I wanted to clear up that my post last week, Lies Like Truth, was criticizing the article in the Scotsman and not necessarily the academics being cited. If, in fact, they are making the claim that the article says they are, they are included in my critique, but I suspect the article doesn’t do justice to their positions. If I had to guess, and this is only conjecture, I would say that they are simply stating that the version of history told by Shakespeare first appears in Wyntoun. No big deal. The only reason it’s worth mentioning is that they were about to say so on a radio special. But that wouldn’t make a good story for the Scotsman, and thus this whole business of being “lifted, almost word for word in places” rears its ugly head.

Case in point: here’s another story from DailyIndia.com and NewKerala.com from Asian News International that seems to have been “lifted, almost word for word in places” from the original story in the Scotsman. Look at the two stories side by side and the ANI piece, appearing the next day, reads like a high school student clumsily paraphrasing from an encyclopedia. But upon closer inspection, the ANI article makes some bold statements that the Scotsman was careful only to imply, despite the fact that the Scotsman article was clearly its one and only source.

For example, the Scotsman plants the idea of the authorship question like so:

In a radio programme to be aired today, Scots historian Fiona Watson and literary expert Molly Rourke claim the story of Macbeth was penned by a Scottish monk on St Serf’s Island in the middle of Loch Leven 400 years before William Shakespeare even drew breath.

Shift around the letters, and the ANI version becomes:

Scots historian Fiona Watson and literary expert Molly Rourke are claiming that the credit for ‘Macbeth’ doesn’t belong to the Bard of Avon, but to a Scottish monk named Andrew de Wyntoun from St Serf’s Island in the middle of Loch Leven who wrote the play 400 years before Shakespeare was even born.

So we go from the idea that Wyntoun penned the story of Macbeth (the man), which is true, to the idea that Wyntoun wrote Macbeth (the play) instead of Shakespeare. Quite a leap. I can only imagine, but I hope I’m right, that Watson and Rourke would be horrified to see these claims attached to their names.

Even the title of the ANI article is dodgy:

Did a Scottish monk write Macbeth instead of Shakespeare?

Oh, I can answer that one.

No!

The Shakespeare Geek points us towards a blog called The Master of Verona and a post he has about Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. He suggests that Macbeth may be reading a suicide note written by Lady Macbeth, possibly written while she was asleep. I love the idea, and he gives strong textual support to make his case. I would look at this more as a bold directoral choice, rather than an argument that this is the way the text demands it must be, but that seems to be largely where he’s coming from as well.

If you look at that scene from the Folio (via the wonderful Furness Collection at the University of Pennyslvania), you may notice that Seyton doesn’t have an exit. Editors generally have provided him with one. But in the original, there is a cry of women, Macbeth has a speech, he asks Seyton “Wherefore was that cry?”, and Seyton responds “The Queen, my lord, is dead.” How does he know? I’ve heard the argument that Seyton is a dark, supernatural being (with a deliberate play on his name), but he’s always struck me as too minor of a character to carry this much import. This reading would add another interpretation. Someone has brought Seyton the suicide note while Macbeth is talking. Then, he hands Macbeth the note as he says his line.

Fun stuff. And I’ve been looking through this guy’s archives. His last post is some Shakespeare limericks. Earlier on, he gets snippy with Slings & Arrows because he takes issue with the character’s interpretations of the Shakespeare. And even earlier he casts the kids in South Park in King Lear and all-Muppet productions of both Lear and Much Ado.

Oh, I so have a new blog to read.

Excerpts from a mock trial questioning Shakespeare’s authorship:

For more on the authorship question, check out this 1964 article by William Murphy.

Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie show us how it really happened:

I think I’ll make the anagram a regular feature on Saturdays.

From Antony and Cleopatra:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burn’d on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

The brave Enobarbus talks of when that temptress Cleopatra had tea, perched on her boat — a pimped-out ride that suffused the great M. Antonius.

How her skillful work there rushed Antony’s desires like the River Nile itself.

How he was so hooked that he often went to her website at http://www.misscleo.org/.

So, this article has been getting a lot of attention on the Internet, and I feel I need to respond:

In a radio programme to be aired today, Scots historian Fiona Watson and literary expert Molly Rourke claim the story of Macbeth was penned by a Scottish monk on St Serf’s Island in the middle of Loch Leven 400 years before William Shakespeare even drew breath.

Pause for laughter.

In Macbeth the Highland King to be broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland, Watson says Macbeth and his wife, Gruoch, were in fact “respected, God-fearing folk”.

According to Watson, the “almost entirely fantastical view” of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth drawn by William Shakespeare is lifted, almost word for word in places, from a collection of folklore recorded by St Serf’s monk, Andrew de Wyntoun.

Wow, there’s so much wrong with that, it’s hard to know where to start.

First of all, the “almost word for word” case is never made, at least not in the article. The few points of similarity between the two texts that are mentioned are dealt with below. But there really was a historical Macbeth, and so any two accounts of his life are bound to have some similarities, whether they be historical or legendary.

