that lies behind social persons, and this truth helps her to tear herself out of her own habituation to one social person (Duncan’s servant) and forcibly plant herself into another (Scotland’s queen) without the aid of the normal processes of Scottish custom. However, wrenching herself out of her old habituation is not sufficient to help her grow in the new one. She has not seen the consequences of the fact that social persons are kept in place by imagination. Dissolution of the habitus and the ideological hold of monarchy upon her own social person can enable her to contravene its dictates (‘Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe topful / Of direst cruelty!’ 1.5.40–3), but she cannot then go on to reap the benefits of kingship once its ideological nursery is razed. In order to thrive, the new monarchs must have an effective ideological vision of social practices (such as military service, progress, and counsel) that can bind their bodies into kingship and bind the other social persons of the polity to kingship. In Shakespeare, polities sicken and are wounded metaphorically (e.g., 5.3.51 and 4.3.40); moreover, strangely, kingship itself suffers – though not through fleshly decay. As Edmund Plowden’s sixteenth-century law reports memorably demonstrate, the king has two bodies, one immune from and the other susceptible to disease and mortality. The body that for Plowden is eternal and immune because it is spiritual (part of the collaborative imagining of society) is shown by Shakespeare to be mutable and vulnerable to damage wrought indirectly by murder and tyranny, because kingship depends for its health upon the sustaining, collaborative acts of the other social persons of the polity.12 Macbeth’s case helps us to see that the social person must be a true personification: the king must truly represent the supporting social bonds that his person claims to personify. If the acts, persons, and social relations that are the very ground of kingship lack an ideological program (a vision of moral goodness and justice) that is capable of forming consensus, then the state fails quickly. Macbeth’s problem is not merely ethical, but political evil: his misdeeds lie exactly in the bonds which his social person depends upon. Because of the powerful effects of the criterion of fit, tyranny, in the play’s! view, is as unsatisfying to the king as to his subjects.13

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The play evokes the feudal topoi (military service, progress, counsel) as part of its forensic assessment of the Scottish state, a rhetorical mode further complicated by the play’s historical and occasional nature. The play takes place in double time for a moment when it acknowledges its presentation before James VI and I; probably in 1606. As is well known, Shakespeare celebrates James’s tenure on the Scottish throne through the masque conjured by the witches (4.1), which contains the procession of eight kings, the last of whom holds a mirror – presumably for the gaze of the King’s Men’s most exalted patron. This is the epideictic moment that erupts from the smooth historical past of the forensic mode: Banquo is James’s forbear, so there is all the more reason to condemn Macbeth. The play does not, however, explicitly address the constitutional transformation that James embodied when his accession in 1603 made him the first holder of both the Scottish and English thrones. Nor, oddly, does Shakespeare portray the transition from Duncan’s genealogical line to James’s, since the play ends with Malcolm’s succession. Instead, Macbeth explains a different transformation of the Scottish categories of social person.14 The constitutional event of primary importance chronicled by the play comes as its culmination, at the end of the last scene: Enter Macduff with Macbeth’s head. Hail, King! for so thou art. Behold where stands Th’ usurper’s cursed head: the time is free. I see thee compass’d with thy kingdom’s pearl, That speak my salutation in their minds; Whose voices I desire aloud with mine: Hail, King of Scotland! ALL. Hail, King of Scodand! Flourish. MAL. We shall not spend a large expense of time Before we reckon with your several loves, And make us even with you. My thanes and kinsmen, Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland In such an honor nam’d. (5.9.20–30) MACD.

Shakespeare depicts a change that is a Scottish parallel to the policy of ‘surrender and regrant’ in Ireland (whereby native Irish titles were given up in favour of courtly English equivalents): thanes are transformed into earls here in the final speech of the play, as Malcolm accepts his acclamation to the monarchy. Like Irenius, Malcolm ‘will applie the people and fitt them to the

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Lawes as it moste Convenientlye maye be’. The system of laws to which he applies them is undeniably English, as the social person of the earl makes clear. The play makes the claim, then, that a substantial assimilation of Scotland to England occurred in the eleventh century, before the Norman conquest.15 This assimilation is characterized as an entirely voluntary honour, as widely acclaimed, and as representing a step forward out of the evils of the world of medieval custom. Macbeth suggests that a transformation of Scottish society – albeit according to an English model – may be able to correct the lack of fit between the Scottish people and the Scottish government. Figured as a sea-change in the social person of the thane, it is nonetheless, as we shall see, a consitutional tranformation. I must return the thane to its context in the three topoi in order to explain why.16 As we have seen, the three topoi of Duncan’s world are violated by Macbeth; it may come as an a slightly unpleasant surprise to an audience who takes the first half of the play as a defense of Duncan’s ideals that these ideals are also disregarded by Malcolm. In order to take the throne, Malcolm invents new versions of knight service, the progress, and counsel that embody social practices and ideals undreamt of by his father Duncan. Only with the deep social support these habitus represent does Malcolm achieve the transformation of social persons – both king and thane – that successfully closes the play. Though both depend on supporting modes of social life and forms of social persons (the constitutional fit that Macbeth sorely lacks), the kinds of kingship deployed by Duncan and Malcolm are quite different. Consider the topos of military service. Duncan’s model of service involves, as we have seen, a feudal exchange of warlike force for reward. From the opening of the play it is clear that loyalty and prowess in killing are valued above all. Macbeth represents the ideal thane (‘Bellona’s bridegroom,’ 1.2.54) when he encounters Duncan’s opponent: Which nev’r shook hands, nor bade farewell to him, Till he unseam’d him from the nave to th’ chops, And fix’d his head upon our battlements. (1.2.21–23)

Reciprocally, Duncan is the ideal king when he rewards Macbeth’s triumph with a new title and a visitation. In Malcolm’s model of military service, there is no such feudal exchange. The ideal soldier in the new dispensation is represented by the Earl of Northumberland, Siward, and young Siward, who led the charge according to Malcolm’s order (5.6). Sacrifice is valued far above prowess in killing, and this father who sacrifices his son willingly is given a

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divine glow as he receives the news of his son’s death in battle: ‘God’s soldier be he! / Had I as many sons as I have hairs, / I would not wish them to a fairer death’ (5.9.13–15). The topos of the progress is similarly transvalued. Exchanges of hospitality and of extravagant speech acts of praise make up the familiar progress of Duncan’s realm, the means for consolidating his domestic support. These practices are abandoned in the hasty flight of Malcolm and Donalbain to England and Ireland, a flight which becomes a diplomatic mission to raise troops for Malcolm’s reentry into Scotland. Malcolm strategically replaces domestic consolidation with a new foreign diplomacy and, consequently, an entirely different structure of political obligations that might well have been unthinkable for his independent father. Exchanges of praise build social bonds for Duncan; Malcolm probingly trades lengthy dispraise with Macduff during the recruitment scene in England (4.3). The two methods of binding followers to the kingship are parallel and distinct: one based on arms and material reward, the other on a moral and affective scheme with vaguely Christian overtones. The provision of military intelligence that characterizes good counsel in Duncan’s feudal world is marginal to Malcolm’s practice of interacting with his subjects. Instead, by the example of the lengthy interview with Macduff at the end of act four, he probes their passionate feelings, provoking and molding them wherever he can.17 The process constitutes an ideological habituation of his subject’s passions: Malcolm elicits Macduff’s strong responses to the disastrous state of Scotland, to the possibility of himself as a vicious future king, and to the slaughter of Macduff’s family; then he explicitly directs those responses towards his own strategic aims. Where the old topos of counsel leads us (and Macduff, who expresses bewilderment) to expect Malcolm to engage his man in an exchange of praise and pledges of fealty, here the scene breaks into two halves: a false confession of vice and a dedicatory oath singly sworn by Malcolm, then a long psychological catechism and an oath of revenge singly sworn by Macduff. As Malcolm has directed, Macduff converts his grief into a whetstone for his sword, using his private motive to reinforce his recruitment to Malcolm’s forces; only then does Malcolm pronounce his power ready, inaugurating the march upon Scotland and proving that the catechism displays a key strategy of his rule. Throughout the curious dialogue, Macduff’s passions are lavished with the careful scrutiny that, in the old topos of counsel, was accorded to military intelligence – and in fact this affective information does give Malcolm the ability to produce his military aim, the decapitation of Macbeth.

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Malcolm’s commitment to the verbal practice of engineering the passions is present in the play as early as the opening of its fourth scene, in which Malcolm reports the confession and execution of the traitorous Thane of Cawdor with remarkable attention to the psychological process of preparation for death. The later, well developed scene between Macduff and Malcolm shows how Duncans son has remade counsel into the skilled practice of psychological catechism, the ‘art / To find the mind’s construction that Duncan lacks (1.4.11–12). His father dead, Malcolm has apparently found a new model in the English king Edward the Confessor; he takes pains to explain the king’s skills as a physician at the midpoint of the counsel scene with Macduff. Reputed to cure the ‘king’s evil’, Edward becomes a symbolically important model for a redeemer of Scotland. Though the Christian overtones of his imitation of the saint are never made explicit, they help to invest Malcolm with an implicit capacity for healing that addresses the play’s pervasive imagery of dismembered, displaced bodies and untreatable disease. In sum, Malcolm entirely revises the social practices of Duncan’s (and Macbeth’s) modes of governance: sacrifice is acclaimed the highest virtue in the new topos of military service; ideals of diplomacy and charisma come to animate the newly international topos of the progress; the political habituation of the passions of the subject is the new aim of the topos of counsel.18 Modes of accession to and deposition from social; persons are controlled by the topoi and, as we might expect, they are also much changed in Malcolm’s world: accession is the reward for services rendered in the old Scotland, but in the new it is the fate of personal saintliness; deposition is the punishment for disloyalty in the old, but in the new it is the fruit of evil. When Malcolm accepts the acclamation of his kingship, it is perhaps no surprise that his first act is to declare the creation of a new social person by extending earldoms to those who would have been his thanes. Malcolm seems to believe (as James did) that he has the divine power of creating social persons as well as of granting accession to them. Yet his belief is well supported: fitting forms of social life have grown into place around the transformation of thanes into earls, so that Malcolm controls a political revolution capable of applying and altering the people to fit a mode of governance already in place. Whether or not we see the new polity as superior to the old one (that is a matter for our deliberation), we do see that constitutional history proceeds according to the dictates of a drive towards fit on the part of both the people and the government, a drive that must encompass habitus.

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Conclusion: the politics of thinking about person Conflicts among competing political factions or regimes proceed according to power, but they also open up ideological contests which may or may not be decided along the lines of force. Like the jousting knights of medieval romance, social orders experience many trials not only of their physical strength, but of their ideological strength as well. Can the social persons of political authority be justified in terms of distributive justice and in terms of the relationships they intend to personify? Is the structure of our polity and the body of its customary and statutory laws responsive to the society it represents? Thinking through social person is a way to test this fit between governance and the people, and calling for the criterion of fit gives scope to our ability to sustain that testing as a two-way process and to change (or resist changing) the shapes of social persons and government when justice requires it. When we understand the rhetorical ideal of decorum as a species of the criterion of fit, we can strengthen that notion as a source of standards, as learned and critical, and as ambitious for justice.

Notes 1

2

3

Barbara K. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 22–3. My argument is inspired by Lewalski’s recognition of the notion of decorum as political. An alternative version of this essay first appeared in the festschrift Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ed. Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2000), and is reprinted here with permission. It is indebted to Nicholas Canny and Victor Luftig for many improvements (but none of its errors). I use the term ‘social person’ (coined in an analogy to ‘legal person’, which it includes) to describe something that social psychologists such as Gerard Duveen and Serge Moscovici would call a ‘social representation’ of the person. Mine is a general term meant to indicate paradigmatic representations of personhood that evolve historically among the institutions of social life. My thinking about social person draws on ideas suggested by Marcel Mauss’s essay ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of “Self”’ in Sociology and Psychology: Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, pp. 57–94 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). See my book, Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). Legal conventions for the treatment of person make explicit their fictional qualities. F. W. Maitland frequently uses the term ‘personification’ when writing about the history of the law of corporations; he finds the origins of the

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4

5 6 7

8

9

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Elizabeth Fowler process of legal personification now called ‘incorporation’ in the relation between medieval parsons (the orthographically identical Middle English ‘persouns’) and their parsonages, in the forms of universities and convents, and in kingship. He traces his legal pun through English political theory by describing the ways that lawyers sought to disentangle various forms of property and dominion associated with the crown. Ernst Kantorowicz’s influential book The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) continues this line of enquiry, showing the theological origins of what became the early modern English theory of kingship. ‘Habitus’ is a scholastic term revived by Marcel Mauss and, most recently, Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). I use the term here with an unusual emphasis on the location in social space of the system of habitual practices; theatre represents habitus by two means: actors can use habitus to develop the bodily shape and gestures of their characters, and (perhaps more interestingly) settings, with their imagined institutional spaces, can make visible in art the collective, institutional function of the habitus. Thomas Smith, De republica anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 62–3. Edmund Spenser, Vewe, p. 199. For fit with respect to The Faerie Queene, see Elizabeth Fowler, ‘The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser’, Representations, 51 (Summer 1995), pp. 57–86. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). All my references the play are to this edition. Charles Ross develops the idea of customary ceremony in the setting of Macbeth’s castles by placing it in the romance tradition: The Custom of the Castle: From Malory to Macbeth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 104–29. For the literary tradition of counsel, see Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). For the literary tradition of the banquet, see Flemming Olsen, ‘The Banquet Scene in Macbeth: Variation upon a Topos’ in Graham D. Caie and Holger Norgaard eds, A Literary Miscellany Presented to Eric Jacobsen (Copenhagen: Publications of the Department of English, University of Copenhagen, 1988), pp. 108–32. For Plowden, see Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. Arthur Kinney argues that the play ‘warns James VI and I of the inherent dangers of imperialist and absolutist thought’ in ‘Scottish History, the Union of the Crowns and the Issue of Right Rule: The Case of Shakespeare’s Macbeth’ in Jean R. Brink and William R Gentrup eds, Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice (Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1993), p. 39.

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14 It has been produced to comment on other constitutional transformations: the play was performed with special consciousness during the devolution campaign of the 1990s, which, with the support of the new Labour government in Westminster, successfully sought to alter the social persons of the constitution by reconvening a powerful and guardedly autonomous Scottish parliament. 15 In this, Shakespeare somewhat mitigates Holinshed’s representation of Malcolm paying homage to Edward, which enraged Scottish writers. See David Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’ in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker eds, Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987), pp. 95–6. 16 One could solidify my argument about the representation of constitutional change by citing Scottish medieval and early modern constitutional history or Shakespeare’s historiographical sources. Medieval Scots inheritance customs were unsettled and, especially during the feudalization of the Celtic earldoms and provinces that is represented by the play, gave rise to significant succession disputes (including one involving Macduff of Fife). See Hector L. MacQueen, Common Law and Feudal Society in Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp. 173–4,328, and chapter 2. The union of the Scottish and English crowns in James provoked, of course, important constitutional proposals and debates that are extremely pertinent here and that I can, for lack of space, only suggest. See Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977) for the rich connections between constitutional jurisprudence and plays of the period, especially pp. 143–47. Hector Boece, Raphael Holinshed, and George Buchanan, the historians cited most frequently by scholars of Macbeth, all prominently employ the three topoi of knight service, progress, and counsel. Holinshed stresses the transformation of the thanes; Buchanan takes pains to set vows of fealty and the need for deep social support before the reader. My chapter has benefited from Norbrook, ‘Politics of Historiography’, especially p. 98 and his use of the concept of decorum, pp. 106–7, as well as three linked articles by Arthur Kinney: ‘Imagination and Ideology in Macbeth’ in Katherine Z. Keller and Gerald J. Schiffhorst eds, The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993), pp. 148–73; ‘Scottish History’ cited above; and ‘Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the Question of Nationalism’ in Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson eds, Literature and Nationalism (Savage, Maryland: Barnes and Noble Books, 1991), pp. 56–75. 17 Kinney finds the background to this scene in humanist debates and treatises on right rule, especially James’s tutor Buchanan’s De jure regni, ‘Scottish History’, pp. 46–9.

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18 For another view of the representations of feudal institutions and shifts in social orders in the play, also influenced by Kantorowicz, see Michael Hawkins, ‘History, Politics, and Macbeth’ in John Russell Brown ed., Focus on Macbeth (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 155–88.

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Hamlet’s country matters: the ‘Scottish play’ within the play ANDREW HADFIELD

Why might Shakespeare have been interested in Scotland? The answer to the question is all too obvious. No one who paid any attention to Elizabethan affairs could fail to take careful note of events north of the border. Elizabethan England was in fact neatly framed by its relationship with Scotland: most specifically, through the Stuart claim to the English throne, but also because Scotland was acknowledged as the site of the most advanced and controversial political ideas in post-Reformation Europe. For many Protestants, Scottish political thought was a source of inspiration and a means of their fighting back against corrupt and tyrannical rulers; for many monarchs and their advisers, keen to preserve the status quo, the same ideas threatened to undermine stability and their legitimacy. These issues were most immediately relevant in England, which would probably be ruled by a Scottish monarch when Elizabeth died, whether that occurred in the 1560s or the 1600s, unless a concerted effort was made to prevent this outcome. In the first part of this chapter I will outline some of the issues and problems raised by Scotland and Scottish history for English readers in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign. In the second I will try to show how closely engaged Shakespeare was with questions generated by his understanding of Scottish history, concentrating especially on Hamlet, a play that has already been persuasively read as a work informed by an understanding of Scottish affairs and politics.1 Scotland was also a divided and fractious land. It appeared to some observers as an example of the worst form of state, where bitter religious conflict

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defined the body politic, as was the case in late sixteenth-century France, especially after the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day (23 August 1572).2 In Scotland, aggressive and bitterly divided factions of Protestant and Catholic nobles fought for control over the monarch. It is no accident that while Mary Stuart was a Catholic, her son, James VI, was brought up as a Protestant. Mary was the product of a French Catholic; education, overseen by her mother-in-law, Catherine de Medici. James had to endure the overbearing Protestant humanist, George Buchanan, as a tutor, who was determined to impress on his young charge the need to serve his people well, and so helpfully bombarded him with examples of the fates of evil tyrants who had disobeyed God’s word.3 As if this was not enough, James was later kidnapped (August 1582) by a group of Protest tant noblemen, the Ruthven lords, who were determined to have him recognize the supremacy of the Scottish Kirk and banish his Catholic favourite, Esmé Stuart, first duke of Lennox.4 It is little wonder that Shakespeare’s one Scottish play, Macbeth, although the action takes place in the tenth century, makes a direct allusion to contemporary religious divisions. Immediately after the murder of Duncan, the Porter compares Scotland to hell and imagines the damned knocking at the gates. One of these is ‘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’ (Macbeth, 2.3.8–11).5 Clearly the primary allusion is to the trial speeches of Father Garnett, one of the condemned Powder] Plot conspirators, in which he sought to extract himself from charges of treason through the use of deliberately specious reasoning and dishonest wordplay.6 But the porter’s words also indicate that Scotland was known to have been a disunited kingdom with powerful and hostile figures1 gaining access to the monarch through force and guile – as in the Ruthven Raid. Given that James’s aim from the very start of his reign as king of England was to achieve a formal unity between the two kingdoms, such reminders of the problems he had left behind in Scotland were indeed potent warnings of a troubled future.7 The impact of Scotland on English politics and political thought was profound. When Elizabeth became queen on 17 November 1558, Catholic monarchs throughout Europe declared their allegiance to Mary Stuart as the true hereditary monarch, establishing a problem that would shadow Elizabeth’s reign even after the execution of Mary in 1587.8 Equally, a piece of spectacularly unfortunate timing saw the publication of John Knox’s polemic against women rulers, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous

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Regiment of Women, in the same year. Knox, as is well known, had Mary Tudor in mind and his work caused considerable difficulty for the Scottish kirk in subsequent years as they sought substantial aid from Elizabeth to combat the Catholic threat in Scotland.9 Nevertheless, Knox’s intervention neatly encapsulates the problematic relationship between the English authorities and Scottish religious and political affairs. Knox later backtracked on his claims that women should never be allowed to rule, arguing rather disingenuously in his encounter with Mary Stuart that he had made no effort to hurt her authority and had written his book ‘most especially against that wicked Jezebel of England [i.e., Mary Tudor’] and that he had never intended to ‘hurt you or your authority’.10 As any reader of The First Blast would have known this was simply not true. There Knox asserted, in stridently misogynist terms, signalled by the marginal note, ‘Causes why women should not have pre-eminence over men’, For who can deny it but repugneth to nature that the blind shall be apppointed to lead and conduct such as do see; that the weak, the sick and impotent persons shall nourish and keep the whole and strong; and finally, that the foolish, mad and frenetic shall govern the discreet and give counsel to such as be sober of mind? And such be all women compared unto man in bearing of authority. For their sight in civil regiment is but blindness, their strength weakness, their counsel foolishness, and judgement frenzy, if it be rightly considered.11

Furthermore, later in the same work Knox articulated a theory of kingship which indicated that sovereignty was the prerogative of the godly such as himself and not the monarch (and he repeated his injunction that God ‘hath sanctified and appointed for man only ... to occupy and possess as His minister and lieutenant, secluding from the same all woman’). Using his understanding of Old Testament history Knox argued that: If any think that the forewritten law did bind the Jews only, let the same man consider that the election of a king and appointing of judges did neither appertain to the ceremonial law neither yet was it mere judicial, but that it did flow from the moral law as an ordinance, having respect to the conservation of both the Tables.12

Here the marginal note informs the reader that ‘The election of a king floweth from the moral law.’ Knox’s political ideas were by no means consistent and coherent and do not really amount to a resistance theory to tyrannical government.13 The one central idea is the supremacy of biblical injunctions

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and the need for the monarch to conform to these rather than exercizing their own means of government. Nevertheless, Knox’s writings do show how inextricably intertwined were the questions of sovereignty and legitimacy, the problem of religion and loyalty, the issue of female government, and the complicated relationship between the Tudors and the Stuarts. It is a sign of the central importance of Scotland to these debates that arguably the most notorious and one of the most widely disseminated treatises which advocated resistance to tyranny, specifically the right of magistrates to depose and kill evil rulers, made explicit references to Scotland as the home of such political thought and action. Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: or, concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and the people over a prince (1579) was published in Basle and was written by the French Huguenots, Philippe du Plessis Mornay and Hubert Languet. But the treatise bore the pseudonym, Stephanus Junius Brutus, the Celt, and the imprint, Edinburgh. The significance of these two details could hardly be clearer. In referring to the founder of the Roman republic who drove out the tyrannical dynasty of the Tarquins; after the rape of Lucrece, transforming him into a modern Celt, the authors were demonstrating that republican political thought had been translated to Scotland through the arguments of those who opposed the Catholic tyranny of queens such as Mary Stuart and Mary Tudor. Edinburgh is the new Rome. Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos gives arguments of hereditary monarchy? short shrift because authority resides in the (godly) people whose monarch is there to serve them: All kings were wholly elected from the beginning. Those who today seem to come to the kingdom by succession must first be constituted by the people. Finally, although it has been the custom in some regions for the people to choose its kings for itself from a certain lineage on account of some out-standing merits, it chooses the stem and not the offshoot. Its choice is not such that if degeneration occur, it may not elect another. The offspring of that stem are not so much born, as made, kings; they are held to be not so much kings, as candidates for kingship.14

The argument is an ingenious one, suggesting that any dynasty only rules because the people choose it and that no line of kings and queens has any right to rule, whatever might appear to be the case and whatever they might argue themselves. Such arguments were developed even more radically by George Buchanan, an author Shakespeare would definitely have read, either through

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an acquaintance with his published works, or through the passages taken from Buchanan’s History of Scotland (1582), included in Francis Thynne’s additions to the ‘History of Scotland’ in the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587).15 Buchanan went even further than the arguments presented in Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, arguing throughout his published works that any godly person could dispose of a tyrant, not just magistrates [i.e., government officials].16 Buchanan reserved especial ire for Mary Stuart whom he had extravagantly praised in 1558 when she married François, son of Henri II of France.17 Her later behaviour and refusal to bow to the wishes of her Protestant subjects after she returned to Scotland when François died in 1560, ensured that Buchanan represented her as a worse Jezebel than Knox had Mary Tudor. Buchanan saw her as a tyrant justly excluded by her people after she had her second husband, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, father of his tutee, James VI, murdered in 1567. Mary was guilty of numerous crimes: imposing her false religious beliefs on the Scots against their wishes; arrogantly refusing to listen to the sensible advice of her courtiers; promoting her own favourites at the expense of others; making little effort to control her natural female deficiencies (unlike Elizabeth); plotting treason against God, lawfully elected monarchs and the godly, and so on.18 However, Mary was not an exception but the culmination of a long line of dreadful Scottish monarchs who met deservedly grisly ends. A key reign in Buchanan’s History of Scotland was that of Kenneth III, who ended the long tradition of elective monarchy in Scotland. Buchanan’s sense of the significance of Kenneth’s reign is encapsulated in the version narrated in Holinshed’s Chronicle of Scotland (1587), a source that Shakespeare made extensive use of when writing Macbeth.19 Kenneth is elected by an assembly of ‘nobles and great peers’. He starts as a good monarch, a vast improvement on the previous king, Culene, so notorious for his ‘filthie sensualitie’ that he was murdered by Calard, whose daughter he ‘had ravished before time among divers others’, while on his way to a parliament assembled at Scone where he was about to be deposed (which then chose Kenneth as king).20 Kenneth is notable for his public show of moral restraint, which he carefully cultivates to win over the people: For the nature of the Scotishmen is, that first the nobles, and then all the residue of the people transform themselves to the usage of their prince: therefore did Kenneth in his owne trade of living shew an example of chastitie, sobrietie, liberalise, and modestie, misusing himself in no kind of vice, but refraining

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himself from the same. He banished all such kind of persons as might provoke either him or other unto anie lewd or wanton pleasures ... He tooke busie care in causing the people to avoid sloth, and to applie themselves in honest exercises, judging (as the truth is) that to be the waie to advance the common-wealth from decaie to a flourishing state, (p. 301)

The passage is notable for its careful praise of Kenneth’s virtues as a monarch, justly regarding him as a successful ruler who leads his people well, but also implying that he is repressing a less virtuous side of his nature, one that may surface later. Kenneth copes well with recalcitrant nobles and establishes a series of successful laws that help to purge the realm of evildoers. He defeats the Danes, the Viking raiders who terrified Northern Europe throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries. As a result he was greatlie praised, loved, and dread of all of his subjects: so that great quietnesse followed in the state of the common-wealth, greatlie to the advancement thereof’ (p. 309). But Kenneth was not famous for any of these achievements, as Buchanan and Thynne were aware. The really significant event of his reign was his transformation of the Scottish constitution when he ended the principle of elective monarchy and established the system of primogeniture.21 Kenneth makes this crucial change for wholly discreditable motives, through the ‘blind love he bare to his own issue’. He poisons the heir apparent, his cousin, Malcolm Duff, the prince of Cumberland, escaping detection only through the goodwill of the people: ‘But though the physicians understanding by such evident signes as appeared in his bodie, that he was poisoned, yet such was the opinion which men had of the kings honour and integritie, that no suspicion at all was conceived that it should be his deed’ (p. 309). Kenneth is highly successful at going through the motions so that he can cover his tracks, the narrative suggesting that the skills that made him a good ruler now help him to become a master criminal. The narrative highlights ‘the cloked love ... which he had shewed him at all times’; the extensive mourning arrangements, ‘that his funeral should be celebrated in everie church and chapel for his soule’; and the tears Kenneth sheds whenever his name is mentioned, convince virtually everyone of the king’s genuine grief, until well after the event, when a few nobles begin to suspect that all is not as it should be, ‘but yet because no certeintie appeared, they kept their thoughts to themselves’ (pp. 309–10). At a council at Scone, Kenneth makes a powerful oration to persuade his people to agree to accept the principle of primogeniture. He argues that

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elected monarchy causes division and sedition in the realm, hindering the peace, stability and prosperity of the commonwealth, often leading to ‘sundrie murthers, occasions of civill discord, and other wicked practices’, and that it would be better if ‘the son should without anie contradiction succeed the father in the heritage of the crowne and kinglie estate’ (p. 310). Kenneth’s son Malcolm is duly declared heir apparent by being made the new prince of Cumberland, and a new act declares that the eldest male heir of the deceased king succeed him as king of Scotland, the brother’s son preceding the sister’s son and a clause enabling the peers of the realm to appoint a regent in the case of a minority (p. 311). Kenneth now has everything he wants and tries to win over the hearts of the people. However he is troubled by a guilty conscience and one night a ghostly voice warns him that God knows his actions and that his issue will be punished for his crimes. Kenneth confesses his act to the Bishop of Movean who assures him that God forgives those who sincerely repent. Nevertheless, not all of Kenneth’s subjects were so magnanimous. On a hunting trip in the Highlands Kenneth lodges at the castle of Fenella, who hates him, not surprisingly, because he has had her son put to death. Moreover, she is a relation of Malcolm Duff. She has a beautiful tower built, ‘covered over with copper finelie ingraven with diverse flowers and images’. Inside she places a statue of the king, holding a golden apple ‘set full of precious stones’, which will trigger off a series of crossbows hidden behind the ‘rich cloths of arras wrought with gold and silk, verie faire and costlie’, when handled. Kenneth duly removes the apple to get a closer look and is killed. The relevance of these events, issues and questions to Hamlet is simultaneously obvious and obscure. Why Shakespeare would not have been able to write a play that dealt directly with the Scottish succession is rather easier to comprehend: Elizabeth had forbidden any discussion of the succession and by the last years of the sixteenth century the most likely successor to Elizabeth was James VI of Scotland.22 Moreover, if a version of Hamlet was circulating as early as 1599, as Harold Jenkins suspects, the unfortunate case of Sir John Hayward’s The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, which fell foul of censors because it appeared to make an explicit comparison between Elizabeth and Richard II, and Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex and Henry IV, would have further served to inhibit direct dramatic representation of historical events that could point up parallels to contemporary Britain.23 Given Shakespeare’s interest in the question of the

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succession, as both an imminent event and a political problem, throughout the 1590s, it would be odd if he had not turned his attention to either Holinshed’s Chronicle of Scotland or the political debates that were taking place north of the border.24 But using material available in Holinshed to write a play about a problematic Scottish king who murders his cousin to keep his dynasty in power, or about one who is legitimately deposed, or about one who tyrannises his subjects, was not a serious option in the years 1599–1603 with the authorities already alerted to the dangerous and subversive use to which history could be put.25 Holinshed’s Chronicles had already attracted the unwelcome attention of the censors who took exception to a number of passages, Thynne’s ‘Continuation’ of ‘The History of Scotland’ being a case in point. The Privy Council called in the 1587 edition of the Chronicles and ordered the removal of ‘[S]uch mention of matter touching the King of Scottes as may give him cause for offense’. Passages which then had to be removed included criticism of James’s favourite, Esmé Stewart, and many details of Anglo-Scottish relations, 1584–86, which might have showed James’s actions in a bad light.26 Given this level of censorship and sensitivity, it is clear that any more direct analysis of Scottish events would have had to be rather more obliquely and allegorically represented. Indeed, the only three plays on obviously Scottish themes produced between 1590 and 1603 are Robert Greene’s comedy, The Scottish History of James IV (1590), and the two lost plays, the tragedy of Robert II of Scotland, for which Philip Henslowe advanced a series of writers, including Ben Jonson, Henry Chettle, and Thomas Dekker 40 shillings in 1599, and Charles Massey’s Malcolm, King of Scots (1602).27 Nevertheless, the plot of Hamlet seems saturated with suppressed and disguised references to Scottish history, all designed to express the anxiety felt by English subjects at the prospect of a Scotsman inheriting their throne. The play does have obvious sources that Shakespeare used, most specifically Saxo Grammaticus’s twelfth-century Historiae Danicae, published in 1514, and retold in François Belleforest’s Histories Tragique (1559–82). Yet it is also evident that Shakespeare made use of numerous other stories for the writing of Hamlet and that the play cannot be reduced to its precursors, including the lost Ur-Hamlet.28 The play opens with soldiers on watch on the battlements ready to confront a hostile foe but ends with that enemy taking over when the royal family has managed to destroy itself, a neat, telescoped tableau of English history after the Wars of the Roses which Shakespeare had just finished dramatizing.29 The murder of old Hamlet takes place in an orchard, as did the

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murder of Mary Stuart’s second husband.30 His body broke out in boils, ‘Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust / All my smooth body’, as did the dead body of Darnley, according to Buchanan.31 It was commonly argued in anti-Marian propaganda that Mary’s partner in crime and next husband, James, earl of Bothwell committed adultery with her before the death of Darnley, as old Hamlet argues was the case with Gertrude and Claudius; that the period of mourning for Darnley was far too short, as Hamlet claimed was the case with his father; and that Bothwell was markedly inferior in appearance to Darnley, a judgement Hamlet claims anyone who saw Claudius beside his father would also make.32 Furthermore, as Howard Erskine-Hill points out, ‘There is as much difference and resemblance between the murder of Hamlet the King and the Darnley tragedy, as between the murder of Gonzago and the murder of Hamlet the King’, and he argues that the play ‘dramatized the position of King James VI ... the tragically incapacitated inheritor of the unnatural scene into which he had been born’.33 Shakespeare uses the impending change of dynasty to speculate more widely and philosophically on the nature of government and the forms of political action that can be countenanced. It is noticeable that key sections of the language of the play’s most famous speech, Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide (3.1), could easily have come from the arguments of such monarchomach treatises advocating the right of citizens to assassinate their ungodly rulers as Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos: To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them ... For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’unworthy takes When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? (3.2.56–60; 70–6)34

The speech is nicely balanced in its hesitant embrace of violence as a solution to problems. When Hamlet meditates on the nature of suffering and action, we cannot be sure whether he is planning ‘to take arms against a sea

