In his Pulitzer prize-winning 1993 book Lincoln at Gettysburg,
Garry Wills showed how the Gettysburg Address revolutionized the
conception of modern America. In Witches and Jesuits, Wills again
focuses on a single document to open up a window on an entire
society. He begins with a simple question: If Macbeth is such a
great tragedy, why do performances of it so often fail? After all,
the stage history of Macbeth is so riddled with disasters that it
has created a legendary curse on the drama. Superstitious actors
try to evade the curse by referring to Macbeth only as "the
Scottish play," but production after production continues to soar
in its opening scenes, only to sputter towards anticlimax in the
later acts. By critical consensus there seems to have been only one
entirely successful modern performance of the play, Laurence
Olivier's in 1955, and even Olivier twisted his ankle on opening
night. But Olivier's ankle notwithstanding, Wills maintains that
the fault lies not in Shakespeare's play, but in our selves.
Drawing on his intimate knowledge of the vivid intrigue and drama
of Jacobean England, Wills restores Macbeth's suspenseful tension
by returning it to the context of its own time, recreating the
burning theological and political crises of Shakespeare's era. He
reveals how deeply Macbeth's original 1606 audiences would have
been affected by the notorious Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when a small
cell of Jesuits came within a hairbreadth of successfully blowing
up not only the King, but the Prince his heir, and all members of
the court and Parliament. Wills likens their shock to that endured
by Americans following Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination.
Furthermore, Wills documents, the Jesuits were widely believed to
be acting in the service of the Devil, and so pervasive was the
fear of witches that just two years before Macbeth's first
performance, King James I added to the witchcraft laws a decree of
death for those who procured "the skin, bone, or any other part of
any dead person - to be employed or used in any manner of
witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment." We see that the
treason and necromancy in Macbeth were more than the imaginings of
a gifted playwright-they were dramatizations of very real and
potent threats to the realm. In this new light, Macbeth is
transformed. Wills presents a drama that is more than a
well-scripted story of a murderer getting his just penalty, it is
the struggle for the soul of a nation. The death of a King becomes
a truly apocalyptic event, and Malcolm, the slain King's son,
attains the status of a man defying cosmic evil. The guilt of Lady
Macbeth takes on the Faustian aspect of one who has singed her
hands in hell. The witches on the heath, shrugged off as mere
symbols of Macbeth's inner guilt and ambition by twentieth century
interpreters, emerge as independent agents of the occult with their
own (or their Master's) terrifying agendas. Restoring the
theological politics and supernatural elements that modern
directors have shied away from, Wills points the way towards a
Macbeth that will finally escape the theatrical curse on "the
Scottish play." Rich in insight and a joy to read, Witches and
Jesuits is a tour de force of scholarship and imagination by one of
our foremost writers, essential reading for anyone who loves the
language.
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