Witches and Jesuits » The Juggler

1606 Witch-Christmas Court

Dec 252012

James I, King of England from 1603-1625

Garry Wills notes in his book Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (p. 35), that a number of plays from roughly 1606- by Marston, Barnes, and Dekker- have Witches in them, admitting that Witchcraft “fascinated Renaissance audiences- it figures in many plays, directly or indirectly. In fact, there is not a single play by Shakespeare that does not have some reference to witchcraft, some metaphor based on it, some term associated with it in a technical sense.” But Wills feels that there is a difference in the way that “Witches” (a controversial 17th century issue) are treated in the period of 1606: which he dates as reaction to the Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James, in 1605.

James I of England (formerly King James VI of Scotland, successor to Elizabeth I as the son of her first cousin, Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots) was a monarch uniquely troubled by Witches- an example (as Mr. Wills points out) of how the possibility of 17th century Witchcraft could turn into an affair of state (what Wills calls “political witchcraft”): “most of the major conspiracies against [James'] life involved witchcraft.” (p. 42) The North Berwick Witches of 1590 supposedly cast spells against him; Bothwell’s 1593 rebellion brought an indictment for Witchcraft; and Magick formulas were found on the body of the man who tried to kill the King, after the failure of the 1600 Gowrie Plot. Small wonder that (as King of Scotland), James wrote the anti-Witchcraft book Daemonologie, calling Witchcraft a pernicious crime and grave social concern. But it was in the wake of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, that “Witches” as agents-of-evil gained new fascination. Unsurprising, then, to find that “Witchy Women,” in dangerous and shivery ways, figure in at least four of the plays conjectured to have been put up by Shakespeare’s acting company during the Court Christmas Season of 1606.

King Lear and the Fool, in the Storm

By the time that James is ready to assume Kingship of England following Elizabeth’s death in 1603, it is clear that the acting troupe with which Shakespeare is associated, both as a writer and as an actor, is thought the best in London; they are honored by His Majesty’s patronage, performing thereafter as the King’s Men. Clearly as well, they are charged with providing a large degree of entertainment during the midwinter festival (which apparently was not thought concluded until Candlemas). This included a heavy court celebration during the Twelve Days of Christmas proper, during which the company performed King Lear on December 26. As much a meditation upon “good kingship” as anything else (and upon the folly of being a King who divides up his kingdom), it is one of Shakespeare’s more self-consciously “Pagan” plays, being set in pre-Christian (Romanized) Celtic Britain. An example of the type of language that Mr. Wills talks about, in identifying the “Witchy” characteristics of the “Gunpowder Plays” written in the aftermath of the Plot, is when Edmund calls his brother a “villain,” claiming that “here stood he in the dark, his sharp sword out, mumbling of wicked charms, conjuring the moon to stand [as his] auspicious mistress.” (Act II, scene i, line 41) The Witch-like image that Edmund the Bastard “conjures” of his brother- standing in the dark, utilizing his sword as some sort of Magickal instrument, mumbling “wicked charms,” “conjuring the Moon” to be his Fortune-granting Protector- helps to poison their father’s mind against Edgar.

The concluding play presented by the King’s Men, on Candlemas 1607, is one of the more Protestant and anti-Catholic works of the period. The Devil’s Charter (by Barnabe Barnes) purports to cover the “Life and Death” of the notorious Borgia Pope Alexander VI- father, for instance, to the infamous Lucretia, and a Pope singularly said to have owed his papacy to a bargain struck with the Devil. Therefore, this play (presented before the Protestant head of the Church of England) depicts the future-pope conjuring demons from out of the Pits of Hell, in a Magickal Ceremony that, for all that demons and hell’s forces are involved, looks so much like a modern Wiccan or Ceremonial Magickal Circle-Casting, as to dispel suspicions as to the genuinely medieval origins of Circle Invocation. However, since the Catholic Jesuits were heavily implicated in the Gunpowder Plot against James, this play of Italianate plotting and intrigue ends with demons dragging poor Alexander (kicking and screaming, ‘natch) to the eternal torments of Satan’s realm. One thing about the Jacobeans- they were not subtle in their political allegory.

Lucretia is one of the women presented in the plays of the 1606 Christmas Season as “Witchy” (according to Mr. Wills). For being the daughter of a “male Witch” (as Mr. Wills puts it), Lucretia would be expected to have Witch-Blood in her, as a Jacobean audience would think of it- a fact underscoring any moment that, say, Lucretia is seen with poisons, in a display of the dark Witches’ Arts of Venefica.

