(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
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Phyllis Rackin has observed in Stages of History that ‘the practice of historiography has become a subject of intense controversy and radical transformation’ within the academy [n1 Phyllis Rackin. Stages of History” Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (London: Routledge, 1990), p. ix.].
[n2 Some of the most recent contributions to this debate include The Uses of History: Marxism, Postmodernism and the Renaissance, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991); Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993); Steven Mullaney. ‘After the New Historicism’, in Alternative Shakespeares vol 2, ed. Terence Hawkes (London: Routledge, 1996). See also Patricia Parker. Shakespeare from the Margins: Languange, Culture, Context (Chicago U of Chicago P, 1996). Combined with her explanation of the rhetorical category of the ‘preposterous’ or hysteron proteron, where the first is last and the last first. Parker’s criticism of the ‘subversion-containment’ model…]
…only a handful of critics has so far indicated the potential relevance to any new critical agenda of a reexamination of Renaissance conceptions of history and temporality…
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…most critical exegesis of Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories continues to define the temporal paradigms of these plays in relation to a familiar ‘modern’, model of historical time, as a diachronic or linear process.
…a handful of critics has attempted to read Renaissance representation of history differently, in ways which recognise their disturbing alterity. In particular, Marjorie Garber has convincingly demonstrated that ‘the whole pattern of history comes full circle’ within the reverse order of Shakespeare’s two historical tetralogies [n4 Marjorie Garber. ‘”What’s Past is Prologue”: Temporality and Prophecy in Shakespeare’s History Plays’, in Renaissance Genres, ed. Barbara Lewalski (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986), pp 301-31. Garber observes that ‘The fact that the first comes second and the second comes first instinctively problematizes the whole question of double time as it relates to the genre of the history play. The first tetralogy predicts the second; the second also predicts the first’ (pp. 322-3).].
At the same time, Patricia Parker has shown the importance within Shakespearean drama of the ‘preposterous’, ‘as a reversal of priority, precedence and ordered sequence’ which ‘also disrupts the linear orders of succession and following’ [n5 Parker. Shakespeare from the Margins, p 21]. These analyses define what they identity as the disruption of the conventional, diachronic ordering of time within Shakespearean texts as either a dramatic effect (Garber) or a literary device (Parker); but in fact, the phenomenon which they describe is fully consistent with an important strand in late Renaissance attitudes towards time and history that has been largely neglected by contemporary critics interested in the problem of the text’s relationship to history. For many thinkers of the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century were profoundly influenced by ancient conceptions of a cyclical or repetitive model of time; ideas which had been shared by a majority of thinkers and intellectual systems in classical antiquity [n6 Quentin Skinner, in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978), 2 vols., attributes the prominence of this conception of history in the late Renaissance to the cultural influence of the Greek historian Polybius as well as of the Stoic-influenced Cicero. Both these authors concurred with Aristotle’s remark, in Book V of his Politics, that the course of human events can be shown to proceed in a series of recurring cycles (I, 109-10). For the extensive influence of Polybius’ cyclical conception of history in this period, see G.V. Trompf, The Idea of Recurrence in Western Thought: From Antiquity to the Reformation (Berkeley: U of C P, 1979). In The Idea of history in Early Stuart England (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990), D.R. Woolf has argued that ‘embedded in the Elizabethan mind were two seemingly contradictory notions of the movement of time’. He defines these as, on the one hand, the residual influence of the Judaeo-Christian providentialist model of history, which saw time as proceeding in a straight line toward the eschaton or last days; and on the other hand, the classical conception of historical cycles, based on the cycles observable in nature, according to which ‘types of government not only grew and declined…one type tended to change into another…in a predictable anacyclosis’ (p. 5).].
