by The Right Honorable

SIR D. PLUNKLET BARTON, BART.

M.A. Oxon.
Senator of the National University of Ireland
Member of the Royal Irish Academy

MAUNSEL AND COMPANY, LTD.
DUBLIN AND LONDON. 1919

Printed by George Roberts, Dublin

To

MY MOTHER

Who implanted a love of

Shakespeare in her children.

PREFACE

This little book does not aspire to the rank of a work of criticism, scholarship, or research. It is a collection of links between Ireland and Shakespeare put together in leisure moments by one who is interested in both subjects.

The idea of gathering these links into a chain was suggested by an article, contributed by Mr. Justice Madden to the Shakespeare Book of Homage, and was encouraged by a perusal of the Introduction to Dr. Sigerson's Bards of the Gael and Gall. After the book was planned and begun, the writer was referred to Mr. David Comyn's Irish Illustrations to Shakespeare, reprinted in pamphlet form from the Weekly Freeman in 1894. It is a pioneer work of great value by an author who was not only an Irish scholar, but also a man of wide culture ; and it contains much information not to be found in this book, which was designed upon different lines.

The author wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to Professor Osborn Bergin, M.R.I.A., and to Mr. R.I. Best, M.R.I.A., for having read some of his proofs, when he was engaged in public work in the country, and for several valuable suggestions.

CHAPTER 1: MACBETH—A TRAGEDY OF THE GAEL

Ross—Where is Duncan’s body?
MacDuff—Carried to Colmekill,
The sacred storehouse of his predecessors
And guardian of their bones.
      —Macbeth, Act II, scene iv, line 32

Macbeth is the only Shakespearian play, the pedigree of which can be traced to an Irish source. It is a tragedy of the Gael ; and its principal characters are Scottish Gaels of Irish extraction. King Duncan, his cousin Lady Macbeth, and Macbeth himself, were scions of a race which claimed descent from one or other of the six adventurous sons of Erc, the Dalriad chiefain, who, in the beginning of the sixth century, led a colony from Ulster to the south-west of Scotland. The colony was hard pressed by the native Picts, and might perhaps have been exterminated, if it had not been for an event which had far-reaching consequences for both Scotland and Ireland, namely the timely arrival in their midst of the Irish Saint Columba.

It was in 563 A.D. that Columba, known in his lifetime as Columbkille or Columba of the Church, left Ireland and landed in the island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides, where he founded a monastery which became the mother-house of numerous foundations on the mainland. His work rivalled that of St. Patrick, for he made himself the chief eclesiastical ruler in Scotland. From his tiny island his disciples went forth to convert the inhabitants of the mainland, while the schools which he established attracted students from all parts of Christendom. Perhaps the greatest of all his achievements was his success in Christianizing the Pictish king and his pagan subjects. Incidentally he came to the rescue of the Irish colony, for whom, as compatriots and kinsmen, he obtained a favored place in his adopted country.

From the time of Columba the Irish colonists gained strength and influence, until, in the ninth century, they established ascendancy over the Picts, under the leadership of Kenneth MacAlpine. When Kenneth, already king of the Dalriad Scots, had subdued the Pictish kingdom, and had been recognized as the first King of Scotland, he signalled his accession to the throne by transferring the seat of civil government to Scone, and by building a church at Dunkeld, to which he conveyed whatever was left in Iona of the relics of Columba. The saint's remains had already been enshrined and transferred to Ireland. King Kenneth was buried in Iona, which became the resting place of his successors.

Two centuries after the death of Kenneth MacAlpine, Duncan I was King of Scotland. He and his cousin, Lady Macbeth, were descendents of Kenneth, while Macbeth himself was also sprung from the stock of the original Irish colonists. Accordingly, we find ourselves, in the play of Macbeth, face to face with a group of Scottish Gaels of Irish descent. That is why the play breathes, more than any of the others, a Gaelic atmoshere. That is why the principal characters resemble the men and women of Celtic Ireland. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were as truly Gaels of Ireland as Richard III and Hamlet's mother were not. That is why, as will be suggested in the next chapter, the “weird sisters” of the play bear more resemblance to the legendary wizardness of the Irish saga than to the witches who flourished and perished in the days of Elizabeth and James.

