FROM STRATFORD-UPON-AVON

“HE’S FRAMED, there’s no doubt about it. To expose his inner treason, the witches hex him into believing he killed Duncan, who remember, is never actually seen dead in the play. Nor is Lady Macbeth either. Smacks of a Mission:Impossible episode, I’d say. Don’t you see? Shakespeare, always a secret Catholic, is trying to highlight the idea those accused of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot against King James 1 were all actually victims of a kind of false flag operation conducted by the king’s chief enforcer, Robert Cecil. Macbeth in his way, is as much a useful idiot as the plotters were.”

This is the theory of Sir Mark Olivier-Rathbone-Warwick, actor, director and radical Shakespeare scholar. And it has caused shock-waves in the theatrical community.

“We all know the superficial links between Macbeth and the Gunpowder Plot – the Scottish king and all that equivocation nonsense. Some even say it’s really a get out of jail card for Shakespeare’s secret adherence to the old faith. Perhaps. But I go further. I see the play as a clever attempt to expose what really happened in 1605. The witches – and maybe even Lady Macbeth – are metaphors for Robert Cecil’s agents, manipulating Guy Fawkes and the other Gunpowder plotters into their attempt on the life of James 1, to expose their treason. Like them, Macbeth is a dupe. Malcolm and Duncan are essentially the same person, the king. Indeed, Malcolm’s return is really a metaphor for his own father’s return to his rightful throne after the traitorous Macbeth has been exposed. All the rest is back-fill. Shakespeare’s genius is that he got away with it.”

Shakespeare lovers who take the bard at his word are up in arms.

“Tripe,” says J. Loveless-Kittenbrain, whose failed attempt to mime all of Shakespeare’s plays, one after the other, at the Edinburgh Festival caused a street riot. “The Scottish play (actors never call Macbeth by its title as it’s said to be bad luck to do so) is a simple morality trip, an homage to rightful kingship. The regicide gets what’s coming to him. It’s merely a genuine pledge of allegance to Shakespeare’s new patron, King James 1, no more. But I bet he never tried to deliver it through mime.”

“Witless Roman Catholic propaganda,” says Belfast Shakespearean expert Professor Johann Luther Howling-Breadstick, of the new theory. “Shakespeare a secret papist? That codswallop has been doing the rounds for years. It’s blasphemy. Treason. May the Lord in His Mercy be kind to this man, because I never will be.”

Scholars who don’t believe Shakespeare actually wrote the plays attributed to him are more entertaining of the new idea.

Dr Hugh Manofwar, who is convinced he wrote the plays in a previous life, says it’s entirely consistent with many of his own arguments. “But I shall enter hypnosis and question my other self as to what exactly was behind Macbeth, just to be sure.”

Speaking from her theatrical retirement home, the great Ms Lillybeth Rumptious-Soundbite, OBE, whose performance as Ophelia in Hamlet won an Academy Award for best scenery chewing back in 1945, insists that such arguments are all pointless, as Shakespeare can only be really understood in its original Sanskrit. “The plays are all direct copies from Hindu legend. There’s not a single addition from William Shakespeare. He was a high-end hustler, nothing more. So roll on new ideas, for all their worth.”