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Within Renaissance humanism, broadly idealized conceptions of temporal recurrence coexisted with much more fatalistic and pessimistic attitudes towards both cyclical time and that power of fate or fortune with which temporal periodicity was typically associated [n7 The changing status of Fortune in the Renaissance has not yet been adequately explored; Frederick Kiefer, in Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (Huntington Library, 1983), presents a fairly limited view of its complex significance within English Renaissance culture. For excellent studies of the figure’s importance to two Renaissance authors, see Thomas Flanagan, ‘The concept of Fortuna in Machiavelli’, in The Political Calculus: Essays on Machiavelli’s Philosophy, ed. Antony Pavel (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1972), pp. 127-56, and Daniel Martin, Montaigne et la Fortune: essai sur le hasard et le langage (Geneva : Librairie Slatkine, 1977). There is also a very useful discussion of the Renaissance Fortuna in Peggy Munoz Simonds, ‘ “To the very heart of loss”; Renaissance Iconography in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra’. Shakespeare Studies, xxii (1994), pp. 220-76. For an extended discussion of th eimportance of Fortune for the temporal repetitions of tragedy, see Philippa Berry, Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings” Figuring Woman in the Tragedies (forthcoming from Routledge), Ch. 5.]
On the one hand, as interpreted in Virgil’s influential ‘Eclogue IV’, the notion of the world’s cyclical renewal could be defined in broadly Platonic terms, as leading to a renovation temporum when divine justice would bring round the Golden Age again, under the benign rule of the god Saturn as Time. The deployment of this conception in the service of the personal cult of the Renaissance prince or monarch has been extensively studied. Yet a more pragmatic and less optimistic conception of temporal repetition, derived form Stoicism, informed the Renaissance reappraisal of classical historians such as Polybius and Tacitus, each of whom had seen history in terms of cycles.
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The influential sixteenth-century French historians Jean Bodin and Louis Le Roy both believed with the Stoics that each temporal cycle must end in ekpyrosis or cosmic dissolution…
Niccolo Machiavelli’s Discourses, Pietro Pomponazzi’s De Fato, and the historical writings of Francesco Guicciardini had all related the rise and fall of states and empires to a temporal periodicity which invariably eluded the mastery of worldly governors, since it was ruled instead by fortuna.
…Protestant emphasis upon predestination…
…Montaigne’s Essais … submission to Fortune’s embrace…
Good and bad fortune are in my conceit two soveraigne powers. ‘Tis folly to think that human wisedome may act the full part of fortune… I say, moreover that even our wisedome and consultation for the most part followeth the conduct of hazard.
…doubleness of Fortune… dual or bi-frontal… Macbeth, it lends an added complexity to that conception of cyclical time which was closely associated with Fortune.
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…Renaissance historiography…has a surprising affinity with th eoncepts of temporal recurrence bequeathed by Nietzsche to postmodern thought…
…fickle ‘turns’ of a feminine-gendered force.
… Macbeth effects a subtle reconfiguring of the meanings of history—as circular and repetitive rather than straight and linear…
…a kind of temporal reversal: a turning backwards of time…
…does not image cyclical recurrence in terms of exact resemblance… a restoration of traditional or Saturnian forms of masculine authority…
…fickle goddess Fortuna [n12 … New Lukacher’s chapters on Shakespeare in Time Fetishes: some versions of eternal recurrence (forthcoming from Duke UP).].
…ambiguous comment upon the recent accession of James I.
…distant barbarism of Scottish history… enigmatic circularity of time…less than idealizing inflection….
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… ‘double time’ …histories, tragedies, and Roman plays… (…many of his contemporaries)…
…historical time of the play is implicitly paralleled or repeated by recent or near-contemporary political moments.
…allusions to … life and death of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots… murder of her first husband…
…many Protestants …characterize her as a whore.
…allusions to classical myth, biblical typology and Celtic antiquity…
…temporal palimpsest… paradoxical elision of Christian demonological lore with pagan conceptions of fate, fortune, and sibylline prophecy…
… ‘weyard’ but also ‘weyward’ pattern within nature…
… ‘fiend-like’ … queen… personification of Fortune’s whoredom… barely veiled comparison to Mary…
…martlet was a badge of Mary Stuart… House of Lorraine…
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…martlet prefigures… transgressive maternal desire…
[n14 … Darnley… Edinburgh house… its ‘good air’ …convalescence from an illness attributed to poison.]
…Macbeth’s crime…abuse of stewardship…
…responsibility rests with woman.
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… ‘They have tied me to a stake: I cannot fly,/But bear-like, I must fight the course’… temporal reversion: to a prehuman or animal state…
… illusory movement of the wood… return of or to the state of primal matter.
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…by returning Scotland to a state analogous to the primal chaos, the violent disordering of nature performed by Macbeth’s tyranny actually enables a different kind of return or temporal repetition, since ultimately it will make possible the reuniting of Britain by Banquo’s descendant James.