The Irish author of an interesting book upon Shakespeare, has wondered how the dramatist came to choose the subject of Macbeth. In all probability the main motive of his choice of plot was to please his patron James I. The play seems to have been skillfully attuned to catch the fancy of the Scottish king. The three weird sisters were certain to interest the superstitious monarch, who had himself published a book in justification of his belief in demonology. The dramatist made much of Banquo, and introduced a prophecy that he would “get kings,” although he would “not be one,” because James was believed to plume himself upon his supposed descent from that individual. He introduced an irrelevant passage, in which the kings power of curing the scrofula of “King’s Evil” by touch or prayer is strikingly described, because James was known to pride himself upon possessing that peculiar faculty. When he staged a vision of kings, some of whom carried two-fold balls and treble sceptres, it was by way of complementing James upon having united in his person the crowns of England, Scotland, and Ireland. At this point Ireland must have been present to the mind of both Shakespeare and of the king, although they were doubtless unaware that the principal characters of the play had Irish blood in their veins, and that the play breathed an atmosphere which was no less Irish than Scottish.

Macbeth lived five centuries after the time of Columba; yet the play contains several allusions, taken from Holinshed’s Chronicles, which serve to remind us of the enduring impression which the Irish saint had made upon Scottish history and topography. They are put into the mouth of Ross, a Highland nobleman, who, after the murder of Duncan, asks Macduff, “Where is Duncan’s body?” Macduff replies :

“Carried to Colmekill,
 The sacred storehouse of his predecessors
 And guardian of their bones.”

The reference is to Columba’s sacred island of Iona, which is said to contain the remains of forty Scottish, four Irish, and eight Scandinavian kings. Elsewhere, Ross, in reporting a victory over the Norwegian invader, announces that no mercy was shown to Norway’s king

“Till he disbursed at Saint Colme’s Inch,
 Ten thousand dollars to our general use.”

Here we have an allusion, not to Iona, but to the little island in the Firth of Forth, now known as Inchcolm, which was granted to Columba by the Scottish king of his day, and still contains the ruins of an abbey dedicated to his memory. The name of Malcolm is another memorial of the saint, meaning the servant or disciple of Columba.

In the same play, when the sons of the murdered king, Malcolm and Donalbain, seek safety in flight, they scatter, one to England, and the other to Ireland.

“MALCOLM—I’ll to England.
“DONALBAIN—To Ireland, I ; our separate fortune
          Shall keep us both safer.”

This incident comes from Holinshed, who adds what Shakespeare does not mention. The passage runs on—“Donald passed over to Ireland, where he was tenderlie cherished by the king of that land.” Doubtless, the Irish king looked upon Donalbain as no mere cousin by courtesy, but as a veritable kinsman.

Dr. Foreman, an Elizabethan playgoer, has given in his diary a description of the plot of the play of Macbeth, which he saw at the Globe Theatre on the 20th April, 1610. When he comes to the flight of Duncan’s two sons he tells us that they fled, “the one to England, and the other to Wales, to save themselves.” Why was the name of Wales substituted for that of Ireland in the acting of the piece? Can it have been that the troubles, which were pending in Ireland in 1610, made it inexpedient to mention the name of that country to a London audience?

We read in Holinshed that the “kernes and gallowglasses,” who are in the servie of “the merciless” Macdonald, who had come out of Ireland “in the hopes of spoil.” In another chapter something will be said about the kernes and gallowglasses. Here we glimpse of them, in Macbeth’s time, seeking their fortune upon a Scottish battlefield.

Macbeth contains plenty of links with Ireland, some of which hve not yet been referred to. Those that have not yet been referred to. Those that have just been cited remind us that in the eleventh century Scotland was ruled by an Irish dynasty ; that soldiers from Ireland went forth to look for spoil in Scottish wars ; that Scottish princes, when outlawed, sought refuge with their kinsmen in Ulster ; and that Columba, after five centuries, was still commemorated in the storied islands of Iona and Inchcolm.