Queen Cleopatra

Another play by Shakespeare that Garry Wills believes was presented during this Christmas Season was Antony and Cleopatra. Noting thematic similarities between The Devil’s Charter, Antony and Cleopatra, and Macbeth (namely, their use of “Witchy Women,” and “Witchy” characteristics in general, as well as the evident availability of a teen-aged actor talented enough presumably to play all three “Witchy” roles: Lucretia Borgia, Cleopatra, and Lady Macbeth), Garry Wills believes that all three must have been written at approximately the same time, and in reaction to the Gunpowder Plot. An air of “Witchiness” undoubtedly permeates the air around the Egyptian Queen in Antony and Cleopatra, including references to her as a “Gypsy,” well-associated with Magickal Craft in the Middle Ages. The play opens in Act I, scene ii, upon an episode of fortune-telling and soothsaying in the Egyptian court (Soothsayer: “In Nature’s infinite Book of Secrecy, a little I can read.”) In what must have been to Jacobean audiences a very “Pagan” instance, one of Cleopatra’s ladies then prays to “sweet Isis, good Isis” to avert a comic misfortune predicted to befall her. Antony describes Cleopatra as a “grave charm,” a “right gipsy,” “thou spell,” and finally outright as “Witch,” in Act IV, scene xii, and Pompey describes her allure in Act II, scene i, line 22: “Let Witchcraft join with Beauty, lust with both!”

Macbeth enters the Witches’ Cavern

Through a complicated series of analyses (in addition to the thematic similarities between the three leading actress roles- Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, and Lucretia Borgia- suggesting that they were all written for one particular boy-actor), Mr. Wills places the probable date of Macbeth’s writing at close enough to the Christmas Season of 1606, that he feels certain it must have been performed then (if nothing else, for the interest of King James, at seeing Banquo- Macbeth’s victim after Duncan- portrayed onstage, as the Stewart Line of Scottish Kings descended from Banquo). Something to remember: although Elizabeth passes in 1603, it takes awhile to move a King from Edinburgh to London, so it is (in 1606) a fairly new situation, James being King of England. The King and his people are getting to know one another, as it were, and it is interesting to note that two plays here (Lear and Macbeth) address very serious issues about kingship. Kind of like the Fool in Lear, I guess that Jacobean acting companies could say things to monarchs that others could not. For the record: I disagree with just about every one of Garry Wills’ interpretations of the Witches (although his take on Lady Macbeth is brilliant). He interprets the Witches as Evil (kind of from a Catholic point-of-view). I see the Witches much more from a Pagan point-of-view, which I think is how Shakespeare saw them as well. (I believe that Shakespeare tends to respond more readily to things of the country and the folkloric past, than to doctrinal things like Protestantism and Catholicism.)

But still in all: isn’t it interesting that 406 years ago, they were celebrating such a Witch-intensive dramatic Christmas Court? Blessed Yule, Pagans!

Lady Macbeth and Witches (Part 2)

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Aug 032012

Lady Macbeth is probably a very interesting role to play, as it exists in two “sections” (basically, pre- and post-killing the King). Both parts are extremely dramatic, but shockingly different; according to Garry Wills in his learned book Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (The New York Public Library: Oxford University Press, 1995), both are based upon Jacobean ideas about Witches that would have influenced the original 17th century audience’s perception in ways that escape our cultural eye today.

Vivien Leigh, as Lady Macbeth

Whereas in the first part of the show, the Lady is seen as an indomitable and domineering Witch-Queen: in the latter, we see a much reduced, more pitiful woman- a woman almost suffering the fate of a Heretic-Witch. SOME BACK-STORY: while the medieval church had attempted forcibly to convert European Pagans to Christianity in the Dark Ages, and when that failed, sought to sermonize, ridicule, and spirituality-shame European Pagans since at least the tenth century- it was not really until the Heresy Persecutions of the 1300s that the church latched onto the idea of forcibly convicting someone of the religious crime of Devil-Worship (a charge enabled by the unleashing of torture upon the accused). Confessions thus got engaged what is called a “Feedback Loop,” reinforcing the notion that wholesale demonic abominations were being conducted by religious “Heretics”: meaning, those whose religious ideas veered too far from the True Orthodoxy of the One Church.

This becomes significant to Witches in the 1400s, when the church shifts the accusation of “Devil-Worshipping Religious Criminal” from Heretics against the Catholic Faith- and directs it against Witches. With Witches now pegged as the demonic criminal subversives of the medieval period, the 300-year Burning Times was upon the land.

For this reason, early Witch-Punishments of the 1400s could resemble very much those of religious Heretics of the 1300s- as in the case of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, a powerful woman married to the Regent of England (ruling whilst the young King Henry VI was in his minority). As Magick-Use seems to have been widely practiced during the 15th century, it is likely that the Witch-Duchess and her cohorts genuinely practiced Magick-Ritual: but to what end, being the pertinent question. Eleanor’s husband’s enemies charged her and her associates with attempting to end the King’s youthful life through use of the Dark Arts- a treasonable offense in the Middle Ages. Eleanor’s associates were tortured and horribly killed; the Duchess herself was forced to undergo the Heretic’s Walk of Shame through the streets of London. Trudging from church to church, carrying a Penitent’s candle, suffering the humility of bare feet in the wastes of the thoroughfares, Eleanor was a very visible figure of punishment, clad in the conspicuous white shift of the convicted Heretic.