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of troubles’ by ending his own life or that of the person who has caused his misery. Equally, the desire to achieve quietus’ (settling a debt) through the use of a ‘bare bodkin’ (dagger), does not indicate whether the intended target is his own breast or another’s, and the mention of ‘oppressor’ and ‘office’ in the immediately previous build-up of phrases indicates that Hamlet’s mind is at least partly on the sins of Claudius. Furthermore, political assassination, successful or not, invariably led to the death of the perpetrator, as is the spectacular case at the end of the play. Assuming the mantle of God’s avenger against tyranny was a dubious honour, as, successful or not, death awaited the chosen one. The soliloquy may well be a meditation on Hamlet’s death, through his own choice and brought about by his own actions, but not quite as has been assumed. Indeed, many of the significant political questions that Hamlet poses derive from those asked in a text such as Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos. Is Claudius a good ruler and are the effects of his rule just and beneficial for his subjects? Would it be better on balance if Fortinbras had taken Denmark and ruled it instead (after all, this is what does happen at the end of the play, and England was about to surrender its crown to a foreign monarch for the second time in half a century)? Should obedient subjects accept their lot and obey their ruler however he obtained power? Or is their duty to oppose him and try to restore the legitimate ruler (assuming one has a claim)? Such comparisons are invited by the play when Polonius tells Hamlet that he ‘did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’th’Capitol. Brutus killed me’ (3.2.102–3), prefiguring not only his own death, but also that of Claudius, as well as demonstrating how potent political narratives shadow the stories of other events, waiting for perceptive readers to make the connections between them. Polonius is clearly not such a reader and his need to explain the fate of the character he played shows that he has no idea that others might already know and understand the story of Caesar and attribute significance to his life and death. Hamlet’s last action before he dies is to kill Claudius, showing that his soliloquy has a prophetic purpose in the plot. Hamlet justifies his actions through his exclamation, ‘The King – the King’s to blame’ (5.1.326). Hamlet clearly means Claudius, although the audience might see an irony if it is thought that the real villain is the ghost of the old Hamlet Claudius has murdered his brother, the legitimate king and subsequently married his wife. It is not clear whether he has destroyed a workable political process in doing so: Hamlet only claims that Claudius has stolen his rightful kingdom after

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Claudius has been exposed as ‘A murderer and a villain, /... That from a shelf the precious diadem stole / And put it in his pocket’ (3.4.97–101) (Claudius publicly declares Hamlet his successor in his first scene ( 1.2.8–9)). After the mousetrap play, he is represented as cut off from God. He admits that his ‘offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t – A brother’s murder’ (3.3.36–8), aligning him with the cursed race of Cain. His attempts to pray are futile: ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never to heaven go’ (97–8). Claudius has violated God’s law, a capital crime according to Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos: ‘The king ... if he neglects God, if he goes over to his enemies, if he commits felonies against God, forfeits the kingdom by this very right and often loses it in practice.’35 His court becomes a labyrinth of spying in which all human relationships are poisoned: fathers spy on sons and daughters; friends betray friends; private utterances become public, invariably distorted in the process with disastrous consequences. When he knows that his crime has been exposed, Claudius plans to murder the heir to the throne to save his secret. Yet it would be a crude reading of the play that saw Claudius’s rule as entirely negative. There is a pointed contrast between the bloody and violent military world represented in the opening scene and the revelry at court represented in the second, with only Hamlet standing aside from the guests as a self-marginalized malcontent. The Old Hamlet’s pride in the warrior culture he inhabits, gambling his country on the outcome of single combat, is replaced by the sensible diplomacy of Claudius, who in dispatching Voltemand and Cornelius to Norway, seems to have preserved peace for Denmark. Modern kingship has started to impose order on a lawless and anarchic kingdom. The tragedy is in fact precipitated by exposing the king’s crime rather than by keeping it concealed. Claudius’s reign bears striking similarities to that of Kenneth III. Both are relatively efficient kings who preserve the territorial integrity of their countries, Kenneth achieving this by defeating the Danes. Both act swiftly and efficiently to establish law and order, and are prepared to be utterly ruthless to impose their will. One of Kenneth’s first acts as king is to have 500 ‘idle loiterers as used to live by spoil and pillage ... hanged upon gibbets ... and commandment given ... that their bodies should not be taken downe, but there to hang still to give example to other, what the end was of all such as by wrongfull means sought to live idelie by other mens labours’ (Holinshed, Chronicle of Scotland, p. 304). Both achieve power as elected monarchs, Claudius assuming the throne as brother of the dead king,

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Kenneth as son of the murdered Malcolm I, whose reign was followed by those of Indulph and Culene. Both are murderers, committing desperate acts, in Kenneth’s case to ensure that his progeny remain on the throne, in Claudius’s, to marry the queen. Both preside over courts that contain hostile and suspicious opponents. And both are assassinated by people closely related to those they have killed: Kenneth by an unspecified relation, Claudius by the son of his victim, his bereaved J nephew. Each death is associated with a dramatic event: Claudius’s with the mousetrap play, Kenneth’s with the golden apple and the crossbows behind the arras. Such links are suggestive, rather than conclusive proof that Shakespeare had these key events in Scottish history in mind when he wrote Hamlet. But any links between the historical narrative and the dramatic plot seem more plausible if they are read alongside the connections already noted between the murder of Old Hamlet and its counterpart, the murder of Gonzago, and the murder of Lord Darnley. One of the noted features of anti-Marian propaganda was its virulent misogyny.36 Buchanan’s Ane Detectioun of the Duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes, published in English in 1572, the substance of which was frequently repeated in the next thirty years, represented Mary as a selfish, lecherous whore who would not hesitate to satisfy her whims before those of her subjects and who had no scruples about murder. Buchanan describes her elopement with Bothwell as fuelled by a dangerous lust which endangers her and the people she is supposed to rule: Though she learned there on good authority that his life was safe, her affection could brook no delay, and she betrayed her infamous lust by setting out at a bad time of year, heedless of the difficulties of the journey... When he [Bothwell] had been brought there [Jedburgh], their staying together and familiarity were hardly consistent with the honour of either. Then, either because of their daily and nightly exertions, which were dishonourable to themselves and infamous in the eyes of the people, or by some secret dispensation of providence, the Queen fell into so severe a sickness that there remained little hope of recovery [my emphasis].37

As James Phillips has noted, the Protestant case against Mary was ‘directed not against her religion per se, but rather against what was portrayed as the weakness and immorality of her character’, the advantage of such an argument being that the deposition of the queen could be justified ‘on personal rather than religious grounds’.38 The aggressive misogyny of Hamlet when he confronts his mother with her complicity in Claudius’s deeds (3.4) is a standard feature of criticism of Hamlet, singling the play out as the Shakespearean work that contains the most striking examples of antifeminist rhetoric.39 Hamlet impugns his mother’s virtue and represents

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Gertrude’s relationship with Claudius as one based on a desire that is wholly inappropriate for a woman. He refers to ‘an act / That blurs the grace and blush of modesty, / Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose / From the fair forehead of an innocent love’ (40–3). Here the audience cannot be sure whether Hamlet is most enraged about her complicity in the murder of her husband (and the text never allows the audience to be certain that she knew about Claudius’s guilt), or her choice of sexual partners, an ambivalence mirrored in anti-Marian propaganda.40 His subsequent speech, comparing the merits of the two brothers, can only strengthen a suspicion that it is Gertrude’s sex that irks Hamlet most. He concludes the encounter by instructing his mother what she should avoid, and in doing so, dwells on her intimate relations with Claudius: Not this, by no means, that I bid you do? Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed, Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse, And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses, Or paddling in your neck with his damn’d fingers. (183–7)

The only queen known to an English audience in 1601–2 who would have behaved with similarly indiscreet and destructive passion was Mary Queen of Scots, the mother of the man whom everyone knew would be the new king of England. The assumption that plays produced on the Elizabethan commercial stage might have been read in terms of topical events by the audience is well attested by substantial evidence, but also intensely problematic.41 Nevertheless, Hamlet seems to contain numerous clues that ask a literate audience to make connections with Scottish history and politics. In fact, if I am right in my readings, one of the wittiest jokes that the play contains is the imagined marriage of Kenneth III as Claudius and Mary Queen of Scots as Gertrude, a union which represented the most frightening aspects of Scotland for an Elizabethan audience, and posed the question of what a union between England and Scotland might entail when James became king. Such a reading may seem rather forced and it would be absurd to reduce the play to an allegory of Scottish involvement in the English succession. Nevertheless, Shakespeare would certainly have been aware that when a figure of Mary Queen of Scots had been allegorically represented in a literary work, in the second edition of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), James had

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demanded that the author be punished because any slanderous attack on his dead mother might affect his chances of claiming the English throne (the exclusion of Mary was based on her lack of virtue so the same case could be made against the son). The result was a major scandal.42 It was highly unlikely that a dramatist would have been keen to reflect openly on the problems James might bring with him from Scotland to England – political uncertainty and instability, religious conflict, corruption at court, sexual scandal, lack of personal morality and unscrupulous behaviour. But a coded warning to whoever might want to listen, adding spice to an already heady mixture of plots and narratives, perhaps seems a more plausible reason for producing a play, especially one first performed at the very end of Elizabeth’s reign. Hamlet makes no attempt to offer any solution to the problems it raises, so it cannot be read as a propagandist play designed to persuade its audience to follow a particular course of action as earlier court dramas were.43 Rather, the bleak atmosphere of despair that characterizes the play can be attributed in part to the fear that the sort of intrigues and political disasters represented were about to engulf England when James eventually travelled south to claim his contested birthright.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6 7

See, especially, Lilian Winstanley, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921); Stuart M. Kurland, ‘Hamlet and the Scottish Succession?’, Studies in English Literature 34 (1994), pp. 279— 300; Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 99–109. See Robert M. Kingdon, Myths about the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacres, 1572–1576 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), ch. 3 ; Roger A. Mason, ‘George Buchanan, James VI and the Presbyterians’ in Roger A. Mason ed., Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 112–37; Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), ch. 3. David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: Cape, 1956), pp. 42–8. All references to Shakespeare are to The Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (London: Thomson, 2001). See Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1951), introduction, pp. xxv—xxxii. Hence it is hard to read Macbeth as a celebration of royal power, as was once the case. See Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York:

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9 10 11 12 13

14

15

16

17 18

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Macmillan, 1948); Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (London: Methuen, 1986). For the contrary argument see Alan Sinfield, ‘Macbeth: History, Ideology, and Intellectuals’ in Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 95–108; David Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’ in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker eds, Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 78–116; David Scott Kastan, ‘Macbeth and the “Name of King”‘ in Shakespeare After Theory (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 165–82. For discussion, see the important work of Anne McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I; Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); ‘Gender, Religion, and Early Modern Nationalism: Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, and the Genesis of English Anti-Catholicism’, The American Historical Review, 107 (2002), pp. 739–67. John Knox, On Rebellion, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), introduction, p. xvi. Knox, On Rebellion, p. 177. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., pp. 28–9. For discussion see Knox, On Rebellion, introduction; Robert M. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580’ in J. H. Burns ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 193–218, at pp. 193–200. Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: or, concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and the people over a prince, ed. and trans. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 74. For analysis, see Alison Taufer, Holinshed’s Chronicles (New York: Twayne, 1999), ch. 5; Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’, pp. 81– 93. See, for example, the discussions in George Buchanan, The Political Poetry, ed. and trans. Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1995), introduction; J. H. Burns, ‘The Political Ideas of George Buchanan’, Scottish Historical Review, 30 (1951), pp. 60–8; Roger A. Mason, ‘Rex Stoicus: George Buchanan, James VI and the Scottish Polity’ in John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason, and Alexander Murdoch eds, New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), pp. 9–33. Buchanan’s most explicit statement of his political philosophy is to be found in De lure Regni Apud Scotos Dialogus (Edinburgh, 1579). See George Buchanan, ‘Epithalamion for Francis of Valois and Mary Stewart, of the Kingdom of France and Scotland’ in Political Poetry, pp. 126–44. See the extensive narratives in Rerum Scoticarum Historia [The History of Scotland] (1582), bks 16–20; Ane Detectioun of the Duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes (1572). See Stuart Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sources (London: Athlone, 2001), pp. 71–4. Buchanan was also relying on Hector: Boece’s Scotorum Historiae, a major source of the narrative in Holinshed (Buchanan’s History did not appear until 1582).

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20 Raphael Holinshed, Chronicle of Scotland (Arbroath: J. Findlay, 1805), p. 301. Subsequent references to this edition are in parentheses in the text. 21 See Buchanan, History of Scotland, bks 6–7; Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’, pp. 86–8. 22 See Janet Clare, ‘Art Made Tongue Tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (2nd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), ch. 3, for the impact of this injunction on drama. 23 Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), introduction, pp. 1–13; The First and Second Parts of John Hayward’s The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII (London: Royal Historical Society, 1991). 24 For further discussion, see Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Political Culture (London: Thomson, Arden Critical Companions, 2003), especially ch. 2. 25 See Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). 26 Taufer, Holinshed’s Chronicles, pp. 131–3. 27 See Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 54, 82. 28 For discussion, see Sir Israel Gollancz, The Sources of ‘Hamlet’ (1926); Hamlet, ed. Jenkins, introduction, pp. 82–112. 29 For recent discussion, see Nicholas Greene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 30 For discussion, see Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics, pp. 103–6; Winstanley, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession, ch. 2. 31 Hamlet, ed. Jenkins, 1.5.72–3. All subsequent references to this edition. 32 See Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics, p. 105. For an analysis of anti-Marian propaganda to which any study of the material is indebted, see James Emerson Phillips, Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964). On Darnley’s murder, see chs. 2–3. 33 Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics, p. 107. 34 This section draws in part on the argument in my Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, ch. 2. 35 Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, pp. 20–1. 36 Phillips, Images of a Queen, ch. 3. See also Sarah M. Dunnigan, Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pt 1. 37 Buchanan, The Tyrannous reign of Mary Stewart: George Buchanan’s Account, trans. and ed. W. A. Gatherer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958), p. 169. In The History of Scotland Buchanan claims that Mary’s French education failed to instruct her properly so that ‘the seeds of virtue, wizened by the allurements of luxury, would be prevented from reaching ripeness and fruition’ (p. 54). 38 Phillips, Images of a Queen, p. 34. 39 See, for example, Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (2nd edn, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), passim.

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40 Dunnigan, Eros and Poetry, pp. 23—7. 41 See David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 42 Richard A. McCabe, ‘The Masks of Duessa: Spenser, Mary Queen of Scots, and James VI’, English Literary Renaissance, 17 ( 1987), pp. 224–42; Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser and the Stuart Succession’, Literature and History 13.1 (Spring 2004), pp. 9–24. 43 See Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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’How Scottish was ‘the Scottish play’? Macbeth’s national identity in the eighteenth century REBECCA ROGERS

One of the best-known features of Macbeth is its alias. Such is the notoriety of the misadventure apparently visited upon those foolhardy enough to utter ‘Macbeth’ within a theatre, that it is frequently referred to as ‘the Scottish play’, even by those without a superstitious bent.1 The adoption of this moniker, like the avoidance of walking under ladders, is normally an affectation and does not indicate any real fear of paranormal malice.2 What it does indicate is a willingness to signal familiarity with the anecdotes that are markers of Shakespeare’s central position in British education, heritage, and cultural life. The alias suggests that the play’s Scottishness is its defining characteristic, which is debatable. Certainly it would appear that directors of recent productions are less interested in signifying the play’s geographical and cultural locale than they are in exploring the characterization of Lady Macbeth, or creating a rationale for the witches, or dramatizing the alienating effects of war.3 Nevertheless, these productions are commonly understood to be variations on the theme of a ‘straight’ performance of Macbeth, which is as wedded to kilts and Scottish accents as ‘straight’ Shakespearean comedies are to the doublet and hose. But, as this chapter will demonstrate, Macbeth’s stageScottishness was a relatively late development in the play’s post-Restoration afterlife. The play only acquired national traits at the time when the national identities of England and Scotland were being reformulated and Shakespeare’s pre-eminent position in English cultural life was being consolidated. During the eighteenth century, as Shakespeare was undergoing the critical recuperation required for his accession to the role of national poet,4

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the relationship between England and Scotland was also under negotiation. The 1707 Treaty of Union yoked together two separate countries that had a long history of antagonism, which persisted after the treaty had been signed and erupted in 1715 and 1745 with the Jacobite uprisings. Tensions also simmered in the aftermath of the Seven Years War when Scots who had been indispensable in the armed forces were rewarded for their military successes with prominent appointments in London society. For those who feared that Scots were invading the centre of power, the Highlander was imagined as a hostile foreigner who was all the more threatening for his geographical proximity and proven volatility. English anxieties were not allayed by the conspicuous intellectual vitality exhibited in the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, and the literary and cultural self-confidence evident in Home’s Douglas and Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry.5 If anything the ‘Gaelic Revival’ confirmed Scottophobic fears that Northerners were intent on cultural imperialism as well as economic migration. Given that the eighteenth century was notable for both Shakespeare’s cultural elevation and for outbreaks of Anglo-Scottish hostility, Macbeth’s theatrical presentation in the period is of particular interest. Was the play’s location emphasized? Did international tensions impact upon how the play was produced or the frequency of its production? How Scottish was ‘the Scottish play’ in the eighteenth century and what might this tell us about the relationship between cultural products and perceived national identities at the time?

The staging of Macbeth National characteristics, like other defining traits, can be signified on stage by manipulating the theatrical sign-systems of costume, scenery and, in this case, the voice. However, for the majority of the eighteenth century, standard production strategies did not facilitate the construction of stage Scottishness. The primary purpose of costume in the operations of a fiercely competitive star system, was to make its wearers look good. Certainly ‘character parts’ would be dressed to indicate status, occupation and peculiar traits, but their clothing would not necessarily form part of an organized pattern of visual signs: costumes were rarely designed to generate historical or aesthetic coherence. Thus, when David Garrick played Macbeth in the production that dominated the London stage for a quarter of a century,6 he was dressed in contemporary breeches, stockings, waistcoat, and over-jacket as depicted in the portrait by Zoffany.7

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Similarly, the use of scenery was more decorative than functional. Innovations in theatre-design in the Restoration had ensured that perspectival scenes, created by means of a series of painted, moving screens, were a standard feature of the theatrical experience.8 However, scenery was rarely commissioned for a particular production and the same sets were used repeatedly. So although Macbeth conveniently utilized such stock settings as the castle, the woods, and the heath, the Scottishness of these locations would not have been signalled on what a nineteenth-century commentator derided as ‘the miserable pair of flats that used to clap together on even the stage trodden by Mr. Garrick; [depicting] architecture without selection or propriety’.9 Thus the play’s national anonymity was guaranteed by nonspecific costumes and scenery; moreover, actors were unlikely to imitate a Scottish accent for fear that it would not be recognized by audiences. Scottish characters rarely featured in English drama in the first half of the eighteenth century.10 Indeed, as Linda Colley notes, few English dramatists knew how to mimic Scots language.11 Perhaps the most compelling evidence that Macbeth had not been equated with Scottishness at this time is the complete disjunction between the play’s theatrical life and international events. Surely productions of ‘the Scottish play’ would have been affected in some way by the upsurge in Anglo-Scottish tensions at the times of the Treaty of Union, the Jacobite rebellions and the conclusion of the Seven Years War? London’s topical interest in its northern neighbour might have generated a sudden increase in the number of productions. Alternatively, the tensions might have rendered Macbeth unplayable until the Gaelic threat had been diffused. In fact, one looks in vain for echoes of heightened Anglo-Scottish hostility in the play’s performance history. There was a remarkably stable mean and median average of five annual performances of the play in London across the eighteenth century, and this consistency was maintained in the troublesome years.12 Macbeth’s apparent quarantine from the real world can largely be explained by the insularity and inertia of the theatre as a cultural institution at this time. Theatrical productions were remarkably uniform: plays in performance remained unchanged for years, and actors frequently played the same role for the duration of their stage career. Garrick and Spranger Barry, for example, both played Macbeth between one and three times a season, across a span of twenty-four years, and ‘Gentleman’ Smith performed the role sixty-one times in sixteen years. For the modern theatregoer, the disparity

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between the age of the actor and his/ her character is extraordinary.13 Perhaps even more alien is the fact that the actors aimed to reproduce the same performance every time. For example, we know from pictorial and literary evidence that Garrick reacted to the appearance of Old Hamlet’s Ghost with the same elaborately contrived ‘Hamlet-start’ for some twenty years.14 This consistency was a direct product of companies’ production strategies. Consecutive performances of the same play were rare and were usually restricted to new plays whose novelty could draw large audiences. This meant that one-night performances of plays such as Macbeth occurred months apart, and rehearsal time was so limited that polished professional productions could only be achieved by reproducing the scenes and sequences as they had already been blocked. If the personnel changed, the rehearsal process was designed to allow new actors to be inserted as cogs into a welloiled theatrical machine. As such, neither cast-changes nor the march of time radically altered the play’s fundamental performance characteristics. The interpretative inertia was amplified by the consensus belief that it was possible to produce a definitive performance of a dramatic role. So, when Garrick won public acclaim for his Macbeth, most of his peers – including Mossop, Barry, Sheridan, Powell, Holland, and Henderson – attempted to replicate the paradigmatic performance.15 As such there was little space for theatrical innovation. If a new dramatic interpretation was successful, it quickly became established as a performance convention, in turn becoming the new definitive interpretation. This process is epitomized by Sarah Siddons’ reworking of the sleepwalking scene. Siddons first played Lady Macbeth on 2 February 1785. Having observed a somnambulist in preparation for the role, Siddons was convinced that she should emphasize the horrors of her nightmare, rather than the fact that she was dreaming. She decided to put the candle down on stage to wash her hands vigorously, to the dismay of her stage manager Sheridan: ‘he insisted that if I did put the candle out of my hand, it would be thought a presumptuous innovation, as Mrs Pritchard had always retained it in hers’.16 Sheridan’s fears were misplaced. The sleepwalking scene was so chilling that one critic, in a comment that became almost as famous as Siddons’ interpretation, declared: ‘Well, sir, I smelt blood! I swear that I smelt blood!’17 The actress played Lady Macbeth eleven times in her first season (1784–85), and gave sixty-three performances before the century was out, making her interpretation of the role even more monolithic than Garrick’s Macbeth. Her performance also placed the sleepwalking scene at the heart of the play’s

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visual iconography. Before Siddons’ performance, the sleepwalking scene was rarely depicted in illustrated editions of the play: only one of six volumes from 1709–1774 portrays the scene. After her performance the dramatic moment emerged as a synecdoche of the play as a whole: in the eight illustrated editions of the play from 1785–1806, only two texts did not include an image of the sleepwalking scene.18 The constrictions generated by an adulatory star-system and iterative rehearsal strategies resulted in remarkably consistent performances. This uniformity is evidenced by the existence of The Play House PocketCompanion, which was published in 1779 as a portable guide to the playingtime of performances on the London stage.19 The Companion provided act-byact time-plans for a collection of frequently performed plays, so that its readers could calculate the duration of the evening’s performance. This remarkable pocket-book could only have been marketed if there was a recognized consistency in performance length, and hence performance characteristics, regardless of who starred in a play or where it was produced. The Companion’s bald statement that Macbeth lasts two hours and fourteen minutes is clear evidence of a standard mode of performance. With such uniformity of production standards it is not surprising that the eighteenth-century theatre did not respond to topical events. Nor is it surprising that Macbeth’s Scottishness was not actively dramatized, or that the play’s production did not respond to outbreaks of Anglo-Scottish tension. Given this context, what is interesting is that one production in the last quarter of the eighteenth century did seek to innovate, did attempt to dramatize the play’s national traits and respond to the sometimes fraught negotiations between English and Scottish culture. The fact that the production was a resounding failure is therefore interesting in its own right.

Macklin’s ‘Old Caledonian’ Macbeth In 1773, Charles Macklin dramatized Macbeth’s national characteristics for the first time in the play’s afterlife. His ‘Old Caledonian’ production aimed to construct a comprehensive theatrical vision of medieval Scotland, through costume and set-design, paying ‘the same attention to the subordinate characters as well as to the scenes, decorations, music and other incidental parts of the performance’.20 Macklin’s ‘judicious alteration of the dresses’21 resulted in costumes that were recognizably Scottish if not historically accurate. According to a line

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engraving in The London Magazine of November 1773, the actor wore ordinary late eighteenth-century knee-breeches, with a fashionable Scottish short jacket under a traditional belted plaid.22 Notably, he did not wear a kilt. The kilt would have been an unmistakable symbol of Scottishness, but it would also have symbolized Gaelic rebelliousness because Highland dress had been outlawed after the Jacobite uprising of 1745.23 Macklin’s first entrance as Macbeth was ‘preceded by fife, drum, bagpipe and a bodyguard in highland dress’ playing the Coldstream March. Both the anthem and the instruments had been carefully selected to signify primitive Gaelic warrior culture as Macklin understood it. Similarly, the scenery representing the interior of a medieval Scottish castle, showed ‘every room ... full of bad pictures of warriors, sword, helmet, target and dirk, escutcheons – and the Hall, boars stuffed, wolves, and full of pikes and broadswords’.24 Thus, visual tropes and musical codes evoked the fantasy of medieval Scotland’s heroes, warriors and primitive glories, which had been popularized by Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry.25 On the opening night, 23 October 1773, Macklin’s vision was greeted with jeers and heckling, and the reviews in the following Monday’s papers were no less savage. The London Evening Post wrote: ‘In act the second, scene the first, Shakespeare has made Macbeth murder Duncan; now Mr Macklin, being determined to copy from no man, reversed this incident, and in the very first act, scene the second, murdered Macbeth.’26 Not to be beaten, Macklin addressed his audience before the second performance, and blamed the rowdiness of the opening night on spoil-tactics orchestrated by Garrick. Macklin accused the Drury Lane actors, Reddish and Sparks, of ‘leading a planned coalition against him’. However, the actors signed affidavits to deny their involvement in any smear campaign; tempers frayed and the affair culminated in a riot when Macklin performed Shylock on 18 November 1773.27 The Old Caledonian Macbeth became a cause célèbre, and ‘Poetical Squibs’ began to circulate in the media. The St James’s Chronicle, alluding to the procession of eight kings in Macbeth, catalogued eight actors’ achievements in the eponymous role from the high point of Garrick, ‘whose utt’rance truth impress’d, / While ev’ry look the tyrant’s guilt confess’d’, down to Macklin, of whom ‘all he boasts, is, that he falls the last’.28 Another venomous squib jibed: The witches, while living, deluded Macbeth, And the devil lay hold of his soul after death;

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But to punish the tyrant this would not content him, So Macklin he sent on the stage to present him.29

Macklin doggedly gave four performances of his Old Caledonian Macbeth in the 1773–74 season, then played the role once in each of the next two years: a brow-beaten total of just six performances. The hostility of the public response to the production can be partly explained by London theatregoers’ fidelity to Garrick: if his interpretation was definitive, then Macklin’s audacious characterization was impertinent. More important, however, is the fact that the very events that had made it possible for Macklin to stage an Old Caledonian Macbeth also compromized its chance of popular success. Although Scots scarcely appeared onstage in the first half of the eighteenth century, their metropolitan presence during and after the Seven Years War meant that Londoners both recognized Scottish accents and enjoyed their stage-caricatures. Xenophobia generated the theatrical stereotype of the obsequious Scotsman-on-the-make. Utilizing this model, Macklin had written a play in 1764, The True-born Scotsman, in which his main character – Sir Pertinax Macsycophant – admitted that he had grovelled his way to a fortune: I raised it by boowing; by boowing, sir; I naver in my life could stond straight i’ th’ prescence of a great mon; but awways boowed, and boowed, as it were by instinct... Sir, I boowed, and watched, and attended, and dangled up o’ the then great mon, till I got intill the very bowels of his confidence.30

So in the immediate aftermath of the Seven Years War, Macklin recognized the theatrical potential of parodying perceived national traits. However, his enthusiastic derogation of Scotsmen was problematic precisely because they were achieving wealth and status in British society. Government censors deemed the play unacceptable, and prevented it from being performed in London theatres until 1781. Even then the title had to be changed from The True-Born Scotsman to the less contentious Man of the World.31 Thus, the international sensitivities that generated stereotypes and satire also made them theatrically inappropriate. Similarly, in the case of Macklin’s Macbeth, the very ‘Gaelic Revival’ that had generated recognizable theatrical signifiers also reminded Londoners of the feared Scottish invasion of English culture. Even though Macklin had eschewed the kilt, he could not create an Old Caledonian Macbeth that was not ensnared in the mesh of Scottophobic anxieties evident in the 1770s. London theatregoers were evidently not ready for one of the English national poet’s great tragedies to become ‘the Scottish

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play’ at this stage. However, in another cultural institution that was fiercely topical, not hamstrung by operational inertia, which revered Shakespeare but was no respecter of persons, the national characteristics of Macbeth had already been exploited.

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Bute, Wilkes, and the Shakespearean verse parody If proof were needed of Shakespeare’s pre-eminent position in English literary culture in the second half of the eighteenth century, it could be located in the emergence of the Shakespearean verse parody in the 1760s. Any type of parody relies upon the pleasure of recognition: a parody can only be successful if the original to which it alludes is sufficiently well known. As such, it is testament to the contemporary cultural visibility of Shakespeare’s plays that satirists began to use them as raw material for their political ends, confident that their reading audience would get the jokes. It is also testament to Shakespeare’s symbolic capital at the time that satirists wished to assert the English national poet’s support for their own political cause.32 Verse parodies concentrated on Shakespearean set pieces, subtly altering the language used at key dramatic moments to generate meaning in the gap between the original and the adaptation. The reader was required to recognize clever inversions of the original language and to draw parallels between characters in the play and contemporary real-life figures as they appeared in the satire. As such, the parodies had to be sufficiently derivative for the literary allusions to be clear, and sufficiently divergent to generate a space for humour and political comment. Although the satires might incorporate a range of comic effects – from scatalogical humour to targeted political derision – they would, without exception, flatter the reader’s ability to recognize high-culture allusions. Accordingly, verse parodies targeted a welleducated, politically aware, urban elite: readers who knew as much about Shakespeare as they did about politics and current affairs. The subject of the first ever Shakespearean verse parody was John Stuart, the Third Earl of Bute. On 26 May 1762 George III made Bute, his old tutor and personal friend, the First Lord of the Treasury and in doing so created the first Scottish Prime Minister of Britain. Although no one dared to question the king’s decision publicly, Bute was deeply unpopular in the House of Commons. As a Scot and a royal favourite, Bute was always destined to have an image problem, but the incompetence and corruption of his leadership took his unpopularity to previously unplumbed depths. As one contemporary remarked: ‘He was too proud to be respectable or respected; too cold and

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silent to be amiable; too cunning to have great abilities; and his inexperience made him too precipitately undertake what it disabled him from executing.’33 The Prime Minister was widely distrusted, which meant that his political blunders were compounded into public-relations disasters. For example, when Bute negotiated the end of the Seven Years War, the terms he obtained for Britain were less advantageous than they should have been.34 Instead of winning the laurels of the peacemaker, Bute was accused of accepting bribes from France: England’s old enemy and Scotland’s old ally. Even by eighteenth-century standards, Bute’s administration was brief, blundering, and corrupt. On 8 April 1763, after less than a year, he resigned his office. However, many feared that Bute remained a shadowy and unaccountable influence over George III, a fear that was aggravated by the persistent and popular but quite unfounded rumour that Bute was bedding the King’s mother. During and after his disastrous premiership, Bute was a prime target for lampoons, cartoons and caricatures, all of which attacked him on the grounds of his nationality. Bute’s Scottishness served as a static point of reference in the midst of complex and bitterly personal faction fighting. A shorthand of symbols existed to identify Scots and to mark them out for attack; these included the kilt, bagpipes, whisky and, in the eighteenth century, testosterone. No doubt partly because of the kilt, Scots were believed to be sexually insatiable,35 and the fear that Scots were usurping England’s rightful authority manifested itself in an obsession with Gaelic sexual prowess, which reached its apotheosis in the speculations about Bute and the Princess Dowager. The extent of the paranoia is revealed in Charles Churchill’s rabidly anti-Scottish poem of 1763, A Prophecy of Famine: ‘Into our places, states, and beds they creep; / They’ve got sense to get what we want sense to keep.’36 Political opponents saw the Prime Minister’s inferior nationality as both the cause of his failings and the symptom of a wider malaise in English political life. Bute’s most redoubtable and vociferous antagonist began a list of the Prime Minister’s flaws thus: The first is, that he is a Scot. Can he help that, say his friends? No, nor can we; I from my soul wish that we could. – But, say they – you cannot impute his country to him as a fault; it is his misfortune. – The misfortune, I am afraid, is ours. In spite of all their specious arguments, I am certain, that reason could never believe that a Scot was fit to have the management of English affairs.37

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This polemic was penned by John Wilkes, Member of Parliament for Aylesbury. The attack appeared in The North Briton, which was established by Wilkes and Churchill as a counter-attack to the views expressed in The Briton, a political weekly that Bute had launched to defend his administration.38 Wilkes wrote in the guise of a ‘North Briton’ – that is, a Scotsman who had ideas above (and south of) his station – whose greedy, selfserving and sycophantic behaviour confirmed the prejudices held by the English xenophobes at whom the paper was targeted. The chain of events that brought Wilkes to national attention began on 23 April 1763, with the publication of the forty-fifth issue of The North Briton, which famously insinuated that George III had countenanced a deliberate lie.39 The royal response was swift: Wilkes’ papers were seized and he was imprisoned in the Tower for seditious libel. However, as the paper was published anonymously, only the printers were named on the arrest warrant. The apprehension of an unnamed individual on a general warrant was illegal, and on 6 May 1763, Lord Chief Justice Pratt released Wilkes on the grounds of his parliamentary privilege. Having successfully defied both the royal and legal courts, John Wilkes emerged as a hero of outspoken, patriotic individualism. The Wilkes controversy became a cause célèbre, generating many column inches of commentary in coffeehouse journals, as well as cartoons and ballads.40 What is more, the controversy spawned a new satirical form – the Shakespearean verse parody – with the publication of The Three Conjurors.

