Macbeth: Man and Myth [Paperback]

I found this book easy to read but I must say I don't know any more about the actual Macbeth now than I did when I started it.

When you get right down to it, very little is known about the man himself. The book did place what little information there is in the context of the regular wars, rebellions and regicide that constituted politics in 11th Century Scotland. I'm just surprised anyone survived long enough to knock off nasty King Malcolm.

When I read the play in school, I thought Duncan was an incompetent wimp and Shakespeare seems to have got that much right.

The other main part of the book describes the evolution of the myth of Macbeth, and this was interesting.

Thanks to Shakespeare's Scottish Play, Macbeth is probably the most famous king in Scotland's history, yet little is known of him beyond the play itself. Aitchison sets out to recify that, examining historical and archaeological sources for the man and the context of his kingship, as well as the route by which an early mediaeval king came to personify evil itself.

The book can be divided into three sections, of which the first and largest is an analysis of the historical sources for Macbeth's life and what they tell us about his reign. The problem with this is aptly summed up by Aitchison, talking of "The Prophecy of Berchán":

...the Prophecy is fundamentally flawed as a historical source, [but] an alternative interpretation underlines its importance for the study of Macbeth... [p. 102]

This problem is the same across the entire skinny corpus of historical evidence. Eulogies from the king's own lifetime, chronicles written by his enemies years after his death, and foreign writings are about all we have, and it takes a skilled historian to build an accurate picture from them. Aitchison does a decent enough job of exploring the context of Macbeth's rise to the throne. In particular he manages to make sense of the relations between the descendents of Kenneth mac Alpin, and the system of tanistry whereby collateral branches of the family tree succeeded each other, bringing much needed explanation to Shakespeare's play, and emphasising in particular that Macbeth was not a usurper.

At times, however, Aitchison's sources threaten to get the better of him, and never is this more apparent than when he is discussing Orkneyinga Saga. While he notes the Saga's "distorted ordering of events [which] casts doubt on its historical reliability" (p. 5), he later relies on a close reading of some of the text for the sole support for his argument (pp. 56-7 and 70). Moreover, relying on a translation of Skaldic verse as evidence for anything historical (p. 58) is dangerous, and it is painfully obvious and all too frequently demonstrated that Aitchison has not (presumably cannot) read this major source in the original. Elsewhere his Latin is entirely taken from other people's translations(pp. 115, 116, 118-9) and he refers to a Middle English poem as being in the "Scots language" (p. 108). It's a shame to see things like this, because the main part of his argument is perfectly innocuous.

Moving on to more recent times, Aitchison then provides a comprehensive tally of Macbeth's literary appearances from the earliest extant chronicles, through Holinshead and Shakespeare, down to the twentieth century and various film versions of his life. The message here seems to be that toadying to the Stewart dynasty by vilifying the one interruption to their reign over Scotland was responsible for the beginning of the Macbeth myth, and that the versatility of that myth - presumably because the historical facts were so easily lost - ensured its survival. Shame to have no comparison with Richard III then.

The final section, on the archaeology of sites connected with Macbeth is excellent; it's a shame, then, that the considerations have to be so sketchy, as the continuity of habitation of most sites ensures that little if anything is left of the eleventh century structures.

I feel very strongly that I ought to have liked this book more than I did. I wanted very much to read it, and am perennially interested in this kind of subject matter. I'm used to ifs and maybes in history; inconclusive evidence is a delight to me. And there were parts of this that were incredibly interesting; the first chapter promises much, but then just never quite delivers. I think that the problem is that so often, Aitchison is dispassionate to the point of torpor; I never quite felt that he really cared about his subject matter. Nevertheless, for those who can stay awake, this - for the extensive bibliography alone - is probably an excellent introduction to a subject much more interesting than it seems to be here.