CHAPTER 2: MACBETH—THE WEIRD SISTERS COMPARED WITH THE WIZARDESSES OF ANCIENT IRELAND

Saw you the weird sisters?—Macbeth, Act IV, scene i., l. 136.

While Shakesperian criticism has illuminated many hidden beauties in the plays, it has also shattered some cherished beliefs. Among the crowd of critics the iconoclasts have elbowed the idolators, and have made havoc with popular traditions. This has been especially the case with the three “secret black and midnight hags” who figure in the play of Macbeth. It is no longer the fashion to apply the name of “witches” to these mysterious persons. It has been pointed out that they are nowhere referred to under that name of Holinshed, who describes them not as witches as “goddesses of destinie, or els nimphes or feiries endewed with knowledge of prophecie by their necromanticall science.” The parts of the play in which they are presented on the stage as idealized types of mediaeval witchcraft, or as satellites of Hecate, Queen of Hell, are believed by the cognoscenti to have been interpolated by Thomas Middleton. This Thomas Middleton, who was himself a prolific dramatist and the author of a drama called The Witch, undoubtedly revised plays for the King’s Company after the Shakespeare’s retirement and death.

It has come as a shock to some old-fashioned admirers of the great Scottish tragedy to be rudely informed that several lines have been adjudged by the commentators to be spurious additions, which were smuggled into the piece by Thomas Middleton. For example, the first scene of the tragedy where, according to the stage direction, the so-called witches enter on an open place amidst thunder and lightning, and the opening lines of the third scene, in which we hear of the sailor’s wife, whose “husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ The Tiger,” have been seriously suspected of not being of true Shakespearean parentage. We feel loth to assent to the disherison of lines, which we have been accustomed to regard as cihldren of Shakespeare’s fancy, such as “When rump fed ronyon cried.” On the other hand there is a general agreement on the part of all students of the play, that the passages in which Hecate, Queen of Hell, is brought on the stage, are quite unworthy of the greatest of dramatists.

Once the play has been purged of its apocryphal additions, we are left with a simple picture of the three “weird sisters,” as Holinshed sketched them, and as Shakespeare transferred them to his canvas. In the present chapter we propose to offer some reasons for inferring that these strange creatures were kinswomen or clanswomen of those wizardesses of the Irish and Scottish saga, who, with the druids, were the traditional wielders of Celtic magic from the dark ages until long after the time of Macbeth.

When we examine the language in which Shakespeare portrays the three weird sisters of the play, we shall find that they are not of the same vulgar type as the pitiable creatures who were tortured and burned in thousands during the sixteenth century. It is true that they are made in the image of human beings ; but their human shape is inhumanly disfigured. Their features are withered, their hands are wrinkled, their lips are skinny, and their chins are bearded. Their art soars high above the comparatively trivial operations of mediaeval withcraft. They can not only fly like common witches, but, in their mastery of the sky and the air, they can raise tempests that will lay low the bladed corn, blow down trees, and make castles, towers and palaces topple to their foundations. Like the druids and wise women of ancient “mortal consequences.” Like them they also have, in the exercise of their prophetic art, a fiendish power of equivocation, which they exhibit when they prophesy that Macbeth will never be harmed by anyone “of woman born,” or ever be vanquished until “great Birnham wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him.” Bitter is the disappointment of Macbeth, when he discovers that in these predictions the weird sisters “lie like truth,” speak like “juggling fiends,” and “palter in a double sense.”

In order to illustrate the affinity between the magic of Macbeth, and of ancient Ireland, let us turn aside, in order to make the acquaintance of a few of the traditional wizardesses of the Irish legends.

A group of three weird women was a familiar feature of Gaelic folklore. They were usually believed to belong to that msyterious race of the Tuatha de Danann, of whom something more will be said in a subsequent chapter dealing with Fairyland. The most ancient example of this type were the three Goddesses of War, sometimes referred to as Badb, Macha and Morrigan, sometimes as Badb’s sisters, who were fabled to be the grand-daughters of a king of the Tuatha de Danann. They were represented as creatures of ill-omen and of horrible aspect, who foreboded death and disaster, broodled over battle fields, stimulated strife nd slaughter, and revelled in the pain and desolation which follow in the track of war. They form the original but by no means the only triple sisterhood to be found in the Irish saga.

