None of the alleged topicalities, however, hold up under examination. (There is no certain contemporary reference to the play until its publication in the First Folio in 1623. It also helps spread the plays rather evenly throughout the working life of the Stratford man and puts its composition after the death of Oxford in 1604. And they add a few scraps of evidence: the porter’s throwaway line about “the farmer who hanged himself on the expectation of plenty” (2.3.3) because wheat prices were low in 1605–7 (Muir xxii) and “touching for evil” by King James (Carroll 222–26), because a doctor in the play tells how King Edward the Confessor practiced touching for evil to effect miraculous cures for tubercular ulcers (4.3.142).ĭating the play to 1606, shortly after the Gunpowder Plot, serves orthodox scholars well in that it links the playwright to a reigning king of England and one of the most sensational events in British history, commemorated ever since as Guy Fawkes Day. Macbeth’s hallucinatory vision of eight kings is supposedly intended to flatter James by showing him as the legitimate descendent of monarchs from Banquo and Fleance (4.1.111–124). His keen interest in witchcraft (he wrote a treatise on it) is thought to have inspired the play’s three Weird Sisters. Other topicalities are also supposed to tie the play to King James.
They note that the play depicts the treason of Macbeth against his king and famously features the porter’s ramblings about “equivocators” (2.3). dissembling under oath to avoid the sin of lying. The principal topical allusions in Macbeth for most Stratfordians-but not all-are to the 1605 Powder Treason or Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and to the subsequent trial of a Jesuit priest, not only for treason but for equivocation, i.e.
Under examination, however, their arguments fail to convince. Instead, with a few notable exceptions, they have argued that there are many topical allusions to events in England that date the play to 1606, three years after James VI of Scotland became King of England.
Generally, Shakespeare scholars today simply pay no attention to the firsthand knowledge of Scotland that is demonstrated in Macbeth. Six of these scholars, however, unwittingly provide much of the evidence supporting Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as the true author of Macbeth.
Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit,Ī review of historical documents and topical allusions in Macbeth shows that the author knew a great deal about Scotland and that he knew it long before 1606, which orthodox scholars argue was the year it was written by William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon. Brief Chronicles & Other Past Journals Expandĭoes Macbeth reference the 1567 murder of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley?Īwake! Awake! Ring the alarum-bell:-murder and treason!.
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