The Real Lady Macbeth with Val McDermid

Lady Macbeth is best known to us as Shakespeare’s scheming, sleepwalking villain. But, as with most of his so-called history plays, Shakespeare’s version of the Macbeths is largely fictional. Dr. Eleanor Janega talks to the best-selling crime writer - and Gone Medieval fan - Val McDermid who has dragged the truth about the real Queen Macbeth out of the shadows to reveal a woman caught up in the patriarchal prejudices and vicious political intrigues of her time. Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. The audio editor and producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Yarnagger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

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• 2:06Speaker 03

  Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  A thousand years ago, in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three companions. The men hunting her are determined to kill her because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  She is no ordinary lady. She's the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  "Hang on a moment," I hear you say. "Is that the same Lady Macbeth who dies after sleepwalking?" Well, yes and no. Nor are the three companions with her witches. They are a healer, a weaver, and a seer. As with most of his so-called history plays, Shakespeare conjured up a myth about the Macbeths as murderous conspirators. To be fair to the bard, he was using some pretty dodgy sources. And he also had audiences to entertain and a king obsessed with witches to keep on the right side of. But now, the brilliant, bestselling crime writer Val McDermott has dragged the truth about Lady Macbeth out of the shadows. In her new novella, Queen Macbeth, Val McDermott has set out

• 3:50Speaker 03

  to overturn Shakespeare's propaganda and present us with a woman caught up in the patriarchal prejudices and vicious political intrigues of her time. And I am delighted that Val McDermott is joining me on Gone Medieval today to tell us about the real Queen Macbeth.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  So first of all, Val, welcome to Gone Medieval.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  It's a delight to be here. I feel we need to fangirl a little bit, you know?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Okay, so that makes two of us. We're doing well. So if we could just, you know, be calm enough to actually talk today. I'm really excited because, you know, this is a household name, Lady Macbeth, but for fictive reasons. And you've actually gone and done some actual historical work, which is amazing. And I'm going to start you off with kind of a more personal question, which is, how did you make the decision to start writing about Lady Macbeth?

• 4:47Speaker 04

  Well, the decision was kind of made for me. Berlin, my publishers, have a series of novellas which look at aspects of Scottish history or Scottish mythology that's informed who we are today. And they've asked writers of fiction to go back and look at the stories to see how much is actually rooted in fact and how we would approach it. And I was given a completely blank slate. They said, you can set it in the present day. Given the state of Scottish politics, I thought writing about a strong woman leader was maybe not the way to go. And they said, you can set it in the historic period, or you can set it against the Shakespeare. And I thought it was a no brainer, really, because I knew enough to know that Shakespeare was not, so we say, historically accurate.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, just slightly, slightly.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Okay, so what is your perception of Lady Macbeth in the Shakespearean version? You know, when you meet her, what do you think of her?

• 5:38Speaker 04

  You think of her as overreaching, ambitious, pushy, domineering, running the show, basically, and running it in not a very good way. Seeking power, seeking privilege, and not a very nice person at all. And then, of course, she has the breakdown and becomes a complete nutter.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  But you know, one of the great nutters of history, which we very much like. But I think you're right. She's a really difficult woman. And I kind of always enjoy it when there are difficult women in history or fiction, because it sort of goes against the grain slightly in that often one expects women to be behaving well. But, you know, it's Shakespearean. It's so over the top. Here's a woman that we have made up to reflect all of our concerns about what femininity could be, that it can stick in the craw a bit.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  She is basically the villain of the piece. She pushes her husband into doing something he doesn't really want to do. And she's responsible for, you know, the death of a king and the ruination of a kingdom. And it's just not true.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  Okay, so were you surprised when you started digging into the real Queen Macbeth? You know, this is your starting point, right?

• 6:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was surprised. I was surprised because the Macbeths were not a hated tyranny for a start. The Macbeths were loved and respected by their people. They ruled for 17 years. Now, in the Middle Ages, you didn't get to rule for 17 years if your people didn't like you. Because the next kingdom over would come in and take you over. There would be people being killed and murdered and slain on the battlefield. You just didn't get 17 year run at it. They were so secure in their kingdom that at one point, they went off to Rome on a pilgrimage and left a regent in charge and came back and the kingdom was, oh, still there. They weren't overthrown by their people. They weren't the victims of an uprising against their tyrannical ways. You know, it was somebody who came in from the outside and said, I'm having your throne.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  As it so often was in the Middle Ages, that's how it happened.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  Okay, in the person of Lady Macbeth, what do we know about her? Do we have, you know, an idea of her early life at all?

