Yet, for all that, I fear that I must close the mystery up only by creating another. For once, not long after these baffling and immortal verses first appeared, at a point where I found myself confronted by the torment of their memorability, aware that for the rest of my life now I would be unable to get them out of my heart and my head, I asked Mr Shakespeare, point-blank, one thunder-rumbling London afternoon, to identify his creatures.
'Who is the phoenix?' I asked him. 'And who is the turtle dove?'
'Mrs Lines and Mr Barkworth,' said Mr Shakespeare.
But I never could get him to say another word on the subject, and he might have been joking.
Chapter Eighty-Seven Shakespeare in Scotland & other witchcrafts
Do you know the real names of the three witches in Macbeth?
Agnes Thomson, Violet Leys, and Janet Wishart - that's who.
You will find their names in that book by King James called News from Scotland. In it he describes the atrocious life of the notable sorcerer, Dr Fian, whose trial he followed, and whose interrogation he conducted. The King was present at many other trials of the sort. Witchcraft was his passion - I mean, the elimination of it. In 1596 he set up a commission including the provost of Aberdeen to judge witches and sorcerers. In the course of that year, twenty-three women and one man were found guilty of sorcery, and put to death. James himself was present at the trial of Agnes Thomson and other witches who boasted of having raised a storm while the King of Scots was on a voyage. She was sent to sea with a whole concourse of sister-witches, each one riding in a riddle or sieve. They took hands and danced singing all in one voice while the master of their coven, Giles Duncan, played upon a Jew's trump. At the trial this scene was re-enacted to the King's satisfaction. Agnes Thomson confessed that 'she took a black toad and did hang the same up by the heels three days and gathered the venom as it dropped and fell from it in an oyster shell'. She also took a cat and christened it, which caused such a tempest that the vessel perished 'wherein was sundry jewels and rich gifts which should have been presented to the now Queen of Scotland'. The ship in which James sailed would have met the same fate if the King's 'faith had not prevailed above their intentions'. All this you can find for yourselves, good readers, in that silly News from Scotland.
I call it silly since I think James was. What Mr Shakespeare thought of him I do not know. I do know that he wrote Macbeth in part to please him. So he worked in bits and pieces borrowed from the King's writings on the theme of witches and witchcraft - from James's Daemonology as well as News from Scotland. He wrote it very swiftly, while our Company was in Scotland. We went there after the Essex affair, when we were in disfavour with Queen Elizabeth on account of that performance of Richard II commissioned by the plotters in trust that it would stir up feeling against her. We were not punished, but we made ourselves scarce.
We played before King James in Edinburgh. After, we went by royal orders to Dunfermline, where we played before his Queen in the palace of Linlithgow. At Aberdeen, we were received in pomp by the provost William Cullen. We stayed there for most of the month of October, performing in the town hall to great audiences. The Scots are very good to strolling players. In Aberdeen we dined at the town's expense. At Linlithgow twelve of us players slept in feather beds.
Sir William Davenant, the poet's godson, claims to have in his possession a letter to Mr Shakespeare signed by the King of Scots, and highly complimentary. I have not seen this letter, but I do not disbelieve in it. King James enjoyed the theatre, and he liked his Shakespeare. That, at least, is one of the things Ben Jonson got right in his Folio eulogy.
Macbeth is soaked in WS's experience of Scotland. Banquo's first question 'How far is't called to Forres?' sounds rather more Scotch than English to my ear. QUELL for murder, SKIRR for search, LATCH instead of catch, GRUEL for broth, SLAB for sticky, CRIBBED for enclosed, all these are northern words which Shakespeare uses only in Macbeth. The receptiveness of his ear was quite remarkable. I was in lodgings with him at Inverness, for example, and our hostess remarked approvingly of the porridge which she had boiled for us that it was thick and slab - the phrase went straight into the Scottish play, used of the contents of the witches' cauldron.
At Inverness, the close proximity into which we were thrown enabled me for the first and last time to observe Mr Shakespeare at work from the inception to the completion of a play. With Holinshed's Chronicles open at his elbow, and the Scottish King's two books of witchcraft not far away across the table, he sat down to write on a rainy October morning. He wrote fast and he did little crossing out. The first two Acts of Macbeth came in a single marvellous day and night. Words poured from Shakespeare's pen in a torrent like one of those I watched tumbling down the mountainside. He created all those early scenes at the gallop, and the power and the urgency of their writing shows (in my opinion) both in the intensity of the verse and the way those scenes always play themselves fast in the theatre. The rest came more slowly, with pauses for reflection, but without apparent trouble. Sometimes he muttered phrases to himself, once or twice I heard him chanting them quite loudly. For example, 'And pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air.' I remember that particularly because it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck when I first heard it, and I'm sure it would do so still if I was able to get to a modern playhouse and there was a performance that did not cut it out. Such things are omitted in these enlightened days. How, they would say, can a baby stride a blast? It is a prime example of what is now regarded as Shakespeare's barbarity.
I regard it as a prime example of his genius, friends.
Mr Shakespeare's writing method was straightforward. Each page was divided into columns. On the left-hand side he would put the name of the speaker, on the right-hand side he would put the exits and the entrances. The poetry was written in the middle. He would write fifty lines on one side, fifty lines on the other. Sometimes, in full flood, he would forget to write the name of the speaker, and just make a squiggle in the margin, for the initial letter of the character's name; then he would go back and spell out the identity later. Similarly, with the exits and the entrances. Each page got dropped to the floor as soon as he had written it. At the end of that long first night in Inverness, as the sun came up, I woke from fitful slumbers and saw Mr Shakespeare still crouched at his table, his eyes red and staring, his hand scuttling back and forth across the page like a crab trapped in a bucket, the sweat running down his face, and the floor of the room covered with sheets inscribed with his rustic gothic handwriting, all straight-flowing letters. It is something I'll never forget. It was like waking and finding yourself in the cavern of a demi-urge, or in some place where a man takes dictation from angels.
Mr Shakespeare stared sightlessly at me. Then he blinked. 'What's for breakfast?' he demanded. 'I'm starving! Be a good lad and fetch me some pippins, will you? Or a taste of dry biscuit. Or a slice of salted pork. Anything but Mrs MacDiarmid's porridge!'
Did a discarnate spirit guide my master's pen in Scotland? He said he was in the grip of Hecate when he wrote that play, but he said it with a grin and a shrug, and at such times I could never tell if he was serious. Later, though, I remember him remarking that the Witch Sycorax had him in her power when he wrote much of his last play of The Tempest.