Macbeth: Hissing the Speaker, Scotland and the Union
Sir Lewes Lewkenor was hissed in Parliament, participated in the debates over James I’s proposed Union with Scotland, and wrote about soldiers, traitors and supernatural foreknowledge. His experiences illuminate the political world of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy.
Hissing the Speaker
Before Shakespeare’s Macbeth appeared, Sir Lewes Lewkenor had already experienced the indignity of being hissed in Parliament.
In 1604, during the opening session of James I’s first Parliament, Lewkenor represented Bridgnorth and participated actively in the proceedings of the House of Commons.
He had been appointed to the Committee for Privileges, but his early parliamentary interventions did not pass without disturbance.
The parliamentary record describes:
Hissing in the House; Coughing down a member not allowed.
The Speaker intervened, warning that:
whoever hisseth or disturbeth any speech hearafter, shall be called to the bar
The disturbance was recorded as:
Growing upon Sir Lewis Lewkenor’s speech.
The spelling of Lewkenor’s name in this quotation follows the contemporary parliamentary record.
The incident was sufficiently serious for the Speaker to warn members against interrupting parliamentary speeches through hissing and coughing.
Yet Lewkenor was to encounter the same problem again.
The foreign ambassador and the second disturbance
On 28 June 1604 the House of Commons was considering Sir Edward Hoby’s proposal that members should express sympathy for the King following a hunting accident.
Lewkenor intervened in the debate, explaining that he had recently spoken with a foreign ambassador.
The parliamentary record states:
Sir Lewes Lewkenor interposeth a Speech
Lewkenor referred to a:
late Conference
with the ambassador and attempted to remind the House of the King’s letter concerning subsidy.
Richard Martin objected to the interruption, and the members again resorted to hissing.
The Speaker intervened, condemning:
Hissing in the House; as not beseeming the Gravity of the Assembly, derogating from the Dignity of it, and from the Privileges, more than any other Abuse whatsoever.
Here we have a remarkable conjunction of Lewkenor’s two public responsibilities.
As Master of the Ceremonies, he was engaged in conversations with foreign ambassadors. As a member of Parliament, he attempted to bring matters arising from those conversations before the Commons.
His intervention provoked a disturbance serious enough to require the Speaker’s authority.
The words hissing, speech and Speaker appear together in the parliamentary record surrounding Lewkenor.
Shakespeare’s hissing speaker
In Macbeth, Ross describes the succession of alarming events following Duncan’s murder:
That of an hour’s age doth hiss the speaker;
Each minute teems a new one.
The correspondence with Lewkenor’s parliamentary experience is particularly arresting.
The parliamentary records describe a speaker being hissed; Shakespeare compresses the same action into the phrase:
hiss the speaker
Shakespeare was evidently fond of the image.
In The Tempest, Caliban cries:
Do hiss me into madness.
In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes imagines a public accusation that:
Will hiss me to my grave.
But the phrase in Macbeth has a particular significance because it brings together the very words associated with Lewkenor’s parliamentary humiliation.
The historical incident took place in 1604, during the period immediately preceding the probable composition of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy.
It is a small detail, but an unusually vivid one: a member of James I’s Parliament, already connected with the court’s diplomatic world, was twice subjected to precisely the form of public interruption Shakespeare describes.
Lewkenor and the Union with Scotland
Lewkenor’s parliamentary experience also connects him with the principal political question surrounding James I’s accession: the proposed Union of England and Scotland.
James VI of Scotland had inherited the English throne in 1603, becoming James I of England.
The two kingdoms now shared a monarch, but they retained separate laws, institutions and political identities.
James wished to establish a closer Union, a project that generated extensive debate in Parliament.
On 28 April 1604 Lewkenor was among those appointed to manage:
matter of estate foreign or matter of intercourse
at the conference with the House of Lords concerning the Union.
The committee included Francis Bacon and Sir Henry Neville.
Scottish government and the relationship between the two kingdoms had therefore become part of Lewkenor’s parliamentary business.
This is important because Macbeth was not simply an old Scottish story presented for the amusement of a Scottish king.
It was a drama about sovereignty, allegiance, succession and the legitimacy of royal power, performed in a kingdom where precisely those questions had acquired new political urgency.
Banquo and the Stuart succession
Shakespeare adapted the story of Macbeth from the Scottish historical tradition, particularly the account preserved in Holinshed’s Chronicles.
But the playwright’s treatment of Banquo is particularly significant.
In the chronicle tradition Banquo was implicated in Macbeth’s conspiracy against Duncan. Shakespeare transforms him into a figure of greater moral integrity, while preserving the prophecy that his descendants will become kings.
The witches tell Banquo:
Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.
Later Macbeth witnesses a procession of kings descended from Banquo.
The eighth carries a glass revealing still more royal figures, while others appear bearing:
twofold balls and treble sceptres
The scene directs the Scottish past towards the dynastic present of James I.
James claimed descent from Banquo, and the prophecy becomes a theatrical celebration of the Stuart succession.
The imagery of multiple crowns also speaks to the political problem of a monarch ruling more than one kingdom.
Lewkenor had participated in the parliamentary debates concerning that very question.
His involvement places him within the political circumstances through which Shakespeare’s adaptation of Scottish history acquires its contemporary significance.
The Gunpowder Plot and the crisis of allegiance
Between the parliamentary debates of 1604 and the probable appearance of Macbeth came the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605.
The conspirators intended to destroy James I, the House of Lords and the House of Commons at the opening of Parliament.
Lewkenor belonged to the Parliament that was threatened, while his earlier military and religious experiences had brought him into contact with the wider world of English Catholics serving foreign powers.
