Witches and Jesuits

In this tour de force of scholarship and imagination, Garry Wills reinterprets Macbeth by returning it to the context of its own time, recreating the burning theological and political crises of Shakespeare's era. Revealing how deeply the plays's original 1606 audiences would have been affected by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, he argues that the treason and necromancy in Macbeth were more than the imaginings of a gifted playwright - they were dramatizations of an atmosphere in which witches, Jesuits, and political conspiracy predominated people's thinking.