Mr Nice Guy

So Shakespeare maligned Macbeth according to members of the Scottish parliament. They want to rescue him from the Shakespearean propaganda and restore his reputation as a good king who may have killed Duncan in battle rather than murdered him and took his throne. According to the SMPs signing the motion, history portrays a very different man to the one Shakespeare presents. Well, that comes as no surprise – after all our impression of Richard III is tainted by Elizabethan propaganda enthusiastically provided by the bard. If recent historical evidence is true, far from the misshapen hunchback who brutally murdered his way to the throne, Richard was the rightful heir; his brother Edward IV was illegitimate and therefore had no right to the succession. Shakespeare is similarly liberal with the other subjects of his historical plays, effectively rewriting Plantagenet and Lancastrian history for the benefit of his royal benefactor.

Whether Shakespeare played fast and loose with the truth is neither here nor there for me – the plays endure because they have all the right ingredients for good drama; believable characters, sound plotting, rich dialogue and wonderfully wicked villains. Writers have always been liberal with facts when they get in the way of a good yarn and the suspension of disbelief is one of the exchanges entered into between writer and consumer. After all, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.