The Three Conjurors The Three Conjurors, A Political Interlude41 set the standard for all subsequent Shakespearean verse parodies. First: it was intensely topical, published in the immediate aftermath of the Wilkes affair. Second: it cast contemporary public figures as characters in a Shakespearean narrative, generating associations between real and fictional individuals. Third: it reworked its source-play’s most famous dramatic scenes and most memorable poetic aphorisms, so that the reading audience would recognize the subtle textual changes and appreciate their comic potential and political message. The Three Conjurors is an anti-establishment account of the Wilkes controversy, which condemns the ex-Prime Minister on the grounds of his alien nationality by dint of conflating ‘Bute’ and ‘Macbeth’ into ‘Macboote’, thereby creating the embodiment of Scottish tyranny. Macboote is a cipher heavily inscribed with eighteenth-century national stereotypes: he is a kiltwearing, whisky-swilling, bagpipe-playing, miserly sycophant. His first

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appearance is heralded by the unmistakable sound of bagpipes and the comment: ‘The bagpipes hear! / Macboote is near!’42 Shortly afterwards, the reworking of the witches’ prophecy alludes to Bute’s hunger for wealth and power and his unfitness for office: ‘Thou wishest / To be great, ar’t not without ambition, / Nor without the vices that attend it. – / What thou wou’d’st fainly, that thou wou’d’st cheaply, / Indeed, too cheaply.’43 Later, when outnumbered and outmanoeuvred by his opponents, Macboote fortifies himself with the definitive Scottish drink, demanding: ‘Hang those that talk of W[il]kes, give me some whisky.’44 The stereotype of the sexually insatiable Scotsman and rumours of the affair between Bute and the king’s mother were irresistible to the satirist. The Princess Dowager appears as ‘Heccate’ – a synthesis of Hecate and Lady Macbeth. Thus, a woman alleged to have had sexual relations with a Scotsman is imaginatively associated with a witch and an accessory to murder. The unnaturalness of Heccate’s behaviour is indicated by the fact that her sexual desires match Macboote’s and her desire for power outstrips his. The satirical narrative suggests that not only is Macboote the real power behind the young, inexperienced king, but Heccate is the hidden force behind Macboote, and she maintains her authority through sexual negotiation. In a reworking of Macbeth’s 2.5, Heccate berates the three conjurors for intervening between her and her lover: ‘how did you dare / T’advise and traffic with Macboote / In Matters of such high dispute? / And I the mistress of his charms, / The dark contriver of all harms’.45 In the next scene, she contrives harm by reworking Lady Macbeth’s ‘unsex me here’ speech, asking the ‘spirits / That tend on party rage’ to fill her with ‘female subtilty’ so that she can broker shady political deals on Macboote’s behalf. She commands the spirits to ‘Stop up the access to reconcilement, / That no compunctious visitings of mercy / Shake my fix’d hate, nor urge a peace between / The enemies of great Macboote and me.’46 Confronted with such a close textual parody, it is glaringly obvious that Heccate does not ask to be unsexed, and this is because her shameless insatiability is a key factor in the Princess Dowager’s character assassination. The scenes with Heccate are designed to reinforce the stereotype of Scottish sexual voracity and to present Macboote as no more than the sum of his regrettable national characteristics. The satire’s raison d’être is to ridicule and condemn Bute and, as such, there is no space for Shakespearean psychological complexity. Accordingly, the satirist had to avoid dramatic moments in which Macbeth was sympathetic or admirable and, in doing so, diverged from the prevailing critical understanding of the character. In the

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second half of the eighteenth century, writers increasingly interpreted Macbeth as a moral fable in which the protagonist’s initial courage and his final guilt and remorse were equally exemplary. As early as 1746, John . Upton argued that Macbeth was calculated to demonstrate how ‘wickedness draws on wickedness’.47 In 1769, Mrs Montagu claimed that the play warned its audiences of the temptations of vice and the torments of guilt: ‘Macbeth’s emotions are the struggles of conscience; his agonies are the agonies of remorse. They are lessons of justice, and warnings to innocence.’48 Clearly the satirist’s Macboote had to be divorced from the critics’ Macbeth-asEveryman; so to erase any vestiges of heroism The Three Conjurors avoids the early stages of the play in which Macbeth’s bravery is displayed and translates the final siege into a demonstration of Macboote’s cowardice and incompetence. Thus, when Macboote echoes one of Macbeth’s profoundly self-aware soliloquies it is not to repent of his actions or acknowledge his fate, but to admit his abject failure. Macboote

Macbeth49

I have rul’d long enough – my way of life

I have liv’d long enough: my way of life

Is fall’n into reproach and infamy,

– Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf;

And that which shou’d attend on resignation

And that which should accompany old age,

As praise, and gratitude, and troops of friends,

As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have – but in their stead

I must not look to have; but in their stead,

Curses both loud and deep –

Curses not loud, but deep,

Macbeth is cursed because his heroic ambitions degenerate into megalomania. Macboote is cursed because he seeks to advance himself and his countrymen at England’s expense. In a reworking of 4.1, Macboote reveals that he does not care if the country is torn apart by civil strife, if commerce disintegrates, if great institutions collapse, if the ‘welfare / Of Br[itai]n’s children crumble all together / Ev’n till the island sicken’.50 Indeed, Macboote wants England to wither so that Scotland can swell. Borrowing from the lexicon of imperial struggle, Macboote describes famine as a power that will abandon Scotland and colonize England, leaving the Scots free to fill their bellies and pockets from the spoils of the British empire: ‘Famine no more shall hover o’er our land, / But fix her empire in Bri[tann]ia’s heart. / While Ca[la]do[n]ia grasps her plunder’d wealth.’51

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However, Macboote’s crusade for Gaelic supremacy is obstructed by the lone figure of Wilkes. As a member of parliament and the editor of a paper, Wilkes’ anti-Scottish outpourings cannot be silenced and he is identified as the source of all Macboote’s problems in the satire’s opening lines: the first conjuror asks, ‘When shall we three see again / An easy and a peaceful reign?’, and the second replies, ‘When the hurly burly’s o’er / When this W[il]kes shall be no more’.52 Throughout the satire his ‘horrid image’ haunts Macboote as the prospect of regicide does Macbeth.53 Because Wilkes was in prison as events recounted in the satire occurred, he only figures in the text as an amalgam of other characters’ comments, and these associate him with the martyr Banquo and the patriotic man of integrity Macduff. Just as Banquo’s issue threatened to disrupt Macbeth’s patrilineage, so Wilkes’ political activities obstruct Macboote’s avaricious plans, and ‘a deed of dreadful note’ must be done to stop both of them.54 Wilkes is also likened to Macduff when the second apparition warns: ‘of W[il]kes beware, / Avoiding him, nought else is worth thy care’. The third apparition advises Macboote to suppress The North Briton: ‘Be bloody, bold and resolute, laugh to scorn / The pen of W[il]kes’.55 Thus The Three Conjurors constructs the Wilkes figure as a multi-faceted opponent to Macboote’s corruption and folly by selecting aphorisms that align him with Shakespearean characters of integrity who display courage in the face of tyranny. The three conjurors of the title represent ‘the triumvirate’ of politicians who were instrumental in Wilkes’ arrest. Verville, Gremonté, and Haxylaff are the satirical doppelgangers of George Grenville,56 who succeeded Bute upon his resignation, and the Earls of Egremonte and Halifax, who became Grenville’s secretaries. Wilkes dubbed the political trio the ‘Duumvirate’ in The North Briton, and described them as ‘the three wretched tools of [Bute’s] power’ in the infamous forty-fifth issue.57 In the satire they hail Macboote as ‘Kn[i]ght O’th’ Th[ist]le’, ‘Kn[i]ght O’th’ G[a]r[te]r’ and ‘Macboote! That wou’dst be K[in]g / Hereafter’.58 Thus Macboote’s fate is prescribed by the conjurors who control the political underworld, just as Macbeth’s past, present and future were prophesied by creatures with more than mortal knowledge. Bute resigned the Order of the Thistle – a peculiarly Scottish honour that had been reinstated by James II – to become a Knight of the Garter as soon as he was created Lord of the Treasury.59 Of course Bute could never become king, but the satire uses the Shakespearean formula to articulate the fear that Bute controlled George III even after his resignation: that he was, in Pitt’s words, ‘the Minister behind the curtain’.60

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Macbeth’s famous cauldron scene, the mnemonic core of the play’s visual iconography and phonetic vitality, is also at the heart of the satire. Imitating the unmistakable metre and form of the witches’ incantation, the conjurors concoct a potion to spirit Wilkes away to prison in which the original loathsome ingredients are replaced with symbols of Wilkes’ popular support; such as the ‘sweltring venom’ of the ‘Priest, that wrap’d in slander’s robe / Inflicts beyond the plagues of Job’; namely, Churchill – clergyman, author of A Prophecy of Famine, and co-editor of The North Briton.61 Heccate rounds the charm up by echoing the ‘Black spirits and white’ song: ‘Oh, give us pow’r / To send to th’ Tower / Ev’ry writer, / Or inditer, / And keep him there, / Till he despair, / Or else submit / As we think fit’.62 In this adaptation of Macbeth’s most resonant theatrical motif, and throughout the satire, key-players in the Wilkes controversy are cast in Shakespearean set-pieces. For example, Lord Temple, an active opponent of Bute and a vigorous supporter of Wilkes, is likened to Banquo: Macboote comments to his wife, ‘Thou know’st that T[em]ple and his faction live’, and she replies, ‘But in them nature’s copy’s not eterne.’63 Similarly, the satirist takes the opportunity to allude to Birnam and to Robert Wood – a politician who was instrumental in Wilkes’ arrest – by showing Macboote’s horror when ‘a moving Wood’ seizes Wilkes’ papers, thereby catalyzing the chain of events that will end in his downfall.64 The satire’s comic success depended upon its readers recognizing similarities between contemporary figures and Shakespeare’s characters, and in recognizing subtle and witty inversions of the original language, and this is why the witches have a disproportionate importance in the satire. It might seem strange that a satire designed to attack Bute should rework all four of Macbeth’s witch scenes and be titled The Three Conjurors rather than, perhaps, The Scottish Tyrant. The witches’ centrality stems partly from the satirical need to claim that Bute’s feeble grasp on power was strengthened by the efforts of corrupt, incompetent, self-serving lackeys who admit: ‘To skreen Macboote is all our Care’.65 But the main reason that the witches dominate the satire is because they already dominated the version of Macbeth that existed in the popular imagination and by beginning with an adaptation of the play’s famous opening lines, the satire situates its readers and prepares them to engage with the comic pleasures and political themes of the text.

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Conclusions The publication of The Three Conjurors marked a new stage in the development of Shakespeare’s posthumous reputation. The appearance of a satire whose comic success depended upon its readers’ close textual knowledge of the source-play indicates the extent to which choice aphorisms had saturated popular culture. The fact that this satire was the progenitor of numerous close parodies of Shakespearean texts for political purposes indicates that the original had some impact. The publication of The Three Conjurors also marked a new stage in the afterlife of Macbeth, at which the play’s national traits became central. The ease with which Bute and Macbeth could be elided into Macboote, and the convenient despotism of Shakespeare’s protagonist, allowed the satirist to exploit the play’s hithertoinsignificant Scottishness to attack Bute on the grounds of his nationality. However, the assault was only possible because the Scottophobia of the 1760s had generated a stereo, typical shorthand with which the satirist could both allude to and consolidate entrenched xenophobic prejudices. Moreover, references to Bute’s caricature-Scottishness served to accentuate Wilkes’ distinctive Englishness. Not only were Wilkes’ patriotic credentials guaranteed by Shakespeare’s apparent championing of his cause, but the national poet’s cultural pre-eminence was fortified by his unconscious literary defence of English liberty. Thus the emergence of a new cultural format made it possible to blend high and low culture to validate one version of contemporary events by appealing to popular prejudice with a deftness denied to the inert cultural institution of the theatre. In the process, Macbeth’s national traits came to the fore, and it is just possible that The Three Conjurors may have initiated the process by which the tragedy became ‘the Scottish play’.

Notes 1

2

For a laborious trawl through theatrical mishaps related to the play, see Richard Huggett, The Curse of Macbeth and other Theatrical Superstitions (Chippenham: Picton, 1981). Understandably, given their profession and its inherent insecurities, theatrical personnel are more likely to treat the superstition with respect. In an interview on 28 February 1996, the actor Tom Chadbon – who had just played Duncan at the Tricycle in Kilburn – said, ‘You’re actually dealing with black magic [in Macbeth] ... Those witches, they’re not messing about, you know. When I was doing it I was quite frightened sometimes.’

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4

5

6

7 8

9 10 11 12

13

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The two most recent productions to have been filmed for a potentially wide television audience foregrounded such issues. The costuming and stage business of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production at the Swan Theatre in 1999, directed by Gregory Doran and starring Anthony Sher and Harriet Walter, which was subsequently filmed for Channel 4, explicitly evoked the contemporary conflict in Bosnia. The BBC’s Macbeth on the Estate, directed by Penny Woolcock, which was filmed on a Birmingham sink estate in 1997 and cast local people alongside the professional actors, made a feature of Lady Macbeth’s childlessness. The film’s extratextual shots of Lady Macbeth mourning in an empty nursery (Is the baby dead / taken by Social Services?) provided maternal loss as a rationale for her subsequent behaviour. For a detailed history of Shakespeare’s cultural canonization, see Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: Vintage, 1989). See Richard B. Sher, “‘Those Scotch Imposters and their Cabal”: Ossian and the Scottish Enlightenment’, Man and Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1 (1982), pp. 55–63. Garrick produced a new, predominantly Shakespearean text of Macbeth in 1744 that displaced Davenant’s Restoration adaptation, which had monopolized the London stages for eighty years. Garrick’s Macbeth won immediate acclaim and was a lasting success, being the third most popular tragedy in the Drury Lane repertory during the actor’s career, performed ninety-six times between 1744 and 1776. Garrick played the title role thirteen times in his first season, and thirty-eight times in all, making it his sixth most frequently performed Shakespearean role. See Appendix B of George Winchester Stone Jr, and George M. Kahrl, David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), pp. 656–8. Johan Zoffany, ‘David Garrick as Macbeth and Hannah Pritchard as Lady Macbeth’, Oil on canvas, 102 x 127.5cm, The Garrick Club. See John Loftis, Richard Southern, Marion Jones, and A. H. Scouten, The Revels History of Drama in English, 1660—1750 (London: Methuen, 1976), pp. 89–95. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, 2 vols (London, 1825), p. xiv. Captain Jamy’s minor role in Henry V is a rare exception. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 128. The number of performances in the years of the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite rebellions, and Bute’s premiership correspond exactly to this average. In the 1707 season there was a slight increase to seven performances; but intense wrangling over the Act of Union took place over several years, and these seven performances actually account for the period from September 1706 to July 1708. Note that Garrick first played King Lear aged only twenty-five, and was still playing the teenaged Romeo at forty-three.

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14 In 1757, the Theatrical Examiner wryly commented: ‘The start at the ghost... may be picturesque, but it is grossly absurd to see a man fling himself into so exact an attitude, which is impossible for him to remain steady in, without two supporters.’ In 1775 a foreign theatregoer wrote a detailed description of the same choreographed effect. See The Theatrical Examiner, an enquiry into the merits and demerits of the present English performers in general (London: J. Doughty, 1757), p. 85; and Lichtenberg’s Visits to England, trans. and ed. Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 10. 15 Only Macklin and Kemble instigated new interpretations. See Dennis Bartholomeusz, Macbeth and the Players (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 82. 16 Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs Siddons, 2 vols (London: 1834), vol. II, p. 38. 17 Sheridan Knowles to Edwin Forrest. Cited Bartholomeusz, Macbeth and the Players, p. 121. 18 Pre-Siddons: Rowe (1714), Theobald (1740), Jennens, Five Plays (1770–74), and Bell (1774) do not illustrate the sleepwalking scene; only Hanmer (1744) does. Post-Siddons: the following all depict the sleepwalking scene: The Picturesque Beauties of Shakespeare (1783–87); Dramatic Writings ... printed complete from the best editions of Sam. Johnson and George Steevens (London: J. Bell etc., 1788); The Shakspeare Gallery (1792); Dramatic Works, rev. George Steevens (London: Boydell, 1802); The Plays of William Shakspeare... with a series of engravings, from original designs of Henry Fuseli, 10 vols (London: F. C. 8c J. Rivington, 1805); and The Plays of William Shakspeare with notes of various commentators, ed. Manley Wood, with plates, 14 vols (London: G. Kearsley, 1806). Only The Plays of William Shakspeare, complete, 8 vols (London: Bellamy and Robarts, 1791) and The Plays of William Shakspeare, 12 vols (London: Vernor & Hood etc., 1798–1800) do not choose to show the scene. 19 The Play House Pocket-Companion; or Theatrical Vade-Mecum (London: 1779) 20 William Cooke, Memoirs of Charles Macklin, Comedian (London: J. Asperne, 1804), p. xxx. Note, however, that Macklin’s old Caledonian vision was riven with inconsistencies. The Scottish troops carried pistols, the castle battlements had cannon and Mrs Hartley, as Lady Macbeth, still wore fashionable contemporary dress which by ‘no means accorded with the habits of the other personages’ according to The London Chronicle, 23–6 October 1773. 21 London Evening Post, Monday 25 October 1773, cited in An Apology for the Conduct of Mr. Charles Macklin, Comedian; Which, it is hoped, will have some Effect in Favour of an aged Player, by whom the Public at large have for many Years been uncommonly gratified (London: T. Axtell and J. Swan, 1773), p. 5. 22 See M. St Clare Byrne, ‘The Stage Costuming of Macbeth in the Eighteenth Century’ in Studies in English Theatre History in Memory of Gabrielle Enthoven (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1952), pp. 52–64.

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23 See Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’ in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 15–41. 24 Cited in Denis Donoghue, ‘Macklin’s Shylock and Macbeth’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 43 (1954), p. 428. 25 Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry was published in 1760, Fingal in 1761, Temora in 1763 and the collected The Works of Ossian in 1765. For the cultural impact of the poems of Ossian see Howard Gaskill ed., Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991) and Fiona J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988). 26 London Evening Post, 25 October 1773; cited in An Apology for the Conduct, p. 5. 27 See entry for Saturday 30 October 1773, in Emmet L. Avery and Arthur H. Scouten eds, The London Stage, 1660–1800, 11 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960). 28 The squib assesses the performances of (in order): Quin, Garrick, Sheridan, Barry, Mossop, Holland, Ross, Smith, and Macklin. Smith is accused of carelessness, and the late Holland’s (apparently plentiful) errors are respectfully passed over. Of all the actors Macklin, unsurprisingly, fares worst. 29 Printed in An Apology for the Conduct, p. 8. 30 J. O. Bartley, Teague, Shenkin and Sawney: Being an Historical Study of the Earliest Irish, Welsh and Scottish Characters in English Plays (Cork, 1954), p. 228; cited in Colley, Britons, pp. 127–8. 31 See Colley, Britons, p. 128. 32 Note that the title-page to The Three Conjurors explicitly states that it is ‘stolen from Shakespeare’. 33 Chesterfield, Characters; cited in Sir Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 133. 34 The definitive peace treaty with France and Spain was signed at Paris on 19 February 1763. 35 A tradition of celebrating Scottish potency dated back to the origins of the Stuart dynasty and endured long after the Glorious Revolution. The Royal Oak was a central symbol of the Stuarts, and it was closely related to ideas about Celtic fertility rituals and the king’s power as an agent of renewal. See Murray G. H. Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 1–6. 36 Charles Churchill, A Prophecy of Famine (London: G. Kearsly, 1763). Note that anxieties about superhuman Scottish potency in the 1760s have their contemporary equivalent in myths about the virility of the threateningly ‘Other’ black male that accompanied the Black Power movement two centuries later. 37 The North Briton, no. 34: 22 January 1763. All references to The North Briton, from No. I to No. XLVI. inclusive. With Several useful and explanatory Notes (London: W. Bingley, 1769). Note that the paper itself was published by George Kearsly, every Saturday, at a cost of two and a half pence.

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38 The first issue of The Briton appeared on 5 June 1762; it was edited by the Scot Tobias Smollet. 39 The forty-fifth issue dealt with the speech that George III gave just before the adjournment of parliament, in which he treated the peace of Hubertsberg as a consequence of the peace of Paris. Wilkes stated that whereas the King’s Speech at the beginning of each parliamentary session gave rise to a debate, the one at the close of each session was a piece of ministerial propaganda upon which MPs had no opportunity to comment. He declared that the recent speech had made King and Country the victims of ‘the most abandoned instance of ministerial effrontery ever attempted to be imposed on mankind’, The North Briton, 45, 23 April 1763. 40 For example: ‘Wilkes, and Liberty: A New Song. To the Tune of, Gee ho Dobbin’ (London: E. Sumpter, 1763). 41 The Three Conjurors, A Political Interlude. Stolen from Shakespeare. As it was performed at sundry places in Westminster, On Saturday the 30th of April and Sunday the 1st of May. Most humbly dedicated to that distressed,

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

and unfortunate Gentleman, John Wilkes Esq. (London: J. Cooke, 1763). Note that Wilkes was seized on 30 April and imprisoned on 1 May. By adopting the advertising traits of a printed play, the title page generates the conceit that the events it satirizes were ‘performed’ in Westminster. It also reminds the reader of the topicality of the satire. (3 Conj. 1.2.31–2) (3 Conj. 2.1.12–16) (3 Conj. 2.2.185) (3 Conj. 1.4.3–7) (3 Conj. 2.1.34–41) John Upton, Critical Observations on Shakespeare (London: G. Hawkins, 1746), p. 50. Mrs (Elizabeth) Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakspeare (London: J. Dodsley, 1769), p. 160. (3 Conj. 2.2.198–203) and (Macbeth 5.3.22–27). All line references to Shakespeare from Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir, 2nd. edn, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1951). (3 Conj. 2.2.83–91) (3 Conj. 1.3.41–3) (3 Conj. 1.1.1–4) (3 Conj. 1.2.81–4). Compare to (Macbeth 1.3.133–7) See (3 Conj. 1.3.32–6) and (Macbeth 3.2.41–6) (3 Conj. 1.2.107–8,116–17) I.e. Gre[e]nville = Ver[t]ville The North Briton, no. 37:12 February 1763 and no. 45: 23 April 1763. (3 Conj. 1.2.51–6) Bute succeeded Newcastle as the First Lord of the Treasury on 26 May 1762, and was created Knight of the Garter on the following day. See Sir Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 157–63.

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61 (3 Conj. 2.2.10–13) 62 (3 Conj. 2.2.54–61) 63 (3 Conj. 1.3.26–7) Compare to (Macbeth 3.2.37–8). Note that Temple attempted to visit Wilkes when he was imprisoned, and later provided financial backing for Wilkes to pursue a court case against Halifax. 64 (3 Conj. 2.2.180) 65 (3 Conj. 1.1.12)

7

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The Bard: Ossian, Burns, and the shaping of Shakespeare ROBERT CRAWFORD

Once an effusion of reverence, the words ‘the bard’ are now an ironic jab.1 Shakespeare knew them, but it is most unlikely he would have called himself a ‘bard’. When Richard III explains, ‘a bard of Ireland told me once / I should not live long after I saw “Richmond”‘, the term ‘bard’ has specific and unEnglish connotations.2 Around 1597 Shakespeare is using it in just the sense found in a 1584 work about Wales: ‘This word Bardh signified such as had knowledge of things to come’.3 Richard Ill’s bard has second sight, and is one of those figures, like the alien witches in Macbeth, who offer a dangerous glimpse of a monarch’s future. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, however, Shakespeare has Enobarbus list ‘scribes, bards, poets’, and seems to link bards to song.4 Here, perhaps for the first time in original English poetry, the term is being moved away from associations with Gaelic or Welsh-speaking poets, and used more in the general sense of ‘poet’ or ‘singer’. The Dubliner Richard Stanyhurst, translating the Aeneid in the later sixteenth century had mentioned bards, but the term was alien enough for Marlowe to leave it as the Latin ‘Bardi’ when he Englished Book I of a work Shakespeare may have known, Lucan’s Pharsalia.5 So, at least as far as original English verse usage goes, the author of Antony and Cleopatra, the poet now often known throughout the Englishspeaking world as ‘the bard’, was instrumental in establishing the more general Anglophone sense of ‘bard’ as ‘poet’. More strikingly, though, Shakespeare became ‘the bard’ substantially as a result of later Scottish cultural dynamics in the mid-eighteenth century. His acquiring of the title ‘bard’ was hastened by the career of another, very different poet who, as a

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result of the global impact of Scottish culture, is also recognized as ‘the bard’ from Adelaide to Zimbabwe. If you talk of ‘the bard’ north of Carlisle or in St Andrew’s societies round the world, you do not mean Shakespeare. You mean Robert Burns. Though deployed with respect in the prose of Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland (published in 1633), the word ‘bard’ was importantly conditioned by its use in Scotland. Its first recorded usages in the English-speaking world are in fifteenth-century Lowland Scottish verse and prose, and are generally unflattering. Bards are associated less with prophecy than with insults, wandering beggars, and a largely Highland and Irish Gaelic-speaking culture scorned by many Scots-speaking Lowlanders. When William Dunbar around 1500 called a rival Scottish poet an ‘Iersche brybour baird’, each word was a studied insult.6 To use ‘Iersche’ (Gaelic) was barbarous to Dunbar’s Lowland ear; to be a ‘brybour’ was to be a vagabond; to be a ‘baird’ was to be a limited sub-poet, rather than a ‘makar’. This pejorative sense continued in Lowland Scotland, and was familiar among the Scots nobility (many of them poets) who travelled south with James VI and I in 1603. A century after Dunbar, in the first versions of his how-to-be-a-king book, the Basilicon Doron, the versifying James VI of Scotland revealed that he had ‘not spaired to playe the bairde against all the estaitis of my kingdome’. By the time James boarded the southern throne, his Scots had been translated for readers more attuned to English, to whom the connotations of the term ‘bairde’ might have been less familiar. In the 1603 edition of Basilicon Doron, the king reveals he has not ‘spared to be something satyrick’.7 The bard, for James, seems to have been associated with satire and invective. Shakespeare, who became one of James’s subjects, wrote plays and poems, but would not have been regarded as a bard. Shakespeare was, however, one of the King’s Men. Moreover, like the King, he was obsessed with how monarchs should behave. None of the world’s playwrights before or after Shakespeare has written anything like so many plays about monarchs. More than a third of Shakespeare’s plays take their titles from kings in Britain, and focus on their actions. The monarchy was one of Shakespeare’s deepest preoccupations, and his work should be seen as linked to that of James VI and I, since both authors (though they did other things too) operated within the once important European genre of ‘advice to princes’. This form of writing provided instruction about how to rule well, and included examples of how to rule badly. It may be traced back to a Greek work admired by King James, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a

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fictionalized narrative supplying advice to an aspiring ruler of Persia. In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance the genre became a pan-European one, with such examples as Machiavelli’s Il Principe (1513; translated into French in 1553 and into Latin in 1566). This genre was strong not least in Scotland where John Barbour’s late-fourteenth-century Scots epic poem about King Robert the Bruce is indebted to it, as is Sir Gilbert Hay’s The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis (c. 1450). One of James VI’s Scottish courtiers, William Fowler (who later, in London, became Secretary to James’s Danish wife, Queen Anne), made a Scots manuscript translation of Il Principe in the 1580s; James’s tutor the Scottish Latin poet, playwright and St Andrews academic George Buchanan authored De Iure Regni apud Scotos (1579) in which, censuring James’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, he suggested that the monarch was ultimately the servant of the people and might be deposed by them. James’s Basilicon Doron is a counterblast to that, prefaced by a sonnet in which he articulates his commitment to the theory that kings rule by divine right: ‘God giues not Kings the style of Gods in vaine.’8 Such arguments, and a sophisticated literary culture of poem-making that included the translation of Petrarch, Ariosto, and du Bartas (whom James brought to Scotland), were a crucial part of the life of the Scottish court of the poet-king, and continued when he headed south to become the greatest ever Scottish patron of English letters. Yet the Reformation in Scotland and England had also encouraged a literature of kingly conduct to be widely read and discussed in English. Reading of the vernacular Bible (encouraged, of course, by the King James Version) meant ordinary folk could read of James’s admired King David (whose psalms James translated) and of Solomon, but also of Herod and less attractive monarchs. Popular literary culture took up the theme, with specific reference to English history, in such works as the (to modern ears oddly titled) Mirror for Magistrates (1559–87), a growing collection of poems about rulers. This work was known to Shakespeare, and stands as a source for Richard III.9 Widespread discussion of rulers’ conduct was increasing in Shakespeare’s time. James’s Scottish courtier William Alexander wrote and published in 1607 his verbose Monarchicke Tragedies (dealing with classical topics) and there were certainly other dramas about monarchs in Britain. Yet Shakespeare’s series of plays about the Plantagenets and Tudors was unique in its construction of an English national dramatic epic that might match, say, such Scottish poems as the Wallace and the Brus and should be viewed as an extension into the general (illiterate as well as literate) civil society of the more courtly ‘advice to princes’ tradition.

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After the publication of history plays was forbidden under the 1599 Bishops’ Ban, Shakespeare continued to write of monarchs in a way that clearly related to the contemporary monarchy, though he did so using kings from the more remote history of Britain such as Lear, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. More than that, though they do not deal specifically with British affairs, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, and many other Shakespeare plays involve questions of monarchy and good governance. Shakespeare had a deeply hierarchical imagination. In King Lear (warning of the danger of disuniting a united kingdom), in Macbeth (on the dangers of usurpation in the Scottish monarchy, a topic – like that of witches – in which James had a substantial personal investment), and even in The Tempest (for James was a monarch much engaged by colonization), Shakespeare, the loyal playwright of the King’s Men who at least once processed with his monarch, can be seen as counselling his Scottish King and having acted out in public the dilemmas of the advice to princes tradition. James the monarch who had visited Elsinore; James the interrogator of witches; James, who championed colonization in the Basilicon Doron; James the uniter of kingdoms – this was the monarch several of whose central fascinations Shakespeare addressed, even if Shakespeare’s earlier work has hints of Scotophobia.10 Whatever critical notes the plays sound, they are preoccupied with the conduct of monarchy; they are, ultimately, the plays of the playwright who processed with the king. Posthumously, this Shakespeare, a ‘carrier’ of the establishment values of hereditary monarchy, became England’s national laureate, the bard. Yet almost no one called Shakespeare a bard until after the advent of Ossian. Though he was emerging as what Michael Dobson calls a ‘national poet’ before 1760, the word bard was scarcely used of him.11 Dobson and others, not attuned to the importance of Scottish culture in the ‘manufacture’ of Shakespeare, have carelessly bandied about terms such as ‘bard’ and (Bernard Shaw’s much later coinage) ‘bardolatry’ without realizing that the time when the term ‘bard’ comes to be used of Shakespeare is extremely significant in terms of Shakespeare and Scotland. Eighteenth-century Scottish scholarship investigated not just Highland bards, but also linked them to classical culture. The word bardos is, after all, Greek, and by 1735 the Aberdeen philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling bard’.12 After the loss of the Edinburgh Parliament in 1707, Scots felt an increasing concern about the status of their own culture, and began to look more closely at native traditions. The work of the poet Allan Ramsay in gathering older Scots-language poems in the 1720s and

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the work of Jerome Stones in assembling Gaelic poems in the 1750s are part of this endeavour of cultural collection to bolster a sense of national worth. An eager, absurd cry of ‘Weel lads; what think you of Wully Shakespeare now?’ is said to have greeted the 1756 Edinburgh premiere of John Home’s Scottish tragedy Douglas (produced successfully the following year by Garrick in London, where it became a popular vehicle for Sarah Siddons). That cry is evidence of Scots seeking a rival to England’s great dramatist; what they developed instead was England’s bard. John Home met James Macpherson and put him in touch with Hugh Blair. That contact led to the 1760 publication of the Ossianic Fragments of Ancient Poetry, bearing on its title page Lucan’s lines about ‘bardi’, and repeating the word ‘bard’ several times in its preface.13 Though English poets such as Gray and Collins had used that word in recent poems, there was little suggestion of England having a national ‘bard’. What Ossian-S mania did throughout Britain and soon across Europe and North America was to excite the world about bards. Thomas Jefferson thought Ossian greater than Homer. Hugh Blair, newly appointed to lecture on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University, spoke not only about Shakespeare but also about the bard Ossian as part of his lectures in the sometimes nervously Anglocentric university subject later renamed ‘English Literature’; his Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763) was published separately from his later Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), though both formed part of the same lecture course and circulated together as students’ lecture notes. Macpherson too published as a preface to his 1765 Works of Ossian a Dissertation in which he explains the importance and function of ancient British bards: They were spared by the victorious king, as it was through their means only he could hope for immortality to his fame. They attended him in the camp, and contributed to establish his power by their songs. His great actions were magnified, and the populace, who had no ability to examine into his character narrowly, were dazzled with his fame in the rhimes of the bards ... They could form a perfect hero in their own minds, and ascribe that character to their prince. The inferior chiefs made this ideal character the model of their conduct, and by degrees brought their minds to that generous spirit which breathes in all the poetry of the times. The prince, flattered by his bards, and rivalled by his own heroes, who imitated his character as described in the eulogies of his poets, endeavoured to excel his people in merit, as he was above them in station. This emulation continuing, formed J at last the general character of the nation, happily compounded of what is noble in barbarity, and virtuous and generous in a polished people.14

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Such a passage situates the bard as a poet disseminating a speculum principis, one of the King’s Men, and a poet who participates in forming ‘the general character of the nation’ at the same time as containing both barbarous and polished elements. It is the perception of just such an amalgam of attributes which let-the nobly monarch-obsessed but sometimes (as Blair and his century saw it) somewhat unrefined Shakespeare be presented as the ‘bard’. In words which strategically and perhaps imperially blur the distinction between England and Britain, he became bard of ‘This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle, /... this England.’15 Shakespeare may have been being positioned before this as national poet, but it was Ossian, and England’s desire for a national bard to counter Ossian, which really propelled him into the role of ‘the bard’. Shakespeare was termed a bard for probably the first time in Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination and the word ‘bard’ meaning poet was becoming increasingly common in mid-eighteenth-century English verse. But what gave by far the greatest impetus to the acceptance of Shakespeare as ‘national bard’ was his being presented as such by David Garrick, organizer of the September 1769 ‘Shakespeare Jubilee’ at Stratford. Garrick uses the word in several poems composed for the occasion. In the Stratford ‘Morning Address’, Shakespeare is ‘our matchless bard’. Yet surely such a designation comes about because Shakespeare is being positioned precisely to match the power of Ossian as what Garrick calls in ‘An Ode upon dedicating a building, and erecting a statue, to Shakespeare, at Stratford upon Avon’ ‘our immortal bard’.16 Ossian and the controversy surrounding him permeated English culture. Samuel Johnson travelled north four years later to search for materials to prove Macpherson a fraud. Certainly Garrick, well connected with so many leading English literati, would have been aware of the general controversy over the status of the Ossianic bard. However, he also had a more direct connection with the emergence of Ossian, for he maintained a specific contact with the John Home who was so intimately connected with the initial presentation of that British bard. For Garrick, Home wrote a series of plays in the 1760s and 1770s. It is inconceivable that Garrick was unaware of the eminence of the British bard Ossian at the very time when he gave such impetus to the custom of calling Shakespeare a ‘bard’. The widespread, and now global development of Shakespeare as national ‘bard’ is a direct reaction to the momentum of Scottish culture, and is bound up with the long-running currents of English-Scottish rivalry. It would be quite wrong, though, to suppose that Shakespeare was not venerated in Scotland. An edition of his works was published there for the first

