Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama

SIX Macbeth and the Jacobean Witchcraft Plays

229 SIX Macbeth and the Jacobean Witchcraft Plays Macbeth offers only the most obvious example, perhaps even a dramatic archetype, of an encounter between the military and the magical, which, as we have seen, occurs frequently in the plays of the early modern period. I consider the tragedy, like Doctor Faustus , to be an exploration of the failure of Calvinist theology to offer a viable model of masculine subjectivity, although the political vision of Shakespeare’s play focuses more directly on a masculinity that assumes responsibility for statecraft. This concern for political responsibility reappears in Marston’s Sophonisba, another play that shares the conjunction of military assertion and recourse to witchcraft, and that also, significantly, responds to issues culturally prominent in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, specifically equivocation and the use of false language as vitiators of personal integrity. Although two later witchcraft plays, Middleton’s The Witch and the collaboration The Witch of Edmonton, offer more “domesticated” social contexts, they also explore individual competency in relation to oaths or bonds, either upheld or violated. A key concomitant of this concern with individual integrity is the increasingly metaphorical presentation of witchcraft—that is, an emphasis on psychological rather than theological meaning—across these four plays. 230 Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama In his provocative study Witches and Jesuits, Garry Wills asserts that Macbeth “is one of the great male witches of drama— like Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.” For Wills, “Macbeth has not given his soul over to the devil until he commits the formal act of witchcraft involved in his participation at the necromantic rites.”1 The compact is, in fact, clinched in act 4, scene 1, where he asserts to the witches, “I conjure you, by that which you profess , / Howe’er you come to know it, answer me.”2 Wills’s argument aims at resuscitating the cultural context of the play to the extent that we feel the full weight of both the political and metaphysical threat that Shakespeare portrays. Written in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Macbeth evokes the triple threat of witches, Jesuits, and political conspiracy as a challenge to the social and divine order of early Jacobean England. Wills must refute the tendency of modern readings to radically psychologize the demonic aspects of the play’s action: “‘Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft’ (1 Samuel 15.23, Geneva Bible). This makes nonsense of the claim that Shakespeare’s witches are just emanations of Macbeth’s inner state.”3 I suggest, however, that there remains much to recommend a psychoanalytic interpretation of the play, and I offer a psychological reading that attempts to come to terms with the specific historical context of the play. Like Doctor Faustus, Macbeth relates the predicament of a male witch whose bondage to the demonic is really an extension of his bondage to the spiritual in general. Shakespeare’s tragedy, like Marlowe’s, reflects not just the claustrophobic mental dilemma of its protagonist , but the cultural dilemma of the spiritual dependency of a predominantly Calvinist culture in tension with the historically intensifying emphasis on masculine self-determination. As discussed in chapter 2, the formal signing of a demonic pact is extremely rare in early modern drama, although Wills demonstrates convincingly that an approximation of such a pact occurs, at least metaphorically, in Macbeth. We return, then, to the idea of the displacement of salvation anxiety, through the concept of the Puritan covenant, onto the anticontract of the witch. In his Macbeth and the Jacobean Witchcraft Plays 231 discussion of the devil’s compact as an “anti-baptism certificate,” Wills argues: In the baptismal formula, one renounces the devil and all his works. In the devil’s pact, one renounces the renunciation. This bond includes one in the Christian community which Pauline scripture calls the saved soul’s bond [syndesmos, the Vulgate’s vinculum] of peace (Ephesians 4.3) and bond of perfectness (Colossians 3.4). There is even a reference to the white baptismal gown in Macbeth’s lament that the Great Bond still keeps him pale [3.2.52–53].4 However, I wish to take Wills’s argument in far different directions than his own conservative conclusions. Rather than witchcraft as a perfectly demonic inversion of baptism, Macbeth suggests the conflation of both kinds of bonds, since both vitiate humanist self-cohesion. The play that...