• 7:41Speaker 04

  She was brought up in a household that was descended from the great King of Scotland, King of Calpin, from whom all the sort of rules of Scotland were essentially descended one way or another. So her father was in the direct line. And so she would have been brought up in, you know, a relatively comfortable existence insofar as anybody could be comfortable in those days. It wasn't the time of great luxury and delight.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  No.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  And then she married Gilly Comigan, who was the Mormour of Murray, which is basically the Earl of Murray. And so she went from being, you know, that sort of lassie of the household to being the mistress of the household. And he was, by all accounts, a sort of pretty coarse man, not a nice guy by and large. It was a dynastic marriage. It was a marriage to cement everybody's place in the hierarchy. So because she was of the royal line, she was the right kind of person for him to marry. So she went from being as the beloved daughter of the house to being the useful wife. What happened to Gilly Comigan is an interesting story as well. He got his Mormourship by supposedly conspiring with Malcolm to kill Macbeth's father.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  And the Mormourship, which theoretically should have gone to Macbeth, but things didn't go in the direct line of deceit, things went in the line of conquest. That became Gilly Comigan's place in society. He became the Mormour of Murray and Macbeth was sent off to the sidelines effectively to live in his banqueting hall in Mull. And then Macbeth came to the court to pay his obeisance to Gilly Comigan, you know, because he was a kinsman and therefore to say, my men are at your disposal should you need them. And in my book, that's the point where he encounters Grueach, which is her real name. And I chose to make this a love at first sight moment. She'd never seen anybody like him. He was by all accounts quite flamboyant. He was handsome, he was red headed, a man of spirit, I think it's fair to say.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  It seemed to me that it was entirely possible that faced with a dynastic marriage that she wasn't very keen on, and this handsome, vibrant man comes to the court to pay his respects. It's not surprising if there was a sudden moment of, oh my God, he's much nicer.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, this is kind of the classic medieval way of looking at romance, isn't it? You know, this is what we get in courtly love literature up and down the block because you have women who are in weird marriages as a result of having to be because it's the right thing for your family. And then some handsome young thing comes along and it destabilizes everything, doesn't it? So really, that's the traditional way to look at things.

• 10:06Speaker 04

  And a handsome young man who in a sense has a right to the position that your husband occupies. And then there's a very strange occurrence that Gilly Comigan is celebrating a banquet in his banqueting hall with his 50 closest guard. And the place burns down and they all die.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Which is an absolute tragedy, except that that then means that Macbeth can move in on the widow.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Tragedy for whom, I suppose is the question here.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  Isn't it a tragedy? It sounds absolutely appalling to us in the modern way. We're horrified when we read about it happening in Kosovo in the 90s, and quite rightly so. And part of me is horrified that this is how Macbeth came to the throne. But on the other hand, if it hadn't have been them, it would have been somebody else. People didn't sit around the table and negotiate and say like, you know, I really fancy your wife, you're gonna get a divorce.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, that it happens not so often, you know? And also it is one of these things too where a fiery, you know, that is real good plausible deniability because it's really difficult for us now to understand and get our heads around just how often things burnt down.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Yes. It would have been a wooden building and late at night, they'd all have been pissed. Nobody would have probably noticed the fire till they were, oh, my tunax on fire.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Is it very convenient?

• 11:15Speaker 04

  Very convenient for Grúach and Macbeth.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  I would argue that that is quite convenient.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  Well, yes. And there's also the question of Grúach's son, Lulach, who is assumed at the time was the son of Gilly Comoghan. But I suspect may well have been the son of Macbeth. Macbeth adopted him as his son and made him his heir.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Hmm. There is always this sort of slippage that's going on behind the scenes, you know, there are various heirs moving in and out. There are various intrigues and especially around the time that we're talking, because this is what, the early 11th century? Things are a bit looser. I mean, all you've got to do is look down to England and see what's going on with this succession on the throne there to see that things get shook up really quickly sometimes.

• 11:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was no newspapers. There was no communication other than word of mouth, really, particularly in Scotland at that time. So you just needed one person to go about saying, this is the case. I know this to be the case. And something became the case. So it was an interesting time. Macbeth and his wife assumed that the throne of their kingdom. In the course of time, they expanded the kingdom to take over Alaba. And it was actually the first step on the way to what's modern Scotland. They were not, by any accounts, tyrannical. They seemed to have been loved by the people, which would suggest that they behaved with a degree of fairness towards them, which was not a given in the Middle Ages at all.