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time in 1753. The preface by its ‘Scots Editor’ stresses Shakespeare’s ‘distinguished character ... as a dramatic writer’, the demand for his works, and ‘a laudable zeal for promoting home manufactures’ in Scotland.17 This eight-volume edition, based on Pope and Warburton’s, was often linked to Hugh Blair, though it may have been managed by one John Reid.18 Shakespeare’s name was praised (and some of his supposed flaws pointed out) in the lecture halls of Scottish universities where such men as Adam Smith (at Glasgow), Hugh Blair (at Edinburgh) and Robert Watson (at St Andrews) lectured on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres; though Shakespeare was not seen as the brightest luminary in terms of an ideal writing style for students, this Scottish university canonization of him went on to be enormously important in America, India, and elsewhere where the lectures of Blair in particular often formed a template for university literary teaching.19 At vernacular clubs such as Edinburgh’s Cape where Robert Fergusson, Burns’s favourite Scottish poet, was a member in the late 1760s and early 1770s, Shakespeare’s health was drunk. Fergusson, who selected at least one Shakespearian epigraph for his own verse, writes fondly of the landscape of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh as ‘Befitting WILLIE SHAKESPEARE’S Muse’.20 As a St Andrews student, Fergusson probably studied Rhetoric with Robert Watson. It was usual for the students to read Shakespeare as part of their university studies, even if they did not go on to be poets. So, for example, around 1770, the young William Villettes (later a distinguished naval commander) lodged with Watson as Watson’s ‘favourite scholar’ at St Andrews and became Watson’s lifelong friend. Villettes borrowed from the university library volumes of Shakespeare as well as Moliere, Thomson, Addison, Pope, and other staples of the Rhetoric and Belles Lettres curriculum.21 Villettes’s contemporary, childhood companion, and biographer Thomas Bowdler was only briefly a student at St Andrews (where he distinguished himself in Greek), but it is easy to see that the impulse to censure Shakespeare for lack of refinement, common in the Scottish university lecture halls, might have nourished the work which took the name Bowdler into the English language and, thanks largely to the work of Bowdler’s sister Henrietta, helped to produce the all too refined Family Shakespear. Often connected with the Church of Scotland ministry, the teachers of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres made good use of their pulpit skills in the lectureroom. They were also very alert to lack of refinement and to impropriety. Blair’s correspondence with Burns is a fine example of such sensitivity. Yet Burns, who had attended no university, was almost as well read as Blair. Burns supplied footnoted references to his admired Ossian; his letters make reference

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to no less than seventeen individual Shakespeare plays. He appears to have contemplated writing drama in 1789, having already written the dramatic ‘cantata’, ‘Love and Liberty’ in 1784–85.22 Blair persuaded Burns not to publish this for reasons of impropriety. ‘Love and Liberty’ has a bard sing alongside prostitutes and tinkers, pronouncing himself ‘HOMER LIKE’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed footnotes) points out cheekily that ‘Homer is allowed to be the eldest Ballad singer on record.’23 Burns, delighting in bards and ballads, was happy, repeatedly, to style himself a ‘bard’, as well as, self-deprecatingly, ‘a bardie’ and, with mock immodesty, ‘my hardship’.24 Like the first Ossianic Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Burns’s first book, the 1786 Kilmarnockpublished Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, has on its title page an epigraph featuring the figure of the bard. The word ‘bard’ is also used twice in Burns’s short, very canny preface. If Shakespeare, substantially as a result of the impact of Ossian, had been refashioned as a bard, Burns sought to present himself as one from the start. The position of national bard had been made prominent by Ossian, whose work was also, like much of Burns’s, bound up with oral culture. Where Shakespeare had quartos and folios, Ossian had word of mouth. His poems were supposed to have come down through two millennia, as part of oral culture. He wasn’t a writer; he was a bard. By Burns’s 1770s youth in Scotland Ossian, like Shakespeare, had come to be loved alike by Highlanders and Lowlanders, radicals and reactionaries, Gaelic poets and Glasgow economists. Ossian’s international success meant not only that this national bard came to be read with fascination abroad. He also provoked admiration and provided a model. Later poets from Blake to Whitman would try on bardic robes. Other countries too would want national bards in order to compete. However, Ossian’s first major rivals, predictably enough, came from close to home. They were Robert Burns and William Shakespeare. This may have been more evident in the eighteenth century than afterwards, when people naively tended to snigger at Ossian and (rightly in terms of quality) would never have classed him with Shakespeare. Significantly, though, in 1795 the first American edition of Shakespeare closes its preface by applying to Shakespeare some of Hugh Blair’s eulogistic words about Ossian.25 In Scotland, Burns was well aware of the position of national bard. Recently arrived in Edinburgh in 1787, he campaigned for a memorial to be erected to the memory of Fergusson as a ‘bard’ whose ‘talents for ages to come will do honor, to our Caledonian name’.26 Soon Burns himself was being hailed as and enjoying the title of ‘Caledonia’s Bard’, an

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appellation which he has never relinquished, and which remains celebrated around the world by an international federation of Burns Clubs that meet to toast their bard (and, on occasion, other bards too, including Shakespeare) every 25 January.27 Shakespeare enjoys no such worldwide annual suppers specially in his honour. Yet when fully recast in England as ‘the bard’ he became not so much the opposite of Ossian as the antidote to Robert Burns. The more Burns’s standing as national bard was accepted, the more Shakespeare was promoted as a cross-border counterweight. It’s rather odd, though, to regard Shakespeare as a national bard. Most other countries, from Whitman’s America to Petofi’s Hungary got bards who were straightforwardly poets as opposed to playwrights, and usually poets who aimed to be ‘bardic’. True, France and Germany have national poets who are dramatists, but no one is likely to call Racine or Goethe a ‘bard’. So why Shakespeare? One reason may be that, in response to the challenge of Ossian and Burns, England had few appropriate contenders. Anglo-Saxon poetry was virtually forgotten. Even Chaucer was regarded as too rude and too hard to understand, though Dryden had considered translating his Middle English; not much point in adopting a national bard whom only academics can follow. When bards came into favour, an obvious choice for England’s national bard would have been Milton, that nation’s greatest maker of epic, but, since he was resolutely opposed to earthly monarchy, his curriculum vitae was quite wrong for the job. No way could monarch-hogging England have a bard who was a radical republican. Dryden and Pope might have been modern contenders, but their very modernity made them unsuited. Better to stick with Shakespeare, who had already become something of a national poet, and convert him into a ‘bard’. In the eighteenth century the more the English bardified Shakespeare, the more their big guns fired at Ossian. Samuel Johnson harried the Highlands and directed the ordnance. Later, Shakespeare was placed in the core curriculum of the English educational system, with Burns usually nowhere to be heard, confirming a cultural siegementality of Little Englandism that, especially with regard to Scottish culture, persists throughout the English school and university system to this day. As England has grown less and less secure about its position as a stateless nation, the ascendancy of anti-British English nationalism in England has ensured that Burns and the national literature with which he identified continues to be viewed as at best ‘peripheral’. Many English univers sities ignore or pay only

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lip-service to Burns in their courses. ‘The bard means something very different north and south of the Tweed. To have Burns as the national bard of England is as unthinkable as having Shakespeare as a Caledonian icon. Shakespeare, though, is read, loved, and taught throughout Scottish society; Burns is now largely ignored in English culture and education. Whatever else it says, this reveals a lot about the culture, educational systems, and politics of the island of Britain. Burns and Shakespeare are very, very different. Perhaps few poets ever write in propria persona, but in the case of dramatists this is peculiarly obvious. With the exception of a small body of non-dramatic verse, all Shakespeare’s poetry is designed to be spoken, yelled, or sung on stage. Shakespeare, then, possesses a kind of actorly orality. This might sound bardic, but it is not. Shakespeare writes for performance, his words to be delivered by particular characters. As creator, he is always backstage, and a backstage bard is a contradiction in terms. Bards are centre-stage figures. They sing their own songs and in so doing gather the community round them. Burns did this in his own lifetime, and his work has continued to perform this function, as it did strikingly at both the opening of the new Scottish Parliament and at the funeral of its First Minister Donald Dewar. Shakespeare’s work, simply because it is drama, functions differently. Especially if one is a foreign tourist, one pays to go and see the Royal Shakespeare Company; but a Royal Burns Company is ideologically and generically unthinkable. So to call Shakespeare a ‘national bard’ has resulted in kinds of crude distortion, torsions and bendings brought about largely in reaction to Scottish culture. England may have a national poet, but, strictly speaking, it has no national bard. The prominence of Burns among icons of Scottishness has ensured that, in vague terms at least, poetry has been viewed as important to Scotland’s cultural identity. On the other hand, a smattering of Burns has been used by a lot of folk inside and outside Scotland as an excuse for ignoring all the rest of Scottish poetry. For too many people, Scotland is allowed only one poet. So different from the monarch-obsessed Shakespeare, Burns is the celebrant of the American and French Revolutions. He writes an ode for General Washington’s birthday, and, though his job as an exciseman may demand some protestations of loyalty, he seems to have little respect for blue blood or the institution of the monarchy. Though older douce Burns supperers and many of his editors denied it, he is probably, at heart, a radical Scottish republican. His friends in Dumfries included William Maxwell, who had been a member of the guard at the execution of the French king and queen, was

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execrated by a dagger-wielding Burke in the House of Commons, and was branded Britain’s most dangerous Jacobin by London’s Sun newspaper. Whatever their editorial carelessnesses, Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg have recently highlighted Burns’s huge admiration for his friend and fellow freemason, the radical nobleman Lord Daer. They quote a long, fascinating 1793 letter in which Daer as a Briton makes incisive sense of the complex Scottish and English political scene in the 1790s, arguing that ‘the Friends of Liberty in Scotland have almost universally been enemies to Union with England’.28 This letter helps explain the context of Burns’s violent political song (first published in 1794), ‘Scots, wha hae wi’ WALLACE bled’. As Noble and Hogg point out, it links Scottish freedom to ‘the tennis court oath of the French revolutionaries’ in that last line ‘Let us DO – or DIE!!!’29 Burns, probably the ‘closest’ renderer ‘in English’ of the French Revolutionary ‘Ca ira’, could simultaneously espouse Jacobitism and Jacobinism.30 The former offered him a figuration of historical Scottish fidelity, the latter a democratic, republican ideal that deposed the ideal of monarchy and proclaimed instead what Burns in his ‘Ode for General Washington’s Birthday’ praised as ‘The Royalty of Man’. Burns likes insulting the Hanoverian king and his flunkeys, though he never quite makes the key point that what is wrong with monarchy as a system is that it is a form of hereditary slavery. One reason for this may be that Burns’s own attitude towards slavery was complex. The bard of Liberty almost emigrated to Jamaica, where he would have become part of a Scottish imperial network closely involved with slave labour. Sometimes he can sound dismissive of slaves; at other moments he sympathizes with their plight. His own powerful sense of democracy came not just from his local milieu and the international revolutionary culture of America and France, but also from those idealized democratic traditions of presbyterian church government which the Scots had long fought to preserve. Whatever forms of Christianity shaped the monarchist Shakespeare, they did not include Scottish presbyterianism. On the other hand, Burns, as a protesting radical poet, despite all his Kirk-excoriated sex crimes, owed a deep debt to the much more democratically assembled governance of Scottish protestantism: The Solemn League and Covenant Now brings a smile, now brings a tear. But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs; If thou ‘rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.31

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Burns’s libertarian ‘democratic’ aspect sets him far apart from Shakespeare as a national bard, and is essential to his tone. Yet kinds of complexity attracted him from the start. A muse, a mouse, and a louse are equally at home in his poetic cosmogeny which, without ever leaving Scotland, takes in many worlds. Whether buttonholing Prince (‘Young, royal TARRY-BREEKS’) or Devil (‘o THOU, whatever title suit thee! / Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie’), this is a voice superbly self-possessed and unawed by social superiority.32 Where Shakespeare, so formed by the advice to princes tradition, always maintains a keen sense of hierarchy, Burns, shaped by oral folk traditions and the sort of Scottish Reformation democratic cultural forms of government that had so irked James VI and I, always tends towards a levelling, fraternal egalitarianism. In his era, the philosophical underpinning for this was provided by the radical aspects of Sentimentalism and one of the texts that underlay it, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Tears, like illness and ruin (favourite Burns topics), are great levellers. Burns, who liked the words ‘Common Sense’ in the several meanings of that expression (including the philosophical), knew Adam Smith’s work well, and appreciated its radical potential. That’s why he sent to his friend James Tennant, a local Ayrshire miller, Twa sage Philosophers to glimpse on! Smith, wi’ his sympathetic feeling, An’ Reid, to common sense appealing. Philosophers have fought an’ wrangled, An’ meikle Greek an’ Latin mangled, Till, wi’ their Logic-jargon tir’d, An’ in the depth of science mir’d, To common sense they now appeal, What wives an’ wabsters see an’ feel ...33

This philosophy’s appeal to common sense and sympathetic feeling might set women and ‘wabsters’ (weavers, a group well known for their radicalism) on a level with the educated well-off. While Burns’s radicalism can be mapped on to the British politics of the 1790s, it is also strongly nurtured by an earlier Scottish Enlightenment mentality of which both the philosophy of sympathy and the literature of sentimentalism are part. The Burns who weeps and Clarindafies is not the enemy of the Burns who lets fly with radical invective. Each is the other’s brother. The Burns who wrote in the year of the French Revolution to the blind Edinburgh presbyterian divine Dr Blacklock (who venerated Shakespeare as a bard) that

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To make a happy fireside clime To weans and wife, That’s the true Pathos and Sublime Of Human life. —

was nourished by sentimentalism.34 These lines sound cosily compromised, but, showing off a knowledge of modern aesthetic criticism, they are also filled with self-reproach. Burns is explaining that he has ‘turned a Gauger’ (exciseman) since he has ‘a wife and twa wee laddies’ to support. He did, after his fashion, love them dearly, and worked hard for them. Yet this Blacklock poem is much less a cosy idyll than a protest about how hard it is to sustain that longed-for ‘happy fireside clime’ without compromizing both poetry and principles. As often, fraternity in this poem is a highly charged concept for Burns: Lord help me thro’ this warld o’ care! I’m weary sick o’t late and air! early Not but I hae a richer share Than mony ithers; But why should ae man better fare, one And a’ Men brithers!

Signed ‘Robt. Burns, Ellisland, 21st Oct., 1789’, this poem sentimentally hymning the family fireside is also a poem in touch with universal fraternite just a few months after the Fall of the Bastille. If Shakespeare has his bardolaters, so has Burns. Yet recent attempts such as that of Don Paterson in his selection of Burns’s verse to rescue Burns from his own bardolatry and focus attention on his sheer aesthetic brilliance as a poetic artist, risk airbrushing away the political passion and the bardic role-playing which are vital to Burns’s often performative art. This bard at his best had the range, amplitude, depth and finesse of a completely remarkable creative artist constantly seeking ways of sounding a voice that bonded his deeply committed, zigzag, Humean self to the greater body of ‘THE PEOPLE’.35 The genres that mattered most to Burns were popular ballad, song, and the inherited Standard Habbie stanza (sometimes now called the Burns stanza); he grew up in a country that had hardly seen a monarch for two centuries; though an exciseman, he cared little for kings, processed with no monarch, and knew a good deal about trees of liberty, transported radicals, and republican culture; he responded with enthusiasm to the ideals of the American and French Revolutions; he spent some time in Edinburgh but

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Ayrshire remained his vital home. Shakespeare, on the other hand, may have known about republican culture, but was formed by and vitally engaged with the elite genre of ‘advice to princes’, transferring it on to the popular stage; he grew up in a country whose monarchs were central to its life, and at a time when the divine right of kings was championed by a new king to whom Shakespeare’s ‘King’s Men’ were linked and whose monarchy was expanding; the Shakespeare who processed with James VI and I is so monarch-obsessed that, however exciting it may be, to read him in the light of republican culture is always to read against the grain; for all his interrogations of problem sovereigns, he remains the King’s man. To see these two bards as jousting competitors is misguided. Understandably, though, national pride may encourage such a view. Thomas Campbell in 1819 thought Burns and Shakespeare equal in terms of their education; he says he is making this point ‘without intending to make any comparison between the genius of the two bards’, but one senses that, like many a speaker at a Burns Supper, he is strongly tempted.36 Arnold went out of his way to denigrate Burns; Eliot defended him. More recently and aggressively, the front page of The Scotsman for 6 September 1999 announced a ‘battle of the bards’ as the ‘Robert Burns World Federation Ltd’ was established. A spokesman for this organization, with ‘more than 400 branches around the world, more than 60,000 “shareholders’”, was reported as saying ‘At the moment, the writing of Robert Burns comes third behind the Bible and Shakespeare in terms of readership penetration. We want Burns to overtake Shakespeare in terms of worldwide recognition by way of a professional marketing campaign so that even more people access his works.’37 Some Members of the Scottish Parliament might support such a scheme, wishing to use Burns as a marketing tool for Scotland. Burns’s actual poems may seem secondary in a business plan which plugs him into the ‘cultural industries’. Yet such a scheme may be in keeping with the elaborate and self-interested ‘marketing campaign’ for Shakespeare carried out by David Garrick 230 years earlier. Ultimately, the point is not to arrange some ‘battle of the bards’, but to recognize that the substantial ideological differences between the national bards of Scotland and England both articulate and were formed by markedly different cultural traditions that are too easily ignored. Shakespeare the bard is in important ways a product of Scottish culture. Such a Shakespeare contributed not least to the shaping of Walter Scott’s later, quasi-bardic vision.38 Burns the bard is also an outgrowth of Scottish culture; his bardic

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trajectory quickened that of Shakespeare. Ideologically, however, Shakespeare’s Renaissance work articulates a monarchist, hierarchical culture far removed from the republican, democratic culture of the Enlightenment and Romantic Burns. Shakespearean ideology has contributed to the myths of England as sceptred isle; the principal intellectual myth of modern Scotland, ‘the democratic intellect’, finds its bardic correlative in Burns. Shakespeare is a welcome part of Scottish, as of world culture; Burns, however much ignored by English academia, has a similar status. In some ways, though, the bardic standing of each depends on his opposite and is increased by it. In the English-speaking world, to an alert ear that phrase ‘the bard’ never has only one meaning; the strongly democratic Scot, Burns, will always contest the rights of the monarchical Englishman, Shakespeare. Shakespeare is widely hailed as bard only as a result of the Scottish poets who claimed, and were claimed for, that title.

Notes 1

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7

8 9

Though they are in no sense responsible for the arguments of this chapter, I am very grateful to my colleagues Dr Andrew Murphy and Professor Neil Rhodes for their comments on and advice about it. William Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. Antony Hammond (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 270 (4.2.104–5). See OED, ‘bard’. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1979), p. 1172 (Antony and Cleopatra, 3.2.16). Lucan, Libri Decern Belli Civilis, ed. A. E. Housman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1926), 19 (1.449); Christopher Marlowe, Complete Works, I, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 105; on Shakespeare and Lucan see Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 273–7. See ‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy’ in Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah eds, The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 87. King James VI, Basilicon Doron, ed. James Craigie (Edinburgh: Blackwood for the Scottish Text Society, 1944–50), 2 vols, I, pp. 94–5; on Buchanan and Shakespeare, see David Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’ in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker eds, Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 78–116. Basilicon Doron, I, p. 4. See Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 168; and Hammond ed., King Richard III, pp. 84–90.

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10 See Arthur F. Kinney, ‘Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the Question of Nationalism’ in Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson eds, Literature and Nationalism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), pp. 56–75. 11 Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 12 Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735; 2nd edn, London, 1736), p. 106. 13 See Howard Gaskill ed., The Poems of Ossian and Related Works (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 1,5,6; hereafter cited as Gaskill. For a fuller discussion, see Robert Crawford, The Modern Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 1. 14 Gaskill, The Poems of Ossian, p. 48. 15 Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. Alexander, p. 454 (Richard II, 2.1.40,50). 16 See these in David Garrick, The Poetical Works (London, 1785). 17 ‘The Scots Editors Preface’ to The Works of Shakespear, 8 vols (Edinburgh, 1753), I, i. 18 See Warren McDougall, ‘Copyright litigation in the Court of Session, 1738— 49’, Edinburgh Bibliography Society Transactions, V, 5 (1988), pp. 2–31; I am grateful to Martin Moonie for drawing article to my attention. 19 See Robert Crawford ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 20 Matthew P. MacDiarmid ed., The Poems of Robert Fergusson, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood for the Scottish Text Society, 1954–6), II, p. 117 (‘Auld Reikie’); for Fergusson’s use of and attitude to Shakespeare, see also Robert Crawford ed., ‘Heaven-Taught Fergusson (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2003), pp. 8, 10, 53–4, 93–4. 21 See University of St Andrews Library Receipt Book, Students, 1768–1772 (LY.207.1), p. 161; also Anon., Memoir of the late John Bowdler (London: Longman et al., 1825), p. 299; Thomas Bowdler, A Short View of the Life and Character of Lieutenant-General Villettes (London: Robinson and Hatchard, 1815), p. 2. 22 Robert Burns, The Letters of Robert Burns, 2nd edn, ed. G. Ross Roy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 2 vols, I, p. 464. 23 Robert Burns, Poems and Songs, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 166. 24 On Burns’s self-presentation of himself as ‘bardie’ see Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 92–9. 25 Hugh Blair, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Philadelphia, n.d. [1795]), 8 vols, I, p. xi. 26 Burns, Letters, I, p. 90. 27 Ibid., p. 83. 28 See Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg eds, The Canongate Burns (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002), p. 638. 29 Ibid., p. 467. 30 See Marilyn Butler, ‘Burns and Politics’ in Robert Crawford ed., Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 102.

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31 32 33 34 35 36

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Burns, Poems and Songs, p. 634. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., pp. 179–80. Ibid., p. 390. Ibid., p. 605. Thomas Campbell, ed., Specimens of the British Poets, 7 vols (London: John Murray, 1819), VII, p. 240. 37 William Chisholm, ‘Rabbie Burns plc Weighs in for Battle of the Bards’, Scotsman, 6 September 1999, p. 1. 38 See Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), pp. 224–30.

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‘Not fit to tie his brogues’: Shakespeare and Scott LIDIA GARBIN

At the first Annual Dinner of the Edinburgh Theatrical Fund on 23 February 1827, Sir Walter Scott finally disclosed his identity as the author of Waverley: I am willing, however, to plead guilty ... Like another Scottish criminal of more consequence, one Macbeth, ‘I am afraid to think what I have done; Look on’t again I dare not.’ ... The wand is now broken, and the book buried. You will allow me further to say, with Prospero, it is your breath that has filled my sails.1

Scott’s admission comes in a weave of allusion; a series of identifications that obscure as they reveal. The identification with Prospero is an obvious (to the point of hackneyed) identification with Shakespeare – the burying of the book and the breaking of the magic staff doubling as Shakespeare’s metaphor for his farewell to the stage.2 The artist as magician needs no explication. However, rather than a goodbye this is in a sense a hello; a disclosure, without closure. If there is a casting off, it is simply the shedding of an already penetrated veil. Scott develops Lord Meadowbank’s original introduction of him as ‘the Great Unknown – the minstrel of our native land – the mighty magician who has rolled back the current of time, and conjured up before our living sense the men and manners of days which have long passed away’.3 Scott initially casts himself as Macbeth, which, although natural enough at first sight, contains some ambivalence. Macbeth, representing an unlawful succession and ruthless ambition, is in direct conflict with the legitimate and

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about-to-return Prospero. Usurper meets usurpedmid-way. Not only that but Macbeth features as a point of national identification. The Scottish pretender reveals his ambitions and his identity while at the same time, necessarily, denying them. As Chairman of the Edinburgh Theatrical Fund Scott proposes a toast in honour of Shakespeare: He was a man of universal genius, and from a period soon after his own era to the present day he has been universally idolized. When I come to his honoured name, I am like the sick man who hung up his crutches at the shrine, and was obliged to confess that he did not walk better than before. It is indeed difficult, gentlemen, to compare him to any other individual. The only one to whom I can at all compare him is the wonderful Arabian dervise, who dived into the body of each, and in that way became familiar with the thoughts and secrets of their hearts.4

In comparison with Shakespeare, Scott is a criminal, or an invalid. This isn’t necessarily evidence of a personal insecurity, or Bloomian anxiety, as Scott finds it difficult to compare Shakespeare to anyone. In his toast Shakespeare ceases to be what he was, an English playwright. He becomes an elsewhere: despite nods to universality Shakespeare emerges as foreign, oriental, and unearthly in a way Prospero certainly is not; distinctly not useful, as an idol he has no healing qualities and as a model, he is inimitable. Shakespeare disappears in the praise. In perhaps the more private space of his journal, the temptation to claim a national status comparable to that of Shakespeare’s is rejected out of hand: ‘The blockheads talk of my being like Shakespeare – not fit to tie ; his brogues’.5 This is a gruff denial, and with this and other pious protestations, Scott has managed to convince some of his readers that he ‘hated being compared with Shakespeare’.6 However, it was Scott himself J who initiated the Scott-Shakespeare ‘parallel’ in his (anonymous) review of Tales of My Landlord for the Quarterly Review of 1817: ‘The characters of Shakspeare are not more exclusively human, not more perfectly men and women as they live and move, than those of this mysterious author’.7 The mysterious author is allowed a (self)identification that no named author dares. The idol becomes a colleague. Although disingenuous in denying a comparison that he himself has initiated, Scott has serious reasons for not wishing to enter the contest and they are not necessarily J to do with modesty. Lockhart reports Scott acknowledging that ‘the greatest success’ any follower of Shakespeare could achieve ‘would be but a spiritless imitation, or, at best, what the Italians call a centone from Shakespeare’.8 This is not the insecurity of the unworthy mendicant, but rather the dismissal of a pointless ambition, an ultimately

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narrow goal. The image of Shakespeare is more frightening than Shakespeare himself, seen simply as a writer. When in the Prefatory Letter to Peveril of the Peak (1822), the Revd Dr Dryasdust asks the Author of Waverley if he intends to apply Shakespeare’s method to his historical writings, the Author promptly answers: ‘May the saints forefend I should be guilty of such unfounded vanity! I only show what has been done when there were giants in the land. We pigmies of the present day may at least, however, do something; and it is well to keep a pattern before our eyes, though that pattern be inimitable.’9 Despite the original and almost obligatory ‘forefend’, the writer quietly admits Shakespeare as a useful precedent from which to learn. He is a pattern. In the ‘General Preface’ (1829) to the Waverley Novels, Scott allows for ‘such unpremeditated and involuntary plagiarisms as can scarce be guarded against by any one who has read and written a great deal’.10 But Scott’s use of Shakespeare extends much further than the odd unintended echo. Scott’s Shakespeare emerges as a crucial influence on several of his novels. The Pirate functions as both a retelling and a reading of The Tempest, starting with a quote from the play on the title page. Shakespeare has also been used as the model for character, Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian faces a similar dilemma to that of Isabella in Measure for Measure and can be seen as having contributed to the contemporary debate on the Problem play. Shakespeare throughout Scott exists as both an authority and a resource, for both characters and narrator. Tags and chapter mottoes are constantly lifted from the works of the bard; Scott’s characters read Shakespeare and quote and misquote him at appropriate or inappropriate moments. We are even allowed a tantalizingly brief glimpse of Shakespeare himself in Kenilworth. He is influential in a manner too expansive and profound to be comprehensively described in an article of this size.11 As a critic, Scott’s major treatment of Shakespeare appears in ‘The Life of John Dryden’ (1808), the ‘Essay on the Drama’ (1819), and the ‘Life of Kemble’ (1826). However, on the whole, Scott’s approach to Shakespeare was not that of the academic, but rather of a reader and a practising writer. In a letter of 1822 to Heinrich Voss, Scott is peeved that ‘Commentators of Shakespeare have overburthened the text with notes and [... ] disputes’; admits that ‘There are I believe some good editions with selections of the notes but I think to read Shakespear[e] luxuriously one should use two copies the one for perusal altogether without notes and the other a full edition cum notis variorum to consult upon any point of difficulty or interest.’12 This

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might almost be how Scott himself would like to be read. He even goes to the trouble of providing his own copious notes. The ultimate touching of the untouchable came with the proposal to have Scott contribute to an edition of Shakespeare.13 In a letter to Archibald Constable of 1822 he wrote: ‘A Shakespeare to say truth has been often a favourite scheme with me – a sensible Shakespeare in which the useful 8c readable notes should be condensed and separated from the trash – but it would require much time 8c I fear more patience than ever I may be able to command.’14 Of the proposed ten-volume work Scott was to provide the first volume containing a general introduction and a biography of the dramatist. However, only Volumes II, III, and IV were printed.15 Despite these critical and editorial ventures, Scott’s most significant tackling of Shakespeare took place within his novels. This occurs most startlingly in Kenilworth. Set in Elizabethan England at the time of the Kenilworth revels when Shakespeare was only eleven, Scott introduces him as a grown man at the height of his creative output. Some of the characters of the novel have seen his plays. Although anachronistic, Shakespeare’s presence was allowed in a tradition first suggested by Bishop Percy in ‘On the Origin of the English Stage’ (1794).16 Shakespeare appears as the ghostly trace of a quotation from Macbeth. Leicester speaks ‘in the words of one, who at that moment stood at no great distance from him’. Soon after, Leicester addresses Shakespeare directly: Ha, Will Shakspeare – wild Will! – thou hast given my nephew, Philip Sydney, love-powder – he cannot sleep without thy Venus and Adonis under his pillow! – we will have thee hanged for the veriest wizard in Europe. Heark thee, mad wag, I have not forgotten thy matter of the patent, and of the bears.17

Scott presents Shakespeare as silent, or at best already existing in the mouths of others: ‘The Player bowed, and the Earl nodded and passed on – so that age would have told the tale – in ours, perhaps, we might say the immortal had done homage to the mortal.’18 Leicester’s easy familiarity, if not downright condescension, emphasizes wild Will’s humble station, as does his reference to two issues regarding Shakespeare, his request of a coat of arms and the petition of Orson Pinnit, the keeper of the royal bears. The first instance is well known. In 1596 the College of Heralds granted a coat of arms to John Shakespeare, although the application had probably been made by his son as the records refer to ‘William Shakespeare, Gentleman’.19 Orson Pinnit’s

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petition is more obscure. The Queen describes what she calls a ‘gamesome matter’: He complains, that amidst the extreme delight with which men haunt the playhouses, and in especial their eager desire for seeing the exhibitions of one Will Shakspeare, (whom I think, my lords, we have all heard something of,) the manly amusement of bear-baiting is falling into comparative neglect; since men will rather throng to see these roguish players kill each other in jest, than to see our royal dogs and bears worry each other in bloody earnest.20

Scott alludes to the same subject in the ‘Essay on the Drama’ suggesting that with the success of Shakespeare’s career, ‘The ruder amusements of the age lost their attractions; and the royal bear-ward of Queen Elizabeth lodged a formal complaint at the feet of her majesty, that the play-houses had seduced the audience from his periodical bear-baitings!’21 Shakespeare is a shadowy marginal figure, at once a product of and disrupter of his age. His genius is by no means recognized, even by himself. His application for a coat of arms seems in retrospect evidence of a banal social insecurity. The quarrels surrounding bear-baiting place Shakespeare in the context of an entertainer, avid for an audience. His introduction as the Player implies an almost knowing duplicity in his role as a normal flesh-andblood human being and legend in embryo. There is a tension between the two which allows Scott some irony at his characters’ expense. The other characters are likewise cast as unwitting dupes, with only the sovereign intuitively sensing true sovereignty. Sussex ‘wish[es] Will Shakespeare no harm. He is a stout man at quarterstaff, and single falchion, as I am told, though a halting fellow’; and he speaks with admiration of Shakespeare’s legendary incursion into Sir Thomas Lucy’s deer-park: ‘[he] stood, they say, a tough fight with the rangers of old Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecot, when he broke his deer-park and kissed his keeper’s daughter’.22 Sussex’s description of Shakespeare as ‘a halting fellow’ significantly recalls Scott’s own lameness.23 His reference to the deer-stealing episode is a variation of the legend according to which Shakespeare ‘not only took the game but also seduced the keeper’s daughter’.24 Queen Elizabeth is unaccountably annoyed at the allusion: ‘I cry you mercy, my Lord of Sussex,... that matter was heard in council, and we will not have this fellow’s offence exaggerated – there was no kissing in the matter, and the defendant hath put the denial on record.’25 According to the author of the life of Shakespeare in the Biographia Britannica: ‘Shakespeare owed his release at last to the Queen’s kindness.’26

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The Scottish usurper presents his predecessor as also a transgressor and trespasser, a ‘halting fellow’, like Scott himself, someone whose identity and status is dependent on the whim of others. The identification is focused even more sharply when the characters discuss Shakespeare’s work. Despite his admiration of Shakespeare as a ‘man, Sussex is unable to appreciate his performances as a dramatist and a player. Sussex ‘wish[es] the gamesome mad fellow no injury. Some of his whoreson poetry ... has rung in mine ears as if they sounded to boot and saddle’. But, he continues, ‘it is all froth and folly – no substance or seriousness in it’.27 As a soldier, Sussex censures the actors’ performances as men of war: What are half a dozen knaves, with rusty foils and tattered targets, making but a mere mockery of a stout fight, to compare to the royal game of bear-baiting, which hath been graced by your Highness’s countenance, and that of your royal predecessors, in this your princely kingdom, famous for matchless mastiffs, and bold bearwards, over all Christendom?

