Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth Book

Macbeth has always been a difficult play for me to follow. In this book, Wills cracks open Macbeth in very interesting ways by positioning the play against the Gunpowder plot, where the Jesuits attempted a mass-assassination of James and his government.

The treasonous actions of the Jesuits and their attempts to equivocate and misrepresent the truth of their actions became fodder for numerous Elizabethan playwrights. Macbeth is one of these plays. Witches, male and female, are agents of equivocation and deceit in numerous of these Elizabethan plays. In this way they are directly analogous to the Jesuits of the time. While the Elizabethans clearly did believe in witchcraft in general, the supernatural aspects that the witches present appear to be subordinate to the verbal deceits that they offer to Macbeth.

The book is uneven. Overall I found it to be very informative and educational, and it did indeed open the play up for me. Though much of it was very clear and felt pretty compelling, sections of it (particularly the "outrun the pauser" chapter) were very difficult to follow.