Did Shakespeare have an “almost entirely fantastical view” of Macbeth? Yes. He was a playwright, not a historian. He often made changes to history to suit his dramatic purposes. That’s what he’s supposed to do. He was also writing for King James, who was a direct descendant of both Malcolm and Banquo. So of course he’s going to make them good and noble and make Macbeth a savage butcher. He knew which side of his bread was buttered.

Also, the Andrew Wyntoun text is from 1420. How is that “400 years before William Shakespeare even drew breath” which he first did in 1564? And if the text really were from 1164, it would not be at all readable to a twenty-first century English-only speaker, as this text somewhat is. Check it out.

But the most striking part of the article is that it completely ignores the fact that we already know what Shakespeare’s source was for the events described. It was Raphael Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In fact, not only was Holinshed’s Chronicles a major source for Macbeth, but also for King Lear, Cymbeline, and all ten of Shakespeare’s history plays. If you don’t know that, it’s easy to be taken in by the following observation in the article:

Referring to Shakespeare’s prophecy that Macbeth shall be safe until Birnham Wood comes to Dunsinane and that no-one “of woman born” shall harm Macbeth, Rourke explained in Wyntoun’s work: “The person [Macbeth’s mother] met later came and saw her, gave her a ring, and prophesied about what was going to happen in the future. One of the things he said was that this child they’d had would never be killed by man born of woman. Wyntoun also recorded that Macbeth believed he’d never be conquered until the wood of Birnham came to Dunsinane.”

Thanks to the wonderful Furness Collection at the University of Pennsylvania, we can see the source for this on Page 174 of the Historie of Scotland section of Holinshed’s Chronicles:

And suerlie herevpon had he put Makduffe to death, but that a certaine witch, whom hee had in great trust, had told that he should neuer be slaine with man borne of anie woman, nor vanquished till the wood of Bernane came to the castell of Dunsinane.

The witch told Macbeth, like the apparitions do in the play, not a person telling Macbeth’s mother and giving her a ring.

The article continues on with reckless abandon:

The historians claim another element of Wyntoun found in Shakespeare is the three witches that open the play. Wyntoun wrote: “Ane nicht, he thoucht while he was sa settled [that] he saw three women, and they women then thoucht he three Wierd Sisters most like to be.

“The first he heard say, ganging by, ‘lo, yonder the Thane of Cromarty’.

“T’other woman said again ‘of Moray, yonder I see the Thane’.

“The third said ‘yonder I see the king’.”

Rourke and Watson say the resemblance to the witches’ prophesy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth – in which the first hails him as “Thane of Glames”, the second as “Thane of Cawdor” and the third proclaims he shall “be King hereafter” – is too great to be co-incidental.

We simply need to turn back to page 170 of Holinshed to see where Shakespeare found this, and thanks to the extraordinary Folger collection we can see a much easier-to-read copy of Holinshed’s version of the story:

Shortlie after happened a strange and vncouth woonder, which afterward was the cause of much trouble in the realme of Scotland as ye shall after heare. It fortuned as Makbeth and Banquho iournied towards Fores, where the king then laie, they went sporting by the waie togither without other company saue onelie themselues, passing thorough the woods and fields, when suddenlie in the middest of a laund, there met them three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world, whome when they attentiuelie beheld, woondering much at the sight, the first of them spake and said: All haile Makbeth, thane of Glammis (for he had latelie entered into that dignitie and office by the death of his father Sinell). The second of them said: Haile Makbeth thane of Cawder. But the third said: All haile Makbeth that heereafter shalt be king of Scotland.

I’ll allow you to examine that scene in Shakespeare and decide for yourself which of these two accounts was most likely Shakespeare’s source.

It’s entirely possible that Wyntoun’s work was a source for Holinshed (or Harrison, Leland, etc.), or a source of a source, or at some point they had a common source. But the idea suggested by this article, that Shakespeare somehow “lifted” Macbeth from Wyntoun, is absurd.

UPDATE: A follow-up post.

I just can’t stop.

From Twelfth Night:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

A Duke expects to go stuff himself in notes. If I gave the poetic Orsino my flash iPod device, it may be eaten.

I did a history and a tragedy, so now I have to do a comedy.

From As You Like It:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

My sane ashen melancholy gentleman harshly says an existential narrative wellspring and, with a serene rhythm, anticipates the modern stage-based development ideas.

I came up with another anagram…

From Macbeth:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

O, a recently-widowed moody Scottish royal tyrant floated from merely muddled to purely clearheaded to observe how poor mortals (us) try to woo fate and start to grasp that life’s a bitch and then you die.

Okay, let’s make this a regular feature.

Taking inspiration from the amazing anagram of the speech from Hamlet, I decided to try my own hand at anagramming Shakespeare. Here is my first attempt, taken from the first lines of King Richard III:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

The too-sinful Gloucester (later – ouch! – dubbed Richard III), by odious puns on nouns, unkindly compares the momentous War of the Roses end to the foul-mood weather.

That was fun! Maybe I’ll make this a regular feature.