The Scottish Podcast

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim & Mild from Aaron Menke. Listener discretion advised. The Tragedy of Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most famous works, and with very good reason. As SNL's Stefan might say, this play has everything. Sleepwalking queens, witches torturing kings with prophecies, ghosts ruining dinner parties, imaginary daggers, forests that move, and murders so bloody that your guilty hands won't scrub clean. Sleep No More, an immersive version of the play, was a hit show in New York City for.

Over a decade. allowing theatergoers to wander freely through the events of the play, with action and intrigue and semi-nude actors waiting around every corner. Macbeth is a cultural mainstay, thanks to its bold imagery and heightened action, with a central role meaty enough to attract major talent for over four centuries. Everyone from Orson Welles to Denzel Washington has lined up to take a stab at the role of Macbeth, a character so supernaturally charged that even speaking his name out loud in a theater is believed to bring catastrophically bad luck. I'm hoping that the room where I record a podcast doesn't count. But what about the real man who inspired the play? the real Macbeth ruled Scotland from

1040 to 1057, seizing the throne through violence and eventually losing it the same way. How much of his actual story made it into Shakespeare's text? Viewing the life of a king who lived a thousand years ago through the lens of a playwright working at the midpoint between then and now tells us as much about the era in which the play was written as it does the era it depicts. Because just like the real medieval Scottish King Macbeth, Shakespeare had an agenda of his own. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. By and large, Shakespeare's version of Macbeth is the primary version of the story that most folks are familiar with. There are probably plenty of people who imagine that Macbeth, like Romeo or Hamlet, was

an entirely fictional figure and not based on someone specific from history. That's a testament to the enduring power of Shakespeare's work. as well as the spotty documentation we have of that particular period in history. The real Macbeth lived in the 11th century, right in the middle of the Middle Ages, and much of what we know about his early years amounts to a collection of educated guesses. In Nicholas Boyder Acheson's excellent book Macbeth, Man and Myth, he states that The scarcity of 11th century sources has often made historians dependent on later material, particularly medieval chronicles. Not surprisingly, the mythological elements present in the chronicler's accounts of Macbeth and his reign have often been incorporated, consciously or subconsciously,

directly into historical analyses. So here's what we know. The real Macbeth was most likely born in 1005, the son of the Mormare of Moray. Moray was a province in medieval Scotland, a tactically crucial area that functioned in part as a buffer zone against invading Viking territories. Mormares, or High Stewards, played similar roles as earls, which meant that Macbeth's father held great power over his domain, which was large and distinct enough to feel like a world of its own within Scotland. His mother's identity is murkier. She was most likely a relative of Malcolm II, then King of Scotland, although how closely is unknown. Some sources claim that Macbeth's mother was Malcolm's illegitimate daughter, but there's nothing

concrete to back that up. Little is recorded of Macbeth's childhood, but it isn't hard to imagine. A boy of noble birth, groomed from an early age to one day take his father's place, trained in fighting and hunting as a matter of course. It's very possible he spent time at Malcolm's court as a child, but whether he was there as the son of a nobleman or possibly the king's own grandson remains unclear. What is certain is that he shadowed his father closely and that war was never far from his thoughts. In medieval Scotland, military capability was a prerequisite for leadership. With pressure both external and internal, any leader worth his title had to be prepared to defend it by any means necessary. In 1020, Macbeth's father was killed

in a dynastic dispute, quite possibly by his nephews, ready for a power grab of their own. At this time in Scottish history, titles were passed down between branches of a family in a system of alternating succession. In all likelihood, the teenaged Macbeth fled for his safety, and it's here that he appears in the historical record for the first time alongside King Malcolm II. Macbeth's murderous cousins took their turn with the title of Mormare of Moray, but their luck didn't hold. One cousin died in 1029, the other followed in 1032. The last one died violently and almost certainly at the hands of his cousin Macbeth, a son's delayed revenge for his father's death. Macbeth claimed the Moormare

ship for himself and married his cousin's widow, Grouch. She brought with her a child from her first marriage, a boy named Lulach. Macbeth adopted him, eventually naming the boy as his heir, a detail that suggests that Macbeth and Gruach never had any children of their own during their marriage. Then, in 1034, King Malcolm II died, most likely in battle.

He left no sons, but the throne passed to his grandson Duncan. breaking with the tradition of alternating succession and ushering the practice of primogeniture, direct inheritance down the bloodline. Duncan hadn't earned his crown so much as he'd inherited it, and his reign shows it. By all accounts, he struggled with the title of king and struggled to maintain the throne.

Trouble pressed in from every side. Viking raids came in from the sea, while Northumbrian forces attacked from the south. Whether Macbeth fought at Duncan's side during these conflicts or stayed quiet out in Moray isn't clear. What is clear is where his attention was fixed. On the throne that, by his own reckoning, should have been his. it wouldn't be long before he would take matters into his own hands.

