Garry Wills has a Phd in Classics, but has mostly spent his public career writing about politics, religion, and history. He’s most famous probably for a fallout with the “intellectual Conservatism” movement in the early seventies when he wrote a polemic against Nixon. He also won the Pulitzer Prize in the early 1990s for a book about the Gettysburg Address.
In this book, he begins his study of Macbeth by asking the question: why do so many performances of Macbeth fail? He doesn’t exactly ever spell out by what he means by the question itself in the sense of definition, but he does offer up some classic examples of productions of the play that failed to carve out a meaningful representation.
Then he begins to explore what is needed to fully grapple with Macbeth as a play and a text. For one, he discusses how too often the play is produced absent the context in London in 1606. The two biggest things I think matter here are the Gunpowder Plot, which is oddly romanticized now because of the Guy Fawkes mask and V for Vendetta, which happened in 1606. Not only was this a gigantic political event, where had it succeeded the entire royal line and much of parliament would have been destroyed but also deeply affected the culture of the time. He discusses numerous examples of “Gunpowder” play which are clearly referential to the plot or otherwise are inspired by it. The reason why this is so important according to this book is that it’s not just a political plot, but a plot tied to religious extremism, which he uses to discusses the play. The second, which is tied to the first, is that James I is on the throne and among other things he wrote, his book Daemonologie is and was influential to the understanding of evil and the supernatural.
Shakespeare’s play, whether some people like it or not, is tied to witchcraft. And while it seems likely that Thomas Middleton wrote in the character of Hecate, the witches are purely Shakespeare, so they must be reckoned with. Wills’s lament is that too many directors cut out the witches and other supernatural elements (and how, I have no idea) and this saps the play of its perverse religious sentiment, the witches (of which Macbeth can be considered one, along in part with Malcolm), and takes the life out of it, turning it into a simplistic moral tale. I can’t speak to the fullness and correctness of Wills’s argument, but I like it, and it’s definitely something I plan to bring in elements of in class discussions in the next few weeks.