Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T04:01:48.251Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

MacBeth and the Background of Jesuitical Equivocation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Frank L. Huntley
Frank L. Huntley*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan Ann Arbor
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The drunken porter in Macbeth says: “Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator” (ii.iii). The speech has often been used as one of the means of dating the play because “equivocation” became notorious at the trial and execution of Father Henry Garnett that followed the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605. Also, it has been well recognized that equivocation is a major theme in the play, both in the narrow sense of common duplicity and in the larger sense of a blur between appearance and reality. There is equivocation between Macbeth as a man and Macbeth as a woman, and it is Lady Macbeth who cries out to become unsexed. The play is filled with equivocal appearances—women with beards, Macbeth in “borrowed robes,” day turned into night, a peaceful castle without and a burning cauldron of evil within. “All nature's germens” tumble together, and “the whole frame of things” becomes “disjoint.” This paper does not deny these usual interpretations of equivocation.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1964 , pp. 390 - 400
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The best and most convenient summary of scholarship is that of Kenneth Muir, ed., Macbeth, “The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare,” 8th ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1953); all my quotations of the play are to this edition. For their generous and helpful criticisms, my thanks go to Professor P. Albert Duhamel of Boston College, and to my colleagues at Michigan, Professors Edmund H. Creeth and James M. Zito. The paper, substantially the same, was read at the Newberry Library Renaissance Conference, Chicago, April 1963.

2 Ed. Heinrich Denziger, Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionem, et declarationem de rebus fidei et morum (Freiburgim-Breisgau, 1957), pp. 370–371, No. 1176. Here, under the heading of Errores varii de rebus moralibus, appears the 26th thesis of Thomas Sanchez' Opus Morale in Praecepta Decalogi sive Summa Cassium Conscientiae, 2 tom. (Paris, 1615–22), iii, vi, n. 15: “If anyone, by himself or before others, whether under examination or by his own accord, whether for amusement or for any other purpose, should swear that he has not done something which he has really done, having in mind something else which he has not done, or some way of doing it other than the way he employed, or anything else that is true: he does not lie nor perjure himself” (Tr. from Catholic Encyclopaedia, xiii (1912), 428.

3 T. B. Howell, ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials, ii (1816), 234. See also ibid., vii, 543–570, for a convenient summary of the English legal view of equivocation occasioned by the last speeches of five Jesuit ‘traitors’ executed at Tyburn on 20 June 1679. These arguments against equivocation in 1679, based as they are on a refutation of Sanchez, may have been the occasion of Pope Innocent's placing the doctrine on the Index the same year.

4 Calendar of State Papers (Domestic Series), 1603–10 (London, 1857), p. 315.

5 Leslie Hotson, I, William Shakespeare (New York, 1938), Ch. viii, pp. 172–202.

6 Martin d'Azpilcueta was born in Navarre in 1491, and died in Rome at the age of 95 in 1586. He taught Canon Law at Toulouse, Cahors, and Salamanca before occupying the chair at Valladolid. A complete edition of his works was published in Rome in 1590, and again in Venice in 1601 and 1602; a compendium of his writings was made by J. Castellanus in 1598 (Cath. Encyc). The basic text is known in Spain as Opera Omnia, in quinque tomos divisa. Venetiis, Dominicum Nicolinum, 1601. Cinco tomos. (36×23). Only one copy of Azpilcueta is in the U.S., and that is a single 1588 volume at the University of Chicago Library. The Vatican Library has the Opera Omnia, but the Vatican Microfilm Library at Saint Louis does not possess a copy of it.

7 In Ch. iv. of Aphorismes, or, Certaine Selected points of the doctrine of the Iesuits, with a treatise concerning their secret practices and close studies (London, 1609), it is said (pp. 20–21) that Navarrus cites the incident in his chapter Humanae aures, 22, quaest. r, from the lives of St. Francis by Angelus de Perusio and Johannes ad Anonia.

8 It is No. 968 (E.45), 2821, in Laud's quarto catalogue, Misc. No. 655 (Casuistry). In 1851 it was transcribed and published as A Treatise of Equivocation (London), by David Jardine, Barrister-at-Law. I quote from this edition.

9 Jardine, Introduction.

10 These same criteria for swearing an oath are contained in the last of the Thirty-nine Articles in The Book of Common Prayer.

11 Cf. the beginning of De Interpretatione, tr. E. M. Edgehill, The Works of Aristotle (Oxford, 1928, 1937), Vol. i, 16a: “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all.”

12 Biblical quotations usually appear in the Vulgate or Douai versions, but I am giving them in the more familiar language of the King James translation.

13 A Treatise of Equivocation, Ch. vi, p. 53 (folio 28 of ms.).

14 STC, No. 19417. This is No. 641 in A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, A Catalogue of Catholic Books Printed Abroad or Secretly in England, 1550–1640 (London, 1956).

15 The defense of the doctrine of equivocation begins with Ch. vii on p. 273 and proceeds for 283 pages to the end of the book.