The idea of the restoration of a lost Golden Age had promoted a new interest in the quasi-mythic past of Renaissance states…
…Trojan founder, Brutus…
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Equally popular…was the identification of James with the legendary British king, Arthur…
But in fact all of the key protagonists of the play were James’s ancestors…
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It was possibly because of this dependence upon different modes of inheritance through the female line that the Stuart dynasty was represented as capable of a phoenix-like parthenogenesis…
…in may encomia which celebrated his accession to the English throne, James was implicitly represented, like Macduff, as one ‘not born of woman’, who had inherited the throne through a phoenix-like regeneration of English sovereignty in which the dying English phoenix, Elizabeth, had miraculously transmitted the kingdom to the reborn British phoenix, James.
… ‘Nova Felix Arabia’: ‘we figure here, / A new Arabia, in whose spiced nest / A Phoenix liv’d and died in the Sunne’s brest’.
… ‘We have scorch’d the snake, not kill’d it: / She’ll close, and be herself’… the imagery of ‘closing’ links the idea of circular time, as represented by the emblematic ouroboros… with breeding.
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‘… Returning were as tedious as to go o’er’ … implication that James’s rule may mysteriously be defined as much by concepts of turning backwards as by extension into the historical future…
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… Banquo’s ghost sits on the ‘stool’ reserved for Macbeth, we may discern a covert allusion to the ‘bank’ or seat concealed in Banquo’s name…
The effect of Banquo’s ghostly return is consequently to elide James’s noble ancestor with the throne/stool in a way which points up the affinity between throne and closet-stool or privy… [!!!]
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[n25 …discussions of the trope of the ‘preposterous’ or hysteron proteron, see [Parker’s] Literary Fat Ladies” Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), chapter 5, and Shakespeare from the Margins, chapter 1.]
…three sisters… chiastic language of equivocation, where ‘the battle’s lost and won’
…like… hags in Jonson’s Masque of Queenes… anti-clockwise… further hints at their association with the ambiguous circularity of time [n26 Jonson described the hags’ dance in the Masque of Queenes as ‘a magicall Daunce full of praeposterous change and gesticulation…dauncing, back to back… making theyr circles backwards to the left hand…’].
… Macbeth and Banquo… twinning which points up both the difference within seeming resemblances, and the resemblance within apparent differences…
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… John Thronborough described England and Scotland as ‘two branches of one vine’, arguing that the two nations were destined ‘to grow up and agree together; seeing nature hath made them all of one kinde, forme, complexion, habit & language’ [n33 John Thornborough, The Joieful & Bessed Reuniting the Two Mighty & Famous Kingdomes, England and Scotland (London: 1604), sig. A3.].
…the King’s speech… the English throne and the union of the two contries should ‘as two twines…have growne up together’ [n34 Cited in Donna B. Hamilton, ‘The Winter's Tale and the Language of Union, 1604-1610’, Shakespeare Studies, xxi (1993), pp. 228-250.].
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… ‘all the Inhabitants of Ireland were first of all called Scots, as Orosius shews; and our Annals relate, that the Scots passed more than once out of Ireland into Albium…’ [n39 George Buchanan, Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582), trans. Into English (London, 1690), p. 51.
…we may see Macbeth as representing the deep-seated English fear of a return to an archaic Celtic barbarism and paganism…
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While both the ‘paltering’ language of the weyard sisters and the ghostly occupation of Macbeth’s stool by Banquo hint at a disturbing affinity between the two ‘captains’, the show of kings presents us with a final chiastic patterning of kingship…
… James, like Banquo in the banquet scene, is effectively occupying the place of Macbeth, who sees not his own heirs by those of Banquo in the glass. What occurs in ant through the glass of the eighth ‘king’ is consequently one further and especially significant doubling of kingship, in which, like the opposing aspects of Fortune, the apparently dichotomous destinies of Macbeth and Banquo, Macbeth and James, are crossed and interrelated. Moreover, this subtle reversal of time and destiny is accomplished in relation to a queenly figure who appears thereby to play the part of Fortuna.
…the association of that kingship which in not able to perpetuate itself through lineal succession with recurring cycles of triumph and betrayal… ‘rebel’s whore’, Fortune, can be clearly discerned.