Ironically this criticism includes an unwitting allusion to Henry V.28 The Dean of St Asaph’s, who represents the clergy, accuses the ‘naughty foulmouthed knaves’ of introducing ‘profane and lewd expressions, tending to foster sin and harlotry’, and of making people reflect ‘on government, its origin and its object’ thus shaking ‘the solid foundations of civil society’.29 The favourable comments of Leicester and the Queen are contrasted to these critical views. The Earl sees the theatre as a kind of opiate, a latter-day soap opera, a circus which keeps the subjects distracted from the policy of the government and more radical political discussion: And in behalf of the players, I must needs say that they are witty knaves whose rants and whose jests keep the minds of the commons from busying themselves with state affairs, and listening to traitorous speeches, idle rumours, and disloyal insinuations. When men are agape to see how Marlow, Shakespeare, and others, work out their fanciful plots as they call them, the mind of the spectators is withdrawn from the conduct of their rulers.30

The Queen does not share the view of her favourite. On the contrary, she remarks: touching this Shakespeare, we think there is that in his plays that is worth twenty Bear-gardens; and that this new undertaking of his Chronicles, as he calls them, may entertain, with honest mirth, mingled with useful instruction, not only our subjects, but even the generation which may succeed to us.31

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Queen Elizabeth voices Scott’s own belief in the importance of history as a civilizing device: ‘a man had better know generally the points of history as told him by Shakspeare, than be ignorant of history entirely’.32 This whole argument could as easily be about Scott’s historical novels, with the exception of Sussex’s unimaginative grumbling about realism in battle scenes. The concerns of political danger, distraction and debate, morality, and lewdness are just as applicable to the Waverley novels, being as they are concerns of any artist. The one criticism that Scott cannot share with Shakespeare is something that Scott famously excels in, the portrayal of large-scale battles. In this Scott has the advantage over wild Will, even if he is winning on a battleground of his own choosing. It is perhaps not a wholly serious contest. There is a self-conscious sense of manipulation about the debate, as there is almost a time-machine comedy about Shakespeare’s appearance. Shakespeare features once more to largely comic effect in Woodstock; or, the Cavalier. Although many characters in Scott quote Shakespeare no one does it with the single-minded mania of Sir Henry Lee, the owner and central character of the novel. As in Kenilworth Shakespeare and his works are made familiar to the entourage of Elizabeth at a time when the dramatist was only a boy, so in Woodstock Shakespeare is killed off some twenty years before his actual death.33 The anachronism in Kenilworth allows the discussion of Shakespeare’s work by members of the royal court. In Woodstock, Shakespeare’s absence allows him to become a point of nostalgic reference for Sir Henry Lee; an expression of longing for a glorious past in contrast with the poverty of the present. This effectively silences Shakespeare as a voice amidst other voices. As in Kenilworth, Shakespeare is only available through quotation and his works. But again this silence promotes a plurality of discourse, leaving him as open to interpretation as he will be in Scott’s time and the centuries to come. The characters of Cromwell’s time reveal their affiliations through their appreciation or otherwise of Shakespeare’s work. Sir Henry Lee is a representative of the old order of Cavaliers. His devotion to Shakespeare serves as a bridge between him and his dead patron: the old knight’s appreciation of Shakespeare as ‘the brightest and best poet that ever was, is, or will be!’ cannot but remind us of Scott’s admiration of the bard.34 The parallel may be extended further. At the time of the composition of Woodstock, Scott was an elderly man whose world had been turned upside down by a grave financial crisis. There is perhaps more than an echo of Scott in the characterization of the elderly man who ‘seemed bent

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more by sorrow and infirmity than by the weight of years’.35 Sir Henry Lee riddles Woodstock with Shakespearean quotations and references. The obsessive love of Shakespeare is almost a malady. It is introduced early in the novel. After some bickering with her father, Alice is relieved to hear him quote his ‘favourite’ because she knows that: ‘Our little jars are ever wellnigh ended when Shakspeare comes in play.’36 Sir Henry is a bardolater and is mocked by all including the narrator for his passion: He graced his nephew’s departure, however, with a quotation from Shakspeare, whom, as many others do, he was wont to quote from a sort of habit and respect, as a favourite of his unfortunate master, without having either much real taste for his works or great skill in applying the passages which he retained on his memory.37

Scott’s own relationship with Shakespeare is reflected in the knight’s obsession. Rooted in a meticulous knowledge of Shakespeare’s work, Sir Henry regularly acknowledges his source, accompanying quotations with expressions such as, ‘as old’, ‘honest’, ‘mad Will says’. There is deference and familiarity. He is treated almost like a talisman or good luck charm, to be rubbed in moments of crisis. There is also an element of self-identification: ‘Mad Will’ is quoted by the Shakespeare-mad Sir Henry. Other characters share the narrator’s askance perspective of the old knight’s literary foibles. Alice leads her father to speak of Shakespeare in order to divert his attention from a disagreeable topic, but he spots her trick: ‘thou wouldst lead the old man away from the tender subject’.38 Prince Charles unsurprisingly scorns the knight’s affection for Shakespeare when the old man offers to read Richard II. When the Prince sarcastically quotes a passage from 1 Henry IV, Sir Henry does not sense the irony.39 Later, the Prince quotes a line from Julius Caesar to Everard commenting: ‘as your future father-in-law would say’.40 Even Phoebe rebukes the knight for quoting Shakespeare in a moment of high danger and distress.41 And yet despite these attacks Shakespeare represents a steadfast point of reference for the old man when all other certainties seem to be melting. As Cromwell approaches, the knight sits down ‘perhaps for the last time, with my Bible on the one hand and old Will on the other, prepared, thank God, to die as I have lived’.42 Shakespeare is co-opted not for the last time as a semireligious rendering of national character. It is not the reading of Shakespeare that is important here so much as the presence of the book. It takes on a role, companion to that of the Bible, in vampire killing or the warding off of evil

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spirits. And yet it is also a consolation of his old age when his main companion is Wildrake, the other Cavalier and Shakespeare connoisseur of the novel.43 The knights last words before dying are also a quotation from Shakespeare.44 Sir Henry justifies his attachment to Shakespeare as part and parcel of a political identification:

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His book was the closet-companion of my blessed master,... after the Bible

–

with reverence for naming them together! – he felt more comfort in it than in any other; and as I have shared his disease, why, it is natural I should take his medicine. Albeit, I pretend not to my master’s art in explaining the dark passages; for I am but a rude man, and rustically brought up to arms and hunting.45

As Charles I’s favourite author, Shakespeare is royalist medicine to the diseased body politic. The presence of ‘dark passages’ does not escape the old knight even with his admission to simplicity. However, his explanation contains an allusion to Milton of which he is unaware. Milton had called Shakespeare ‘the Closet Companion of [King Charles’s] solitudes’.46 The presence of Milton in the testimony of a bardolater and cavalier hints that Sir Henry’s iconographic appropriation of Shakespeare is built on shaky ground. The dark passages Sir Henry detects are evidence more of a blindness in the old knight than to any real obscurity. Sir Henry’s later admiration of Milton’s Comus will further destabilize the use of literary icons as a form of political affiliation. Jonathan Bate has remarked that: ‘there is a strand within Bardolatry which turns Shakespeare against the power of the State and repossesses him in the name of liberty’.47 For A. N. Wilson, Shakespeare’s work constitutes a refuge for the old knight in adverse times: ‘Who, for instance, like Sir Henry Lee in Woodstock, would not pine for the company of Ben Jonson and memories of Shakespeare, when the contemporary world echoed to the mad farce of the Civil War and the ranting of crop-eared fanatics?’48 This use of Shakespeare as escapism to a safely royalist past is endangered by the presence of dark passages which refuse to conform to the political views of the reader. Add to this the presence amongst those cropeared fanatics of a poet of the calibre of Milton, and any sense of a clear demarcation of literature on political grounds is fatally undermined. The Prince’s lack of appreciation for Shakespeare is at once an anticipation of Restoration taste and an indicator of the Prince’s worth as a future monarch. Sir Henry’s attempted reading of Richard II underlines the danger of appropriating Shakespeare. The chapter is prefixed by a few lines from that play:

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For there, they say, he daily doth frequent With unrestrained loose companions; While he, young, wanton, and effeminate boy, Takes on the point of honour, to support So dissolute a crew.49

The tag in which the newly crowned Henry IV asks to see Prince Hal prepares the reader for Alice’s description of Prince Charles in the following narrative. She suggests he should ‘rule his passions and be guided by his understanding’.50 The reading, or better, the non-reading, of Richard II in Woodstock is a turning point in the narrative. Sir Henry only manages to read the first line of the play to the Prince, before he suddenly leaves the room.51 Charles calls the attempted reading an ‘atrocious complot with Will Shakspeare, a fellow as much out of date as himself, to read me to death with five acts of a historical play, or chronicle, “being the piteous Life and Death of Richard the Second?”‘.52 The Prince rejects both Shakespeare and a representative of the old school who ‘read [Shakespeare’s plays] with more zeal than taste’.53 The Prince, who embodies the new generation, cannot endure: ‘to hear him read one of those wildernesses of scenes which the English call a play, from prologue to epilogue – from Enter the first to the final Exeunt Omnes – an unparalleled horror – a penance which would have made a dungeon darker, and added dulness even to Woodstock!’54 In the ‘Life of Dryden’ Scott explained that the literary tastes of the monarch and his followers had been formed at foreign courts.55 However, it is not merely a foible of literary taste that has the Prince scurrying from the room. His stated fear of being ‘read to death’ expresses an obvious discomfort with the subject matter. In the ‘piteous life and Death of Richard II’, there is a reflection of Charles’ present situation and his father’s fate. The skilful politician Cromwell threatens Charles as Richard was endangered by the cunning soldier Bolingbroke. Sir Henry might fancy himself in the role of old John O’Gaunt who warns Richard of his fate when he tells him that he is ‘in reputation sick’, yet it is understandable that the Prince does not savour the allusion.56 And he was not alone. Richard II has been uncomfortable reading for many royalists. The first example of a political appropriation of Richard II dates back to 1601, on the eve of the Essex plot.57 Viewed as an anti-monarchical play for a long time, its performance was frequently banned.58 Nahum Tate’s adaptation of it, as Gary Taylor observes, ‘so obviously ran the risk of reminding audiences of their

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own Charles II that it was banned before it could be performed’.59 Michael Dobson tells us that in December 1680: ‘no play depicting the feasibility of deposing an English monarch could possibly be tolerated’.60 Shakespeare, the king-killer, is poor reading matter for any monarch who feels his head on the block. Although inappropriate as a simple champion of royalism, Shakespeare is likewise rejected by the Puritans. Everard Markham, Sir Henry’s Puritan nephew, gives his own judgement of Shakespeare. Despite an earlier love of Shakespeare’s works, he is unable to square him now with his Puritan ideals: I cannot, even in Shakspeare, but see many things both scandalous to decency and prejudicial to good manners – many things which tend to ridicule virtue, or to recommend vice, at least to mitigate the hideousness of its features. I cannot think these fine poems are an useful study, and especially for the youth of either sex, in which bloodshed is pointed out as the chief occupation of the men, and intrigue as the sole employment of the women.61

Everard condemns the ‘immorality’ of Shakespeare’s work. Despite the fact that ‘it would be as easy to convert [Sir Henry] to the Presbyterian form of government, or engage him to take the abjuration oath, as to shake his belief in Shakspeare’, Sir Henry’s reply to Everard is an apology that pleads that the bad taste of the time be taken into account: the noblest sentiments of religion and virtue – sentiments which might convert hardened sinners, and be placed with propriety in the mouths of dying saints and martyrs – happened, from the rudeness and coarse taste of the times, to be mixed with some broad jests and similar matter, which lay not much in the way, excepting of those who painfully sought such stuff out, that they might use it in vilifying what was in itself deserving of the highest applause.62

Scott, recalling Dr Johnson, deplored the barbarity of the audience in Shakespeare’s time. Sir Henry defies his nephew to cite a Puritan ‘poet with enough both of gifts and grace to outshine poor old Will, the oracle and idol of us blinded and carnal Cavaliers’ and, at this request, Everard quotes a passage from an author whose works, he thinks, ‘might equal even the poetry of Shakspeare, and which are free from the fustian and indelicacy with which that great bard was sometimes content to feed the coarse appetites of his barbarous audience’.63 His uncle is so impressed that he asks him to repeat the quotation.64 Sir Henry admits his admiration for the anonymous poet, with a quotation from Shakespeare: ‘all his noble rhymes, as Will says, “Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh”‘.65 However, ultimately Sir Henry

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cannot endure a comparison between Shakespeare and Milton, the Puritan poet par excellence. On learning the identity of the poet that he has unwittingly liked, Sir Henry banishes his nephew from his house.66 Everhard is allowed a fair point but Puritan critics, as exemplified by Tomkins, are more extreme in their condemnation. Shakespeare ‘is the king and high priest of those vices and follies. Here is he, whom men of folly profanely call nature’s miracle. Here is he, whom princes chose for their cabinet-keeper, and whom maids of honour take for their bed fellow.’67 Ultimately, Shakespeare will be used as the seal to Charles’ restoration. Sir Henry Lee’s last Shakespearean quotation comes at Charles’s triumphant entrance in London as King. The ‘old man, detaining him with the other hand, said something faltering, of which Charles could only catch the quotation: “Unthread the rude eye of rebellion, And welcome home again discarded faith.’”68

In King John, Melun warns Salisbury and Pembroke to return to their legitimate sovereign. Shakespeare’s words could be seen to sanction the restoration of the legitimate monarch on his throne.69 However, it is a sanction which the new king would perhaps rather not have. Again, the knight places Charles in an uncomfortable position: ‘Extricating himself, therefore, as gently as possible, from a scene which began to grow painfully embarrassing, the good-natured King said, speaking with unusual distinctness to insure the old man’s comprehending him, “This is something too public a place for all we have to say.’”70 A new era has begun which will not leave room for old Cavaliers like Sir Henry, or Sir Walter. For Scott the 23 February 1827 might well have marked a new era, the succession of a new literary king. The ghosts of both Prospero and Macbeth haunt the proceedings. As does that of Shakespeare who unlike Banquo is made visible to all. The Scottish usurper holds his own. Indeed, there is even a certain pride in a successful usurpation. ‘I am willing,’ Scott says in his speech, ‘however, to plead guilty.’

Notes 1 Reported in Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, 2 vols (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970), II, 1008–9. 2 See for instance Julian Patrick, ‘The Tempest as Supplement’ and Barbara Howard Traister, ‘Prospero: Master of Self-Knowledge’ in William

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Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, ed. Harold Bloom, Modem Critical Interpretations (New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), pp. 69–84 and 113–30 (especially pp. 71–2, 127–8). Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, II, 1008. David Vedder, ‘Memoir of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., with Critical Notices of his Writings, Compiled from Various Authentic Sources (Dundee, 1832)’ in The Lives of the Great Romantics by their Contemporaries: Scott, ed. Fiona Robertson (London: Pickering 8c Chatto, 1997), pp. 23–43 (pp. 40–1). The quotation is taken from The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 252 (11 December 1826). See Moray McLaren, Sir Walter Scott: The Man and Patriot (London: Heinemann, 1970), p. 61. J. C. Smith also said that: ‘It annoyed Scott to be compared to Shakespeare’. See his ‘Scott and Shakespeare’ in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, collected by L. Binyon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), XXIV, 114–31 (p. 114). Walter Scott, ‘Tales of My Landlord’ in The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, 28 vols (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1851–7), XIX (1853), 1–86 (p. 65). There has been much debate among Scott scholars as to the authorship of this review. In the Introduction to Chronicles of the Canongate (1827) Scott said that it was written by William Erskine ‘with far too much partiality’ adding that he ‘supplied [his] accomplished friend’ with information and that his friend ‘took the trouble to write the review’. See The Prefaces to the Waverley Novels, ed. Mark A. Weinstein (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), pp. 70–80 (p. 77). The review was written by Scott; see James T. Hillhouse, The Waverley Novels and their Critics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1936), p. 17, note 3. John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, 10 vols (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1856–57), X, 195. Weinstein, Preface, p. 68. Ibid., p. 100. Indeed even a whole PhD thesis would prove insufficient. However, should the reader be curious, my thesis submitted to the University of Liverpool ‘Scott and Shakespeare’, 1999 covers precisely this subject. Sir Walter Scott, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, Centenary Edition, 12 vols (London: Constable, 1932–37), XII, 450–1 (March– April 1822). This was a proposal put to him rather than one he originated himself. Scott, Letters, VII, 79 (25 February 1822). For Scott’s comments on this edition, see also Scott, Letters, I, 413; VII, 270–2; VIII, 225; IX, 51,385; X, 59, 76–7, 88, 112, 159, 178, 186, 224–5, 267, 275; XI, 302. A brief description of how the project came to life appears in the Contents page of Volume II. From the letters he exchanged with his publisher, it is clear that it was to be a popular edition, with selected notes: ‘I mean an Edition of Shakspeare with a text as accurate as Weber and you can make it, which would be to you both a labour of love, and a selection of notes from former editions with some original commentaries, exclusive of all trash and retaining only what is necessary to the better understanding the Author or to justify disputed readings of importance. I do conceive that such a Book printed well, leisurely and accurately in an elegant but not an expensive form would cut out

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all the ordinary editions and afford a most respectable profit to the adventurers as well as credit to the press.’ See Scott, Letters, I, 413 (23 October 1810). According to Balakrishna Rao, the edition was not completed because of the ‘uncertainty, after the completion of the Shakespeare as to whom the work should belong, to Constable or to Cadell’. See his ‘Scott’s Proposed Edition of Shakespeare’, Indian Journal of English Studies, 6 (1965), 117–19 (p. 118). According to Lockhart, four volumes were printed, while Rao, who quotes from a letter from Constable’s son, writes they were only three. There is no evidence that the fourth volume was Scott’s introductory volume. Scott’s biography and introduction were probably never completed; on 11 April 1827 he wrote to Cadell that he thought he ‘could undertake to finish the life in a twelve month’. See Letters, X, 186. Reported in Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 139. Walter Scott, Kenilworth: A Romance, ed. J. H. Alexander (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. 168. Ibid., p. 168. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, p. 36. Scott was acquainted with the life of Shakespeare in the Biographia Britannica: or, the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Who Have Flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, from the Earliest Ages, down to the Present Times, 7 vols (London: printed for J. Walthoe and others, 1747–66), VI, part I (1763), 3627–39 (p. 3627). He owned an edition of 1747; see J. G. Cochrane, Catalogue of the Library at Abbotsford, Series: Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh: T. Constable, 1838), p. 233. Scott, Kenilworth, p. 173. Walter Scott, ‘An Essay on the Drama’ in The Miscellaneous Prose Works, VI (1852), pp. 219–395 (pp. 347–8). Scott, Kenilworth, p. 174. It is of course part of the tradition which derives Shakespeare’s lameness from sonnets 37 and 89. See for instance Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 156. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, p. 114. Scott, Kenilworth, p. 174. Biographia Britannica, p. 3628. The author drew this assumption from the fact that Falstaff, a favourite with the Queen, is a deer-stealer in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Scott, Kenilworth, p. 174. Ibid., p. 174. See Henry V, Prologue to Act 4, 50–3. Kenilworth, p. 175. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 175. See Walter Scott, ‘Life of Kemble – Kelly’s Reminiscences’ in The Miscellaneous Prose Works, XX (1851), 152–244 (p. 158). The action of Woodstock takes place in October 1651 when Sir Henry Lee is sixty-five; the knight states that Shakespeare died when he was a child, but in 1616 Sir Henry was already a grown-up man. See Walter Scott, Woodstock; or, The Cavalier, The Dryburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, 25 vols (London and Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1892–94), XXI (1894), pp. 1,20,31.

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34 Scott, Woodstock, p. 302. During the Puritan period Shakespeare was read rather than performed and therefore it was more common to refer to him as a poet than a playwright. For an overview of the period’s effects on the drama, see Hyder E. Rollins, ‘A Contribution to the History of the English Commonwealth Drama’, Studies in Philology, 18 (1921), pp. 267–333; Louis B. Wright, ‘The Reading of Plays during the Puritan Revolution’, Huntington Library Bulletin, 6 (1934), pp. 73–108; and Ernest Sirluck, ‘Shakespeare and Jonson among the Pamphleteers of the First Civil War: Some Unreported Seventeenth-Century Allusions’, Modern Philology, 53 (1955–56), pp. 88–99. 35 Cf. Lockhart, Memoirs, VIII, 353–7 and Scott, Woodstock, p. 15. 36 Ibid., p. 20. 37 Ibid., p. 54. 38 Ibid., pp. 20–21. 39 Cf. Ibid., p. 301 and 1 Henry IV, 4.1.111. 40 Cf. Scott, Woodstock, p. 348 and Julius Caesar, 5.1.119, 122. The Prince’s comment is genuine this time and his affection for the knight appears in his ‘glistening’ eyes. 41 Scott, Woodstock, p. 415. 42 Ibid., p. 400. 43 Ibid., pp. 455. Wildrake’s quotation from Twelfth Night (2.3.56–7) endears him to Sir Henry (pp. 246–7). 44 Scott, Woodstock, p. 462. 45 Ibid., p. 20. 46 Quoted in Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: Vintage, 1989), p. 9. Cf. John Milton, Eikonoclastes: 1, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don. M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), III, 1648–49 (1962), 350–68 (p. 361). T. A. Birrell informs us that Sir Thomas Herbert, whom he calls a ‘very duplicitous man’, was the source for the story that Charles I was reading Shakespeare and Jonson during his last days. See his English Monarchs and their Books: From Henry VII to Charles II, The Panizzi Lectures 1986 (London: British Library, 1987), p. 47. 47 Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 7. 48 A. N. Wilson, The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 10. 49 Cf. Scott, Woodstock, ch. 23, p. 275 and Richard II, 5.3.6–7, 9–10. Two other chapter-tags from Richard II, besides the one quoted above, provide a parallel with the Prince; cf. chs. 21,25, pp. 249,296 and Richard II, 5.5.67–8; 1.3.118. 50 Scott, Woodstock, p. 275. 51 Cf. Ibid., p. 277 and Richard II, 1.1.1. 52 Scott, Woodstock, p. 279. 53 Ibid., p. 284. 54 Ibid., p. 278. 55 Scott, ‘Life of Dryden’, The Miscellaneous Prose Works, I (1852), p. 58. 56 See Richard II, 2.1.96. 57 See Richard II, ed. by Peter Ure, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1956), pp. lvii–lxii. 58 See Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions, p. 62.

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59 Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, p. 24. 60 Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 81. 61 Scott, Woodstock, p. 303. Cf. above the view of the Dean of St Asaph’s in Kenilworth, p. 175. 62 Scott, Woodstock, pp. 303–4. 63 Ibid., p. 305. 64 Cf. Ibid., p. 306 and Milton, Comus in The Complete Poems, ed. B. A. Wright (London: J. M. Dent, 1980), pp. 47–75, lines 210–22. 65 Cf. Scott, Woodstock, p. 307 and Hamlet, 3.1.161. 66 Scott, Woodstock, p. 308. 67 Ibid., p. 41. 68 Cf. Ibid., p. 462 and King John, 5.4.11–12. 69 In Waverley the same lines sanction the hero’s decision to leave his commission to the Hanoverian monarch (p. 216). 70 Scott, Woodstock, p. 462.

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Shakespeare goes to Scotland: a brief history of Scottish editions ANDREW MURPHY

Scotland was something of a power-house of British publishing in the nineteenth century. In 1873, Henry Curwen estimated that some 10,000 people were employed in the printing trade north of the border. ‘The eight or nine leading houses’, he observed, ‘with one exception, print themselves the books they sell; a practice which is almost indigenous to Edinburgh, or, at all events, does not obtain in London.’1 Printing and publishing had, however, been slow to take hold in Scotland. There was virtually no printing in the country before the mid-1500s and during the course of James VI’s 57-year reign an average of fewer than a dozen books were published annually.2 It is somewhat surprising, then, to discover that one of the books to have been produced in Scotland in the early decades of the seventeenth century was an edition of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, which appeared under the Edinburgh imprint of John Wreittoun. Of Wreittoun little is known, and E S. Ferguson has observed that ‘most of his books are now among the rarest productions of the Scottish press’.3 The poem seems a strange choice for a Scottish publisher in an era in which the fires of the Reformation were still smouldering. The original London publisher of the poem – Richard Field – appears to have regarded the work as a piece of erotica, offering it for sale at about three times the price that might have been expected for a book of its size.4 Wreittoun’s edition of Venus and Adonis was probably little more than a curious anomaly. No other Shakespeare texts appear to have been published in Scotland for the remainder of the seventeenth century. Indeed, it would be 1752 before another Shakespeare edition appeared with a Scottish imprint. In

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this year, the Glasgow publishers Robert and Andrew Foulis began issuing single-play texts, which purchasers could, if they wished, gather into an eight volume set.5 The final text in the series was issued in 1766, at which point the edition was also reissued in a smaller format (duodecimo instead of octavo). The Foulis brothers were closely associated with Glasgow University, with Robert serving as official printer to the college. The brothers were key figures in the Glasgow of the Scottish Enlightenment and they set very high standards in the work that they produced. They were awarded medals for the quality of their publications on several occasions by the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, Manufactures and Agriculture in Scotland.6 The Foulis volumes offered their readers a derivative edition. As the title pages make clear, the texts were ‘according to Mr Pope’s second edition’.7 At the same time as the Foulis Shakespeares were becoming available, however, another edition was published which had a Scottish editor as well as Scottish publishers. This edition appeared in Edinburgh in 1753, with the imprint ‘by Sands, Murray and Cochran for W. Sands, Hamilton & Balfour, Kincaid & Donaldson, L. Hunter, J. Yair, W. Gordon, and J. Brown’. Volume 1 opened with ‘The Scots Editors Preface’; the base text was William Warburton’s London edition of 1747, but the Scots editor did make some of his own emendations and had clearly collated at least some of the recent major editions.8 In his Preface, the editor indicates that ‘the great demand for [Shakespeare’s] works among the learned and polite, and a laudable zeal for promoting home manufactures, were the principal motives for undertaking an edition of his works in Scotland’.9 There is some debate as to the exact identity of this Scots editor. A 1795 reprint of the text attributed the editorial work to Hugh Blair, the Scottish academic and divine who had an important foundational role in establishing English literature as a field of university study and whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres helped to introduce American students to Shakespeare.10 Recent work has, however, cast some doubt on this attribution.11 It is possible that the early readership of the first Edinburgh Shakespeare did not much care who had edited the text – or, indeed, whether the text had been freshly edited or was simply a reprint of one of the London Shakespeares. A large part of the appeal of the edition (and its contemporary Glasgow equivalent) must have been its price. The Edinburgh Shakespeare cost just £1 2s, or £1 8s ‘neatly bound in red turkey’.12 The Foulis complete sets sold for £1 12s in the octavo version or just 16s in the smaller duodecimo format.13 These prices were significantly lower than their London equivalents: Lewis

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Theobald’s edition had, for instance, cost 2 guineas in 1733.14 Producing good books at cheap prices was the stock-in-trade of the Scottish publishing industry in the eighteenth century. It was a practice, however, that led to a protracted dispute between the Scots and their London counterparts. The Londoners essentially regarded publishing rights as a form of perpetual property; they reasoned that a publisher who bought the rights to a particular work owned those rights indefinitely and could – as in the case of any form of real property – choose to resell them or to pass them on by inheritance.15 This had certainly been the case from 1557, when Mary I granted a monopoly on printing to the Stationers’ Company. But, by the eighteenth century, the situation had changed. The 1709 Act for the Encouragement of Learning contained provisions limiting copyright to a period of twenty-one years for works already in print and of fourteen years for new books, renewable for a further fourteen if the author were still alive. The implication of the act was that by 1730 the works of writers such as Shakespeare had effectively entered the public domain. The precise meaning of the 1709 act was, however, much debated and the London trade made strenuous efforts in the courts to have the principle of perpetual copyright reaffirmed – the act’s term limits notwithstanding. These legal battles were necessary in large measure because a burgeoning Scottish publishing industry had begun to make the cheap reprint its staple product. Scottish reprints were being sold throughout the British market, undercutting the equivalent London editions, and were also being exported to the North American colonies (where a native publishing industry was slow to establish itself). One of the most determined opponents of the Londoners was the Edinburgh publisher Alexander Donaldson. In a pamphlet on the subject of literary property, published in 1764, Donaldson observed: The progress and advancement which of late years have been made in the art of printing in other parts of the united kingdom, particularly in the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, has been matter of umbrage and jealousy to these booksellers of London; at whose instance various prosecutions have been intented, both in the court of Chancery in England, and the court of Session in Scotland, against certain of the booksellers of Edinburgh and Glasgow, for their having reprinted and vended new editions of some of those books, in which the London booksellers pretend they have an exclusive right of property.16

Donaldson had been a member of the consortium that had issued the first Edinburgh edition of Shakespeare in 1753 and he was also involved in several other Shakespeare publishing projects. He served as agent for a Shakespeare

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edition published in Birmingham in 1768 and produced a new edition of the Edinburgh text in the following year (in conjunction with fellow Scot, Walter Ruddiman). The next year again (1770), Donaldson began issuing single text editions of the plays, and in 1771 he produced another complete plays edition, dedicating it – with a certain bravura cheek, some may have felt – to no less a person than David Garrick: ‘THIS edition claims your patronage in a particular manner, because it is exactly printed from the one published at Edinburgh in 1753, which I have heard you honour with your approbation’.17 The imprint for this edition was ‘London and Edinburgh’. In 1763, Donaldson had opened a shop in London, with the specific intention of challenging the English monopolists in their own back yard. By the time he issued the 1771 Shakespeare, Donaldson had moved his shop from the corner of Arundel Street, in the Strand, to 48, East corner of St Paul’s Churchyard. St Paul’s Churchyard was the traditional centre of the London publishing trade. Donaldson was now selling his cheap reprints right on the very doorstep of the Londoners, who felt that they owned these texts by exclusive right. The London publishers did not, by any means, simply allow Donaldson free rein. His activities were repeatedly challenged in the courts and the Londoners had some success in their legal battles with the Scot. However, in 1774, Donaldson won a decisive victory when he appealed to the House of Lords against a crucial judgement. The Lords ruled in Donaldson’s favour and the decision had the effect of definitively confirming the term limits set down in the 1709 Act for the Encouragement of Learning. As a result of this decision, the concept of perpetual copyright was finally laid to rest. The judgement won by Donaldson had the effect of formally confirming the existence of a public domain of texts which were available for any publisher to draw upon. Donaldson and his compatriots were not, of course, the only publishers to benefit from the loosening of constraints on publishing which followed the 1774 decision. An English reprint trade also quickly established itself in the final quarter of the century. Partly as a result of Donaldson’s victory, then, cheap editions of Shakespeare began to proliferate more generally from the end of the eighteenth century onwards.18 In this sense, Donaldson can be credited with playing an important role in the broadening of Shakespeare’s popular appeal from the turn of the century. Many of these cheap popular editions continued to be produced in Scotland, and by 1819 the Edinburgh publisher Alexander Constable felt compelled to acknowledge that ‘Editions of Shakspeare are indeed very numerous’ and that ‘the Public is supplied even to repletion’ with existing texts.19 Such repletion did not,

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however, stop Constable’s presses from turning and certainly Scottish editions of Shakespeare continued to appear throughout the nineteenth century. If the Donaldson judgement played a part in faciliting an expansion in popular Shakespeare publishing in the nineteenth century, another significant factor in that expansion was the broadening of the educational franchise. The number of schools in the UK increased gradually over the course of the century and, in 1870, the Elementary Education Act was passed, further expanding the number and range of schools available to younger children. By 1880, school attendance up to age ten had become compulsory and, within another decade, public elementary schooling was being provided free of charge.20 The formalization of requirements for education was accompanied by a culture of examination and Shakespeare quickly found a place within the new exam systems.21 These developments prompted their own particular publishing effect and editions of Shakespeare specifically aimed at the schools market soon began to appear. Among those servicing this market was J. M. W. Meiklejohn, Professor of Education at the University of St Andrews. Together with his son, M. J. C. Meiklejohn, the St Andrews academic produced ‘Professor Meiklejohn’s Series’, a set of educational volumes on a wide range of topics. The professor himself also produced editions of individual Shakespeare plays for the London and Edinburgh-based publishers W. & R. Chambers. His attitude to the text indicates a shift in educational thinking from the classical to the vernacular – a shift which resonates with the gradual contemporary emergence of English as a university discipline in its own right.22 Meiklejohn privileges the study of Shakespeare’s language over other possible topics. In his annotations, he tells us, Shakespeare’s ‘idioms have been dwelt upon; his peculiar use of words; his style and his rhythm’. Meiklejohn encourages teachers to pursue a similar focus with their charges; should they do so, he observes, it ‘is probable that, for those pupils who do not study either Greek or Latin, this close examination of every word and phrase in the text of Shakespeare will be the best substitute that can be found for the study of the ancient classics’. Meiklejohn goes on to suggest that ‘every boy and girl in England should have a thorough knowledge of at least one play of Shakespeare before they leave school’ and he argues that this would give children ‘one of the best lessons in human life – without the chance of a polluting or degrading experience’.23 To be doubly sure of preserving his juvenile readers from pollution and degradation, Meiklejohn expurgated his editions, cutting over 400 words from his text of Hamlet.24

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certainly his work is now little remembered. However, one of the most

important editions of the nineteenth century was a text which, while it was not published in Scotland, did, nevertheless, have strong Scottish connections. The edition in question is the Cambridge Shakespeare, issued in nine volumes between 1863 and 1866. The text was also spun off into the commercial single-volume Globe edition. The Scottish link here is with the publisher – Alexander Macmillan. Macmillan had moved down to London from Scotland in 1839, following in the footsteps of his brother Daniel. Both worked at the publishers L. and G. Seeley in Fleet Street. Alexander was himself closely interested in literature and, in 1840, he published, anonymously, a little volume entitled The Genius of Shelley, Being Selections from his Poetry with a Sketch of his Life.25 In 1843, the Macmillan brothers established their own publishing company and, in time, Alexander rose to a position of high influence within British publishing, taking a hand in the affairs of both Cambridge and Oxford university presses as well as directing the activities of his own company.26 The surviving correspondence makes it clear that Alexander Macmillan was the guiding spirit behind the Cambridge Shakespeare and its Globe spinoff. He took soundings from James MacLehose, the official printer to the University of Glasgow – a close confidant of Macmillan throughout his life. In 1860, Macmillan wrote to MacLehose, seeking his advice on the larger of the two projects: I want you to be so kind as to tell me what you think of the chances for an edition of Shakespeare, edited like a critical edition of a classical author, with merely the text and such various readings as seemed to have value either for their appeareances in early editions or from their intrinsic worth ... No attempt at commentary is to be made... I fancy it will make eight volumes, including the poems printed so, and might be sold at £4 4s. 750 copies would yield a decent profit. Tell me what you think of the scheme. It would go out as the Cambridge edition. The editors do it as a labour of love, and the publisher would only have to risk paper and print. Of course you will consider the matter as strictly private.27

Macmillan changed his mind about the print run, which was increased to 1,500 copies.28 His editors would also appear to have changed their minds about producing the edition simply as a ‘labour of love’: in October of 1866, Macmillan wrote to William Aldis Wright (by then the principal editor) observing ‘I have ordered payment of £75 to you ... for vols 8 & 9. I am very glad at the completion of this great work.’29

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While work on the multi-volume edition was still ongoing, Macmillan wrote again to MacLehose in Glasgow, seeking his advice once more: I enclose a page for a Shakespeare, which I fancy doing in one volume, on toned paper for 3s. 6d., very nicely bound in Macmillan’s choicest cloth binding. The text to be gone over by our Cambridge editors, but done in this edition with an eye to more popular uses than they felt themselves at liberty to consider in their critical and scholarly edition. Now your judgment is always as you know precious to me, even when I cannot quite follow it. I want you to tell me whether you think I have a reasonable chance of selling 50,000 of such a book in three years. For if so I can do a nice stroke of business. You see it would be immeasurably the cheapest, most beautiful and handy book that has appeared of any kind, except the Bible.30

On this occasion, Macmillan was sufficiently pleased with the advice he received from his fellow Scot that he had 500 prospectuses for the Globe edition sent to Glasgow, with MacLehose’s name overprinted on them. MacLehose was also sent 300 circulars and four cards on which to gather orders.31 Macmillan and his editors achieved a great double success with the Cambridge and Globe editions. The Globe, as Margreta de Grazia has observed, was ‘portable, affordable, and legible ... intended for worldwide circulation’. In an age of imperial expansion it provided, as she notes, ‘One Shakespeare for one world’.32 The popular success of the Globe was matched by the critical success of the Cambridge, which served as the dominant text of the second half of the nineteenth century and, indeed, beyond. The impact of the edition on textual scholarship is registered by Horace Howard Furness, founding editor of the Variorum Shakespeare (initiated in 1871): ‘Ever since the appearance ... of The Cambridge Edition of Shakespeare [the] whole question of texts ... which had endlessly vexed the Shakespearean world, has gradually subsided, until now it is fairly lulled to a sleep as grateful as it is deep’. The Cambridge served as the central benchmark edition for several decades after its first appearance. The dominant position of the Cambridge edition came gradually to be challenged with the emergence, in the early decades of the twentieth century, of the New Bibliography, which offered a fresh approach to editing and textual theory, promoting a closer direct engagement with the printed text as it appeared on the page and seeking to map out the exact nature of the manuscript copy which lay behind the printed text. Part of the project of the New Bibliography was to trace, with greater accuracy, the precise

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relationships among the earliest printed texts. Looking back to Macmillan’s landmark editions of the nineteenth century in 1934, John Dover Wilson observed that the Cambridge editors had not been able adequately to grasp the nature of these textual relationships. Writing of the editors’ handling of the second quarto and First Folio texts of Hamlet in the Globe edition, Wilson notes that They have confidence in neither text; they halt between them, and are unable to make definite choice of either because they are ignorant of the character of both. And if further proof of this be needed, it is furnished by their other edition of Hamlet, that published two years later in The Cambridge Shakespeare, which differs from its predecessor in 102 readings, 89 of which go in favour of Q2 and 10 in favour of F1. This looks like tardy repentance, until the changes are examined and found to be almost without exception mere trivialities. Nor is any principle evident behind them; they seem nothing but the veerings of a weather-vane.33

Wilson himself served as editor for what might be described as the first Shakespeare edition undertaken on New Bibliographic principles.34 It took Wilson forty-five years (1921–66) to bring the edition fully to print and many commentators felt that a certain speculative extravagance on Wilson’s part meant that his texts did not offer the best example of New Bibliographic practice.35 An alternative to Wilson was available from 1951, when Peter Alexander, Regius Professor of English at the University of Glasgow, produced a new text, also edited on New Bibliographic lines, and published by the long-established Glasgow firm of Collins. Collins had been publishing the same Shakespeare edition for the best part of a hundred years and they estimated that, by the mid-twentieth century, ‘several million copies must have been sold’.36 They decided that the time had come to revamp the text and they called in Alexander, initially in an advisory capacity. Collins were under the impression that their stock text might originally have been a reprint of either the Cambridge or the Globe. Alexander checked this and reported his findings: it is not the Cambridge or Globe text. Nor is it the Oxford text. Naturally I have only tried samples, but the results they give are quite conclusive. To place it exactly might well require a good deal of searching; it might prove to be someone’s private version and not taken directly from a well known version.37

Impressed by his scholarly credentials, Collins asked Alexander whether he would wish to revise the text for a new edition, which they hoped ‘would become a standard text’.38 Alexander agreed to do this, for a fee of 500 guineas, and he estimated that the work would take 2,000 hours.

