Garry Wills Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”
The New York Public Library/ Oxford University Press, 223 pages, $19.95
reviewed by Donald Lyons
Garry Wills has paused in his efforts to unearth the egalitarian implications in key documents of American history and has turned his attention to, of all things, Macbeth. The result could be worse. It could, for instance, be a work of academic New Historicism that sees the play as “inscribing” subservience/ subversion to a repressive Court, etc.—fill in the blanks. Instead, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” exemplifies a more amiably old-fashioned kind of dottiness.
It is Wills’s thesis that there is a problem about Macbeth (he cites “the seeming unplayability of the piece,” actors’ superstitions, and so on) and that he has found the clue. Macbeth, produced late in 1606, was, he claims, a Gunpowder Plot play. On November 5, 1605, a “cell of papists … directed from Rome by skulking Jesuits” and led in London by one Guy Fawkes, had been detected in an attempt to blow up King James and Parliament on the Parliament’s opening day. There followed an orgy of show trials and grisly executions. Wills compares the trauma of it all to Pearl Harbor and to Dallas. The very language of the day was impregnated by the event: “Words like ‘train’ and ‘blow’ could no more be used ‘innocently’ in the aftermath of the Powder Plot than could ‘sneak attack’ or ‘grassy knoll’ in the aftermath of Pearl
