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,...

 

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