The Porter and the Jesuits: Macbeth and the Forgotten History of Equivocation☆

Abstract

AbstractThis essay explores Shakespeare’s relationship to the intellectual history of equivocation in sixteenth and seventeenth‐century rhetoric and dialectic. It demonstrates that ‘equivocation’, far from denoting only a Jesuitical practice of deception, had a long and complex history intrinsically linked to theories of interpretation. Thus, the essay challenges the view that Macbeth’s apparent obsession with equivocation can be attributed exclusively to the Gunpowder Plot. The widely presumed influence of the conspirators’ trials on the play, based largely on verbal parallels with sermons, speeches and treatises, sidelines a fundamental sixteenth‐century discourse about epistemology. The essay offers a historicized understanding of equivocation to demonstrate that the concept had permeated early modern culture more deeply and earlier than usually acknowledged. It provides a comparative analysis of Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘equivocation’ in Hamlet, All’s Well That Ends Well, Othello and Macbeth. Reading Macbeth alongside pre‐Gunpowder Plot plays (The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure), and the rhetorical and dialectical tradition, reveals a culture that was deeply disconcerted by what was perceived as the inherent instability of meaning. The essay argues that the theological‐political controversy about equivocation was a debate about language and interpretation in which Shakespeare’s characters had participated before 1605.