Abstract
Following Malcolm’s testing of Macduff’s loyalty in Act 4, Scene 3 of Macbeth, an English doctor informs the two that there is a “crew of wretched souls” suffering from some disease and awaiting the English king Edward the Confessor, at whose “touch, / Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand, / They presently amend” (4.3.143-45). Macduff inquires about this disease, and Malcolm responds with a description of a peculiar ceremony whereby Edward cures patients suffering from scrofula or “the king’s evil”:
’Tis call’d the evil:
A most miraculous work in this good king,
Which often, since my here-remain in England,
I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven,
Himself best knows; but strangely-visited people,
All swoll’n and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,
The mere despair of surgery, he cures,
Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,
Put on with holy prayers, and ‘tis spoken,
To the succeeding royalty he leaves
The healing benediction. With this strange virtue,
He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy,
And sundry blessings hang about his throne
That speak him full of grace. (4.3.146–59)
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Notes
See also Arthur Clark, who calls the passage “an excrescence from a dramatic point of view.” Murder under Trust or the Topical Macbeth (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic, 1981), 23. And see Gary Wills on its connection to Malcolm, who becomes a capable physician in contrast to Macbeth’s failure in Scotland. Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), 122. Henry Paul has a more elaborate theory that impetus for the passage’s inclusion came from James’s plotting council, including Master of the Revels Sir George Buck, who wanted James to incorporate the angel into his ceremony of touching. The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 379–86. Even recent interpretations that find discontinuity between Macbeth and James’s absolutist vision still interpret the passage as a royal compliment. For example, Alan Sinfield reads the scene as epitomizing James’s strategy of differentiating the usurping tyrant from the legitimate king. “Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals,” Materialist Shakespeare, ed. Ivo Kamps (London: Verso, 1995), 97.
Prior to Robert, there was a long history of healing by rulers. The spiritual tradition goes back to Christ as healer. See Raymond Crawfurd, The King’s Evil (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), 10.
See Helen Farquhar, “Royal Charities, Part I—Angels as Healing-pieces for the King’s Evil,” British Numismatic Journal 12 (1916): 69–70
and Noël Woolf, “The Sovereign Remedy: Touch Pieces and the King’s Evil,” British Numismatic Journal 49 (1979): 101.
Stubbe, The Miraculous Conformist (Oxford, 1666), sig. B4r. Stuart Clark points to another concern in the relation between royal and folk healing, which was often associated with the devil. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 663. Moreover, healing coins strikingly resemble the emergent notion of fetishism. See William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish I,” Res 9 (1985): 5, 10.
Thomas, Religion, 232; quoted in Julian Stafford Corbett, The Successors of Drake (London: Longman, 1900), 168.
Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 39, 29, 32, 31.
Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, vol. 7 (London: J. M. Dent, 1926), 336.
Thomas, Religion, 197; James I, Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1918), 332.
Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster, 1968), 1:241. See also ibid., 1:215–16.
Weber, Economy, 1:254; Clanchy, England and Its Rulers 1066–1272 (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 156.
On writs as routin-ized charisma, see also Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 22.
Berger, “The Early Scenes of Macbeth: Preface to a New Interpretation,” ELH 47 (1980): 20.
On the clothing imagery in Macbeth, see Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1935), 324–27
and Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, 1947), 38–39.
Hawkins, “History, Politics and Macbeth,” Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge, 1982), 167.
Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. John Frederick Nims (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2000), 1:154–57, 158;
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (London: Penguin, 1978), 2.7.16, 17.
Monod, The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe, 1589–1715 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999), 40.
Quoted in Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), 15.
Murray, “Why Was Duncan’s Blood Golden?,” Shakespeare Survey 19 (1966): 41, 42.
For another example of Duncan’s “golden blood” read as a sign of his sanctity, see Paul A. Jorgensen, Our Naked Frailties: Sensational Art and Meaning in Macbeth (Berkeley: U of California P, 1971), 87–88.
Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1985), 373–74.
Zimmerman, “Duncan’s Corpse,” A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Chicester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), 329. Scrofula was believed by some to have been called the “king’s evil” because it was caused, not healed, by the king. See Clark, Thinking, 666.
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© 2011 Stephen Deng
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Deng, S. (2011). “Mysteries of State”: The Political Theology of Coinage in Macbeth . In: Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern English Literature. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118249_6
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