Shakespeare’s 1606 tragedy MACBETH is hard to perform because it is wildly misinterpreted. In October 2000 at the University of North Carolina in Asheville, Kristin Kundert-Gibbs backgrounded the murderous Scot with Hopi Indian music. She staged a troupe of witches  acting MACBETH as purification, a way of resexing an “unsexed” world which has “lost touch with the earth and our shared humanity.”

Directors who believe  that “history is bunk,” may occasionally give us  valuable insights into a writer’s intentions. But give me history!  History says that Shakespeare  staged Macbeth in 1606, when the recent Gunpowder (also called Guy Fawkes) Plot by a small group of Catholic terrorists (some related by marriage to Shakespeare) failed to blow up King James I and Parliament. It would have been hard to write any play in 1606 without gunpowder seasoning.

History also says that a priest, Father Henry Garnet, heard the confession of one or more plotters and advised against regicide. He and other Jesuits were also charged with teaching England’s persecuted Catholics to “equivocate” when unjustly commanded by law to do things against their conscience. One is not surprised therefore by the Porter’s scene (2.3) . 

Finally, the monarch of Scotland and England was brainy, trained in theology by (and largely accepting of) arch Calvinists. He was a published author on witchcraft and relations with devils. Hence we can expect to find these themes as well in MACBETH.

All this comes to light in Professor Gary Wills’s   1995 WITCHES AND JESUITS: SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH  -- a work 30 years in the conceiving and writing. Few scholars dispute that Shakespeare’s tragedy reflects the Guy Fawkes terrorist plot. Not as many find great significance in the play’s allusions to equivocation and Jesuits. Astonishingly, some directors also treat as “unwelcome intrusions” the witchcraft, necromancy and soul selling, though they never would in the FAUSTS of Marlowe or Goethe. .

Why are witches central to MACBETH? First, they were also central to the official government spin on the Powder Treason. On that view the Devil and his servants, the Jesuits, had devised the sacrilegious plot. The three Weird Sisters had been busy elsewhere on classic witch errands when they briefly came together above the battlefield to open the play. Dead bodies were magnets for witches (unthinkingly seen in England as necromancers). The Witch of Endor( I Samuel 28.7-25) had used Samuel’s dead body to prophesy to Saul. Scottish witches did the same. In Act Four necromancy deludes Macbeth into thinking himself safe from his enemies. As the play progresses, there enter a fresh cast of evil spirits and Hecate their queen, along with witch music. Had not Shakespeare hinted to his audiences that spirits would appear  higher in hell’s hierarchy than the Weird Sisters? At a certain point in his descent into evil, according to Gary Wills, Macbeth acquired that power to compel evil spirits to reveal the future which comes only after and through a bond with Satan. Macbeth sold his soul.

We all feel how dark, how relentlessly black is the play’s setting. The main reason? Darkness and its unusual thickened airs are witches’ natural ambience. In Macbeth’s witch catalog it is dark when (4.1.52-59) they “untie the winds and let them fight against the churches .”

Macbeth is drawn into the double toil (= net) of Satan when a witch says (4.1.45)
Something wicked this way comes.
That something is the soul of Macbeth. He has now made himself over into a witch.

For Macbeth has conjured spirits and in so doing crossed a line thoroughly understood by Shakespeare’s audiences. They knew the price that Satan requires any man to pay for forbidden knowledge: loss of his soul. Necromancy is the crime of witchcraft. Macbeth commits it. In so doing he became a witch himself. He went over to the dark side. He was not a 21st century nihilist tempted by ideas within his psyche but a 17th century diabolist.

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