Humane Statute and the Gentle Weal: Historical Reading and Historical Allegory

Summary

Shakespeare’s Macbeth has come in for some critical battering in recent times. The recurrent retreat from bardolatry has disconnected the play from its author, and the critical consensus is based on an acceptance that the Folio text of the play is a palimpsest of at least two versions: one from the time of the Gunpowder plot and one, with Middleton’s additional songs, late enough to have been influenced by Jonson’s Masque of Queens. The bibliographical uncertainties of the text (which are not many) have been used to endorse a freedom of interpretation that releases the play from historical particularity into wider speculation.

Stephen Orgel, for example, can assert that the Folio version was ‘prepared for a single, special occasion’ (p. 144), a performance for King James VI and I, named as the ‘great king’ for whom the witches perform their antic round in Act 4. Orgel is too serious a scholar to hide the absence of any evidence for a court performance. However his historicist methodology allows him both to develop a political reading that depends upon the presence of the king and to reverse the argument by suggesting that the additional witch scenes constituted an effort, ‘with uncertain success, to liven up an unpopular play’ (p. 148).