As with his other histories, Shakespeare took his characters and plot largely from contemporary chronicles, including Holinshed’s. In it, we see the plot largely as we recognize it from the play, with some notable exceptions. The essential characters are there, including the witches (whose prophecies Shakespeare took almost verbatim), Macbeth, Duncan, Banquo, Fleance, and MacDuff. Holinshed puts Duncan down as overly kind and condemns Macbeth as overly cruel, and in a nod to Machiavellian politics suggests that "the mean vertue betwixt these two extremities" (207) might have made a very decent king.
Neither of their histories—Holinshed's nor Shakespeare's--is particularly accurate or all encompassing. King Duncan reigned from 1034-1040, Macbeth for another seventeen years after that. Duncan’s reign was characterized by rebellion and warfare; Macbeth’s was stable enough to allow him a trip to Rome. Duncan died not in his bed, but on the battlefield near Elgin, defending his crown from the combined forces of Macbeth and Thorfinn, the Jarl of Orkney, and it was Duncan’s son Malcolm, as opposed to MacDuff, who ultimately killed Macbeth—possibly in single combat, and almost certainly miles away from Dunsinane. Importantly, however, Shakespeare does include in his version of events the military aid lent to Malcolm under the Earl of Northumberland. Such a selective portrayal of history, especially in the scenes dedicated to singing the praises of England’s then King Edward I and the dramatic reduction of Macbeth's reign to an apparently brief temporal eruption in an otherwise stable successive line attest to James' influence over the play in favor of his own political agenda: emphasizing the "rightness" of Stuart rule and the ancient political and military union of England and Scotland, which he symbolically if not popularly embodied.
According to Alan Sinfield, "it is often assumed that Macbeth is engaged in the same project as King James…rendering persuasive the ideology of the Absolutist state" ("Macbeth: history, ideology and intellectuals," 66). This ideology is dependent on the legitimacy of a king, and the distinction between a right lawful king and a tyrant. James recorded his understanding of that distinction in his Basilicon Doron, published in 1599 as a handbook on effective leadership. It came with the following dedication: "To Henrie: my dearest sonne and natural successor." The concept of "natural" is crucial to Jacobean political ideology, intimately tied to the divine ordination of kings James believed in and wanted to promote. In James' philosophy, a rightful king, ordained by God, comes to the throne via natural succession—in this instance a coded phrase for primogeniture. A tyrant comes to the throne by other, unnatural means. They may have identical policies on governance, suppressing or oppressing with equal force, but the naturally succeeding monarch has God’s approval and hence can be no tyrant.
Therefore, it is Macbeth’s accession by regicide that earns him the unfortunate appellation, rather than his qualities as a ruler. Shakespeare consistently posits Macbeth and his rule as an isolated eruption, outside of nature, right, and time. His claim to the throne, legitimate according to the system of tanistry that defined the tradition of succession in Scotland until controversially and bloodily set aside by Malcolm II in favor of Duncan, is never mentioned by Shakespeare, though history had not forgotten it. The system, whereby the king would name the strongest of his subjects "Tanist," or presumptive heir, regardless of familial relation, was only finally obliterated by legal decree during James' reign. Historically, Macbeth’s claim was at least equal to if not stronger than Malcolm’s, given Duncan’s dependency on the former to crush the ongoing rebellion and defeat a Norse force of invasion. To acknowledge it in the drama, however, would have contradicted the overall thematic concern of establishing the House of Stuart as legitimate, natural, and ordained for rule by God.
The "unnatural" surrounds Macbeth, particularly, as Grace Tiffany notes in "Macbeth, Paternity, and the Anglicization of James I," in the form of unnatural, childless women. Lady Macbeth’s child by another marriage, Lulach, is hinted at, but her anti-maternal language overwhelms the possibility of seeing her as a mother. She calls upon the Gods to "unsex" her, and to "take her milk for gall" in I.v, and in I.vii speaks of dashing out her baby’s brains. The witches, who along with Lady Macbeth lead Macbeth to his fall, are yet even more unnatural creatures. Under their influence and due to his own unnatural ambition, Macbeth falls out of synch with the natural order of time, demonstrated in II.ii by his inability to sleep. He refers to sleep as "the death of each day’s life," and "great nature’s second course." In V.i, the attending physician refers to Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking as “a great perturbation of nature."
Given the political context of the early 17th Century English succession crisis occasioned by Elizabeth’s childlessness, as well as the violent turmoil that soon followed it in the form of the Gunpowder Plot, James I would have desired to distance himself and his house from any such notions of monarchical instability. The Jamesian reading focuses on two major scenes constructed toward that end: the Banquet (III.iv) and Kings’ Progression (IV.i). Both contain overt references to James and the Jacobean political agenda; so overt, in the opinion of George Williams in "Macbeth, King James’ Play," that they "severely strain the coherence of the play" (13). One might expect the ghost of Duncan to appear at the Banquet over Banquo’s, but this play, as the constant reiteration of prophecy demonstrates, is about the future of the monarchy, not its past. Banquo’s descendants are meant for the throne, and it is to Banquo and Fleance that James I traced his lineage. Historians now suggest that Banquo never existed as anything more than a mythological figure of Stuart ancestry, enhanced and traded upon by Stuart monarchs to extend their royal heritage farther back than the 14th Century. His presence is therefore requisite in Macbeth according to the Jamesian reading, but problematic to its dramatic construction. His neutrality in Duncan’s death and his own unceremonious murder reduce his character and Fleance’s to little more than unfulfilled plot devices, intrusions of the Stuart myth on the action of the play, for unlike every other prophecy of the witches, the coming of Banquo’s line to the Scottish throne goes unfulfilled onstage. Further sacrifice of dramatic continuity to Jacobean political propagandizing occurs in IV.i, when the progression of only eight Stuart monarchs undoes some of the work accomplished by installing the Banquo myth. Outside of that immediate context, however, the scene does serve as a visual demonstration of the "ancient" stability of the house and its ability to provide uninterrupted succession, culminating in James I, whose face would have been reflected in the mirror held by the Eighth King. The twofold balls and treble scepters were emblems of his house.
