At my high school, we read a Shakespeare play each year in English classes. For juniors, that play was, by inviolable custom, MACBETH. It was not taught with historical context; that is to say, nobody took time to explain that, far from being the murderous bastard whose ambition killed a beloved king, drove a wife and accomplice to madness and death, and all but destroyed Scotland in the process that Shakespeare made of him, Macbeth was one of the truly great Scots kings. (That Shakespeare was pandering to the man on the throne of a united-in-all-but-name England and Scotland of his day, James I, descended from the bloodline of the man who killed Macbeth in battle, would have been, frankly, a bit hard for my peers to grasp. Iambic pentameter was hard enough without adding the history of a declining Celtic kingdom, and the attempt of a playwright to stay in good standing with the royals, to the mix.)



In her 2008 novel LADY MACBETH, Susan Fraser King does a good deal toward telling Macbeth's story, and that of his wife, straight. She tells the story of a quarter-century long marriage and a seventeen-year reign by a beloved couple who were brought down, ultimately, by their very failure to be the ruthless killers of Shakespeare's fancy.

King's accomplishment is to take the meager information we have about Lady Macbeth and her husband and construct, frankly, a far more plausible history than Shakespeare's. Lady Macbeth, far from being the diabolical harpy of the play, is a princess of both Scots and Irish descent whose bloodline was so royal that she was in fact a full partner to her husband, Queen of Scots to his kingship rather than queen consort, left to reign in his stead during his 1050 pligrimage to Rome.

The witches of Shakespeare's imagination (probably another ploy to tempt his royal fan, whose obsession with witches is legendary) are transformed in King's narrative into what they truly were: Celtic wisewomen gifted in herbal lore and with the Second Sight, walking between the two worlds of old Celtic customs of protective chants and rituals and the insistence that none but the Catholic faith (itself, in those centuries, still divided between Roman and Celtic practices) could save.

The king Duncan whom Macbeth kills to ascend the throne is portrayed as what he truly was: an incompetent hothead in his twenties, put on the throne by a grandfather who wanted to establish a dynasty in keeping with the customs of the neighboring Saxons of England, who all but decimated Scotland in a bloody and fruitless war to try to bring the Vikings of the Orkney Isles under his dominion, and was killed not by treachery but in a fair fight with Macbeth, his older and infinitely more gifted cousin.

The downfall of the Macbeths would come, seventeen years into his reign, because they had mercifully let the young sons of Duncan live. The older one would be the killer of Macbeth and would go down in history as Malcolm Canmore, taught that his father had been usurped by an evil man and out for revenge; he succeeded both by killing Macbeth and by trying to destroy his reputation so thoroughly that both Shakespeare and his source, Raphael Hollinshed, could completely without irony portray Macbeth as a monster.

Nor, according to King, is there any reason to suppose that Lady Macbeth predeceased her husband. Barely forty at the time of his death, she most likely survived him, but totally disappears from the historical record thereafter.

Moreover, King points out, Malcolm Canmore did not succeed to the throne immediately upon Macbeth's death; Macbeth's successor was his stepson Lulach, Lady Macbeth's son by a first marriage, which suggests a far more convincing account of Macbeth's death: that, gravely wounded, he nevertheless lived long enough to make a fast journey to Scone, where Scots kings were always crowned sitting on the Lia-Fail (Stone of Scone, itself eventually usurped for the crownings of English kings), and saw Lulach crowned before he died of his wounds.

I will give Shakespeare this, though: nothing in King's otherwise excellent telling of the story of a beloved and great king can match the majesty of Macbeth's final soliloquy, given when news of his wife's death is brought to him:

She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
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!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. . .

Some last observations: Macbeth's death traditionally is said to have fallen on August 17th in the year 1057, so it's ironic that I should have come across this book in the local library just now.

Number two, for all Malcolm Canmore's scheming and hatred, Macbeth and his successor Lulach both lie buried, as they should, with the rightful kings of Scotland in the ancient royal burial ground on the island of Iona.

And one final oddity, a tie to Shakespeare's play: Immediately after Macbeth kills Duncan, he is summoned by a knocking at the gate, celebrated by the essayist Thomas de Quincey in "On the Knocking at the Gate in MACBETH." I swear this is true; the night I began reading this book I was awakened, in black dark, by the sound of someone knocking at our front door, a sound repeated twice. There were no other sounds of walking or of anyone being around, and Mom, sleeping in a room much closer to the front door, heard nothing.

Being of Scots and Irish blood myself, I can't help but wonder what a summoning that might have been.

And if anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.