LEC052013 ARDRA A.P CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EQUIVOCATOR IN MACBETH

                         Macbeth is a famous tragedy written by William Shakespeare, which deals with the reference of equivocation throughout the play. Between 1598 and  1606,in England, there was much talk of equivocation. Shakespeare, through the play, is attempting to provide reference to the Gun powder incident of November 1605. It was a plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament, and to replace King James I with a catholic ruler. Nevertheless, the plot was discovered, and the plotters were executed, including the Jesuit priest Henry Garnet. This in turn connects the reference of Equivocator in Macbeth to the Gun Powder plot ("The Trial").  

                                  While looking the background of Macbeth’s composition we find that it was written likely between 1606 and 1610. The following reasons help us confirm the evidences:

1.  The lines “….some I see

That two-fold balls and treble scepters carry….” (IV,I) refers to James 1 who united two islands and three kingdoms. The coronation of James 1 took place in 1603. These lines are complimenting the king’s hereditary gift for curing “the king’s evil” by a mere touch.

 2.      The porter seems to refer to the abundant harvest in 1606 when he said                                    “…here’s the farmer who hanged himself in the expectation of plenty…”(II,III), here the porter also refers to the equivocator, notorious Jesuit Henry Garnet who was given to equivocation during his trial for the Gunpowder Plot in march 1606. The porter also refers to French fashion in hoses which is described in Nixon’s “black year”, published in 1611.

 At Garnet’s trial, a major complaint repeatedly brought by the prosecution was about his practice and support of equivocation. Equivocation was a Jesuit logic that allowed Catholics – who may have needed to lie under oath in order to preserve their lives or those of other Catholics – to avoid incriminating themselves or others, without lying in the eyes of God. This included techniques such as only speaking part of a sentence out loud and finishing it or adding a qualification silently in one’s head, so as to mislead the auditor. The English authorities were intensely distrustful of equivocation. They saw it as lying and as a sinful attack on language and meaning itself.(The Trail of Henry Garnet,1606).

                         In Act II, scene iii, of Macbeth, Shakespeare makes the drunken Porter utter, among other things, this remark: “Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O! come in, equivocator” (8-12).  It is suggested that the Porter is here alluding to Father Garnet, who went under the name of “Farmer” and was accused of equivocation in the trial of the Gunpowder Plot (see Muir 59, note 9), although we know the Porter is plainly addressing an imagined person coming to his imagined hell.  A few lines later, the Porter jokingly tells Macduff that drink provokes three things: nose-painting, sleep, and urine.  Then he goes on to say:

 Lechery, Sir, it provokes, and un provokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.  Therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to: in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him. (28-35)

Towards the end of the play, when a messenger comes to tell Macbeth that he has seen a moving grove, Macbeth confesses that he begins to “doubt the equivocation of the fiend,/That lies like truth” (V, v, 43-44).  And when Macduff says he was untimely ripped from his mother’s womb, hence not born of a woman, Macbeth yells: “… be these juggling fiends no more believed,/That palter with us in a double sense” (V, viii, 19-20).

                       In the play Macbeth, some of the most significant characters rely upon their ability to equivocate, in order to hide their purely malicious intentions. Through his characters and work, Shakespeare also portrayed the political situation of that time and paved a way to the audience for the further discussion and interpretation about that.

                     

                    WORKS CITED 

                    "The Trail of Henry Garnet,1606." The British Library, 23 Sept 2015,

www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-trial-of-henry-garnet-1606

“The Gunpowder Plot and Shakespeare's Macbeth.” Shakespeare's Globe, 5 Nov. 2014, www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/blogs-and-features/2014/11/05/the-gunpowder-plot-and-shakespeares-macbeth/.

Huntley, Frank L. “Macbeth and the Background of Jesuitical Equivocation.” PMLA, vol. 79, no. 4, 1964, pp. 390–400. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/460744.

Bloom, Harold, ed.  William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  Modern Critical Interpretations.  New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Joyce Studies Annual (2009), pp. 212-223