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Even granted that he was reworking an existing text and not starting with a blank sheet of paper, Alexander’s projection for the time needed to complete his work was a gross underestimate and he repeatedly failed to meet the deadlines set for him by Collins. The Glasgow professor came in time to feel a certain sense of regret at the constraints that the practicalities of commercial publishing placed upon him, observing that ‘I have been too ambitious to get it all right by my way of it, & such ambition is doubtless a sin’ and ruefully concluding that he couldn’t ‘expect the Sales side to have any patience with this’.39 His revision of the text was thorough-going and was closely informed by New Bibliographic thinking and his edition was finally brought to press some seven years after he agreed to undertake the project. The publishing company’s ambitions that the edition might become a standard text were to a large extent realized – at least in a UK context – and Gary Taylor has observed that the Alexander text established itself as the ‘most esteemed and influential British edition of the twentieth century’.40 Like the text which it replaced, the Alexander edition had a long shelflife and it turned in respectable sales figures year by year and decade by decade. Peter Alexander himself died in 1969, but his edition has long outlived him. Early in the 1970s, Collins were investigating the possibility of producing a special version of the text for a commercial book club and their plans for this edition provide an interesting insight into the complexities of the publishing market-place. An internal memo at the press asks that, as a further move towards getting the book club ‘to use a handsome quantity of our Shakespeare, would you please have a couple of samples made up in a skivertox binding. We could then possibly offer the Shakespeare in a similar way to the deal we did with the NEW GUILD DICTIONARY / WESTMINISTER DICTIONARY’. The basis of the deal, the memo makes clear, is that ‘we could possibly create a reasonably high fictitious retail price’ for the book club ‘to discount’. The writer of the memo asks whether it would ‘be right out of the question to offer a guilt top?’, with the ‘u’ in ‘guilt’ being crossed through – it is hard not to feel, in the circumstances, that there is a certain significance in this slip of the pen.41 Later in the same decade, Collins were looking into the possibility of turning out a high-volume low-cost version of the Alexander text. W. T. McLeod writes to the production department at the press asking Could you let me have costs for producing as cheaply as possible an edition of our Tudor Shakespeare text on the same mechanical paper as we are using for the reprint of the Greek Contemporary Dictionary. Cost the production on a run of 100,000, adhesive bound with laminated paper over 1750 micron boards.42

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If, in the 1970s, the Alexander text enjoyed a sales boost from the book club trade and from mass market sales, the edition was further revitalized at the end of this same decade when the BBC approached Collins to enquire about using the Alexander edition as the base text for their planned TV series of the complete plays. Collins cut a complex deal with the BBC, whereby the Alexander text would receive acknowledgement in the credits to each of the programmes; Collins would be granted exclusive publishing rights to some of the publicity stills from the series for use in a repackaged Collins edition; and the BBC would produce their own single text editions of the plays, with the Collins text being acknowledged as providing the base text for these volumes. The BBC’s own volumes were to be produced using plant provided by Collins. W. T. McLeod of the Glasgow firm wrote to the Books Editor at BBC Publications in February of 1978, enclosing some proof materials and he commented that while ‘the quality is far from perfect, I believe the worst flaws would respond to skilful retouching and if the worst comes to the worst in a few instances we can always make plate corrections before taking pulls’.43 In the event, the BBC’s own set of texts does not appear to have sold particularly well, though Collins did have some success with their repackaged edition, using the BBC publicity stills on the cover. Collins were anxious to sell this edition into the American market, but both the BBC and their American partners, Time-Life, were ‘adamant that under no circumstances would they allow any use of the BBC stills on books other than the BBC publications’.44 This resistance stemmed partly from the fact that the BBC’s own editions were being published in the American market by Mayflower Books and also from the fact that the BBC was considering repaying its American sponsor, the petrol company Exxon, with ‘a very substantial quantity of the BBC books at a rock-bottom price for distribution to its customers and agents’.45 It is rather a nice thought to imagine American gas station customers being presented with a copy of Measure for Measure in exchange for filling up their tank with Exxon. Perhaps it speaks of a different age. Having been revitalized courtesy of the BBC in the closing years of the 1970s, Alexander’s text received a further boost in 1994, when staff from Alexander’s old department at Glasgow University contributed a set of new introductions to each of the plays and the text was relaunched by Collins. The introductory matter to the new version of the text included an essay on ‘Shakespeare’s Theatre’, by Anthony Burgess – one of the very last pieces by the novelist to appear in print.

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Shakespeare goes to Scotland

Peter Alexander’s edition was a thoroughly Scottish Shakespeare, in that it was edited by a native Glaswegian who served as Regius Professor at the city’s university, and it was produced by a Glasgow-based publisher. In the context of the early twenty-first century this seems like a curiously anomalous local narrative. The Collins firm that published Alexander’s text still exists, but only residually. It has been absorbed into the conglomerate HarperCollins, which is, in its turn, a division of the global multi-media corporation News International. The heyday of Scottish publishing is long since past – the majority of the most important publishing companies are now multinational conglomerates and little room is left in the industry for a Donaldson, a Collins or a Macmillan who, in other eras, left their mark on national culture. In these circumstances, it seems unlikely that we will ever see another important Scottish edition of Shakespeare. Given this fact, there is a certain sad amusement to be drawn from the fact that one of the premier scholarly editions of Shakespeare – the Arden Shakespeare – has in recent years migrated from Routledge to its current home at Thomas Nelson. The name ‘Thomas Nelson’ means about as much in this context as the name ‘Collins’ does in the context of HarperCollins. But there once was a Thomas Nelson – he was born into a religiously minded family at Throsk, near Stirling, in 1780. With a certain quaint sentimentalism, Henry Curwen tells the story of his early life: When, like many youths of his time who had their own paths to clear in the world’s jungle, he resolved to leave Scotland and to seek his fortunes in the West Indies, his father accompanied him on the road to Alloa, the place of embarkation, and during the journey asked him, ‘Have you ever thought that in the country to which you are going, you will be far away from the means of grace?’ ‘No, father,’ replied the son, ‘I never thought of that; and I won’t go.’ And immediately the scheme was abandoned, and they retraced their steps homeward.46

Thomas did, eventually, leave home. As Alexander Macmillan would do after him, he moved to London and trained as a publisher. In due course

–

and

unlike Macmillan – he returned to Scotland and set up in business in Edinburgh. The firm that he established there became, in time, one of the biggest in the UK. Writing in 1873, Curwen observes Taking printing, publishing, and bookbinding together, Thomas Nelson and Sons, of Hope Park, are the most extensive house in Scotland. They removed to their present establishment a quarter of a century ago, and were compelled, after a lapse of ten years, to build a new range of offices far exceeding anything of the kind in the city of Edinburgh, and probably unparalleled out of it... In the main

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building there are three floors apportioned to the various branches of the trade. Machinery is used wherever it is possible, and by its aid, and by a well-organized system of division of labour, the number of books manufactured is enormous. Everything, from the compilation of a book to the lettering of its binding, is done upon the premises, and for the founts of type and the paper alone are the proprietors indebted to outside help.47

There is a certain irony in the fact that, while Thomas Nelson looked on the prospect of a world elsewhere and withdrew from it, his name now survives in the imprint of a global conglomerate. The Arden Shakespeare is thus now brought to the world under the name of the son of a small farmer from near Bannockburn. It is only in such ghostly resonances that a significant Scottish tradition of Shakespeare publishing lives on.

Notes 1

Henry Curwen, A History of Booksellers, the Old and the New (London: Chatto &Windus, 1873), pp. 410–11. 2 T. I. Rae, Scotland in the Time of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 31. 3 F. S. Ferguson, ‘Relations between London and Edinburgh Printers and Stationers to 1640’, Library, 4th series, vii (1927), p. 194. 4 See Francis R. Johnson, ‘Notes on English Retail Book-Prices, 1550–1640’, Library, 5 (1950), p. 92. 5 For a more detailed account of Shakespeare publishing in Scotland in the eighteenth century see chapter 6 of Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 6 David Murray, Robert and Andrew Foulis and the Glasgow Press with some account of the Glasgow Academy of the Fine Arts ( Glasgow: MacLehose, 1913 ), p. 29. 7 Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1756). 8 See Richard Hosley, Richard Knowles, and Ruth McGugan, Shakespeare Variorum Handbook: A Manual of Editorial Practice (New York: Modern Language Association, 1971), p. 63. 9 Works of Shakespear (Edinburgh: by Sands, Murray and Cochran for W. Sands, Hamilton & Balfour, Kincaid & Donaldson, L. Hunter, J. Yair, W. Gordon, and J. Brown), vol. 1, p. i. 10 See Introduction, pp. 2–3. 11 See Warren McDougall, ‘Copyright Litigation in the Court of Sessions, 1738— 1749, and the Rise of the Scottish Book Trade’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 5th part, 5 (1988), p. 14. 12 A catalogue of curious and valuable books, to be disposed of by way of sale, (the lowest price being marked at each book), at the shop of Alexander

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Donaldson, the first fore-stair above the entry to the Royal Bank, Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Donaldson, 1753), p. 46, items 1113 and 1114. 13 Philip Gaskell, A Bibliography of the Foulis Press (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964), pp. 270–3. 14 See pricing information included in the (unpaged) proposal section of Samuel Johnson’s Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth: with

15

16

17 18

19

20 21

22

23 24 25 26

remarks on Sir T. H.’s edition of Shakespear. To which is affix’d, proposals for a new edition of Shakeshear [sic], with a specimen (London: E. Cave, 1745). On disputes regarding the precise meaning of copyright in the eighteenth century, see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968). Anon [Alexander Donaldson?], Some thoughts on the state of literary property, humbly submitted to the consideration of the public (Edinburgh: Donaldson, 1764), pp. 4–5. The Works of Shakespear (London and Edinburgh: A. Donaldson), vol. 1, ‘Dedication’, unpaged. An exemplary figure here would be John Bell, who issued a convoluted set of popular editions in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. A very useful account of the editions is provided in Kalman A. Burnim and Philip H. Highfill Jr, John Bell, Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture: A Catalog of the Theatrical Portraits in His Editions of Bell’s Shakespeare and Bell’s British Theatre (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998). The plays of Shakspeare. Printed from the text of Samuel Johnson, George Steevens, and Isaac Reed. (Edinburgh: Constable, 1821), vol. 1, p. v (italics in original). See W. B. Stephens, Education in Britain, 1750–1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), especially p. 81. On the rise of the examination as an educational tool in the nineteenth century, see John Roach, Public Examinations in England, 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). On Scotland’s role in relation to the development of English studies, see Robert Crawford ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). Meiklejohn ed., Hamlet (London and Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, n.d.), ‘General Notice’, verso of title page (all quotations). See Noel Perrin, Dr Bowdler’s Legacy (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 113. For these details, see Edward Bell, George Bell, Publisher: A Brief Memoir (London: Chiswick Press, 1924), pp. 18–20. For a general history of the publishing company see Charles Morgan, The House of Macmillan (1843–1943) (London: Macmillan, 1943).

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27 George Macmillan ed., Letters of Alexander Macmillan (London: Macmillan, 1908), pp. 52–3. 28 See David McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press: Vol. 2 Scholarship and Commerce, 1698–1872 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 393. 29 Macmillan archives, letter from Macmillan to Wright, dated 17 October 1866, British Library add. ms. 55386. 30 Macmillan, Letters (see n. 27), pp. 171–2. 31 McKitterick, History, II, p. 393. 32 De Grazia, ‘The Question of the One and the Many: The Globe Shakespeare,’ the Complete King Lear, and the New Folger Library Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 46:2 (1995), p. 247. 33 Wilson, The Manuscript of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Problems of its Transmission: An Essay in Critical Bibliography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), vol. I, p. 8. 34 A significant portion of the work on the edition was undertaken while Wilson was Regius Professor of English at the University of Edinburgh and Wilson deposited his papers at the National Library of Scotland. 35 Fredson Bowers observed of Wilson that his ‘highly speculative mind produced more random insights than it did comprehensive working hypotheses that have stood the test of informed scrutiny’ – ‘Today’s Shakespeare Texts, and Tomorrow’s’, Studies in Bibliography, 19 ( 1966), p. 45. 36 Collins archives, HarperCollins, Glasgow, letter from G. F. Maine of Collins to Peter Alexander, dated 12 October, 1944, Collins file ‘Shakespeare Oct 1944–Aug 77’. Further references are to this file until otherwise indicated. My thanks to Edwin Moore for facilitating my work at HarperCollins. 37 Typed sheet, headed ‘Shakespeare (Notes by Professor P. Alexander, Professor of English Literature in the University of Glasgow’ dated 5 October 1944. Subsequently, the press seems to have established that the text had first been issued in 1862, before the appearance of the Cambridge and Globe editions – see memo from ‘D. Department’ to Mr W. A. Collins et al., dated 21 September 1944. 38 Maine to Alexander, as n. 36. 39 Letter from Alexander to G. F. Maine, dated 29 May, 1952. These comments relate specifically to the multi-volume ‘Collins Classics’ edition, which appeared after the single volume edition of 1951. 40 Taylor, ‘Introduction’ to Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987) p. 56. 41 Collins memo, dated 5 December 1972, Collins file ‘Shakespeare Sept 73 (to May 79)’. 42 Memo from McLeod to W. H. Ross, dated 18 August 1977, headed ‘CHEAP SHAKESPEARE’, Collins file ‘Shakespeare Oct 1944–Aug 77’. 43 Letter from McLeod to T. Kingsford, dated 7 February 1978, Collins file ‘BBC Shakespeare, Dec 77-Mar 82’. All references are to this file unless otherwise stated. 44 Memo to the Collins chairman from Michael Hyde, dated 23 March 1979, headed COLLINS COMPLETE SHAKESPEARE (TV WRAPPED EDITION).

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45 Memo from W. T. McLeod to J. A. D. Macfarlane, dated 11 August 1978. 46 Curwen, History of Booksellers (see n. 1), p. 401. 47 Ibid., pp. 407–8.

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Citz Scotland where it did? Shakespeare in production at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, 1970–74 ADRIENNE SCULLION

Elsinore stripped back to an essential bare black-box set with actors in black loincloths and short cloaks; an angry, youthful prince; a Player King with undertones of paedophilia. A luminous Mediterranean beach-front setting; one actor doubling as both Viola and Sebastian. A heady ‘ethnic’ drum beat underscoring an equatorial location; a male actor as a dangerous and forbidden Cleopatra. A louche Achilles lying provocatively with Patroclus under the knowing gaze of a semi-naked Helen. A lithe, nude Hecate. Elsinore transposed to a twentieth-century asylum. A male actor in t-shirt and rehearsal skirt as a steely Lady Macbeth. These are snapshots of productions of Shakespeare’s plays at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow. They affirm that the Citizens’ Theatre, most especially during the 1970s when all these examples were staged, was a theatre of distinctive aesthetic innovation and theatrical daring, and underline the company’s reputation as a unique and remarkable element of late twentieth-century Scottish theatre culture. This chapter will describe and debate the innovative and controversial productions of Shakespeare’s plays by the Citizens’ Theatre Company under the directorship of Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald. While this was a directorship that uniquely spanned the period 1969 to 2003, this chapter will focus on productions during the early phase of this regime. I speculate that these early productions – which include the Hamlet ( 1970), Antony and Cleopatra (1972) and Troilus and Cressida (1973) sketched above – were deployed by the directorate to demonstrate – to enact – the spirit of the Citizens’ of that time. I suggest that these

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Shakespeare productions encapsulate the distinctive internationalism of the Citizens’ aesthetic project as provocative and sexy, and represent the company’s dramaturgical policy as daring and scholarly. Certainly, the company’s interest in the key themes of gender play and cross-dressing, ‘designer’s theatre’ and camp are consistently developed and reassessed in productions of Shakespeare’s plays. However, one might go further by suggesting that from Havergal and Prowse’s first Shakespeare production

–

Hamlet in 1970 – Citizens’ Shakespeare has functioned as a kind of cultural shorthand, deliberately deployed to advance the company’s aesthetic agenda and to force its audience’s active spectatorship. In 1969 Giles Havergal was appointed the artistic director of a theatre in trouble. In the space of four seasons four artistic directors – David William, Michael Meacher, Michael Blakemore, and Robert Cartland – had been appointed to and then swiftly resigned from Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre.1 Relations between the board and the staff were strained to breaking point. Audiences were dwindling for the main stage and also for the associated studio space, the Close Theatre Club. Against this backdrop the appointment of Havergal was something of a risk: he was young (born in 1938) and littleknown to Scottish-based theatre makers or theatregoers; although he did have the reputation of changing the fortunes of one theatre, the Civic Theatre in Watford, where he had already been artistic director. In a programme note for the first production of his first season as artistic director of the Citizens’ – the British premiere of Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore – Havergal wrote the following: ‘We believe that theatre has a unique contribution to make to community life, but only if it is of the highest standard, both in plays presented, and method of presentation ... We hope the combination of plays, and those presenting them, will give you [the audience] a worthwhile evening of uniquely theatrical entertainment.’2 It was a clear aim, based on quality and high production values, but it was also, perhaps, one that lacked specificity, and it certainly failed to articulate a compelling aesthetic or political vision. The 1969/1970 season, which began with Havergal’s production of Milk Train – but also included Don Taylor’s Sam Foster Comes Home, Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, Jean Anouilh’s Colombe, and Robert David MacDonald’s Ebb3 – undoubtedly offered an ambitious range of texts but did little to fire the imagination of Scottish theatregoers.4 With questionable success during this first season and, as a result, the clock ticking

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on his directorship, Havergal reviewed the policy he had expressed in his first programme note. In partnership with his resident designer, Prowse, he recast it almost completely. For the second season the programming and production policy changed. While Havergal had launched his first season by offering an interesting and unusual play list’,5 for the second season the emphasis was on exploring ‘famous plays by famous authors’6 and, more particularly, presenting plays that the audience had heard of but, significantly, produced in ways that they would least expect. Havergal and Prowse sought to achieve this aim with a core company of young actors – the Citizens’ Theatre Company – who would work together on the full repertoire of productions through the year: the policy was summarized by Havergal as predicated on ‘well known plays by well known authors presented by a permanent company playing simultaneously at the Citizens’ and at the Close Theatre Club’.7 For the 1970/71 season the play list does indeed seem predicated on the tried and tested – opening with a neat combination of Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and being followed by Brecht’s Mother Courage, Shaw’s Saint Joan, Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Williams’ more familiar A Streetcar Named Desire, and Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. A pantomime – Aladdin – and a production of the less familiar Jean Genet’s Le Balcon were also tucked into a programme of these great and well known texts. The equally busy season in the Close included Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Noël Coward’s Private Lives, C P Taylor’s Bread and Butter, Edward Bond’s Early Morning, Zola’s Nana, Robert Walker’s Capone, Gerlind Reinshagen’s The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe, the divertissement The Low Moon Spectacular, Lindsay Kemp’s late-night event The Turquoise Pantomime and a second Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus. The year closed with a main stage production of Twelfth Night. While this repertoire – and, in particular, the mainstage repertoire – might seem to suggest a fairly standard rep fare, play choice was only the first part of the Citizens’ new policy. It was the audacious way that these plays were staged that marked the Citizens’ as attempting something new. During this 1970/71 season, audiences were introduced to a new visually stimulating world of bold theatre design, challenging directorial choices and daring dramaturgical intervention. Plays were edited, settings were reimagined and productions pushed at boundaries in a manner hitherto unknown in Scottish theatre. As a consequence, throughout this season, and

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indeed on through the subsequent decade, reviewers vied with each other to express dramaturgical, aesthetic and, very often, moral outrage at the unfamiliar ways of the Citizens’. And it was, for a time at least, in the production of plays by Shakespeare that the Citizens’ Company was at its most unfamiliar and audacious and experimental, and the reviewers at their most outraged and indignant and appalled. This stylistic approach and this critical climate were initiated by an extraordinary production of Hamlet in September 1970. The second season of Havergal’s artistic directorship began on 4 September 1970. By 5 September the first wave of reviews and commentary on what became a cause célèbre was published: in the Scottish Daily Express Mamie Crichton described ‘a Hamlet of unbelievable ineptitude’, naming it ‘distasteful’.8 With a weekend to sharpen his pencil The Scotsman’s Allen Wright began what was to be a long series of attacks on the company and its work. Awarding unprecedented profile to an arts review, and under the headline ‘Hamlet depicted as a gibbering oaf’, Wright’s column was run, in full, on the front page of his newspaper. He fumed: Hamlet is presented as the village idiot in Giles Havergal’s grotesque production ... the Prince of Denmark is reduced to a gibbering oaf, squealing and prancing like an animal and snorting at the king. It is a hideous spectacle ... Watching this travesty, I wished that someone would have the decency to bring down the curtain before any more wounds were inflicted on a work of art ... Ophelia and Gertrude are played by men – as ‘drag queens’, howling and sobbing with anguish. Hamlet also seems to luxuriate in grief, as if it were some form of sexual ecstasy... Perhaps the crudeness of it all is summed up in the fight – cudgels are used instead of rapiers.

Wright goes on to rail against the ‘butchery of Hamlet’, the ‘slaughtering of the soliloquies’, and to condemn an ‘inexcusable’ directorial concept.9 Despite – or even because of – the outrage of the press, a fevered correspondence in the pages of the Glasgow Herald, the flurry of cancellations of school bookings, disquiet from some city councillors and much letter writing to the company itself, the impact of the production was unprecedented, emerging as a much mythologized defining event in the history of the Citizens’.10 In self-deprecating mode Havergal has subsequently expressed ‘regrets that the production was not half as flamboyantly outrageous as the reviews suggested’.11 But for Glasgow in 1970 it was daring enough. The production employed an all-male cast and a stark, black-draped set. Actors were encouraged to highly demonstrative emotional display, as well as being physically exposed in black loincloths and cloaks. Hamlet – played by

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David Hayman – was a troubled, haunted figure harried and tormented by doubt and constantly teetering towards hysteria and externalized madness. His performance was subject to vituperative commentary from reviewers: Crichton, for example, described him ‘as a shouting, raving maniac mostly without variation’ and claimed that ‘The noble speeches were lost in gibbering.’12 The distinctiveness of the production – and its significance in marking a new period of development for the company – was further signalled even in the printed programme. Ostensibly familiar – in design and presentation terms the format was only slightly different from that used in the previous season – in a break with convention the acting company was listed alphabetically with no characters assigned to the individual players. Indeed, the programme for Hamlet listed all the members of the season’s acting company not just those appearing in Hamlet: thus launching the Citizens’ Theatre Company as a distinctive and innovative ensemble that sought to achieve ‘confidence and continuity’ for the theatre.13 (In passing Allen Wright found even this aspect of the production pretentious and unconvincing: he wrote, ‘The cast are not identified in the programme, under the ludicrous pretence of it being an ensemble effort.’14) The 1970 Hamlet was a production fully in tune with the aesthetic and political movements of the time: a company of equals – equally billed and equally paid – working together in a spirit of discovery and daring. The popcult references were yet to come in the development of the ‘Citz aesthetic’ but already in place were the bold scenography predicated on a monochromatic palette, the corporeal display and the radical dramaturgical interventions – in this instance involving significant textual cuts. In addition, and as has been mentioned, the Hamlet company was all male and the homosocial, and indeed the explicitly homosexual, was soon to emerge as a key element of the theatre’s iconography and philosophy. At times this was recast as camp and stylized display but at others it offered a much more provocative and challenging interrogation of theatre and gender convention. At the end of the 1970/71 season – which also included a Close Theatre production of Titus Andronicus directed by Keith Hack – a production of Twelfth Night added a comedic and, indeed, a pop-cult spin to the theatre’s growing interest in gender play and stylish design. The designer Prowse provided the director Havergal with a latter-day Mediterranean beach-front setting – ‘all sand and dolce vita’.15 This Illyria was a fashionable seaside resort displaying ‘the general air well-sustained of an expensive place in off season’16 and populated by a rag-bag collection of misfits and exiles: fraying

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flower children, seedy displaced English gentlemen, vampish women, innocents abroad. In addition to tons of the whitest of sand, the luminous design included drapes of white muslin that were flown in to suggest the terrace of Olivia’s beach-front home. Prowse also provided flamboyantly incongruous costuming: Oxford bags, sports jackets and flannels held up by an old school tie; 1930s cami-knickers and wedge heels; micro-skirts; velvet hipsters and beads.17 The actor Jeremy Blake doubled as Viola and Sebastian. Drawing on the uni-sex style of contemporary fashions, his hair was cut in a long modish bob and he wore contrasting velvet trouser suits, blue for Viola and pink for Sebastian. For some this casting lent a new plausibility to the mistaken identity scene but for others this had the effect of emasculating Sebastian and resulted in an (unwelcome) over-emphasis on ‘a quite different sort of sexual ambiguity from what we may think as inherent in the play’.18 Interestingly, and across a significant proportion of contemporary reviews of the Citizens’ during the 1970s, such criticisms slip all too readily into an only-faintly disguised homophobia. An unidentified review of this production of Twelfth Night argues that ‘With his [Havergal’s] persistent emphasis on sexual ambiguity, the romance here assumes a rather more sickly colour.’19 Describing the stage picture of the 1973 Troilus and Cressida Crichton notes that there are ‘two other persons in constant, nauseating homosexual embrace’.20 The gender play, cross-dressing, the body display, the bold and statuesque dressing of women, the campery that runs through the Citizens’ project during the 1970s is always a challenge to such conventional viewpoints. And, of course, it exists in the immediate aftermath of theatrical censorship and a renewed spirit of licence in British theatre and society more generally. It is an aesthetic that draws on the influence that Lindsay Kemp had on British theatrical performance as well as the linked contemporary image play in pop music – not least in relation to Kemp’s recreation of David Bowie.21 In short, it parallels the rise of a gay sensibility within British society as broadly conceived. Siting the aesthetic project of the Citizen’s Theatre in relation to these broader shifts begins to reveal the radical nature of its aesthetic and the revolutionary force of camp within a sustained performance context. The same critics who had attacked Hamlet were similarly eager in their condemnation of Twelfth Night. While finding something positive in the acting, Christopher Small nonetheless argued that ‘there is no blinking the fact that the play as a whole is distorted, in part rendered remarkably dull, in the end reduced to a complete shambles’.22 Allen Wright drew clear parallels with the season’s opening production:

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Shakespeare seems to bring out a mischievous streak in Giles Havergal, who began the season at the Citizens’ Theatre Glasgow by distorting Hamlet and ends it by making nonsense of Twelfth Night. This happy blend of mirth and romance has been reduced to a silly farce in a misguided attempt to make it more popular.23

However, Cordelia Oliver, writing in the Guardian, was beginning to argue more strongly in favour of the Citizens’ and its new policy: she astutely notes that the production is ‘as likely to annoy a minority of the die-hards as it is certain to delight most of the younger theatregoers. And that is very much the pattern at the Citizens’ nowadays.’24 The Citizens’ new production policies and new team of production staff and actors was indeed attractive to a new, younger generation of theatregoers than that which had been associated with this rep theatre in the 1960s and before. Drawing on contemporary fashion and new thinking, being sexy and edgy in production, and being confident enough to ride out the wave of establishment critical resentment, by the end of 1970/71 Havergal was reflecting, with some satisfaction, on a season that has been the most published and talked about in the eventful 27 years since the theatre was formed ... The results have been significant... the audience figure has started to increase, for the first time for some years the trend is up, not down and we have already beaten the audience figures for 1969/70 and 1968/69 ... A survey of those attending the Citizens’ this season shows that there is an excitingly high proportion of young people in our audience.25

It was this new, young audience – open to new ideas and willing to be challenged by theatre – that provided the bedrock of Citizens’ audience over the next decade and beyond. It was to be amply rewarded with some of the most daring theatre being made in Britain at the time. 1971/72 saw two further Shakespeare productions — Timon of Athens (directed by Keith Hack and designed by the nascent talents of Maria Bjornson and Sue Blane for the Close Theatre, May 1972) and Antony and Cleopatra (main stage, May 1972). The latter was a flamboyant production, directed by Havergal and designed by Prowse, that affirmed the theatre’s focus on imaginative design and engagement with issues of gender in performance. In this regard a particularly distinctive feature of the production was the casting of Jonathan Kent as Cleopatra. Although reviewers were less than convinced by his performance – Christopher Small describes him as ‘mincing and caterwauling his way through the part like a hysterical school fellow’ – they

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did celebrate the visual aspects of the production. Small went on to highlight ‘the sight of Cleopatra as a kind of sorceress, gazing through the flames of a sacrificial fire at her own dark future, her face half-visible in the flickering light’ and described ‘another stunning visual coup when Antony returns to surrender to her wiles and, taking him into her arms, she envelopes him in an enormous gauzy red cloak that also covers half the stage’.26 Douglas Gifford also commented on ‘The ribbon which binds Antony and Caesar, a blood bond attached to a skull, which is drowned in the wonderful stage-swamping, red robe of Cleopatra, just as poor Fulvia’s hold on Antony is drowned.’27 Colours and textures were rich and earthy. The stage floor looked liked mud, baked hard by the sun. The built set consisted of straw huts erected around this public space. The costuming located the action in some equatorial land and approached the play’s theme of two cultures uneasily coming together by way of corporeal display: dust brown bodies posed and displayed themselves to reveal the Romans and Egyptians as quite differently alluring; the Egyptians very much the ethnic, exotic other. While the directorial and design concepts were spectacularly declared, Antony and Cleopatra was also a feat of the director as dramaturge with the lengthy dramatis personae reset for a cast of just seven by way of ‘cuts and reversals, with [the] division of some of the great speeches into chorus and stichomythia’.28 The Citizens’ aesthetic may well be characterized by its spectacular stage design but it is rooted in a robust understanding of dramaturgy and the potential of the theatrical canon to adapt and to be adapted. In the programme note for this production Havergal reflected on the previous two seasons and expanded on his vision of theatre as ‘event’. He also reset the Citizens’ Theatre Company as engaged in a creative dialogue with its audiences: Our intention is to offer you a ‘theatrical experience’, to make each performance an ‘event’ in which you participate. We feel that the theatre is no longer a place where you sit at one end of the building in the dark and watch us acting at the other end in the light. Instead, we want to create an unrepeatable event or happening which involves you on many levels. Sometimes we fail to produce the right ingredients to make this special kind of fusion possible. Where we have, particularly in this season’s productions of Galileo, Loot, Danton’s Death, In the Jungle of the Cities, and in our pantomime Cinderella, we feel we are doing what we should be doing within this community. We provide an experience which will entertain in the fullest sense – amusing, enlightening, moving, shocking, upsetting, angering, delighting and above all astonishing you – the audience.29

