Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” in Our Day: “Equivocation” and Murdered Truth When Our Own Usurper Sits on the Throne
Some aspects of Shakespeare’s great political tragedy “Macbeth,” director Melia Bensussen writes in her notes for the current production at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass., “resonate… with our cultural moment.”
Indeed.
Would that ‘moment’ be the one when our current usurper sells out his country’s interests, alliances, values, and national pride to the two-bit totalitarian gangster who currently directs the long-running catastrophe generally known as “Russia”?
“Macbeth” is a play about an ambitious Scottish lord (read ‘oligarch’) who murders his country’s rightful king to take the crown for himself, pinning the crime of regicide on two patsies who supposedly have been paid by another potential usurper to take off the king.
In other words he conspires to usurp his country’s seat of power, and then lies about how the murder happened. When asked why he killed the two servants blamed for the murder before they could be questioned, he replies that when he found them “steeped in the colors of their trade” — i.e. with King Duncan’s blood all over them — he was overcome by a righteous passion to make them pay at once for their foul deed.
In Shakespeare’s time, this kind of convenient lying was called “equivocation.”
The two servants did indeed have Duncan’s blood on their hands and clothes but only because the Macbeths put it there to make them look like killers.
When you hold back crucial facts that fundamentally change the meaning of your account, or witness, or legal testimony, or private explanation, or formal apologia — that’s equivocation.
It was the word of the day — and a long day — when Shakespeare wrote this play because his country was still recovering from the shock of having their king and entire top level of government nearly extinguished by the Gunpowder Plot. Discovered just in time, the plot was the work of a coterie of aristocrats who wished to restore the ‘old religion,’ the Church of Rome, to England.
Some of those gathered in the net of the conspiracy’s investigators were defenders of the practice of equivocation by England’s secret or fairly open Catholics. In the wake of Henry VIII’s split from Roman Catholic church, all English subjects were compelled to take an oath recognizing the king’s ultimate authority over all matters of religion. Some theologians argued that it was morally acceptable to swear the oath — thereby avoiding punishment — while keeping “mental reservations” over its truth. God, that is, would understand why you were forced to swear the oath even while your heart was keeping the true faith.
Yes, you were really saying, I agree the King is the ultimate authority in religious matters X and Y, but (and I won’t bring this up publically) when it comes to Z, appointing bishops for instance, that’s the Pope’s business.
To the policing wing of the English government, the doctrine of equivocation threatened to undermine the basis of law and the practice of criminal justice. English judges and police relied on sworn testimony — to a degree that no country today could imagine — because of the widespread and entirely seriously held belief that giving “false witness,” a direct violation of God’s commandments, imperiled your soul. In other words, you stood a good chance of going to hell.
But if people believed they had God’s permission to ‘equivocate’ or hold back essential matters from civil authorities, it would make law enforcement impossible. Investigator: Was your brother at home yesterday? Witness: Yes he was… (That is, he was home except for the hour or two when he was out murdering a romantic rival.)
As a result, those who had advocated in behalf of the doctrine of equivocation were charged with abetting the Gunpowder Plot conspiracy even if they did not play an active role in it. And some were executed along with the active conspirators.
Well, we have certainly come a long way since the reign of King James I and the year 1606 when Shakespeare wrote “Macbeth.”
Nowadays both those in power, and many of those who have no power, lie all they want.
The most consequential of these equivocators, the head of the American government, lies all he wants in public, with the clear intention of assuring his deluded followers that his version of events, or various other fictive claims about the state of the nation and the world, are somehow to be believed — perhaps as ‘matters of faith’ — over matters of fact, matters of public record, empirical evidence such as statistics produced by his own government, and explanations, analyses, scientific studies and other points of record offered by experts in the various fields. Substituting prejudice and ignorance, that is, wherever he senses these misstatements will “play” with those who voted for and still support him.
And no one, apparently, worries about going to hell for such moral failures any more.
It’s almost enough to make you wish to bring back that particularly brutal sort of thought control that passed for ‘religion’ in the 17th century. Do what we say, religious authorities told the illiterate masses of that day, or you will suffer the torments of eternal damnation.
‘Almost,’ but not quite. There must be some better way to deal with liars. Perhaps those who take an oath of office to protect our national interest will discover it.
Our president is the Great Equivocator, inventing what is not true, omitting what is true but inconvenient to his wishes. Blatantly changing the story from day to day.
He can hardly keep his lies straight. Yet equivocation — using words to disguise or twist actuality — remains a useful devise even in an era of 24–7 public exposure. So when President Bluster stands next to his criminal master and utters a blatant piece of cowardly nonsense at the behest, and for the pleasure, of that master — but finds that this bald-faced fiction will not ‘play’ even with his own base — he commands public attention the next day to ‘correct’ the record.
Whoops, he says, I forgot to include the second ‘not.’
As in, “T***P tells it like it is.” Not!
And he’s content that those who choose to swallow this baloney because they’re poor, frightened, racist dimwits will still tell pollsters that they support ‘their’ president… So, crisis over?
But Stumpy is not only an equivocator. Like Macbeth he’s also a usurper.
Time was, as Macbeth complains with unconscious black humor at the sight of Banquo’s ghost — a rival he has had murdered — “when the brains were out, the man would die… but now they rise again… and push us from our stools.”
You can’t help admiring the man’s candor. (And I cannot do anything but express my awe at the genius that could pen such lines.)
While the current usurper may not pay off murderers in ready cash, he sits him down beside them and praises their ability to be such good tyrants. As for payoffs, he commands others to pay off his various partners in adultery.
More seriously, his election campaign conspired with a criminal tyrant to plant damaging (though pathetically minor) revelations, malicious rumors, and outright ‘fake news’ about his opponent in order to twist a tormented and patently fraudulent 2016 presidential election in his favor.
Russian ‘intelligence’ agents, working for Putin, getting the go-ahead from T***P campaign officials, intentionally spread lies and misinformation to foment hatred and disdain for his opponent, so that many of those who would never support a candidate as politically unqualified and personally repulsive as T***P chose to stay home instead of voting for an opponent tarnished by the Russian smear campaign.
We know this drama of Shakespearean evil happened. Our intelligence agencies have documented these secret collaborations and criminal practices and released a report of their findings. When you tell lies in order to get somebody to buy something from you, that’s fraud. That’s what the Russians colluding with the T***p gang did. It worked. Too many voters bought a pig in a poke. Or walked away from the whole deal; in effect, just as bad.
The inescapable conclusion was that our 2016 election was contaminated by fraud practiced by agents of a hostile power.
Knowing this, the only sensible course is to cancel the fraudulently flawed results and hold another vote. This time with the criminal elements removed from contention.
Shakespeare’s hero-villain Macbeth holds our attention — and even a reluctant sympathy — because of his admirable parts. He was a brave and able warrior and commander putting down a revolt by a would-be usurper in behalf of a legitimate king, Duncan. He is eloquent to a fault, and psychologically acute. He knows that regicide and his other crimes are repulsive to everything good; yet he goes against his moral instinct to achieve power.
And he hates what he’s turned into. A killer, a tyrant, an abuser of power; who can trust absolutely no one. “I am in blood stepped in so far,” he soliloquizes, “that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
Does anyone want to hear our POTUS soliloquize? Unburden himself? Look into the mirror? Knowing that whatever he said, even if it were intelligible, would be re-equivocated the next day?
I didn’t think so.
I believe the ghosts of the murdered 2016 election are returning. The Middle Ages had a saying for this: Truth will out.
Sometimes, tellingly, the saying was modified to “murder will out.”
I hope when the whole story comes out there’s something left of this troubled realm to hear it.