Taking into account the apparently close alliance of the play’s themes and morality to the project of James Basilicon Doron, as well as the very visible presence of James I and his supposed ancestry within the play itself, it becomes clear how a Jamesian reading of Macbeth makes a great deal of sense not only on a textual level but when set against the real historical circumstances of its composition and performance. There are, however, significant disruptions of that interpretation within the identical text; disruptions that suggest a tacit criticism of or disagreement with the ideology the play seems to support. Alan Sinfield, for example, notes that while "absolutist ideology declared that even tyrannical monarchs must not be resisted" (67), Shakespeare clearly could not allow Macbeth to triumph. The play answers regicide with regicide; not exactly the course of action James I would like to have seen portrayed. One can perhaps dismiss this as a necessity of dramatic convention, or argue that the importance of punishing Macbeth the usurper outweighed the underlying contradiction of killing Macbeth the king; but further complications are far more difficult to overlook.
The presence and meaning of equivocation, detailed by the Porter in scene II.iii and crucial to the unfolding of the witches’ prophecies, create an underlying framework of the entire play that implies a thematic current contrary to the Jacobean agenda. The progression of the Stuart kings, for example, is meant to demonstrate stability and the natural order—but it is conjured by the unnatural witches with whom James, according to the reading in his name, would not have wanted his house associated. The scene also contains another glaring historical omission that could, depending on one’s interpretation, severely compromise the Jamesian reading. James was the ninth Stuart on the Scottish throne, but he appears in mirror of the eight; the scene is one monarch short of a full house. The missing sovereign is Mary, Queen of Scots, an example of absolutism gone murderously wrong, but also the rightful heir. Mary embarrassingly disrupted the distinction between lawful king and tyrant that James wished to illustrate and exemplify. This might explain her absence, but that absence is entirely too conspicuous in the context of the scene. She would not have been as easily forgotten by contemporary audiences as Macbeth’s seventeen years on the throne (reduced to almost nothing by the play) or Banquo’s complicity in the plot according to Holinshed (also effaced for the negative taint it would have on James). In the Basilicon Doron, James says to his son
to "look…especialie the bookes of the Kings, and Chronicles, wherewith ye ought to be familiarlie acquaynted: for there will ye see your selfe (as in a mirrour) either among the Catalogues of the good or evill Kings." Shakespeare offers the catalogue and mirror, but takes no definitive stance on good or evil.
The final, and arguably critical, disruption to the Jamesian reading is the role of MacDuff in defeating Macbeth. MacDuff is the essential figure of equivocation in the play, the solution to the witches’ riddle of how Macbeth could be killed by no man of woman born. That riddle, in turn, depends on the circumstances of MacDuff’s birth—not natural, as one would expect of the agent of Scotland’s return to order, but unnatural, and like Macbeth, out of synch with time. The emphasis of Macbeth on natural order and the rights attached to birth as the defining elements of lawful goodness ultimately and irreconcilably contrasts with the unfolding and resolution of its plot. The unnatural may serve the powers of good as well as the natural, challenging James’ defense of absolutism as based on natural birthright.
The problem of equivocation raises interesting questions regarding the purpose and function of the play in Jacobean England. Giving interpretative primacy to the flaws in the Jamesian reading, and presuming their ready comprehension by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, exposes the author to at least some appreciable level of personal and political risk, especially given his patronage and the fact that the king definitely saw, and may have commissioned, the play. Alternately, those flaws, when displayed in the context of the carnivalesque atmosphere of the playhouses, may have functioned as part of their larger political strategy of subversion and containment. Excluding major differences between the Court and Bankside versions of the play, the latter seems the most reasonable conclusion, but requires a longer project to defend.
Works Cited
Holinshed, Raphael. Shakespeare's Holinshed; the Chronicle and the plays compared. Ed. W. G. Boswell-Stone. New York: Dover Publications, 1968.
James I, King of England 1566-1625. The Basilicon Doron of King James VI. Ed. James Craigie. London: W. Blackwood & sons ltd., 1950.
Sinfield, Alan. "Macbeth: History, Ideology, and Intellectuals." Critical Quarterly 28, no. 1-
2 (1986 Spring-Summer): p. 63-77.
Tiffany, Grace. "Macbeth, Paternity, and the Anglicization of James I." Studies in the Humanities 23, no. 2 (December 1996): p.148-62.
Valbuena, Olga. "To 'venture in the rebels' fight': History and Equivocation in Macbeth." Renaissance Papers (1994): p. 105-22.
Williams, George. "Macbeth: King James’s Play." South Atlantic Review 47, no. 2 (May1982): p. 12-21.