“A deed without a name”: Macbeth, the Gunpowder Plot, and terrorism

Abstract

Terrorism, paradoxically, both speaks and is unspeakable. To the perpetrators, terrorism has a precise and clear message. To its victims, the terrorist act is so horrible it defies language. In this article, I suggest that we can find the origin of this paradigm in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In his speech to Parliament a few days after the plot was discovered, King James begins by admitting the paradox: “What can I speak of this, I know not; Nay rather, what can I not speak of it? And therefore I must for horror say with the Poet, Vox faucibus haeret” (My voice sticks in my throat). The Folio Macbeth intervenes in the post-Gunpowder Plot era by incorporating the paradox of speakability/unspeakability into the rhetoric of the play. Like the Gunpowder Plot itself, the Captain “cannot tell” whether Macbeth and Banquo “meant to bathe in reeking wounds/Or memorize another Golgotha” (1.2.39-41), and the Weird Sisters engage in “A deed without a name” (4.1.49). This version of the play does not mirror the rhetoric surrounding the Plot in order to participate in the orgy of self-congratulation and anti-Catholicism following its discovery. Rather, in the Folio Macbeth, Shakespeare uses the Gunpowder Plot as a ground for interrogating the fundamental myths of the Stuart dynasty, and his play emphasizes the overlaps between king and traitor, legitimate and illegitimate violence, terrorist, and victim of terrorism. However, the only evidence available for a contemporary performance suggests that the King’s Men used a very different script when they performed the play in 1611, a version that endorses rather than questions Stuart absolutism.