• 12:37Speaker 04

  And this was an interesting notion to pursue and a direct opposition to Shakespeare's view of them. I mean, he just made it up.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  And I guess this is my question, right? Is this a case of Shakespeare just not getting hold of the correct sources? Or is this just Shakespeare having a nice time and writing some fiction, do you think? I mean, is he using unreliable sources or is he himself just dabbling?

• 13:00Speaker 04

  I think he came across at least one unreliable source and thought, oh, that'll make a good drama.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 13:06Speaker 04

  In fairness, speaking as a writer of fiction myself, if I was researching a particular historical period, and there were three accounts that said nothing happened, and one account that said this happened. I'd go for the one that said this happened.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  It's a lot sexier, isn't it? But then you have this really interesting story. Of the warriors dying, of this fire, of something that can be interpreted, if one wishes to, as foul play. And did you kind of think that you were going to find anything like that when you started scratching around yourself?

• 13:39Speaker 04

  I didn't really, because I didn't know enough about it. There's not a lot to know about the historical period, it should be said. Scotland in the 10th century is, in many respects, a blank canvas for reasons that I'll explain, because it actually have a bearing on what I wrote. I had written this plot, this story, and at one point, it's quite crucial that messages are exchanged between two people in different places. So not unreasonably, I had notes being written and sent off by a trusted messenger, and I submitted my first draft. And Hugh Andrew, who's the publisher at Berlin, said, "There's a slight problem with this." I said, "What's the problem, Hugh?" He said, "Well, there wasn't paper in 10th century Scotland. We don't have anything like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in Scotland, because there was no paper.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  All we do have is sort of monkish chronicles, which don't really have a great deal of connection to the daily lives of the kingdom." So that's one of the reasons why there's a big blanks in the day-to-day history of Scotland. We kind of know the big events, because the monks will have written about the big event, but not the nuts and bolts of how things happened within that big picture. So I had to go away and find another means of communication. So I thought, what did people know about it at the time? How could they communicate? And I was discussing this. It so happened I was having dinner that evening with my partner, Nicholas Sturgeon, who, you know, you might say is another strong Scottish woman. And in the course of that conversation, we were all disagreed about who actually suggested it first. We did come up with a solution, which was to use the language of plants.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Hmm, I love this.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  People did know and understood. They didn't just randomly send you a bunch of flowers. They'd send you a bunch of flowers that had a meaning. So I thought this was a good way of having a communication between Bruach and Macbeth when they were separated by a big distance. I got my lesson in history there. I did have another situation where Hugh disagreed with me, but I was able to make a valid argument. At some point, I have them cooking with ginger. Ginger was in one of the things they're eating or drinking. And Hugh goes, "I don't think they would have had ginger in 10th century Scotland." And I said, well, I think they might have had, because the Romans got a long way up Scotland. I mean, people think that Hadrian's Wall was as far as they got, but they didn't. They got much further north than that. And the Romans brought herbs and spices that we hadn't had before. And the climate in Scotland would allow you to grow ginger.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  So I made this argument and to absolutely nail this argument, I got in touch with Mary Beard and said, Mary. And she said, that's entirely plausible.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Yes, thank you, Mary.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  And what to say from my previous historical research is entirely plausible is enough for me.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  Listen, all we need is plausible when we are having a nice time. This is what I would say. And also I think you're spot on because ginger was such a big deal for the aristocracy. You know, it was a way of showing that one had refined taste. And so you would have got hold of it one way or another, even if the Romans hadn't brought it up. If you heard that people had it further south or somewhere else, you would go get it.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  And make an attempt. So I'm with you on this one.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  And it's also clear that we did have trading contacts with Europe, particularly the Scots. We had good relationships with mainland Europe. From Fife, we had connections to the Low Countries and to Russia. Further south, we had connections down into the continent. And of course, Macbeth and Gruulak actually went to Rome on their pilgrimage, which must have been absolutely astonishing.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Imagine.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  To go from Scotland, where everything was built with wood, except great big stone castles. And to go to Rome and see what you could do with stone, the cultural life, the warmth, the sunshine, the food. It must have been just astonishing.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  I always love this because whenever you get travel accounts, for example, as a result of the old alliance, you often have French knights that are going up to Scotland.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  And to a man, they're all kind of like, oh, it's quite cold, you know, the entire time, which always makes me laugh. You know, they're used to, you know, pausing about in southern France and then they have a bit of an awakening when they get to the Highlands.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  God, yeah. So these were all things that I was able to sort of argue for and to absorb. And I really enjoyed writing it. I really enjoyed digging into what I could find out. And that's where Gone Medieval came in. And I found myself checking through your back podcasts to find out what people were eating, what people were wearing. What their attitudes to sex were, what their attitudes were to relationships. And that was immensely helpful because you'd done all the work for me.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  Well, we're here to be of service. Let's just say that.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And you were of service. It was great. So I was able to, you know, concoct menus and particularly to do with the plants and the medications. Because instead of Shakespeare's three witches, I gave Gruach three serving women, three women that have been with her since childhood. And as would have been the case at the time, when she moved from her father's court to Gillicomigin's court, she took her women with her. That was her power base. That was her source of information. That was her, her way into the new court that she was going to. And so I gave her these, these three women, one who's very practical and one who's good with plants and medicines and is viewed as a sort of witch because she can cure you when you're sick, and one who's just in touch with things.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  And so these three women are at her side throughout and they stay with her almost to the bitter end. And that is her source of support. And they have their serving man Angus, who is there to do the things that the women are not able to do because of societal or physical capabilities. And that's her wee miniature court. They were there. That was her team. And I think it's something that as a writer of crime fiction, I have always been conscious of from my earliest days. The thing that I found really difficult about the new wave of feminist crime fiction in the 1980s was you had all these women who were private eyes or whatever, and they were loners. They were just like the men. They were mavericks. They had no friends.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  And I thought, that is not how my life as a woman works. You know, I don't have this situation where I don't have people around me that I can turn to. And so I, right from the very start, I always created female protagonists who had a group of people around them, a group of women mostly around them, who they could turn to when they needed help. You know, if they needed to know something about the law, they had a friend who was a lawyer. If they needed something to do with police, they had a friend who was a police officer. Whatever they did to investigate, they had a way in through their circle of friends. And I think this is how women operate. This is how women have always operated, regardless of whether it's the Middle Ages or the 21st century. We know who we trust.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  I think that this is such an important point because one of the things that, you know, forgive me if I launch into a rant that I've made on this podcast many times, but one of the things that often frustrates me when we look at historical figures who are women is we celebrate and uphold women that we perceive to be doing things in a masculine way. So the minute a woman grabs a sword, we're like, oh, this is amazing. What an incredible woman. She's so strong. But, you know, if a woman quietly wields power in a way that traditionally one would expect her to, that's not interesting. We don't find it interesting when queens are having massive diplomatic power and sending their ladies out to broker deals behind the scenes. And I think that's interesting. You know, I think it's cool, you know?