Shakespeare portrays Macbeth as a brave general in Duncan's army, a loyal subject whose murderous ambitions are drawn out thanks to his wife and a trio of witches whose prophecies pull him down a dark and, ultimately, spoiler alert, fatal path. In reality, Duncan was a, for lack of a better phrase, chronic bag fumbler, racking up defeats across the country and putting the entire kingdom at risk. A king who couldn't defend his borders in an age where martial success was basically a prerequisite for legitimacy was a king whose grip on the throne was growing weaker by the year. and Macbeth, whether watching from Moray or from within Duncan's own camp, was ready to make a move. In Macbeth, Man and Myth,

Aitchison lays out three factors that likely drove Macbeth toward regicide, and together the factors paint a picture of a man who saw the throne as a rightful claim finally being asserted. The first was dissent. Macbeth was of noble blood, a member of the aristocratic ruling dynasty of Moray and very possibly a grandson of Malcolm II. Under the old system of alternating succession, he would have been a serious contender for the throne in his own right. It was only Malcolm's decision to break with that tradition and hand the throne directly to his grandson Duncan that had shut Macbeth out of the running in the first place. The second factor was marriage. Macbeth's wife, Gruoth, was herself of royal blood,

a descendant of earlier Scottish kings, and her lineage brought its own claim to the throne into their union. Whether she pushed him toward the crown the way Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth famously does is impossible to know with any certainty, but it's easy enough to imagine the two of them as like-minded forces. each recognizing in the other the same ambition and each encouraging it. Like their dramatic counterparts, theirs may not have been a marriage built on romance so much as on shared appetite. The third factor was simpler and frankly more brutal, royal and martial qualities. As Aitchison puts it, quote, early Scottish kings were first and foremost, war leaders, end quote. Duncan's repeated military failures had made

it painfully, publicly clear that he wasn't up to the task. And in Macbeth's mind, there was a straightforward way to prove that he was taking the throne by force and holding it the way a king is supposed to. Murder for political gain, was nothing new in Scotland by this point. It was practically a tradition of its own. It had already claimed Macbeth's father, who likely had been killed by his own nephews in pursuit of the very same kind of advancement. Macbeth had grown up in a system of that logic. Now he was ready to use it. After a failed raid into Durham added one more embarrassment to Duncan's record, Duncan headed north into Moray, Macbeth's own province.

Had he heard rumblings of Macbeth's ambition and was looking to nip it in the bud, or was he simply looking to offload some of his shame by punishing some underling who didn't support him strongly enough? Either way, Duncan died in battle in 1040, almost certainly at the hands of Macbeth, who then took the throne. No record survives of Macbeth's coronation, but it almost certainly followed the pattern of the time, with Macbeth marking the transfer of power by taking his seat on the Stone of Destiny, a block of red sandstone that was featured in coronations of Scottish and later British monarchs for centuries. Not much is known about the reign that followed. Later accounts describe Macbeth alternately as a tyrant and as a benevolent ruler, and

the truth likely sits somewhere in between. Those accounts are shaped as much by who's doing the describing and when as they are by what Macbeth actually did while he held power. What does seem clear across the patchy record is that Macbeth was a patron of both the church and the arts and an experienced war leader who understood exactly what the throne demanded of him. By the standards of the time, Macbeth may well have been a competent king.

But for all of his strengths, Macbeth failed to finish the one piece of business that might have secured his reign for good. That piece of business? Eliminating the competition. Duncan's sons, Malcolm III and Donald, were still young boys when their father was killed, again likely at Macbeth's hands, and Macbeth tried to have them hunted down and killed before they would grow into substantial threats. The boys escaped and spent years in exile, waiting for their moment to even the scales. There is a dark symmetry here. Macbeth's own rise to power is believed to have possibly been fueled by a need to avenge his father's murder. Now the sons of the man he'd killed were carrying out the same grievance, with the same eventual reckoning waiting in

the distance. As the boys grew up, Malcolm was able to mount a legitimate opposition against Macbeth, which came to a head at the Battle of Dunsinane in 1054, also sometimes remembered as the Battle of the Seven Sleepers. Malcolm did not fight alone. He had the backing of Seward, Earl of Northumbria, acting on behalf of Edward the Confessor, then King of England. This was outside military muscle that Macbeth, isolated in his own kingdom, simply could not match. Macbeth was defeated and retreated north to his home territory of Moray.

In the aftermath, Malcolm took control of the south, and Scotland was effectively split in two, with each man holding down his half of a broken whole. The split lasted three years. In 1057, Macbeth was finally killed by Malcolm's forces at the Battle of Lumpinan. His stepson Lula, the boy he had adopted and raised as his own, was crowned king in his place, but the reign was brief.

Malcolm defeated him the following year, and in 1058, Scotland was reunified under King Malcolm III. Malcolm went out the way he had come into power, bold and bloody, but his legacy would be something that no one could have predicted. The legend of Macbeth would actually begin before Shakespeare, back when the Scottish monarch was still alive. Macbeth had begun to be mythologized during his own lifetime. Seizing a throne through violence and losing it the same way was dramatic enough material on its own without the poetry. And while Macbeth did have an arguably legitimate claim to the throne, the manner in which he asserted it was the kind of story that practically begged to be retold and embellished.