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Havergal’s note goes on to trail a summer of international touring to be undertaken by the company – Saved, Timon of Athens and Antony and Cleopatra were played during a tour that encompassed Rome, Antwerp, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Hanover, and Dublin – as well as a visit to the Edinburgh International Festival with a new production by Keith Hack of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great and revivals of Timon of Athens and the previous season’s Twelfth Night. Havergal’s statement neatly encapsulates the new role of the Citizens’ both within Glasgow and in relation to European theatre more generally. On the one hand this was a company outlined as a contemporary re-imaging of the municipal repertory theatre, innovative and even experimental in its aesthetic but financially and physically accessible to its local constituency; and, on the other, it recast the provincial rep as a confident powerhouse of European theatre, a theatre company based in Glasgow and confidently making art on the edge that had a role at the very heart of European culture – from where it drew its core repertoire and in which it aspired to have a voice and a platform. Arguably, it is this aspiration to combine a role at a local level with one on the wider European stage that is the uniquely innovative aspect of the Havergal Citizens’ of the 1970s. Back in Glasgow, Shakespeare was again an important part of the 1972/73 season. On the main stage Philip Prowse made his debut as a director with a production of Troilus and Cressida. The production – which he designed as well as directed – was played with American accents and shaped by references to Hiroshima and Vietnam. It was dismissed by Wright in The Scotsman as a ‘cruel parody of Shakespeare’.30 Meanwhile in the Close Theatre there was a more overtly experimental use of Shakespeare being presented. Aiming to be a laboratory exercise on text and performance, Lear demonstrated the versatility and openness of the resident company of Citizens’ actors and underlined the potential of the studio space to be appropriated for experiment and play. Across the 1972/73 season the actor and director Steven Dartnell undertook a series of workshop projects that led to four semi-staged performances. Using four plays as starting points – Peter Weiss’ Marat/ Sade (1972), Shakespeare’s King Lear (1972), Strindberg’s The Father (1973) and Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1973) – Dartnell’s experiments in text and performance were predicated on the company as ensemble and the potential of that for encouraging new approaches and topical techniques. While underlining the significance of the Close as a space where it was possible to achieve something distinctive from but linked to the work on the main stage, Dartnell also sought to mark the projects as rather different from conventional stagings even in the Close. He wrote:

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None of the plays will be presented in the conventional style of past Close productions. Scripts will be used as a basis for public exploration of the relationship between actors and audience. It has often been stated that the Close has been used merely as a smaller version of the Citizens’. These presentations will be an attempt to use the Close in a genuinely experimental and illuminating way.31

This sense of the Close as laboratory was very much part of the theatre Zeitgeist and certainly Dartnell’s experiments develop the studio theatre’s role in relation to the overall Citizens’ project. With this point in mind it is, perhaps, useful to contrast Dartnell’s vision with that previously outlined by the Close’s general manager Roger Southern in October 1971: ‘While the policy at the Citizens’ is to present well-known plays by famous authors, the policy at the Close complements this by concentrating on lesser-known plays by well-known authors’.32 Dartnell’s experiments challenged this conventional view of the studio space in relation to the main stage. The Lear project was played out in a dazzlingly white box setting and involved eight actors from the Citizens’ Company clothed in enveloping white costumes: so that even scenographically the studio was re-imagined as a ‘laboratory’. The casting was fixed but unexpected – a youthful Rupert Frazer was Lear and the parts of Kent, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia were cross-dressed. Dartnell and the stage manager remained visible on stage stopping and redirecting the acting, offering suggestions and notes for the actors, trying out ideas as in a rehearsal or workshop environment.33 According to Dartnell’s programme note: We have taken a thread from Shakespeare’s King Lear and have begun to investigate the theme of filial ingratitude and parental egocentricity. The aim of the project is for the actors to remain as flexible and receptive as in rehearsal. In this way we hope that an audience can be involved in the experience of the actor’s working process.34

Despite rather negative press reaction, one might certainly see the four projects as offering a distinctive use of both the studio theatre and the ensemble company: developing the skills, confidence and experience of the actors in a creative way that underlines theatre as ‘event’ and as process.35 The use of a Shakespeare play as one of the season’s four source texts is perhaps unsurprising but the interventions made by Dartnell in the project – cross-gender casting, self-reflexive staging drawing attention to the theatre space and heightening and even dramatizing the actor – audience relationship – are emboldened and distilled manifestations of the techniques already being

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developed in main stage Citizens’ productions. And indeed once the Close burns – in May 1973 – the site of experimentation at the Citizens’ is exclusively focused on the main stage. This had some advantages – not least in terms of resources being focused only on the main stage. But it also made particular demands on the directorate and their developing vision – which was really hitting its stride at this time. Because there was no smaller studio space, there was no sense of the ‘experimental’ being marginalized or subordinated; when experiment happened it was in the full glare of the main stage and its audience. As a result the development of the ‘Citz aesthetic’ was a much more open and public affair than might have been the case if the Close had continued to develop its role as a space dedicated to the new, the experimental, the risky. Havergal was now in command of an internationally respected organization that had a reputation for a daring and innovative approach to the classic, Western repertoire, a company with a role to play in European theatre practice, but with a more contested role in Glasgow and Scotland. Although by the mid 1970s the Citizens’ was a company at the very forefront of international theatre making, this position was debated most particularly at home where the Scottish critics questioned the company’s commitment to and role within a rather narrowly defined view of Scottish theatre. Shifting the critical frame somewhat, a trend in the contemporary reviews moved from the particulars of individual productions and seasons to the internationalism of the operation itself. Christopher Small reflected, more particularly, on the 1972 tours by questioning ‘Whom do the Citizens’ represent abroad?’ It is good that people abroad should feel so [positive] about any Scottish company, or company resident in Scotland; it is good that there should have been not only full houses in almost every place visited, but lively and extensive argument about the merits of the productions seen; it must clearly have been good for the company to take their individual talents and their universally commended teamwork to other countries, and it cannot do their reputation at home any thing but good that they are doing so. … A Citizens’ Theatre using Glasgow as a base for forays elsewhere, a counterattempt to cold-shoulder it at home are effects that nobody can really want. Perhaps it is best for the Citizens’, who work here all through autumn and winter, to fly elsewhere, reverse swallows, in the summer. But it would be nice to think, more maybe than has lately been possible, that this is where they actually belong.36

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And even at the end of the 1970s, after a decade of work at the highest of levels of quality and innovation, Donald Campbell remained unconvinced of the appropriateness of Havergal’s vision for a theatre in Glasgow. He argued that: In the context of Scottish theatre, of course, the Citizens’ is a monumental irrelevance. It does absolutely nothing to examine or reflect the concerns and mores of contemporary Scotland and, indeed, as far as the average Glaswegian is concerned the Citizens might as well be in Timbuctoo [sic]. Giles Havergal is an Englishman who uses a preponderance of English actors in his company and (with the exception of his resident dramatist, Robert David Macdonald) no Scottish writers at all.37

A recurrent criticism of the Havergal regime was that it was defiantly non-Scottish, that it did not produce work of Scottish writers and that its representations were disconnected from the immediate national culture. But, arguably, other companies were fulfilling this goal, not least the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh which was enjoying significant contemporary success under the leadership of Clive Perry. Coincident too was the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, finding new energy as a focus for new Scottish writing, and the nascent 7:84 Theatre Company (Scotland), whose debut tour of The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil occurred in 1973. Taken together, work achieved by the Citizens’, the Traverse and 7:84 in the early and mid 1970s changed the nature of Scottish theatre and the attitudes of its audiences and its critics. The amount of theatre being made, its quality, its general appeal and its political and aesthetic diversity insisted that representations of a huge variety of kinds could have international resonances and that culture in Scotland could encompass a variety of complementary visions and projects. I would argue that, in this context, the international focus of the Citizens’ aesthetic project, and its early commitment to international touring, is to be understood as part of a general re-imaging of theatre making in Scotland in which discourses of provincialism and inferiorism were discarded in favour of a new confidence about the nature and role of the small nation in relation to European culture. The critics who still sought a set of more traditional images from Glasgow’s rep theatre were, in this view, merely reflecting a more general sense of ‘inferiorism’ – demonstrating something of a Scottish ‘cultural cringe’ – when they attacked how the Citizens’ set about making theatre in and for Glasgow and beyond.

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Across the 34 years of Havergal’s directorship Shakespeare held his place in the repertoire. In that time the Citizens’ undertook 21 productions of Shakespeare’s plays, but it was in the four seasons from 1970/ 71 to 1973/74 – during which time the Havergal Citizens’ did most to define and refine its aesthetic and social role – that Shakespeare was most frequently produced: from 1970/71 to 1973/74 the company presented nine productions of Shakespeare plays; six main stage productions; two fully staged productions for the Close Theatre studio space as well as the Lear project outlined above.38 Using that most canonical of British playwrights – indeed using that most canonical of English playwrights – the early 1970s saw the Havergal Citizens’ go out of its way to challenge expectations about what it might mean to make new work in a Victorian popular, repertory theatre located in one of the most deprived areas of Scotland’s decaying industrial heartland. For the Citizens’, Shakespeare was a tool, used as a high cultural shorthand to make quick connections, to rattle critical cages and to confound expectations. That text – and, in particular, that Shakespearean text – was open to mediation ran counter to theatrical convention and critical praxis in Scotland in the 1970s. The use – and the alleged abuse – of the Shakespearean text was an outright declaration of an aesthetic and dramaturgical war that was to be fought on stage at the Citizens’ Theatre.

Notes This chapter draws on materials held in the Citizens’ Theatre Collection lodged in the Scottish Theatre Archive (STA), part of the Department of Special Collections of the library of the University of Glasgow. This archive holds a significant collection of primary material relating to the Citizens’ including prompt copies and scripts, programmes, minutes, accounts and cost sheets, miscellaneous cuttings and photographs, as well as some of the other publications and materials referred to in this chapter. 1 This period of upheaval and uncertainty followed the relatively settled leadership of Iain Cuthbertson (1962–65). 2 Giles Havergal, Programme note for The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, September 1969), STA Ex 20. 3 Ebb, an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Ebb Tide, was Robert David MacDonald’s first play for the Citizens’. The play was famously unsuccessful with, as the anecdote goes, ‘audiences being numbered in the single figures’. 4 This trend was bucked at the very end of the season (in May 1970) when a scenographically bold and successful production of Oscar’s Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest gave an indication of what was to come.

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5 Havergal, Programme note for The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (September 1969), STA Ea 20. 6 Giles Havergal, Programme note for The Hostage (Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, January 1971), STA Ea 21. 7 Giles Havergal, Programme note for Twelfth Night (Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, May 1971), STA Ex 21. 8 Mamie Crichton, ‘Hamlet proves tragedy for Citizens”, Scottish Daily Express (5 September 1970), unpaginated press cutting STA Ea Box 2/21. 9 Allen Wright, ‘Hamlet depicted as a gibbering oaf’, The Scotsman (7 September 1970), p. 1. 10 See cuttings file, STA Ea Box 2/21. 11 Michael Coveney, The Citz: Twenty-One Years of the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre (London: Nick Hern, 1990), p. 41. 12 Crichton, ‘Hamlet proves tragedy for Citizens”, Scottish Daily Express (5 September 1970), STA Ea Box 2/21. 13 Havergal, Programme note for Twelfth Night (1971), STA Ex 21. Reflecting further on the 1970/71 season Havergal expanded his comments on the use of a company which is ‘a unique experiment in Britain – all eighteen young actors, with similar background and experience, play parts both large and small, working together on a widely varied programme. Whatever criticisms have been levelled at the season, the acting has been recognized as being of a very high standard, and the versatility and skill of the actors has gained them many supporters’. 14 Wright, ‘Hamlet oaf’, Scotsman (7 September 1970), p. 1. 15 Christopher Small, ‘Twelfth Night or what Mr Havergal wills...’, Herald (17 May 1971), unpaginated press cutting, STA Ea Box 2/35k. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Allen Wright, ‘Making a nonsense of Twelfth Night’, The Scotsman (17 May 1971), unpaginated press cutting, STA Ea Box 2/40. 19 EG [sic], ‘Pop-art Shakespeare’, unidentified press cutting, STA Ea Box 2/40. 20 Mamie Crichton, ‘Garbled noise from the Citizen’s’ [sic], Scottish Daily Express (3 April 1973), unpaginated press cutting, STA Ea Box 2/39. 21 Kemp was an immediate as well as a contextual influence on the Havergal Citizens’. His production of The Turquoise Pantomime had been performed at the Close in October 1970 and, in October 1971, he directed the Citizens’ Company in an all-male production of The Maids also in the Close: this was a production that featured Rupert Frazer, Tim Curry, and James Aubrey and was subsequently produced at the Traverse in Edinburgh. Kemp also choreographed the Citizens’ 1971/72 pantomime, Cinderella. See Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 409–10. 22 Small, ‘Twelfth Night...’, Herald (17 May 1971), STA Ea Box 2/35k. 23 Wright, ‘Making a nonsense of Twelfth Night’, The Scotsman (17 May 1971), STA Ea Box 2/40. 24 Cordelia Oliver, ‘Twelfth Night at the Glasgow Citizens”, Guardian (18 May 1971), unpaginated press cutting, STA Ea Box 2/40.

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25 Havergal, Programme note for Twelfth Night (1971), STA Ex 21. 26 Christopher Small, ‘Caterwauling and mincing Cleopatra’, Glasgow Herald, undated press cutting [1972], STA TP 47/8f. 27 Douglas Gifford, transcript of radio review of Antony and Cleopatra for Twelve Noon, BBC Scotland (16 May 1972), STA Ea 8/14c. 28 Small, ‘Caterwauling and mincing Cleopatra’, Glasgow Herald, STA TP 47/8f. 29 Giles Havergal, Programme note for Antony and Cleopatra (Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, May 1972), STA Ex 22. 30 Allen Wright, ‘Citizens’ cruel parody of Shakespeare’, The Scotsman (2 April 1973), unpaginated press cutting, STA Ea Box 2/39. 31 Steven Dartnell, Programme note for Lear (Close Theatre, November 1972), STA Ex 24/3e. 32 Roger Southern, ‘Close Theatre Club’, Programme for The Three Sisters (Citizens’ Theatre, October 1971), [p. 9]. 33 The Lear company included Rupert Frazer as Lear; Colin Haigh as Cornwall; Jonathan Levy as Albany; Celia Foxe as Kent; Jeffrey Kitson as Goneril; Patrick Hannaway as Regan; Colin Haigh as Cordelia; and Lewis Collins as Gloucester. Dartnell directed and Maria Bjornson was the designer. 34 Dartnell, Programme note for Lear, STA Ex24/3e. 35 In The Herald Christopher Small, no great apologist for the Havergal Citizens’, argued that ‘There is a good deal of talent used here, in fact; but it remains to be said that so to squander it, so to abuse the patience of the audience, so to lean upon the power of this play to absolve the worst silliness is a misuse of the resources made available which need not, surely, be repeated. The attempt, it is averred, is to “use the Close in a genuinely experimental and illuminating way.” Think again.’ Christopher Small, ‘Talent misused in Dartnell’s Lear’, Herald (27 November 1972), unpaginated press cutting, STA Ea Box 8/29. In The Scotsman David Leigh was more succinct: ‘This is not [King] Lear at the Close Theatre Club, Glasgow, except in the sense that if one added boiling water and stirred a fair version of the play might probably emerge.’ David Leigh, ‘Phoney Lear at the Close’, The Scotsman (27 November 1972), unpaginated press cutting, STA Ea Box 8/29. 36 Christopher Small, ‘Whom do the Citizens’ Represent Abroad?’, Herald (5 July 1972), unpaginated press cutting, STA Box 4/17d. 37 Donald Campbell, ‘Who needs a national theatre? Part 2’, Scottish Society of Playwrights Newsletter 2.12 (July 1979), pp. 3–7, pp. 5–6. This article was published in three parts across three consecutive issues of the SSP Newsletter: Part 1 in 2.11 (June 1979), pp. 13–17; part 2 in 2.12 (July 1979), pp. 3–7; and, part 3 in 3.1 (August 1979), pp. 8–11. 38 See appendix for full list of Shakespeare’s plays at the Citizens’ between 1969 and 2003.

Appendix

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Chronology: Productions of Shakespeare plays by the Citizens’ Theatre Company, 1970–2001

1970– 71

Hamlet, September 1970. Director, Giles Havergal; Designer, Philip Prowse. All male cast – black box – scandal – David Hayman as Hamlet. Titus Andronicus, March/April 1971. Director, Keith Hack; Designer, Keith Hack and Amanda Colin. Close Theatre production. Twelfth Night, May/June 1971. Director, Giles Havergal; Designer, Philip Prowse. Contemporary Mediterranean setting – Jeremy Blake doubling as Sebastian and Viola.

1971– 72

Timon of Athens, May 1972. Director, Keith Hack; Designer, Maria Bjornson and Sue Blane. Close Theatre production. Antony and Cleopatra, May 1972. Director, Giles Havergal; Designer, Philip Prowse. Ethnic ‘other’ setting – Jonathan Kent as Cleopatra.

1972– 73

Lear, November/December 1972. Director, Steven Dartnell. Close Project 2 – season of experiments on texts – Marat/Sade, King Lear, The Father, The Connection. Troilus and Cressida, March/April 1973. Director, Philip Prowse; Designer, Philip Prowse. Setting references Hiroshima and Vietnam – US accents – first production directed by Prowse alone.

1973– 74

The Taming of the Shrew, February/March 1974. Director, Giles Havergal; Designer, Philip Prowse. Italian street café setting – David Hayman and Angela Chadfield as Petruchio and Katharine – Italian accents. Macbeth, March 1974. Director, Steven Dartnell; Designer, Geoffrey Rose. ‘Rock’ score – blood and gore – nude Hecate – Suzanne Bertish as Lady Macbeth.

1974– 75

Coriolanus, September/October 1974. Director, Jonathan Chadwick; Designer, David Fisher. Brechtian staging – with projected scene titles – Gerard Murphy in title role – Susanne Bertish as Voluminia.

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Romeo and Juliet, February/March 1975. Director, David Hayman; Designer, Philip Prowse. Verona street setting. 1975– 76

Hamlety September/October 1975. Director, Philip Prowse; Designer, Philip Prowse. Prussian setting – David Hayman and Alan Butler alternate roles of Hamlet and Fortinbras.

1978–79

Macbeth, February/March 1979. Director, Giles Havergal. Designer, no credit. All male cast – bare set – ‘own’ clothes – Gerard Murphy as Macbeth – David Hayman as Lady Macbeth.

1981– 82

Hamlet, October 1981. Director, Robert David MacDonald; Designer, Philip Prowse. Asylum setting – Andrew Wilde as Hamlet — First Quatro.

1982– 83

The Merchant of Venice, January/February 1983. Director, Philip Prowse; Designer, Philip Prowse. WW2 setting.

1988– 89

Richard III September/October 1988. Director, Jon Pope; Designer, Kathy Strachan. On–stage studio theatre season – bare, black production – Ciaran Hinds as Richard III.

1989– 90

Macbeth October 1989. Director, Jon Pope; Designer, Stewart Laing. Post-apocalypse setting.

1993–94

Romeo and Juliet, October 1993. Director, Giles Havergal; Designer, Kenny Miller.

1996–97

Hamlet, September 1996. Director, Philip Prowse; Designer, Philip Prowse. Stripped-back, bare, black setting – Cal MacAninch as Hamlet.

1998–99

Macbeth, February/March 1998. Director, Robert David MacDonald; Designer, Kenny Miller. Gerard Murphy as Macbeth – Anne Myatt as Lady Macbeth only woman on stage – all male witches.

2001–2

A Midsummer Night’s Dreamy October/November 2001. Director, Giles Havergal; Designer, Giles Havergal.

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Local Macbeth / global Shakespeare: Scotland’s screen destiny MARK THORNTON BURNETT

In a recent discussion of Scottish identities, Cairns Craig argues that, in the wake of the failure in 1979 of the devolution referendum, a divided construction of the possibilities inherent in a national cultural practice emerged. On the one hand, Craig suggests, the collapse of the devolutionary imperative in Scotland precipitated a sense of communal loss and apocalyptic gloom, which was reflected in such novels as Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), A. L. Kennedy’s So I am Glad (1990) and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), works variously concerned with a Thatcherite free-market economy, the destructive effects of deindustrialization and the onset of psychological breakdown. On the other hand, Craig’s argument makes clear, this registration of ‘despairing passivity’ belied a material development – the contemporary revitalization of Scottish cultural institutions.1 New organizations for promoting Scottish culture were established; fresh magazines were launched; unprecedented publishing ventures were initiated; and, as Duncan Petrie reminds us, additional sources of film finance, such as the Glasgow Film Fund and the Scottish Film Production Fund, which have reinvigorated an ailing Scottish film industry, were secured.2 Not surprisingly, therefore, Scottish literature and culture came to have a more prominent role in school and college curricula, and indigenously inspired reinterpretations of Scottish political history and policy quickly ensued. When, Craig concludes, the 1997 referendum cemented the reality of a Scottish parliament and local government, this was merely the logical extension of a longer-term investment in organizational autonomy, cultural self-expression and national affirmation. Now a working model of

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nationalism, one ‘tolerant both of internalplurality and of a flexible submersion of its sovereignty’, could be put into play.3 This characteristic movement – between a pessimism which involves a loss of local identity, and an optimism which agitates for its reclamation and celebration – is, I would argue, a central facet of the global economy. For, according to recent discussions, globalization is also marked by competing impulses, which move in antithetical directions. In its most obvious incarnation, the chief effect of the various features of globalization

–

an

interpenetration of social relations, the undermining of national borders, deterritorialization, a compression of the time-space continuum, and the growth of communications technologies and multinational companies – has been to enforce a pervasive homogeneity, a deindividualized sameness, which often culminates in the dissolution of a nationstate’s distinctive integrity.4 Because of the world-wide distribution of goods, and because of the free transfer of capital, a conception of the national particular has disappeared, to be replaced by the phenomenon of the global universal. At the same time, however, globalization can be said to operate in a contrary capacity. It simultaneously functions in such a manner as to highlight the discrete processes upon which globalization depends and to ensure the continuing vitality of indigenous cultures and industries (the global defines itself against and through such local practices).5 Indeed, such is the symbiotic relation of the local and the global in some sectors of the economy that theorists have coined the term ‘glocalization to describe the multiple and contradictory means whereby the individual and the general co-exist and intersect.6 ‘Glocalization is one useful term to conjure the ways in which, according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, some global ‘corporations seek to include difference within their realm and ... aim to maximize creativity, free play, and diversity in the corporate workplace’.7 Another is postmodernism, since, as at least one contemporary commentator has pointed out, ‘post-modernism is the logic by which global capital operates’.8 To make the observation from a complementary perspective, ‘postmodernism’, as Colin MacCabe states, ‘is the cultural form of the current moment of ... global multinational capitalism’.9 This is not to claim that postmodernism and globalization are in any way synonymous, but it is to suggest that, in a world system paradoxically revelling in instability, replication and the difficulty of ever achieving an authentic cultural utterance, the postmodern and the global appear as relatively familiar bedfellows. To be fair to Cairns Craig, he does begin to acknowledge that tendencies in contemporary Scottish culture have a ‘glocal’ component. With reference

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to Iain Banks’ novel, Espedair Street (1987), he writes: ‘the weirdness of the collision between global, multi-cultural capitalism, and the texture of an intensely local and highly regional Scottish identity, becomes the drivingforce of much of the best creative writing about Scotland in the 1990s’.10 What is characteristic of the literary work Craig identifies is also, I would suggest, the dominant signature of filmic representations and, in particular, of recent interpretations of Macbeth on screen. By concentrating on one feature film of Macbeth (Jeremy Freeston’s 1996 cinematic undertaking) and two television productions (respectively, Michael Bogdanov’s 1997 and Gregory Doran’s 2001 versions), I wish to argue in this chapter that, in keeping with one strand of globalization, what is witnessed is the gradual disappearance of Scotland: these reworkings of Shakespeare’s drama plot a path in which the local is first prioritized and finally blanked out. Scotland, it will be demonstrated, evaporates, and is stripped away, to be replaced by homogeneity, in such a way as to illuminate the fragility, and unavailability, of meaningful ‘Scottish’ paradigms. Yet, in the same moment, these filmic representations, as befits a further facet of the global economy, allow for the return of Scotland, either in the form of history or in the form of a supplement. Scotland, then, takes on the mantle of the local, which the global both produces and relies upon, pointing up the extent to which globalization is vulnerable to that which it creates. Both of these ideological movements unfold according to, and within the parameters of, a postmodern aesthetic (imitation, parody, fragmentation and an emptying out of ‘reality’, for instance, are invariably stressed), suggesting that the ultimate locations of the global and the local in Shakespearean appropriation are less evident, and more remote, than might at first sight appear. The 1996 film version of Macbeth, according to the video jacket, ‘is authentically set in eleventh-century Scotland. This epic ... production’, the note continues, ‘conjures a grim world of battlefields, desolate moors, forbidding castles and haunted caverns’ and perhaps takes a leaf from Orson Welles’ Macbeth (1948), in which a ‘Holy Father’ (Alan Napier) is interpolated as a voice of Celtic mysticism. Certainly, in Freeston’s Macbeth, such markers of Scottishness are continually underscored: shots of beaches, lakes, rivers, woods, snow-clad mountains, deer and castles join company with the indigenous accents of the cast. Visuals embrace the heraldic ‘lion rampant’ (used on later medieval Scottish flags), which, initially featuring on Macbeth’s shield, later appears on Malcolm’s military accoutrements in an evocation of the resurgence of genuine, rather than impersonated, royalty.

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And, matching the aural interruptions of the Celtic pipes on the soundtrack are the numerous Celtic crosses, which are put to work in thematic capacities. Commencing upon his preparations for murdering Duncan, Macbeth finds that the Celtic cross before which he has been praying metamorphoses into the fateful dagger: it is a neat cinematic moment, which serves to emphasize the irreligious implications of his endeavour. When, towards the end, Macbeth’s armour is glimpsed hanging upon a cross-like structure, an ironic reminder of this transformative moment is facilitated. But Scottish veins of meaning are not only to be found in the film’s intratextual interstices; they reside, too, in its extratextual associations. As Macbeth, Jason Connery inherits a local colouring from his father, Sir Sean Connery, an advocate of the importance of, and need for, Scottish education and independence, a supporter of the Scottish National Party and an actor known for his long-declared vow to play Shakespeare’s bloodiest protagonist. In Bogdanov’s 1997 television production of Macbeth, Scotland is similarly a suggestive presence, although here the emphases are less obvious, taking the form of seemingly understated visual messages. Thus, while the characters mainly appear as street fighters dressed in combat gear, tartan detailing in epaulets implies local affiliations, regional connections and, in view of tartan’s historical applications, military points of contact. Because Malcolm (Jack Davenport) is figured as a soldier who wears a full tartan cap and scarf, complemented by a tartan insignia on his collar, an impression of his unadulterated Scottish identity is afforded. When tartan detailing consorts with pale-coloured garments, as it does in the case of Duncan (Philip Madoc) and his entourage, white takes over as the dominant indicator of Scottishness, an impression which is reinforced in the scene in which Lady Macduff (Ruth Gemmell), in a creamy white interior, feeds her children porridge. Here, as elsewhere, traditional modalities (in this case, the consumption of porridge) are deployed as signs of virtuous Scottishness, and this extends, as well, to constructions of technological preference. Banquo (Michael Maloney), despite being a twentieth-century military commander, still elects to ride a horse. Scottishness, then, according to Bogdanov, is not pervasive; rather, it is periodic and occasional, subject to the ebb and flow of political vicissitude. The particular species of Scottishness deployed in the Bogdanov and Freeston versions of Macbeth on screen is, of course, by no means straightforward or transparent. Slavoj Žižek writes that ‘what we experience as reality is not the “thing itself”, [for] it is always-already symbolized, constituted [and] structured by symbolic mechanisms’, and, in the case of

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Freeston’s Macbeth, such a sidestepping of a Scottish ‘reality’ is an inevitable consequence of the film’s representational procedure.11 Thus, when the film focuses upon thundery skies, homespun tartans, witches appearing amid ruined buildings and shades of interconnected red (the auburn hair of Lady Macbeth [Helen Baxendale] is thematically linked to red wine, spilled from a goblet, which, in turn, is dovetailed with the red stripes on Macbeth’s kilt), this is not Scottishness; rather, it constitutes a second-hand, ‘always-already symbolized’ construction of Scottishness that is hardly ‘authentic’. In fact, what Freeston purveys is a historically imperial, and highly Romanticized, view of Scotland. As Jeffrey Richards states: Scotland was invented by English Romanticism and ‘characterized by wild landscape, music and song, and by the supernatural’. ‘Romanticism’, he goes on, ‘had certain basic fascinations: the past (especially the medieval past), nature [and] the occult’, concluding, ‘simultaneously there developed a passion for the Gothic, for medieval castles, abbeys and towers, and particularly for picturesque ruins’.12 All of these are, of course, staple ingredients in Freeston’s film, so that the local in his reading of Macbeth assumes a fraught and problematic status, riven, as it is, with signal reminders of an alternative tradition. To put it another way, in highlighting stereotypical visual fragments of Scotland, Freeston transports us to a postmodern arena, and, here, his film brings to mind Fredric Jameson’s description of the ‘nostalgia film’, which ‘approached the “past” through stylistic connotation, conveying “pastness” by the glossy qualities of the image, and “1930s-ness” or “1950s-ness” by the attributes of fashion’.13 Freeston’s Macbeth may seek to resurrect a credible ‘eleventhcentury’ historical moment, but it does so via strategies that expose the mediated complexion of Scottish identity and that betray the film’s submission to compromising representational requirements. One might go so far as to suggest that Freeston’s Macbeth ultimately registers, in an unwitting fashion, the necessary hybridity of any attempt to realize Scotland as a free-standing cultural and national experience. For, if English Romantic mentalities underpin the film’s constructions (tartan, it might be remembered, is hardly exclusive to Scotland, since it was devised by an eighteenth-century English Quaker before being subsequently marketed and militarized), so, too, do English material arrangements prop up the processes of this Macbeth’s production and distribution.14 To deploy the terms of Arjun Appadurai, in his recent discussion of globalization, Freeston’s Macbeth discovers not only an interwoven or cross-checked ‘ideoscape’ but also a multi-levelled ‘financescape’.15 Hence, while the film avails itself of the

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participation of the Wallace Clan Trust, draws upon the resources of Grampian Television and takes full advantage of Scottish architectural edifices (such as Blackness Castle, West Lothian and Dunfermline Abbey, Fife), it simultaneously profits from the sponsorship of the English-based Cromwell Productions and capitalizes upon English locations (such as Cutler’s Farm, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Warwick Castle). Both of these latter locations, of course, are rich in Bardic association, suggesting that, in the drive towards verisimilitude, the Shakespearean ranks alongside the Scottish as a contributing influence. Deflecting attention away from the film’s content and towards the circumstances of its making reveals an internal hegemony, a narrative of deference and control which, in some senses, mimes the cultural history of Scotland itself. Idealism notwithstanding, in Freeston’s Macbeth, the ultimate unconscious admission is that Scotland has been, and continues to be, manipulated, adulterated and commodified; by contrast, in Bogdanov’s 1997 television version of Macbeth, this is precisely the point, with the production taking as its dominant theme the ways in which Scotland, and signifiers of Scottishness, can be self-consciously deployed for ideological purposes. The ‘authenticity’ of Scotland, then, from Bogdanov’s perspective, is irrelevant; rather, what matters are precisely those accretions of interpretation, and layerings of invention, that have typified the history of Scottish identity. For example, at the start of the production, the fact that Macbeth (Sean Pertwee) is represented as wearing only a small scrap of tartan points to his distance from established, and Scottish, sources of power and authority. Similarly, Lady Macbeth (Greta Scacchi), at her first appearance, wears a dress stamped with a red floral pattern, an index of her resistance to clan factions and of her proximity to the fiery environment of the witches. Before the murder of Duncan, moreover, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are figured as dressed in a black tie and a black silky dress respectively, the implication being that, for them, power inheres in English aristocratic practices and persuasions. Indeed, as the production gathers pace, it is increasingly Englishness, rather than Scottishness, that is cultivated both as a repository of meaning and as a set of values to be grasped and imitated. Admittedly, this interpretive decision does not entirely accord with the play’s geographic citations or material peregrinations; it does, however, have the advantage of underscoring, through a felicitously contemporary translation, the class elements of transgression and the extent to which Macbeth’s ambition is destructive of ideals of national purity and unity. Thus, Macbeth is consistently seen as defining

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himself within, and against, English locations: he inhabits an abandoned warehouse (a version of a London loftspace), and Banquo is clearly killed deep in the city’s docklands. In keeping with his south-of-England predilections, Macbeth even maintains a Cockney porter as part of his retinue. For much of the production, a black-and-red colour scheme is used to betoken this investment in all things English. Blood-red spots spatter upon Macbeth’s white shirt, Lady Macbeth sports herself in a red dress, Duncan is laced with bloody hues, and a red fire alarm sounds, all at precisely the points where the protagonist is figured as abandoning his tenuous Scottish loyalties. (In this sense, Bogdanov might be said to be reversing the more conventional applications of red characteristic of Freeston’s cinematography). The coronation scene is particularly resonant in these respects. The new king enters attired in black leathers and shades, while his consort, reclining on a red throne, presents herself in a red-and-black tartan outfit, complete with black choker. Through such stylistic references, an immediate impression of the subordination of Scottish systems is created: the choker arguably signifies the strangulation of the local and the distinctive. But, in view of the recurrence of tartan, an additional implication is that Scotland, in the same moment that it is dominated, is transformed and incorporated. The Macbeths operate so as to pose a threat to the coherence and uniqueness of Scottish identity, subsuming the local into a neutral aesthetic that nevertheless retains traces of the earlier model. In so doing, they are realized as enabling an attenuated form of cultural imperialism that homogenizes in the interests of an absolute political sovereignty. The relationship between the Scottish and the English in Bogdanov’s Macbeth, however, does not end with the titular protagonists. Crucially, an apparently more affirmative modality of Englishness, which goes hand-inhand with Scottishness, is manifested in Malcolm and his ministrations. The notorious ‘testing scene’ is filmed at a Victorian English country house, whose mullioned windows, high chimneys, red-brick exterior and baronial splendour bespeak a long-established aristocratic Englishness (in contrast to the faux and parvenu Englishness the Macbeths communicate). Because Malcolm is here decked out in a summery white suit, and because white flowers festoon the scene, the production is able to point to a construction of an older and harmonious English/ Scottish reciprocity. ‘The English power is near, led on by Malcolm’, exclaims a Scottish lord towards the end, his pronouncement already having been granted rich visual support.16 Whatever English/Scottish reverberations the production sets up, however, it quickly

