Megha Prakash LEC052030 - Critically analyse the significance of equivocation in Shakespeare's play 'Macbeth'

Megha Prakash LEC052030

Critically analyse the significance of equivocation in William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth.

  

    The equivocation in the play Macbeth has attracted many critical commentaries and conjecture. Critics have also hailed the diversity of major themes in Macbeth, one noticeable theme- perhaps even the most fundamental of all permeating the whole play is without doubt equivocation(Huntley. Macbeth and Background of Jesuitical Equivocation: 390)Of course, this theme is not confined to Macbeth- infact, equivocation occurs in a number of Shakespeare’s play. According to Shapiro, who references the Treatise of Equivocation by Father Henry Garnet ( Shapiro. The Year of Lear:157), the Jesuits “distinguished between four ways of equivocating” (Shapiro. The Year of Lear: 158): choosing ambigous words omitting a crucial piece of information, playing with words and gestures, and mental reservation (ibid).

   

        As a dramatisation of an episode of Scottish history, the play is associated with the reigning Monarch James1( patron of Shakespeare’s company). Equivocation became eminent in England during the early 1600s, when Jesuits- Catholic clergymen who had arrived England to minister to the divine needs of Catholics were ensnared and interrogated by the Protestants authorities. Under interrogation, the Jesuit was planted in an impossible situation that he could contravene in belief which would surplus his life but damn his soul or he could assert his faith which would save his soul but get him murdered. Faced with this sphere Jesuits found ways to mispread language so that a word phrase or sentence could mean one thing and it’s antithetical at the same time. In this way, seized Jesuit could save him life and his soul.

      

         Equivocation became henious throughout England when two Jesuits were concerned in the 1605 strived to assassinate King James1 by blowing up the House of Lords, while it was in session. The conspiracy would be framed to history as the Gunpowder plot. In the month following the Gunpowder plot Shakespeare would write and stage Macbeth. Shakespeare and his contemporaries established themselves in what Hadfield term an “age of lying”(Hadfield. Johnson and Shakespeare in the Age of Lying: 52) and quoting Perez Zagorin, an “age of dissimulation” (ibid) It is therefore, hardly surprising that Shakespeare picked up on the topic particularly in a play closely associated to King James in anyways.

The Porter functions as comic relief, lessening the tension in the mind of audience after the murder of King Duncan. In the drunken state the Porter envisions himself as the Porter of hell asking “i’ the name of Belzebub”, who is knocking (Shakespeare 1992: “Macbeth” ll, lll: 782). The ambiguity of the weird sisters speculates a greater theme of doubling, mirrors and schism between inner and outer world. Beginning with the equivocal prophecies of the weird sister’s aspects seldom align with the authenticity. One of the most ambigous aspects of the play is the character of Macbeth himself. As the play continues, the breach between the world of reality and that of delusion is the core of equivocation.

             

         The anticipation of the plot is took forward with the apparently irrelevant and comic incidents . In this way the play mirrors life, in simply not contributing closure and a clear answer, the ending being just as equivocal as the rest of the play. Thus the theme of equivocation inquired in Macbeth makes the play a mirror for the anxieties the contemporary audience faced at that time.

Works cited

• Hadfield, Andrew “Johnson and    

        Shakespeare in an Age of Lying”.The            Ben Jonson Journal 23.1:52-                        74.2016.Online.

• Shapiro, James “ The year of Lear”.                   Shakespeare in 1606, 2015: New York:         Simon and Schuster.Print

• 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.

• The Trail of Henry Garnet,1606 “The                   British Library”,23                                           Sept.2015,www.bl.uk/collection-                    items/the-trial- of- henry- garnet-                 1606#.