Over the following centuries, early medieval writers, Viking sagas, and no small amount of political propaganda slowly distorted Macbeth's legacy. chroniclers started folding in supernatural elements where, hem, none had existed. Political rivalries were recast as moral melodramas, with clear villains and clearer lessons. And because history tends to be written by the winners, much of this retelling laid the groundwork for a narrative that favored Malcolm's line. the one that, by the time anyone was writing anything down in earnest, happened to still be sitting on the throne. By the time Macbeth's story finally reached Shakespeare, the king was approaching slenderman status, the stuff urban legends are made of. Shakespeare's

primary source for his play was Hollandshed's Chronicles, itself already steps removed from anything resembling a contemporary record. Macbeth the play is estimated to have first been performed in 1606, during the reign of James I of England, who also, not incidentally, was James VI of Scotland, and who shared his own curious connections to earlier figures in this same saga.

Listeners of this podcast will be all too familiar with King James I, the witch-hater Bible-commissioning, male-companion-keeping son of Mary Queen of Scots. He also happened to be a descendant of Malcolm II, which put him on the winning side of this particular family drama. And if that weren't enough material for a playwright to work with, the Gunpowder Plot, a conspiracy aimed squarely at killing James and toppling his government, had taken place just the year before. All of this goes a long way toward explaining Shakespeare's artistic choices. A play featuring prophecy-wielding witches? and a plot to assassinate a Scottish king was exciting theater that just so happened to be tailor-made for the witch-hunting Scottish man with the best

seat in the house. Though, to be fair to Shakespeare, much of the mythology surrounding Macbeth, the witches included, was already baked into the story long before it reached him. Shakespeare wasn't inventing the legend, so much as giving it its final, most indelible shape. Whatever the mix of inherited myth and timely flattery that produced it, the resultant play was a hit, and an enduring one. Macbeth has been performed steadily over four centuries now, and the title role remains one of the great benchmarks for actors on stage and on screen. The play even carries its own superstition.

Actors traditionally avoid saying its name inside a theater, referring to it instead as the Scottish play. I continue this episode really hoping that doesn't apply to me here. Plays and podcasts are different, right? There's no clear origin for The Curse, but it's probably some combination of the play's dark subject matter and the genuinely high risk of injury built into its stage combat and very physical role. However the legend started, the superstition only added another layer of lore onto a story already built from layers of it.

Acheson puts it best, the life of the historical Macbeth was every bit as eventful, violent, and intriguing altogether as dramatic as that of the tragic character portrayed by Shakespeare. That this should be the case despite the severe limitations imposed by the sparse contemporary source material is all the more remarkable. When you line it all up, It's easy to see why we still talk about Macbeth, a real man who clawed his way to a throne he believed was rightfully his, only to lose the throne the same way he won it. A wife whose own royal bloodline gave her just as much of a reason to want the crown as her husband did. A dead king's sons, exiled as boys, who spent years waiting for the exact

kind of reckoning their father's killer understood better than anyone. And over five and a half centuries, all of that got filtered through chroniclers with their own agendas, sagas with their own flourishes, and finally through a playwright writing really for an audience of one. A king who hated witches, who had just survived an attempt on his own life, and who happened to share a bloodline with the winning side of the story. Simply put, Macbeth is an irresistible story, and a fascinating example of the game of telephone that medieval history can be prone to. The myth didn't replace the man so much as it grew out of him.

with each retelling adding one more layer of drama, or magic, to a life that, it turns out, hardly needed the embellishment in the first place. At one point, Abraham Lincoln even declared Macbeth his favorite play. But, to be fair, O Mary hadn't been written yet. That's the story of the real Macbeth, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear about the strange and legendary pilgrimage Macbeth took to mainland Europe during his lifetime. One of the more curious footnotes of Macbeth's reign, and one that is not represented in Shakespeare's play, is his pilgrimage to Rome.

By modern standards, this was an enormous undertaking. Weeks of travel across hostile and unpredictable terrain, through foreign courts and uncertain alliances, just to reach the seat of the church. And yet Macbeth was hardly unusual in making the trip. Plenty of 11th century kings did the same, treating the journey to Rome as something close to a rite of passage, a way of connecting their earthly crown to something larger and more permanent than themselves. But why did Macbeth go to Rome? Was this a genuine act of faith? A man who had finally grasped the destiny of he believed was owed to him, making good on the debt to God for getting him there? Or was it political maneuvering dressed up as devotion? A trip to Rome would have

put Macbeth directly in front of the church's highest authority, an opportunity to align himself with Christendom's power structure and claim a kind of divine sanction from that no amount of fighting at home could buy him. For a king whose claim to the throne, however legitimate by the old rules, had been seized through violence rather than inherited peacefully, that kind of blessing might have been worth the journey all on its own. Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim & Mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz. Writers for Noble Blood are Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Paul Jaffe, Natasha Lasky, and me, Dana Schwartz. The show is edited and produced by Jesse

Funk and Gnomes Grippen, with supervising producer Rima Ilkayali, and executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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