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sidelines once the battle between Macbeth and Macduff (Lorcan Cranitch) commences. Here, Macbeth is figured as having reverted (a strip of tartan appears on his epaulet) to an earlier stage, in contrast to Macduff, who, as throughout, is unwavering in his national allegiances (he wears tartan trousers). As at the start, viewers are returned to essentially Scottish constructions, only Scotland, by this point, has attracted to itself a denser range of associations. Consequently, the battle registers not only as an immediate conflict of equals (this is a level playing field, as is reflected in the use of 360° camera work), but also as an opportunity to invoke the past. The tartan detailing on Macbeth’s military garb, for instance, suggests the talismanic status of Scottish signifiers (the protagonist is still dictated to by the supernatural), while the anti-civilian ethos implies that military origins are being harked back to as instruments for securing ‘success’ (1.3.131). Yet the ‘success’ that is achieved by Malcolm and his followers is by no means clear cut. In a wry reworking of Roman Polanski’s film version of Macbeth (1971), in which an ambiguous Malcolm (Stephan Chase) is seen returning to his nemesis’ supernatural haunts, thereby relaunching a cycle of evil, Bogdanov launches Duncan’s son in comparably unsettling directions. As a militaristic-looking Malcolm enters to survey his triumphs, the sounds of ‘Jerusalem’ are heard emanating from a loudspeaker. The use of the famous English hymn to accompany Malcolm’s victory parade has a doubled effect. On the one hand, ‘Jerusalem’, particularly in the wake of its twentiethcentury usages, has become associated with a narrative of empire building and imperial activity; the hymn is often seen as synonymous with those ideologies that envisioned London as the world city and that posited the English nation as another ‘Holy Land’. The inevitable conclusion would seem to be that Malcolm, tainted with (albeit passé) English ways, is another Macbeth, nationally treacherous and ambitiously metropolitan. On the other hand, since ‘Jerusalem’ represents a truncated musical version of William Blake’s longer prophetic poem on Milton, first composed in 1804–10, one is obliged to recognize an alternative reading of the lines, one that pays attention to pro-ecological and anti-industrial sentiments. ‘England’s mountains green’ and ‘pleasant pastures’, for instance, are arguably in danger from the country’s ‘dark Satanic mills’.17 In other words, Blake elaborates a dystopian vision of English history, which throws light, in turn, upon Bogdanov’s Macbeth, in which it is precisely the urban and industrial predilections of the titular protagonist that are found to be objectionable. Judged in this light, ‘Jerusalem’ might be read as a statement hostile to

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Macbeth and as a reinstatement of particular Romantic orthodoxies. (By extension, one could speculate that, given Blake’s contemporary attachments, a shadow of a Romantic vision of Scotland, such as that subscribed to by Freeston, hangs over Bogdanov’s dénouement.) Arjun Appadurai has remarked that globalization can on occasion work against itself to produce ‘irony’ and ‘selectivity’.18 No less unexpected and contrary a series of effects is at work in Bogdanov’s Macbeth. We are invited, I think, not only to read ‘Jerusalem’ selectively (that is, to select from it a number of alternative readings), but also to distinguish ironies amidst its interstices (to see beyond the surface to qualifications and contradictions). There is no easy resolution of either Englishness or Scottishness in this production, since each continues to unravel itself within the orbit of the other. Thus far I have concentrated on Scottish and English elements in two screen versions of Macbeth, whether these are extraneous or internally thematic; globalization, however, is most often traced to, and associated with, the domination of US values and ideologies. With Freeston and Bogdanov’s versions, global influences, as they feed through American representational practice, are particularly apparent, and not least at the level of generic imitations. For all its self-advertised credentials, Freeston’s Macbeth is, ultimately, as Colin McArthur argues in a different context, far less concerned with Scottish history than with Hollywood and its cinematic traditions.19 The close, for instance, discovers tartanclad warriors executing bloody charges and either avoiding, or falling to their deaths upon, rows of sharpened stakes; here, the film stages a composite of edited highlights from both Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989) and Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995), highly successful productions which, backed by the US corporations of the Samuel Goldwyn Company and Paramount respectively, made Shakespeare palatable to non-European audiences and indulged quasi-mythologized delineations of Scotland for American consumption. In addition, the film discloses, at the protagonist’s death, an even greater indebtedness to Hollywood conventions: Macbeth hears Lady Macbeth intoning to him – ‘Hie thee hither’ (1.5.23) – and looks at his bloodied hand as if in secret sympathy with his wife’s earlier ‘damned spot’ (5.1.34) predicament. Posthumously exorcizing former differences, this moment of rapprochement finds its animating logic in a familiar filmic discourse of romance and thereby seeks to bring Shakespeare’s ‘dead butcher and his fiend-like queen’ (5.6.108) within the bounds of narrative acceptability.20 In Bogdanov’s Macbeth, too, the pressures of Hollywood are keenly felt, although, in this production, it is the postmodern tendencies of that cinematic machine that are taken up and

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replicated. Not least in the prominence accorded Macbeth’s landrover and Lady Macbeth’s pill-popping, Bogdanov’s Macbeth aims to outdo other Shakespeare films of the 1990s in which identical properties and habits are highlighted: one thinks in this connection of Ian McKellen as Richard III daring the world from his landrover in the 1995 film of the same name or Diane Venora as Lady Capulet swallowing tablets in Baz Lurhmann’s 1996 release, William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo + Juliet’. Both of these, of course, are films consecrated to the virtues of postmodernity, as their use of staccato editing and stylistic fragmentation, among other elements, indicates. But eventually it is not so much the specific echo as a general ambience that marks Bogdanov’s Macbeth out as a globally postmodern phenomenon. The opening of the production plunges us into an abandoned quarry masquerading as the ‘blasted heath’ (1.3.76) in which, apart from the witches, dummies, burned out cars, and televisions litter the scene. Clearly suggested is a postapocalyptic moment characterized by ruination, decay and detritus; at the same time, the environment highlights a postmodern condition. Not only do the dummies connote the imitation and the facsimile (Mike Featherstone has described postmodern culture as ‘endlessly reduplicated and simulated’); so, too, do the televisions, since their screens reveal both the production’s title and the battle action as it happens.21 In this sense, we are positioned in Jean Baudrillard’s territory, which is ‘the third order, no longer the order of the real, but of the hyperreal’.22 More unsettlingly, perhaps, because a screen is privileged as a prime representational medium in this landscape seemingly recovering from a ‘global catastrophe’, we are forced to acknowledge a further dimension of the postmodern – the extent to which war, in Slavoj Žižek’s words, has been ‘deprived of its substance’ and replaced by ‘the spectre of an “immaterial” war where the attack is invisible’.23 The production’s opening, then, interestingly filmed in black-and-white, would seem to establish both a tone and appearance of mondial homogeneity, and, indeed, there is little to choose between this ‘Scottish’ scene and other nuclear wastelands characteristic of recent Hollywood cinematic outings. We are, in fact, paradoxically reminded of one of the constructions of Scotland circulating in the wake of the failed referendum bill; that is, an audience is presented with a fallen world robbed of a redeeming distinctiveness. Despite his entertainment of signifiers of Scotland, Bogdanov is simultaneously keen to explore the ways in which a national aesthetic is imperilled at the hands of technology, industrial excess and global conflict. In Doran’s Macbeth, the most recent of the three productions under discussion, a preoccupation with homogeneity is also continually to the fore.

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Camera work is hand-held and giddy, while the editorial technique is impatient, compressed and telegraphic; as a result, one experiences Macbeth as a kind of documentary drama in which the Shakespearean play becomes difficult to separate out from other generic forms and styles. Such a difficulty is compounded by the production’s predilection for lurching tracking-shots and low-resolution green lighting: for viewers sensitized to recent political events and popular television series, these representational strategies function to evoke the Gulf War, in both of its manifestations, and longrunning TV shows such as The X-Files. Clearly an investment in introducing contemporary registers has as its objective a reading of Macbeth that prioritizes the unexplained and the arena of international political warfare; art additional by-product, however, is that we come to inhabit a world with no firm dividing-lines or sharpened edges: one modality of being fades into, and is synonymous with, the next. If camerawork inculcates an impression of sameness, so, too, do the production’s visuals. Filmed in the stark, bricklined interior of the Old Roundhouse Theatre in London, whose only redeeming feature is a metal catwalk, Doran’s Macbeth gives no clue as to its imagined geographical anchorage and favours only the bare narrative essentials. Lanterns, spotlights and torches focus upon leather outfits, silver buttons and militaristic garb, but no attempt is made to suggest either factions or individual affiliations: each major player is, literally, cut from the same cloth. Nor does the production aspire to place in discrete categories the ‘real’ and the ‘supernatural’, since even the witches who, like Macbeth (Antony Sher), smoke pot, wear semi-military attire. At once, the visual design lends emphasis to the production’s psychological investments and, similar to Trevor Nunn’s landmark Thames Television realization of Macbeth in 1979, steers us towards a confrontation with the protagonists’ inner demons. Nowhere is this dimension more obvious than in the scene where Lady Macbeth (Harriet Walter) is filmed upside-down and underwater as her voiceover reflects upon her husband’s ‘human-kindness’ (1.5.15): it is in an inventively introspective moment. Yet, at the same time, a prevailing visual greyness means that the constructed mindset of the individual is also the psychology of the collective. Antony Sher writes in his autobiography that what was aimed for in the production was a sense of a ‘modern world but one you can’t easily identify. Everything and everyone will be caked in soot, oil, grime, dried blood ... and you can’t say which war this is either: Flanders, Vietnam, Balkans?’ Concluding, he writes ‘we remind ourselves of images we’ve seen on TV recently: earthquakes in Turkey, the war in Kosovo

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– again and again images of modern societies made primitive’.24 Global homogeneity, in short, is the production’s interpretive template or rationale, and it is applied in such a way as to collapse temporal specificity and flatten national borders. In the process, characterological particulars are submerged beneath stock media signifiers, with little room remaining for singular agency. Emerging from, and dovetailing with, the deployment of stereotypical mondial images is a familiar postmodern preoccupation. Fredric Jameson writes that some filmic ‘images consistently and reflexively designate the medium itself and foreground the process of reproduction with an insistency which one is tempted to read as a fundamental symptom or secret of postmodernism itself’.25 Because self-conscious gestures are constant interventions, Doran’s Macbeth is no exception to this rule: Macbeth looks into the camera on accepting the title of Thane of Cawdor; he addresses his soliloquies into a mirror; and he places his hand over the camera when speculating upon how he will the ‘multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red’ (2.2.62–3). At one and the same time, then, the production draws attention to its own artifice and acknowledges its status as a rehearsal of a world outside its fictive frame. In so doing, Doran’s Macbeth demonstrates the extent to which it is simultaneously shaped by, and participates in, the assumptions and practices that have transformed and standardized its contextual locations. It would seem, therefore, that this most recent reading of Macbeth places Scodand at its furthest remove; indeed, one might argue that Scotland, as befits an increasingly homogeneous trajectory of Shakespearean representation, is suppressed, made hollow and vacated. Such a reading suits with the ways in which Doran’s Macbeth excises many Scottish references and focuses indistinctly on a map that may or may not represent Scottish terrain. Taking note of Etienne Bonnot de Condillac’s remark, via Jacques Derrida, that ‘memory... consists ... in the power of reminding ourselves of the signs of our ideas, or the circumstances which accompanied them’, however, allows for an alternative perspective.26 For Scotland, or a version of it, does project itself into this Macbeth, yet only at the level of echoes and recollections, of a ‘memory’ that needs ‘signs in order to recall the nonpresent’.27 Once again, we here find a further bridge to the global economy, since, as Andreas Huyssen argues, ‘local and national memory practices contest the myths of cyber-capitalism and globalization and their denial of time, space and place’.28 In Doran’s construction of the signs of memory, first the visual and then the aural are invoked. At the entrance of

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Duncan (Joseph O’Conor), for instance, a backlit drawbridge descends to reveal the spectacle of a king flanked by churchmen and dressed in white and gold; the sounds of a Latin chant are deployed to complete the effect. Later, the eerie wail of Celtic pipes is enlisted as Duncan prepares for sleep. For Doran, then, what is Scottish is also what is older, Catholic and institutional, the implication being that Duncan incarnates an anterior ‘golden age’. Thus, when Macbeth assumes power and dresses himself in Duncan’s robes, only to appear soon afterwards in military garb decorated with gold braid, visual highlighting suggests that Scotland now exists as no more than a cultural performance that parodically impersonates, or nostalgically brings to mind, a lost original. As the production develops, Scotland comes to signify, through the application of memory, a paradoxical combination of both historical continuity and abused religious value. Here, the aural is particularly important, with Celtic pipes being played as Macbeth cries ‘Banquo!’ (3.1.140) and harks back to the bloody resolve to dispatch his closest associate: because of the meanings already enshrined in the music, the production is able to gesture to the prospect of a connection linking the various members of the Scottish nobility. Such a suggestion is reinforced by the play’s contextual anchorage and its resonant delineation of Banquo as an apparitional Stuart ancestor of James I of England and VI of Scotland. In the original court performance, a mirror in this ‘parade of kings’ (3.1.59) scene was included to reflect greatness back upon the main viewer, the monarch himself. More complicatedly, the returning refrain of Celtic pipes during the ‘testing scene’ allows the lineal theme to incorporate a quasi-divine dimension; taking place in a church, the disquisition on Scotland implies that England, the bastion of the spiritual, is a harbour from Scotland, a ‘nation miserable’ (4.3.103) now plagued by a profane monarch and a monstrous secularity. Elaborating the play’s forces of resistance in these terms sits easily with conventional essentialist interpretations. But these are further ambiguated by the production’s conclusion in which the witches, lamenting Macbeth’s fall, intone over his body a final Latin requiem. By extension, Scotland, seemingly repressed, is reinstated via association as the unearthly and the mystical. In view of the status of Latin as a ‘dead language’, one might also suggest that the demise of Scotland is here commemorated. In fact, what Doran’s Macbeth demonstrates at this point is the phenomenon of Scotland as a ghostly recurrence. As Jacques Derrida states, commenting upon questions of ‘repetition’, ‘a spectre is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back’. ‘Think... of

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Macbeth’, Derrida concludes.29 Through a process of accretion and transformation, Doran’s Macbeth comes to be haunted by that which it endeavours to remember. If Scotland ‘comes back’ in Doran’s Macbeth in the form of history or memory, then this is borne out by a documentary, ‘The Real Macbeth’, that aired on Channel Four the same night that the production received its première. Hosted by Tony Robinson of the popular archeological show, The Time Team, ‘The Real Macbeth’ fills in those Scottish spaces that Doran’s Macbeth neglects or is incapable of accommodating; it provides an extratextual opportunity for a longing for the local to be articulated; and it celebrates the residue of the postmodern impetus to strip Macbeth down to a nationless narrative. And it performs this task in ghostly fashion. To cite Slavoj Žižek in his discussion of what is left over from the ‘signifying operation’, ‘there is no reality without the spectre, [and] the circle of reality can only be closed by means of an uncanny spectral supplement ... This real... returns in the guise of spectral apparitions’.30 Thus, although the documentary strives to uncover the ‘secrets behind the real king’ and to reveal ‘what the old Scotland was like’, it executes its intentions via ghostly rehearsals of fog-encrusted landscapes, lakes, rivers, forests and ruined abbeys. Visuals of faded parchment maps and leather-bound tomes, which join company with sepia photographs of past Macbeths, add to the spectral impression. Judged alongside the screen versions of Macbeth of the 1990s, this manoeuvre brings us full circle back to Scotland as stereotype. As in Freeston’s Macbeth, we are appealed to via ‘always-already symbolized’ Scottish images: even the academic ‘talking heads’ drink whiskey and sport flowing red beards. At the same time, this documentary attempt to establish a historical Scottish sovereign who constituted a genuine ‘Gaelic threat’ is obliged to recognize, as in earlier productions of Macbeth, the pervading and intersecting power of English practices and institutions. The documentary opens and closes with the Globe Theatre in London as if in covert acknowledgement both of James I’s royal patronage and of the nonindigenous nature of this particular televisual recovery. Certainly, a circular argument can be defended; however, because ‘The Real Macbeth’ was broadcast as a sister-piece to Doran’s Macbeth, a more apt descriptor might be the documentary as prosthesis. In this sense, the supplement comes into its own, for, as David Wills writes, the ‘artificial addition’ is ‘about’ nothing less than ‘placement, displacement, replacement, standing, dislodging, substituting, setting, amputating, supplementing’.31 ‘The Real Macbeth’,

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then, might best be judged as the crutch on which the postmodern Macbeth is supported. Or, to put it another way, the documentary form offers further corroboration of the ways in which the local, whatever its ultimate manifestation, consorts with, and feeds into, global interpretive paradigms. ‘At bottom’, writes Jacques Derrida, ‘the spectre is the future: it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back’.32 Like the ghost, the screen versions of Macbeth of the 1990s take us in complementary directions. In their concern with Scottishness and Englishness, they push us backwards to early modern constructions and invite us to speculate about the ‘Britishness’ not only of Shakespeare but also of the archipelagic landmass which his work represented and in which it was disseminated. In this sense, despite its distance from more recent appropriations, the early modern period might itself be seen as ‘glocal’, since it constituted par excellence the moment at which various expressions of the local were accommodated to, and made to serve the interests of, larger, world-oriented systems. But the ‘glocal’ touches, too, upon the present, and an additional by-product of the screen Macbeths of the 1990s is that they prompt us to predict future forms of Shakespearean interpretation. It is hazardous, of course, to argue for the ways in which the Macbeth to come will unfold; nevertheless, some recent filmic Shakespeares make available telling suggestions. In films such as Greg Lombardo’s Macbeth in Manhattan (1999), Klaus Knoesel’s Rave Macbeth (2001), Alison L. LiCalsi’s Macbeth: The Comedy (2001) and Billy Morrissette’s Scotland, PA (2001), which respectively centre upon a rehearsal of Macbeth and its connections to the metropolitan condition, the German rave scene, the ambitions of a satirically treated lesbian couple and the rise, set in the 1970s, of a fast-food hamburger restaurant, it is clear that the movement towards the disappearance of Scotland has almost completed itself. For, in the main, these are movie features that celebrate the values of a US hegemony rather than a Celtic hinterland. Such a diminution of the local will also be the case in Kenneth Branagh’s Macbeth in-the-making; according to publicity, the tragedy is ‘transplanted to ... an utterly modern setting.... The bloody battle for leadership centres on the control of a global media empire. ... But here the murders take place on Wall Street’.33 Crucially, the synopsis implies that this Macbeth will not only self-consciously take energy from the global moment; it will simultaneously thematize the very means whereby the eradication of the local has been effected. Inasmuch as these films bear witness to the decline of Scotland, they also, it might be claimed, stand as testimony to the

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ailing status of Shakespeare: with but one exception, they bypass Shakespeare’s language in favour of modern parlance. What we are left with is a densely intertextual network of reincarnations and reinventions, one that does not necessarily fit neatly inside a ‘glocal’ frame. For these are films characterized, above all, by multiplicity – of genre, gender and national origin – and, as such, they fail to pursue straightforward ideological routes. This should not strike us as entirely surprising, since, from Arjun Appadurai’s perspective, the global economy can often appear as asymmetric: ‘global flows’, he writes, reveal ‘growing disjunctures among ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes’ and follow ‘increasingly nonisomorphic paths’.34 If nothing else, Appadurai’s remark shows that, whatever the future of Shakespeare and Scotland, the creative impulse will entertain a range of representational options in the same moment as it resists the temptations of familiar identifications.35

Notes 1

Cairns Craig, ‘Constituting Scotland’, The Irish Review, 28, Winter (2001 ), p. 18. 2 Duncan Petrie, ‘The New Scottish Cinema’ in Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie eds, Cinema and Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 160,161. 3 Craig, ‘Constituting Scotland’, pp. 19–21. 4 See James H. Mittelman, The Globalization Syndrome: Transformation and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 15; Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 15, 59, 78–9, 166; Malcolm Waters, Globalization (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 3,63. 5 See Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 46; Darren O’Byrne, ‘Working-Class Culture: Local Community and Global Conditions’ in John Eade ed., Living the Global City: Globalization as Local Process (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 73; Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1998), p. xix. 6 Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and HomogeneityHeterogeneity’ in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson eds, Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 23–44. 7 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 153. 8 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 151. 9 Colin MacCabe, ‘Preface’ in Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (London: BFI Publishing, 1992), p. xii. 10 Craig, ‘Constituting Scotland’, p. 23.

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11 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Spectre of Ideology’ in The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 73. 12 Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to ‘Dad’s Army’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 178. 13 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or; the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 19. 14 See Richards, Films, p. 183. 15 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 34, 35. 16 Macbeth, ed. G. K. Hunter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 5.2.1. All further references appear in the text. 17 William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 480–1. 18 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 7. 19 Colin McArthur, ‘Brigadoon’, ‘Braveheart’ and the Scots (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2003), passim. 20 For a discussion of the dominance of the romance genre in Hollywood cinematic practice, see Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 37,108. 21 Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991), p. 98. 22 Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), p. 121. 23 Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002), p. 37. 24 Antony Sher, Beside Myself (London: Hutchinson, 2001), pp. 340–1. 25 Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 60. 26 Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, trans. Alan Bass, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Harvester Wheat-sheaf, 1991), p. 88. 27 Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, trans. Barbara Johnson, in Reader, p. 133. 28 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia’, Public Culture, 12 (2000), p. 37. 29 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 11. This study, of course, centres upon Hamlet, a play haunted by the spectre of Scotland. See Stuart M. Kurland, ‘Hamlet and the Scottish Succession’, Studies in English Literature, 34 (1994), pp. 279–300. 30 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), p. 180; Zizek, Reader, p. 73. 31 David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 9,226. 32 Derrida, Specters, p. 39. 33 Kenneth Branagh’s ‘The Shakespeare Film Company’/Intermedia (London: Intermedia, n.d.), n.p. Also on Branagh’s Macbeth, see ‘Branagh brings the Scottish play up to date’, Belfast News, 13 May (1999), p. 9; Samuel Crowl, ‘Communicating Shakespeare: An Interview with Kenneth Branagh’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 20.3 (2002), p. 28.

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34 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 37. 35 My thanks to Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy for their stimulating and generous comments on an earlier version of this essay.

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Index

Albee, Edward 173

Beckett, Samuel 174

Alexander, Peter 4, 5, 164, 165, 166, 167

Behan, Brendan 174

Alexander, William 126

Bjornson, Maria 178

Anderson, Benedict 24

Blackwell, Thomas 127

Ane Detectioun of the Duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes 98

Blair, Hugh 2, 3, 128, 129, 130, 131, 158

Anne of Denmark 47

Blake, Jeremy 177

Anouilh, Jean 173

Blake, William 131, 196, 197

Antony and Cleopatra 124, 127, 172, 178, 179, 180

Blakemore, Michael 173

Appadurai, Arjun 193, 197, 204 Ariosto, Ludovico 126 Aristotle 72 Bacon, Francis 54 Baker, David J. 11 Baldwin, T.W. 3 Banks, Iain 191 Barbour, John 126 Barry, Spranger 106 Barton, Anne 8 Basilicon Doron 38–50, 54, 59, 125, 126, 127 Bate, Jonathan 149 Baudrillard, Jean 198 Baynes, Thomas Spencer 3

Belleforest, François 94

Blane, Sue 178 Blank, Paula 61 Bogdanov, Michael 6, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198 Bowdler, Thomas 130 Bowie, David 177 Bradley, A. C. 3, 4, 5 Branagh, Kenneth 197, 203 Braveheart 10, 197 Brecht, Bertolt 174 Brown, Keith 54 Bruce, Robert, King of Scotland 126 Buchanan, George 88, 90, 91, 98, 126 Burbage, Richard 58 Burgess, Anthony 166 Burnett, Mark Thornton 6, 9, 13 Burns, Robert 12, 124–40

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208

Index

Campbell, Thomas, 137 Cartelli, Thomas 14 Cartland, Robert 173 Chapman, George 56 Charles I 149 Charles II 150 Chase, Stephen 196 Chaucer, Geoffrey 132 Chettle, Henry 94 Churchill, Charles 112, 117 Cicero 67 Colley, Linda 106 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de 200 Connery, Jason 192 Connery, Sean 192 Constable, Alexander 160, 161 Constable, Archibald 144 Coward, Noël 174 Craig, Cairns 189, 190, 191 Craig, Thomas 59 Craik, T. W. 33 Cranitch, Lorcan 195 Crawford, Robert 2, 10, 12, 13 Crichton, Mamie 175, 176, 177 Curwen, Henry 157, 167 Cymbeline 2 Cyropaedia 125 Daemonologie 47 Dartnell, Steven 180, 181 Davenport, Jack 192 Day, John 56 De Grazia, Margreta 163 De Jure Regni apud Scotos 126 Dekker, Thomas 94 De Laclos, Choderlos 173 Delaney, Shelagh 174 De Republica Anglorum 71 Derrida, Jacques 200, 201, 203 Devereux, Robert 93 Dewar, Donald 133 Dobson, Michael 127, 151 Donaldson, Alexander 159, 160, 161, 167

Doran, Gregory 191, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202 Douglas 1, 15, 105, 128 Dryden, John 132 Du Bartas, Guillaume 126 Dunbar, William 125 Dunn, Esther Cloudman 3 Du Plessis Mornay, Philippe 90 Eastward Ho! 56 Eliot, T. S. 137 Elizabeth I 20, 21, 37, 87, 93 Ellis, Steven 22, 23, 30, 31 Erskine-Hill, Howard 95 Faerie Queene, The 72, 99 Featherstone, Mike 198 Ferguson, F. S. 157 Fergusson, Robert 130, 131 First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, The 88 Fletcher, Lawrence 2 Ford, John 174 Foulis, Andrew 158 Foulis, Robert 157 Fowler, Elizabeth 2, 12 Fowler, William 126 Frazer, Rupert 181 Freeston, Jeremy 6, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 202 Fuller, Thomas 54, 55 Fumerton, Patricia 61 Furness, Horace Howard 163 Garbin, Lidia 13 Garrick, David 105, 106, 107, 109, 128, 129, 137, 160 Gelber, Jack 180 Gemmell, Ruth 192 George III 112, 113, 116 Gibson, Mel 197 Gifford, Douglas 179

209

Index

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Goldberg, Jonathan 2 Goldsmith, Oliver 174 Grammaticus, Saxo 94 Gray, Alasdair 189 Greene, Robert 94 Grenville, George 116 Gurr, Andrew 33 Hack, Keith 176, 178, 180 Hadfield, Andrew 9, 12, 58 Hamlet 2, 87–103, 127, 161, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177 Hardt, Michael 190 Havergal, Giles 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184 Hawkes, Terence 9, 14 Hay, Gilbert 126 Hay, James 55 Hayman, David 175 Hayward, John 93 Hazlitt, William 8 Heaney, Seamus 38 Henriad, The 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34 1 Henry IV 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 148 2 Henry IV 32, 33, 46 Henry V 6, 7, 8, 11, 15, 26, 27, 28, 33, 37, 46, 48, 49, 57, 146 Henry VIII 21, 29 Henslowe, Philip 57, 94 Highley, Christopher 11 History of Scotland 91 Hoby, Edward 56 Hogg, Patrick Scott 134 Holinshed, Raphael 43, 44, 45, 91, 94, 97 Home, John 1, 15, 105, 128, 129 Homer 127, 128 Homes, Henry (Lord Kames) 3 Hughes, Ken 6 Hunter, G. K. 9 Huyssen, Andreas 200

Isle od Gulls, The 56 James I and VI 2, 8, 9, 11, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 28, 31, 34, 37–50, 54– 63, 69, 79, 88, 93, 94, 99, 125, 126, 127, 135, 137, 157, 201, 202 Jameson, Fredric 193, 200 Jefferson, Thomas 128 Jenkins, Harold 93 Johnson, Samuel 129, 132, 151 Jonson, Ben 56, 94, 149 Joyce, James 12 Julius Caesar 148 Kemp, Lindsay 174, 177 Kennedy, A. L. 189 Kent, Jonathan 178 Ker, Robert 55 Kernan, Alvin 2 King John 152 King Lear 2, 14, 38, 49, 50, 127, 180 Knoesel, Klaus 6, 203 Knox, John 88, 89, 90, 91 Kurland, Stuart 12 Kurosawa, Akira 6 Languet, Hubert 90 LiCalsi, Alison L. 203 Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII 93 Lockhart, John Gibson 153 Lombardo, Greg 6, 203 Lorimer, R. C. 5, 6 Lucan 124, 128 Luhrmann, Baz 198 McArthur, Colin 197 Macbeth 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 23, 53–66, 67–86, 88, 104–23, 124, 127, 141, 142, 144, 152, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202 MacCabe, Colin 190 McClure, Derricke 6, 53

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Index

MacDonald, Robert David 172, 173 McKellen, Ian 198 Macklin, Charles 108, 109, 110 MacLehose, James 5, 162, 163 McLeod, W. T. 165, 166 Macmillan, Alexander 5, 162, 163, 164, 167 Macpherson, James 105, 109, 128, 129 Madoc, Philip 192 Major, John 42 Malcolm, King of Scots 94 Maloney, Michael 192 Marlowe, Christopher 124, 180 Marston, John 56 Massey, Charles 94 Maxwell, William 133 Meacher, Michael 173 Measure for Measure 143, 166 Meiklejohn, J. M. W. 161, 162 Meiklejohn, M. J. C. 161 Milton, John 149, 152 Minogue, Danii 1 Mirror for Magistrates 126 Monarchike Tragedies 126 Morrissette, Billy 6, 203 Murphy, Andrew 5, 13 Murray, James 56 Napier, Alan 191 Negri, Antonio 190 Nelson, Thomas 167, 168 Noble, Andrew 134 Norbrook, David 57 North Briton, The 113, 116, 117 Nunn, Trevor 199 O’Conor, Joseph 200 Oliver, Cordelia 178 Olivier, Lawrence 8 Orton, Joe 174 Palmer, Patricia 62 Paterson, Don 136

Percy, Bishop 144 Pericles 127 Perry, Clive 183 Pertwee, Sean 194 Petrarch 126 Petrie, Duncan 189 Pharsalia 124 Phillips, James 98 Plowden, Edmund 78 Pocock, J. G. A. 24, 25, 28, 32 Polanski, Roman 6, 196 Pont, Robert 59 Pope, Alexander 130 Principe, Il (The Prince) 126 Prophecy of Famine, A 112, 117 Prowse, Philip 172, 173, 174, 178, 180 Purves, David 5, 6 Puttenham, George 55, 56 Quintilian 67 Ralegh, Walter 55, 72 Raleigh, Walter 3 Reid, John 130 Reinshagen, Gerlind 174 Rhodes, Neil 2, 9, 11, 59 Rich, Barnaby 62 Richard II 8, 43, 45, 148, 149, 150 Richard III 126 Richards, Jeffrey 193 Robart the second Kinge of scottes tragedie 56, 94 Robinson, Tony 203 Rogers, Rebecca 12 Ruddiman, Walter 160 Saville, Henry 53 Scacchi, Greta 194 Scott, Walter 13, 137, 141–56 Scottish History of James IV, The 94 Scullion, Adrienne 1, 13 Shakespeare, John 144 Shapiro, James 57

211

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Index Shaw, George Bernard 127, 173, 174 Sher, Anthony 199 Siddons, Sarah 107–8 Small, Christopher 177, 178, 182 Smith, Adam 2, 130, 135 Smith, David Nichol 3 Smith, Thomas 70, 71, 72, 73 Southern, Roger 181 Spalding, William 3 Speed, John 42 Spenser, Edmund 70–3, 125 Stanyhurst, Richard 124 Stevenson, John 2 Stoppard, Tom 174 Strindberg, August 180 Stuart, Esmé 88, 94 Stuart, John 111, 112 Stuart, Ludovic 60 Stuart, Mary 88, 90, 91, 95, 99 Tamburlaine the Great 180 Tate, Nahum 150 Taylor, Don 173 Taylor, Gary 150, 165 Tempest, The 8, 127, 141, 143, 152 Timon of Athens 178, 180 Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, The 42 Three Conjurors, The 113, 116, 118 Titus Andronicus 174, 176 Tough, D.L.W. 22 Tragedie of Gowrie, The 39 Trainspotting 10 Troilus and Cressida 43, 172, 177, 180 True-born Scotsman, The 110 Twelfth Night 174, 176, 177, 180 Tudor, Mary 89, 90, 91 Two Noble Kinsmen 3 Upton, John 115

Venora, Diane 198 Venus and Adonis 1, 157 View of the Present State of Ireland, The 71, 72, 125 Villettes, William 130 Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos 90, 91, 95, 96, 97 Voss, Heinrich 143 Waldegrave, Robert 39 Walker, Robert 174 Walter, Harriet 199 Warburton, William 130, 158 Washington, George 133 Watson, Robert 2, 130 Weiss, Peter 180 Weldon, Anthony 54, 55 Welles, Orson 6, 7, 191 Welsh, Irvine 189 Whitman, Walt 131 Wilkes, John 113, 114, 116, 117, 118 William, David 173 Williams, Tennessee 173, 174 Wills, David 202 Wilson, A. N. 149 Wilson, John Dover 4, 163 Winstanley, Lilian 12 Winter’s Tale, The 127 Wolsey, Thomas 29 Wreittoun, John 157 Wright, Allen 175, 177, 180 Wright, William Aldis 162, 176 Xenophon 125 Young, Peter 45 Žižek, Slavoj 192, 198, 202 Zola, Emile 174