MACBETH
A True Story
By Fiona Watson
Quercus, 320pp.
Reviewed: 12 June, 2010
The tension between history and drama is part of our response to either genre. We scan history for dramatic human elements that resonate with choices that may face us in our contemporary lives, and we respond most strongly to drama, in its fictional forms, when we can believe that it reflects, in essence, real human experience.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth places its doomed anti-hero and his impatient wife so starkly in the foreground that no others of the cast seem more than vague figures emerging and fading from a Scottish fog. MacBeth is fatally seduced by the witches’ prophecy that he shall be king, and a succession of murders proceeds from that. Shakespeare offers no suggestion that things could have turned out differently: the Fates are in charge and the outcomes are inevitable.
There was a real King MacBeth of Scotland, and most of the other main characters also appear in the historical annals. MacBeth’s history was of course more complex, and more interesting, than Shakespeare’s eloquent but fatally flawed villain. Scottish historian Fiona Watson has spent years scanning the annals and records from Scotland, Ireland, England and Scandinavia to unpick the centuries of biased misreporting in search of this real MacBeth.
The real MacBeth died in battle in 1058, after ruling Scotland for seventeen years. By contemporary accounts he was in fact a popular and generous king whose reign was characterized by peace and prosperity, a rare thing in those bloodthirsty times. He was in fact the first ever king of a Scotland united in the boundaries that we now recognise, and also the last Gaelic-speaking king before the permanent takeover of Anglo-Saxon and Norman dynasties.
MacBeth had been the King of Moray – the northernmost of two Scottish kingdoms that had, over centuries, evolved from a patchwork of separate realms in a kaleidoscope of endless wars, rivalries, and shifting alliances. The southern kingdom was known as Alba.
MacBeth’s reign marked the crucial period period during which the various peoples of Scotland were forced to re-make their sense of identity, in line with some trends across much of western Europe. In Scotland, identity had been broadly ethnic rather than national. Picts in the southeast, Irish-linked Gaels in the west, Pict-Gaelic Moravians in the far north – all salted and peppered with the raiding and invading of Norse Vikings who controlled much of Ireland, the Western Isles, and the Orkneys.
Northern England was also Norse-ruled, in shifting relations with the Anglo-Saxon realm of southern England. At the peak of Norse influence, a few years before MacBeth, the Danish King Canute (Cnut) had ruled for more than a decade, from London, over almost all of Britain, Denmark and other european territories.
Throughout the Dark Ages, people’s lives had depended on the ability of local warlords to enrich them, or protect them, in an environment where raiding, rape and pillage were normal. Any lord or king who was unsuccessful would be replaced, commonly by murder, as readily as the modern sacking of a football coach or CEO.
There is no doubt that MacBeth had gained power by force of arms from Duncan, but Watson argues that this was consistent with the “best practice” statecraft of the time. Shakespeare portrays King Duncan as a kindly old buffer and MacBeth as a disloyal usurper. Watson tells us that Duncan had just led Scotland into a ruinous failed invasion of England, and that his replacement would have been welcomed and entirely expected. MacBeth’s claim to the throne was equal to any, by those standards, and his method of claiming it not exceptional.
Duncan had been the first King of Alba appointed on the new-fangled principle of primogeniture – his descent from the previous King Malcolm. This had been a controversial break from the long-standing Scottish tradition of rotating the monarchy among several families with royal claims – including MacBeth’s own ancestors.
The real MacBeth’s reign was so prosperous that he could afford the huge expense, and the political risk, of undertaking a pilgrimage to Rome to visit the Pope, Leo IX. MacBeth was the only Scottish king ever to do this, and the background is significant.
For centuries the Scottish church had persisted in its Irish-originated Columban form, independent of Rome. As the Roman Papacy became more assertive, it declared that its Archbishop in York had spiritual responsibility for Scotland – including pronouncing on the legitimacy of monarchs. Pope Leo was in the process of reasserting central control and reorganizing the hierarchies of the Roman Catholic Church across all of Europe, so Watson surmises that MacBeth’s trip to Rome was an attempt to persuade the Pope to confirm Scottish nationhood, by appointing a separate Archbishop for Scotland.
This may be what really provoked the Anglo-Saxon King Edward, in league with the Danish Earl Siward based in York, to invade Scotland, overthrow MacBeth, and install in his place Malcolm, Duncan’s refugee son. Regime change has a long history.
For Shakespeare’s primary audience, the issue in MacBeth was legitimacy, and the principle was primogeniture. Shakespeare’s patron was James Stuart, James V of Scotland and just appointed James I of England on principles of primogeniture. The 16th Century “histories” on which Shakespeare based his play had been edited to apply this principle, retrospectively, to MacBeth’s era in which it did not actually apply.
I had wondered why Banquo (and his ghost) needed space at MacBeth’s table. In history, Banquo only appears in accounts written 500 years after the events of Macbeth. Banquo was invented to provide an ancient lineage for the Stuart dynasty, including Shakespeare’s real and present King James.
Watson lightens this potentially heavy repast of battles and genealogies with a chatty style and is careful to distinguish between evidence and (fairly frequent) speculation, including some italicized accounts of imagined encounters that some may not appreciate.
The publishers give us a few pages of grainy, monochrome photographs of key sites, mostly nondescript ruins. A decent map would have done more to help in keeping track of events covering several centuries and many locations. Readers of Caledonian ilk may be the most motivated to seek out this book for some second thoughts about Scottish identity. It is also an engrossing read as an exercise in forensic scholarship.
Richard Thwaites is descended from long lines of British mongrels including Scots, Norse and Anglo-Saxons – none of them researched.