At some point, the English abandoned this excessively-Catholic ordeal of the Heretic’s Humiliation (I would imagine around when Henry VIII splits from the church in the 1500s, and the newly-Protestant English start to jettison anything that smacked of “Popery”). Shakespeare’s audience presumably remembered the Witch-Duchess, forced to walk bare-footed in her white cloth with her candle of penance; almost 150 years later, Eleanor’s story becomes a significant sub-plot in the Bard’s History Play Henry VI, Part 2. And as Mr. Wills notes: every detail of Lady Macbeth’s legendary Sleep-Walking Scene (Act V, scene i)- the bare feet, the white nightgown, the carried candle, even the reference to the “damned spot” on her hand that recalls the theory that Witches nursed their Familiars with their own blood- every nuance of this guilt-plaugued, restless, tormented scene of madness and recrimination, subliminally suggests the Heretic-Witch Duchess of Gloucester.

Lady Macbeth and Witches (Part 1)

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Aug 022012

In his book Witches & Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (The New York Public Library: Oxford University Press, 1995), Garry Wills argues that Shakespeare presents two dramatically different aspects to Lady Macbeth’s character in Macbeth, both of them drawing upon Witch-Tropes familiar enough to the Jacobeans so as to create a frisson for his audience that we might miss today.

Ellen Terry, as Lady Macbeth

Once Lady Macbeth and her husband conceive of killing King Duncan (so that Macbeth can become King), they both apply themselves to the idea with gusto (as suggested, for instance, in John Singer Sargent’s 1889 portrait of the famed 19th century actress Ellen Terry in the part, seen to your left). Lady Macbeth exhibits such brio, that she immediately devotes herself to a speech “psyching herself up” for the regicide- a speech that imitates so closely a Witch’s Invocation that Shakespeare’s audience must have felt a thrill of dangerous excitement run down their spines as she spoke. To the Jacobeans of the early 17th century, Magick-Use (onstage or in person) was a Thing of great potency, and something with which a cautious person will demonstrate enormous care. For the Thane’s Lady to devote herself to murder, and the royal murder of a King, by calling upon “Murdering Spirits” of darkness and cruelty- this, to theater-goers of the 1600s, would be a dangerous, treacherous path indeed.

“The raven himself is hoarse, that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements. Come, you Spirits that tend on Mortal thoughts! Unsex me here and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood; stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of Nature shake my fell purpose, nor keep Peace between the effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts and take my milk for gall, you Murdering Ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait on Nature’s mischief! Come, thick Night, and pall Thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor Heaven peep through the Blanket of the Dark, to cry, Hold! Hold!”

[Enter Macbeth, her husband]

“Great Glamis! Worthy Cawdor! Greater than both, by the All-Hail hereafter!” [Act I, scene V, lines 40-56]

The speech, probably inspired by Medea’s Invocation to the Night in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (familiar to the 17th century English both through the Latin and the popular English translation), “mirrors” a Witch’s Speech so much, that the Witchcraft-Believing audience will start subliminally thinking of Lady Macbeth in terms of Witchcraft- if they do not start considering her as a Witch outright. (In the 2006 Australian film of Macbeth, the speech is delivered forthrightly as a Witch’s Invocation to the Full Moon.)

“The raven himself is hoarse”- the Lady’s first line calls to mind the proverbial Witch’s Familiar, still associated with Witches (see Disney’s Snow White and Disney Pixar’s Brave), and surely inherited from Celtic Raven-Goddesses such as the Morrighan. “Come, you Spirits that tend on Mortal thoughts”- this line is actually ambiguous, as it simply means, “You Spirits that know my thoughts”; basically what anyone Invokes, whenever they invoke Desire. Ah, but: “Unsex me here”; “Fill me up with cruelty”; “Stop up the access and passage of remorse.” Here the Lady is asking the Spirits to remove the (stereotypically feminine) soft, gentle aspects of her womanhood, and fill her with cruelty, blocking within her any twinges of misgiving and empathy that might trouble her killer’s conviction. “Come to my woman’s breasts and take my milk for gall”: Lady Macbeth goes on to demonstrate a troubling inclination to refer to her functions of maternity in horrific terms; here she wants “Murdering Ministers” to transform her milk to the bitter fungus gall. Like her husband, she calls forth the Darkness of Night to shroud their crime from detection. And lastly- “Great Glamis! Worthy Cawdor! By the All-Hail hereafter”- she imitates the Witches in their first meeting with Macbeth.

Both Macbeths will immediately begin to talk in Magickal-User terms, once they begin to plot the King’s murder (Macbeth will go so far as to adopt the language of a Master Magus when he joins the Witches in their Circle): they think that their Magickal terminology gives them power and control over their actions.

Ah- but when the Spirits That you are invoking are the “Murdering Ministers of dunnest [blackest] Hell”: how much control do you think you really have?

As the Macbeths discover: it is one thing to plan a murder; another thing to execute it. But to live with one’s conscience afterwards- that’s something else altogether.