• 20:47Speaker 04

  I think it's more interesting because it's the way that men don't wield power. So often it's about, let's get the swords out and let's kill each other on the battlefield. But as the women like Grueach and her women weave their way in and out of the scenes, often completely unnoticed because they're just women. And that gives them a power that the guy who's swaggering with his sword never has because he's obvious. And I like the sort of idea of the subtle power and the subtle stuff that they can do behind the scenes and exercising what they generally see as the good for not just for themselves, but for the tribe, if you like, for the clan. And that the Macbeths treated their people, I think, well, is evidenced by the fact that they didn't have interior rebellions.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  There's no evidence of any uprising against them from their own people in the historical record. And I think there probably would be if there had been, because there's lots of stuff in the record about other people being overthrown, kingdoms falling and rising. So I took that as license to have them do what they do.

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• 25:18Speaker 03

  OK, this is something I wanted to ask you about because one of the things I love about the book is that you've really challenged Shakespeare's version of events in very many ways. And we've already got on to some of that, just handmaidens as opposed to, you know, witches. But you, in very many ways, rewrite this very convenient narrative of Shakespeare's. You know, one of the ways that he presents Lady Macbeth, for example, is that, you know, she's this bitter, barren shrew. Just a horrible woman that everyone hates. And you, on the other hand, have Grok here, and she's politically astute. Is this something that you assess as a result of the fact that we have these, you know, fairly happy subjects, that we have not a lot of evidence to the contrary? I mean, how are we getting here?