16 Thomas Morton (1564–1659), Bishop successively of Chester, Lichfield, and Durham, in 1605 published An Exact Discovery of Romish Doctrine in the Case of Conspiracy and Rebellion, 4 tomes; and there is a tradition that the young John Donne helped him in his anti-Jesuitical argument (STC, No. 18184; DNB).

17 STC, No. 3371.

18 Ibid., pp. 148, 96.

19 Mentioned in The Execution of Iustice in England for maintenance of publique and Christian peace, against certeine stirrers of sedition, and adherents to the traytors and enemies of the Realm, without any persecution of them for questions of Religion, as is falsely reported and published by fauters and softerers of their treasons. xviii. Decemb. 1583 (STC, No. 4902). Burghley inveighs against the planting of “seedemen and Iesuites” in England, bringing “certeine Romish trash, as of their hallowed Wares, their Agnus dei, many kinde of Beades, and such like.” “When the traitors are captured,” he continues, “like hypocrites, they couloure and counterfeite the same with profession of deuotion in religion.” He gives a long list of eminent Roman Catholics who were allowed to worship undisturbed by the Queen, including Archbishop Heth of York and Bishop Poole of Peterborough. No Roman Catholic, as long as he did not meddle in state affairs, “was called to any capitali or bloody question upon matters of religion”—the first use of the phrase “bloody question.”

20 John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, tr. from the Latin by Philip Caraman (London, 1956), pp. 98–99.

21 STC, No. 4901.

22 Printed in Harleian Miscellany (London, 1808), i, 516.

23 STC, No. 8208.

24 This is quoted in Janelle's Robert Southwell, pp. 81–82; in Appendix E of Caraman's John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan; and in Henry Foley, S.J., Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (London, 1877), i (1st ser.), 369.

25 STC, No. 779.

26 Ibid., pp. 5, 9, 12, 19.

27 STC, No. 10017.

28 Ibid., pp. 9–10.

29 See Allison and Rogers, No. 35. “M.A.'s” title is fetching: The Discoverie and Confutation of a tragical fiction, devysed and played by Edward Sqyer yeoman soldier, hanged at Tyberne the 23, of Novemb. 1598. Wherein the argument and fable is, that he should be sent from Spaine by William Walpole Iesuit, to Poyson the Queen and the Earle of Essex, but the meaning and moralization thereof was, to make odious the Iesuites, and by them all Catholiques (STC, No. 9).

30 William Watson, Important Considerations which ought to move all true Catholikes to acknowledge that the proceedings of Her Maiesty have been mild (London, 1601), p. 43 (STC, No. 25125).

31 Christopher Bagshawe, A True Relation of the Faction begun at Wisbich by Fa. Edmonds, alias Weston, a Iesuit, and continued since by Fa. Walley, alias Garnett, the Prouincial of the Iesuits in England, and by Fa. Parsons in Rome, with their Adherents (London, 1601), p. 73 (STC, No. 1188).

32 Ibid., p. 74.

33 STC, No. 780.

34 Ibid., p. 138.

35 STC, No. 19449.

36 Page, C recto.

37 STC, No. 1814.

38 Ibid., p. 3.

39 Ibid., pp. 29–30. This version of the “bloody question” is quoted by G. B. Harrison under 15 Nov. 1601, in A Last Elizabethan Journal (London, 1933), pp. 218–219.

40 Ibid., p. 35.

41 Calendar of State Papers (Domestic Series), 1603–10 (London, 1857), pp. 273, 286, 289.

42 A Complete Collection of State Trials, 6 vols. (London, 1742), i, 241.

43 Macbeth's first act of technical equivocation comes in his apparently frank letter to his wife. Despite the fact that chronologically the witches' prophecy for Banquo followed their prophecy for Macbeth, he omits from the second half of his letter to his wife all reference to Banquo's issue. That Shakespeare gives us only half of his letter rather than the whole of it is significant too.

44 Cf. Masefield as quoted by Muir, p. 120.

45 Macbeth was revived in the spring of 1611, and the first record of a performance we possess is that of Dr. Simon Forman's manuscript called The Bocke of Plaies and Notes thereof per Formans for Common Pollicie (i.e., “as affording useful lessons in the common affairs of life”) [Muir, p. xvi]. Between the Gunpowder Plot in England and the 1610 assassination of Henri IV in France, the anti-Jesuit feeling was fanned by such publications as Robert Pricket's The Iesuits Miracles, or new Popish Wonders. Containing the Straw, the Crowne, and the Wondrous Child, with the confutation of them and their follies (London, 1607) [STC, No. 20340]. This long six-line stanza poem plays up Jesuitical equivocation, treason, and ‘miracles’ that elevated the victims of English justice. For example:

False traytor Garnet that foule murthering thief,

His treason did each treasons plot protect,

Upon his trust did damned sinne relie,

With hope to bring to passe, Arch villanie. (Av)

Again:

But Garnet dead, he for his treason died,

False was his heart, desiring guiltless bloud,

Equiuocations force his cunning tried.

Thereby to make his hel-borne actions good:

Fondly think not, for him strange strawes to see,

Nor worth a straw, such patcht vp wonders be. (B3r)