Macbeth and Scotland: The Relevance of the Connection

Macbeth (c.1606) is habitually referred to as ‘the Scottish play’. In but one of the innumerable examples of that phenomenon, the distributor's campaign book for a 1960 film adaptation of the play opined that, ‘based in actual Scottish history, the film is a “natural” for Scots, wherever they may be – why not a Scottish Night complete with bagpipes and kilts?’ However, the central question with which this essay is concerned – how Scotland and the Scots are represented in William Shakespeare (c.1564–1616)'s original text and its subsequent (particularly cinematic) realisations – has only relatively recently become a possible topic of concern in the backwash of identity politics. The collective scholarly shift away from the politics of class to the politics of gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, dating roughly from the late 1960s, has fed into every area of cultural activity, not least Shakespearean productions and Shakespeare Studies.

Shakespearean criticism's historic lack of interest in questions of race and ethnicity (the figures of Shylock, Othello and Caliban excepted) has not precluded diverse versions of Macbeth from addressing such questions unconsciously. This essay argues that a few dominant discourses about Scotland and the Scots have lain, like deep-but-obscured foundations, within Shakespeare's original text and its diverse realisations. Those discourses have been activated only partially from case to case – in costume and/or scenic design here, in acting performance or incidental music there – all the way throughout history to the twentieth century's cinematic versions of Macbeth.

Asking how diverse versions of Macbeth constructed Scotland and the Scots exemplifies the core problem of any kind of ideological analysis: the interrogation of texts with regard to questions that they never set out to answer. Consider, for instance, what is often spoken of as the first fine art representation of Scotland and the Scots: an early-sixteenth-century Italian fresco depicting a papal emissary, Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1405– 64), addressing the court of Scottish king James I (1394–1437). Existing solely as a consequence of Piccolomini's subsequent status as Pope Pius II, the fresco was executed by the painter Pinturicchio (1454–1513) in 1505–07.