• 26:03Speaker 04

  Well, I got the important because it's used to uprisings led by somebody coming in from the outside to say, I'm gonna have your throne, and your people will have a much better time with me. There was none of that going on, as far as we can tell, in the Macbeth's history. And there were plenty of people... People who wanted to go, wanted to take a puppet in the throne that he had. And in the end, that's what overthrew him was Malcolm coming after him. But I think it's reasonable to make these assumptions that this was a stable kingdom. Cause there's no evidence to the contrary. And there probably would be evidence to the contrary. I mean, what we know about that period of history is usually things like Malcolm slew Kenneth and Kenneth slew Malcolm. Which is actually one of the weird lines I found in the historical record. And you think, which Malcolm? Who killed you? Who's still alive at the end of this? You know, there weren't many names to go around.

• 26:46Speaker 04

  But I think in many respects, the assumptions I made are not without substance. You know, I think it was quite clear that this was of the kingdoms at the time relatively stable. I mean, there are things that Shakespeare wrote that we do know to be the case. You know, we know that Macbeth slew Duncan. He did not kill him up the back stairs in the middle of the night in his castle. He slew him on the battlefield. That's what happened. And that's what always happened in the Middle Ages by and large is people got into a fight in the battlefield, killed each other, whatever. Malcolm slew Kenneth, Kenneth slew Malcolm. But this is what happened. That it wasn't a conspiracy up the back stairs. We know that to be the case for the start. And we also know that she wasn't a barren shrew. She had a son, Lulach, who succeeded to the throne. I mean, I think this went off the case, you know, we all know, we've all seen it in our lives.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  You know, powerful couple who have a child who's a complete waste of space.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of that about in the Middle Ages.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, Lulach really was a bit of a waste of space. Um, you know, I mean, you can see his parents going, when is he ever going to grow up? When's he gonna go out and kill someone on the battlefield?

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Come on now.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  Come on, son, you've been brought up properly. So, yeah, I think Lulach was a disappointment. You know, you might not have been going about saying to everyone, here's my son Lulach, isn't he amazing?

• 27:53Speaker 03

  You know, because to a certain extent, you would say, I don't understand what the problem is by having like a big fight scene on a battlefield. With Macbeth going after Duncan and killing him. But then it's a bit of a fizzle, isn't it? It's like, ah, and then the son was kind of a nobody and hmm, nevermind.

• 28:10Speaker 04

  You have to work within the parameters of the period as well. You can't just rip up the history book insofar as there is a history book. I got a bit of form for this before. I did a book some years ago called The Grave Tattoo. Which is a contemporary thriller, but it's set against the mutiny on the bounty and its aftermath. Because what I didn't know in. I discovered serendipitously that William Wordsworth and Fletcher Christian were at school together.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  What?

• 28:30Speaker 04

  Yes, William Wordsworth and Fletcher Christian were at the same small primary school in the Lake District together. And there was a strong rumor and persistent rumor that Fletcher Christian did not die on Pitcairn, but that he came back and was appalled and astonished to find that he was a wanted man with price on his head. Because as far as he knew, the last he'd done was set Bligh adrift in a boat with land in sight. He wasn't doing that Bligh was going to make this mad voyage across the Pacific. And so I thought, this is really interesting because there's no grave for Fletcher Christian on Pitcairn. There's graves for most of the mutineers, but not Fletcher Christian. So I started with this as my starting point and read everything I could get my hands on about the Mutiny on the Bounty and its aftermath. And it seemed to me that it was entirely plausible that he got back.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  Because Dorothy Wordsworth's diary, she talks about William used to work in the garden when the weather was clement. He'd sit and he had a bower in the garden and he'd sit and write. And Dorothy mentions a sailor coming to see William in the garden and spending at the afternoon talking with him. And I'm thinking, if I was Fletcher Christian and I came back after doing the Mutiny on the Bounty and settling Pitcairn and all that nonsense, and found that all they wanted to do was hang me, I'd be fairly brast off. I'd want to tell my story. And you've got your old school pal who's now, you know, the poet laureate, a famous man. And I had this, this mad notion that Wordsworth would have written this epic poem about the Mutiny on the Bounty, Fletcher Christian's version. But he couldn't publish it, of course, because it would be tantamount to saying, I harbored a fugitive.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  So I put this together and I had this missing man manuscript. I mean, that was the MacGuffin really. And I went and spoke to Robert Woof, who was at that time, who ran the Wordsworth Centre in the Lake District. And I laid the story out to him and I said, what do you think, Robert? He said, it's charmingly plausible. And that has become really my watchword, as I was saying earlier, my touchstone. Is it plausible? Is it charming?

