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Something Wicked This Way Comes



Betrayal. Witches. Magic. Dark prophesy. Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s darkest and most intriguing plays. Many people are surprised to learn that the play is based, at least in part, on actual historical events. Macbeth, his wife, Duncan and Malcom were real people. Macbeth really did become king of Scotland. Shakespeare’s source for the play was “The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland” by Raphael Holinshed. This is the same book that he used as his major source for his history plays as well as “King Lear” and “Cymbeline”.

Shakespeare was not entirely faithful to his source. In the play we see Duncan as a wise and virtuous king. Macbeth plots to kill the king who is staying at Macbeth’s castle. Having second thoughts, Macbeth is goaded on to action by his overly ambitious wife who helps him cover up his crime. In truth Duncan by many accounts was a weak and inefficient king whose reign was filled with rebellions. By contrast, Macbeth’s was a good king, at least for the first 10 years or so of his reign. According to Holinshed: “Mackbeth shewing himselfe thus a most diligent punisher of all injuries and wrongs attempted by anie disordered persons within his realme, was accounted the sure defense and buckler of innocent people; and hereto he also applied his whole indevor, to cause yoong men to exercise themselues in vertuous maners, and men of the church to attend their divine service according to their vocations.” The last few years of Macbeth’s reign were more repressive as Duncan’s sons had now become of age and were scheming for the downfall of Macbeth. Shakespeare uses his dramatic license to make Macbeth’s reign seem like only a matter of days or at most weeks, but in truth, Macbeth reigned for 17 years. Duncan had reigned only 6 years.

The real Macbeth who had a claim to the throne as good as Duncan, and seeing the poor administration of Duncan, raised up an army, defeated and defeated Duncan in battle on August 14, 1040. The assassination account is lifted from the story of an earlier king. King Duff was assassinated by one of his nobles, Donwald. Donwald was goaded into the action by his wife. He killed the king while Duff slept in Donwald’s home. In this respect, Macbeth and his lady have then been quite slandered by Shakespeare. Lady Macbeth, whose real name was Gruoch (which is probably why Shakespeare only refers to her as Lady Macbeth) was ambitious and likely encouraged her husband to rebel, but there is no evidence that she was the pathologically evil person portrayed by Shakespeare. She was also reported to have been a great aid to Macbeth in running the kingdom. Interestingly enough, Gruoch was the great granddaughter of King Duff.

In the play, Macbeth starts out as the Thane (Earl) of Glamis. This is apparently an error on Holinshed’s part. The real Macbeth was the Mormaer (High Steward) of Moray. Macbeth killed and took the title of Mormaer from his cousin (who had killed and took the title from Macbeth’s father). Macbeth then married his slain cousin’s widow. Yeah, it was a rough time to be alive.

In 1054 Siward, Earl of Northumberland invaded Scotland and defeated Macbeth at the battle of Birnum Wood/Dunsinane. Macbeth survived and fled but three years later was killed by MacDuff whose family Macbeth had killed. Gruoch had a son by her previous marriage named Lulach. An attempt was made to make Lulach king but he was defeated and killed by Malcom within the year.

The play takes place in an important historic time in Scotland. Scotland had become a kingdom 200 years earlier, and for 200 years there had been no orderly method of picking her kings. No King of Scotland was succeeded directly by his son or grandson. When an old king died the crown went to whoever was the strongest man in the royal family. This of course led to much strife and battles for power. In the play, after the murder, we see Malcom exiling himself to England. The play makes it seem like he was there only a short time but in fact he stayed there 14 years. This was time enough to pick up English customs and traditions and to bring them back to Scotland when he became king. From Malcom’s time onward the monarchy passed (English-style) from father to son.

By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes . . .

Some of the most memorable characters in this play are the witches. Shakespeare got them from Holinshed, who in turn got them from another historian Hector Boece. We call them witches for convenience, but the characters in the play always refer to them as the weird sisters or the weird women. Our modern use of the word “weird”, meaning strange or bizarre, comes from this play. Prior to this play, the word seems to have meant fate from the Anglo-Saxon word “wyrd”. So they can represent the three fates. Holinshed says that they were either,”the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science.” No one really knows what the origin of the witches is. Some have speculated that King Malcom’s wife Margaret invented the witches as a way of discrediting Macbeth. Whatever their origin, they make for wonderful theater.


Shakespeare found a way to weave together different stories, tall tales, and histories into a cohesive masterpiece that speaks to the human weakness of ambition, and folly discovered too late.

 . . . Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).

The link to Star Liner


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