The political and religious context: The Gunpowder Plot
Some notes on the religious and political context from James Shapiro’s excellent book, 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, Faber and Faber: London, 2015. (Summary by Dr Jennifer Minter, English Works Notes)
In the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) contemporaries found themselves searching for the ultimate source of such a hellish crime. A failed assassination attempt against King James 1 of England in 1605, known as the Gunpowder Plot, reflected unsettled political and religious times, as the Protestant faith replaced Catholicism.
With regards to the scale of the threatened destruction, some believed the plotters were demons. Lancelot Andrewes delivered a sermon one year later claiming that such evil could not have originated in the minds of men. It had been “propounded by Satan”. The young John Milton’s poem on the Gunpowder Plot focuses on evil’s satanic origins.
However, as Shapiro notes, “in refusing easy explanations for what possesses people to do evil things, Shakespeare wrote a play well suited to its times”. (219)
The Gunpowder Plot, which was subsequently foiled and celebrated as the Fifth of November, was the brainchild of Robert Catesby and his cousin Thomas Wright and Thomas Winter, whose plan was to blow up the king (King James) and Parliament, then “to surprise the Princess Elizabeth” and “make her queen”. They had prepared, in her name a “proclamation against the union of the kingdoms”. They recruited Thomas Percy and Guido (Guy) Fawkes. All were recusants (Catholics) who resented the mistreatment of Catholics in England.
Whilst recusants (resistant Catholics) suffered recriminations in Protestant England during Shakespeare’s times, there was little retribution towards recusants in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. At one stage, Shakespeare’s father, John, was one of three people (Catholics) accused of not receiving Communion in 1592. In 1606, Communion was mandatory on Easter Sunday. Twenty-one parishioners, including the godparents of his twins, refused to appear at Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church, as did Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna. Showing loyalty to their faith was a bold move, especially for a 22-year-old unmarried daughter. Shapiro notes, “how Shakespeare felt about Susanna’s actions – whether he was proud and supportive of his eldest daughter or furious at her unwillingness to play along or concerned about having to pay her 10 pound fine if it came to that – is lost to us, though it provides the rarest glimpses into the ways in which the national concerns that infused his works touched so close to home.” (260)
One lone conspirator remained from the Gunpowder Plot. Francis Tesham was brought to trial and key evidence was provided in his “A Treatise on Equivocation” – essentially a manual teaching Catholics how to lie under oath.
According to Shapiro, the Jesuits used four ways of equivocating (See “mental reservation”):
- The simplest method was to use deliberately ambiguous words.
- The second method was to omit a crucial piece of information. (Cited as an example was Abraham in Genesis when he told the Egyptians that his wife, Sarah, was his “sister”.
- The third method relied on the interplay of word and gesture, where the gesture may have been concealed and contradicted the word.
- The fourth method is “mental reservation”. For example, a Jesuit might say, “I didn’t see Father Gerard”, while finishing the sentence in your head with the words, “hide himself in a well-concealed priest-hole”. It was not a lie if you knew that God could read your thoughts.
Mental reservation
The court described how the doctrine of mental reservation could lead to chaos, undermining the nature of one’s oath and the rule of law.
“The Commonwealth cannot possibly stand if this wicked doctrine be not beaten down and suppressed, for f it once take root in the hearts of people in a short time there will be no faith, no troth, no trust .. and all civil societies will break and be dissolved.” (182) This is a world where honest exchange becomes difficult.
Shapiro notes: “Shakespeare was clearly fascinated by the various ways in which one could equivocate and had been employing this device in his plays and poems long before he or his culture had settled on a name for it. .. One of the great pleasures afforded by his works is watching his many lovers, rivals, servants, avengers and villains equivocate, sometimes playfully, sometimes in the most cunning and destructive ways imaginable.” (196)
In Act 5, and close to the fatal encounter with Macduff’s army, Macbeth tells the Messenger: “If thou speak’st false, Upon the next tree shalt thou hang alive… I care not if thou dost for me as much. I pull in resolution, and begin To doubt the equivocation of the fiend/That lies lie Truth: “Fear not, till Birnam wood Do come to Dunsinane; and now a wood comes toward Dunsinane”.
If Macbeth fears the nature of equivocation in this symbolism of a child “crowned, with a tree in his hand” coming to Dunsinane, then he, too, recalls the equivocator that the Porter joked about in Act 2, Scene 3. The act of equivocating is about saying one thing and meaning another. (It is the “eye wink(ing) at the hand”.) (The Porter, “knock knock! Who’s there, i’ the other devils name! Faith, here’s 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; O! come in, equivocator”.
- Return to Macbeth: A study in power
- For excellence in language analysis, see The Language of Persuasion: become an expert