What is perhaps the most interesting instance of the appearance of three weird women in an Irish legend occurs in an ancient tale called the “Enchanted Cave of Keshcorran.” The scene is laid in the County Sligo, and the three hags are supposed to be the daughters of Conoran, a chief of the Tuatha de Danann, who held a magical sway over the Keshcorran countryside. The take opens with a hunting party organized by the celebrated Finn mac Cool. There is a poetical description of the landscape, in the midst of which the hunt is to take place, its forests, its fastnesses, its leafy coverts, and its wide expansive plains. From the top of Mount Keshcorran Finn delights in listening to the shouts of the huntsmen and to the cries of the beaters. Meanwhile Conoran’s, who evidently regarded Finn as a poacher upon their goulish preserves, conceal themselves in a cavern which they beset with an entanglement of crooked holly sticks hung with bewitched hasps of yarn. Here they like in wait for the hunters. The appearance of the three sorceresses is depicted in lurid colours. Their coarse hair is dishevelled , their eyes are rheumy and bleared, their black mouths bristle with sharp and venomous fangs. They are endowed with long arms, scraggy necks, bandy legs, nails like sharp-tipped ox-horns ; and they are armed with pointed distaffs. By their devilish arts the three harridans lure Finn and his companions into their cavern, bewitch them, bind them, and throw them into black holes or dark labyrinths. The take goes on to describe how the prisoners are ultimately rescued by Goll, the Ajax of his day, who slays the three wizardesses, and receives for reward “Finn’s slender white-skinned daughter” as his wife.

Another trio of wizardesses occur in another Irish legend, and afford an even closer parallel to the weird sisters of Macbeth than the three Godesses of War, or the three daughters of Conoran. These are the three daughters of Calatin, who play an important part in the tragedy which terminates the career of Cuchulainn, the most heroic figure in the Irish saga of the Red Branch Cycle, and the Hector of an Irish Iliad. The greatest epic in the whole range of Irish literature in the Tain Bo Chuailgne, which being translated means the “Cattle Raid of Cooley.” This infamous Irish epic, known commonly as The Tain, tells the story of the expedition which King Ailill and Queen Méve of Connaught organized and led across Ireland for the purpose of carrying off a famous bull, belonging to the chieftain of Cooley, which is the peninsula lying between the bays of Dundalk and of Carlingford. Cuchalainn was nephew of King Conor mac Nessa of Armagh, and lived in a princely palace near the town of Dundalk, then known as Dundealgan, on the marches of Ulster. He defended the peninsula from the western invader, and, at a ford on one of his native rivers, slew countless of his enemies in single combat.

The Connaughtmen, whom Cuchilainn slew during the Cooley cattle raid, including a wizard named Calatin and his twenty-seven sons. The family would have been exterminated if Calatin’s widow had not given birth to three posthumous daughters. Queen Méve, who was bent upon revenging herself upon Cuchulainn, mutilated the three girls by cutting off their right legs and left arms, so that they might be so odious and horrible as to be better qualified to excel in the grim profession for which she destined them. She then proceeded to have them educated in spells, druidism, witchcraft, and incantations. They were sent to the best schools of wizardry in different parts of the then known world, until they became finished experts in what Holinshed, when speaking of the “weird sisters,” called  the “Necromanticall science.”

In the fulness of time Queen Méve raised a fresh army, and marched upon Ulster, taking with her the three disfigured hags, who were burning to avenge the death of their father and brothers. King Conor mac Nessa, at their approach, summoned Cuchalainn to his court at Emania near Armagh, whither the three wizard women pursued him flying through the air, and alighting on the plains outside Emania. Here they endeavored to entice Chuchalainn from his retreat by raising phantom armies, and by producing the confused noise of battle array and of the shouting of engaged hosts. The druids and court ladies retrained Cuchulainn from sallying forth meet these mysticall batallions, and ultimately

— To be cont'd