A war on Catholics

The ‘Scottish play’ is perhaps Sha Shakespeare’s most topical. Jam James VI of Scotland’s acc accession to the English throne led S Shakespeare to consult the histo historian Raphael Holinshed’s ChroniclesChr (1587). He rewrote Holi Holinshed’s story of Macbeth’s mur murder of Scottish king Duncan and the role of the witches in his dow downfall, while celebrating the imp importance of Banquo, from who whom it was believed James was descended.

T The king had written a book abo about his belief in witchcraft, calle called Daemonologie (1597), so he was probably delighted to watch a play showing “weird” witches that “trade and traffic with Macbeth / In riddles and affairs of death”.

But Shakespeare also exploited London’s tense atmosphere following the unsuccessful gunpowder plot of November 1605. One of the executed conspirators was the Jesuit father Henry Garnet, who had written a book on equivocation, directing Catholics to give misleading or ambiguous answers if arrested by the Protestant authorities. Many regarded equivocation as a sign of Catholicism’s duplicity.

It’s an idea that suffuses Shakespeare’s play. Macbeth condemns the witches as spirits who “palter [equivocate] with us in a double sense”. Immediately after Duncan’s murder the porter answers the knocking at the castle’s gates by saying: “Here’s an equivocator,” someone “who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.” This alludes to Garnet’s presumed failure to argue his way into heaven.