Shakespeare's darkest and most disturbing play
anatomizes the consequences of blind
ambition sustained by faith in anarchic nature. "If chance will crown me," declares Macbeth,
"chance will have me king” (1.3.143). Macbeth might have been reading Edward de Vere's
Geneva text of the historical books of Samuel, in which the annotator has carefully noticed the
dialectic between the force of chance and the idea of divine grace, underlining the Genevan note
(f) attached to I Samuel 6.9 which testifies that "The wicked attribute almost all things to fortune
and chance, wheras in dede there is nothing done without God's providence and decree”
(emphasis added: Genevan 1570). That it was the author of Macbeth,
and not the Scottish
conspirator himself, who derived the moral from the marked verse, is indicated by a singular fact
of no small importance: the aptness of the allusion depends entirely upon the reader's awareness
that Macbeth is one of "the wicked" who "attribute all things" -- even the coronation of a King --
to "chance”.
In an earlier chapter we encountered the idea, written by de Vere in the margins of his Geneva
Bible at Wisdom 18.21, that "prayer is the weapon of the Godly.” Like so many idioms and ideas
extant in de Vere's own handwriting (see Fowler 1986), the idea is copiously iterated at the lexical
level in the Shakespeare canon. When, for example, Queen Margaret declares that "his champions
are the prophets and the apostles,/His weapons holy saws of sacred writ, his study his tilt yard” (II
Henry VI 1.3.61), she has in mind the principle, written in the margins of de
Vere's bible, that spiritual devotion can be a sublimation of the aggressive
instinct and substitute for military confrontation.
This thought also forms a strong and sustaining thematic pattern in the
de Vere Bible annotations. De Vere seems to have entertained a pious belief
Figure Twenty-Nine: I
Samuel 14.1 note (l) in
de Vere STC 2106.
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