Guy Fawkes had served in the Low Countries, a military environment familiar from Lewkenor’s own career.
Lewkenor’s Estate of English Fugitives had already explored the dangers of divided allegiance, religious exile and English soldiers serving Catholic rulers abroad.
In the aftermath of the Plot, these questions became matters of immediate national security.
The government had to distinguish loyalty from conspiracy, religious conviction from treason, and foreign diplomacy from potential interference in English affairs.
For the Master of the Ceremonies, responsible for receiving foreign ambassadors, such anxieties belonged directly to the political atmosphere of his office.
The equivocator at the gate
The Gunpowder Plot also gave renewed significance to the problem of equivocation.
In Macbeth, the Porter imagines himself guarding the gate of hell.
Among those seeking admission is an equivocator:
Here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale.
The joke belongs to the intense controversy surrounding religious allegiance and the interpretation of oaths.
But equivocation is not confined to the Porter’s comic scene.
It becomes one of the structural principles of the tragedy.
The witches repeatedly speak words that are true but calculated to deceive Macbeth through his interpretation of them.
They tell him:
none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth
They also promise that he will remain secure until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane.
Macbeth interprets these statements as guarantees of invulnerability.
But the prophecies are fulfilled in ways he has failed to imagine.
The witches do not need to lie. Macbeth destroys himself by mistaking ambiguous truths for absolute promises.
In a political culture preoccupied with equivocation, conspiracy and the meaning of sworn allegiance, the dramatic mechanism possessed particular force.
The Spanish Mandeville and dangerous foreknowledge
Lewkenor had entered another part of Macbeth‘s imaginative world before James I inherited the English throne.
In 1600 he published The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles, a translation associated with the extraordinary literature of Antonio de Torquemada.
The work belongs to a European tradition fascinated by supernatural marvels, prophecy, spirits, witchcraft, necromancy and hidden causes.
These subjects were not remote curiosities in the intellectual world of the early seventeenth century.
James VI had himself written Daemonologie, published in 1597, discussing witchcraft and the activities of supernatural powers.
Shakespeare’s witches therefore belonged to a world of intense contemporary interest, both literary and political.
The most destructive gift the witches offer Macbeth is information.
They do not command him to murder Duncan.
They announce a possible future:
All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!
Macbeth supplies the murderous interpretation himself.
Knowledge of the future becomes dangerous because he cannot resist attempting to control it.
His tragedy develops from the desire to convert prophecy into certainty.
Lewkenor’s Spanish Mandeville inhabits the same intellectual territory: the human appetite for knowledge beyond ordinary perception and the disturbing consequences of encountering hidden powers.
The soldier and the traitor
Before Macbeth becomes a murderer, Shakespeare presents him as a celebrated soldier.
He is:
brave Macbeth
His courage has helped preserve Duncan’s kingdom against rebellion and foreign invasion.
Yet the tragedy does not remove his military skill or courage when he turns against the King.
It changes the allegiance governing them.
This distinction belongs directly to the world described in Lewkenor’s Estate of English Fugitives.
Lewkenor writes about soldiers, exiles and Englishmen whose service to foreign princes raises the question of when martial honour becomes political betrayal.
A soldier may retain extraordinary courage after abandoning the authority that once made his violence honourable.
That is precisely Macbeth’s transformation.
The warrior who kills rebels for his king becomes the man who murders the king.
By the end Malcolm calls him:
this dead butcher
His capacity for violence has not disappeared. Its political meaning has been reversed.
Lewkenor’s experience of Low Countries captains, defectors, foreign service and disputed allegiance supplies a contemporary military world in which Shakespeare’s distinction between courage and loyalty becomes especially vivid.
The Scottish tragedy and the Jacobean court
The connections between Lewkenor and Macbeth therefore extend across several distinct kinds of evidence.
His parliamentary humiliation supplies the striking correspondence of the hissing speaker.
His involvement in the Scottish Union places him among those debating the constitutional consequences of James I’s accession.
His earlier writings on English fugitives and foreign soldiers illuminate the tragedy’s central distinction between military honour and political treachery.
His Spanish Mandeville belongs to the supernatural literature surrounding prophecy and witchcraft.
And his responsibilities as Master of the Ceremonies placed him within the courtly and diplomatic world in which the Gunpowder Plot, foreign allegiance and royal succession were matters of immediate importance.
These connections are not repetitions of the Venetian material already examined in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, or the governmental questions explored in Measure for Measure.
They reveal another dimension of Lewkenor’s experience: the soldier and royal officer participating in the constitutional and political transformation of England under its new Scottish monarch.
Macbeth asks what happens when courage is separated from loyalty, prophecy from judgement and royal power from legitimate succession.
Lewkenor’s career had brought him into direct contact with all three problems.
Continue:
Henry V — The Soldier’s Voice →
Sources and Further Reading
The Journals of the House of Commons, 1604, including the disturbances during Sir Lewes Lewkenor’s parliamentary speeches and the proceedings concerning the proposed Union with Scotland.
Sir Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), accounts of foreign military service, divided allegiance and the careers of English soldiers abroad.
Sir Lewes Lewkenor, The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles (1600), supernatural marvels, prophecy and hidden causes.
Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles, Scottish history; James VI, Daemonologie (1597); Shakespeare, Macbeth.
The Master of the Ceremonies, 18 October 2026 manuscript, chapter “Macbeth: Hissing the Speaker,” including the Scottish Union, Gunpowder Plot, equivocation, supernatural literature and military allegiance.