• 30:15Speaker 03

  I absolutely love that. Here's one thing that I also love. I just want to drag us back to Rome. This was something that really surprised me when I was having a look at it, which it shouldn't have. Because pilgrimage to Rome is one of those things that is very important to medieval people. A lot of people do it, especially if they are quite high up, if they're well to do, which we certainly know that my parents are. And I think that this is such an important point that you managed to make. But how did you find out about it to begin with?

• 30:46Speaker 04

  Um, it's there in the record that they went to Rome on a pilgrimage. Um, and of course they'd have gone by sea, which meant it didn't take the months and months it would take to go across it by land and get into various rocks along the way. They'd just go off on their galley, the boats at the time, which lovingly are called Birlands.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Down the west coast and, and across the channel and down the coast of Spain and, and across, oh, they're right, it's Rome. I did not want to make this about some profoundly religious experience for them. Because I didn't have the sense that that was what was underlying it, that it was just the thing that they probably should do. And Macbeth had this relationship with the monks on the island in Loch Riven, where she ended up. I see Macbeth as being quite pragmatic, a pragmatic man. And I see him as being in with the monks was not a bad thing. Christianity was gaining traction at that time in Scotland. And that this was not going to cause him any hurt or any grief to go and see the Pope and see how that transpired. You know, being in with the Pope was not a bad thing.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  So I see that as more of a pragmatic transactional event in their lives. But I think it must have been absolutely astonishing to go there and go like, wow, we knocked up these things.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  I mean, absolutely, you're gonna see a completely different way of living, which is one of the things that's so interesting at the time. I mean, I suppose it's still true now, but you know, in the medieval period, places are really different. But I think that there's also a really important point here, which is that if you're able to go to Rome for several months on pilgrimage, that also means that your kingdom is super stable.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  Because otherwise, you know, if they were really hated, if these were a couple of people who nobody liked, the minute you were out the door, everyone would be like, ha ha.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. The kingdom would have fallen, there's no question about it. But, you know, they, they left a region and, and off they went and, and it was fine. They came back and everybody was like, oh, it's nice to see you back again and did you have a good time? No. What have you got us?

• 32:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Like, oh.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  If you've got any good friends. And, um, Ethne, who was the herbalist, will have been absolutely over the moon with what was available to her. You know, I can just picture her potting up all these plants, having her own bit in the burly and going, don't you touch my plants?

• 32:55Speaker 03

  I love that. Oh.

• 32:56Speaker 04

  So, yeah, I think that, you know, if they didn't have ginger before then, they certainly had ginger after it.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  Well, there you go. Right? You're not going down to the continent without coming back with the good stuff, frankly.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. What's the point in going otherwise? And I think that's probably no small part of it. You know, they'll have come back with stuff that have made people go like, wow, how can we have that?

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Well, you know, that's what it means to be royal, right? Is to have these connections and make these moves. And, and this is this consummately royal couple, well-liked, well-connected, moving about. And you've managed to present that really, really well here in opposition to what we usually see from Shakespeare, right? Because Shakespeare, you know, yeah, he shows them take over the kingdom via treachery, et cetera. And then, you know, the minute they do, they die. And obviously, that's not what happens here. You have this fairly long reign. But also, you managed to talk about what happens to Grah after Macbeth dies, because he does die. So what do you kind of describe as her journey after the death of her husband?

• 33:58Speaker 04

  She has to make herself secure because she is potentially the rallying figure for their people. If there's going to be an uprising against Malcolm and his people, she's going to be at the forefront of it. So she has to make sure that she and her women are safe. And so they turn to the monks in the monastery and they secure her. Because Macbeth's been good to them, he's given them the land, he's made donations to the monastery. So, you know, in a sense, they've kind of already planned that escape route. And she's waiting to see what happens. How's Malcolm going to take over the kingdom? How's it going to be? How pissed off are the people going to be? Is there a chance of rising up against it? So all of this is in her mind. And also because Lulac's around at this point still.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  And she's got to kind of cover his back as well. So it's important to her that she stays alive. So she's grieving the. Loss of the man that she loved, but she's also conscious that she has a duty to the kingdom. And so when they come after her, she has to try and secure herself. And I think there's a lot of bravery in that, the fleeing from sanctuary. Uh, they know that Malcolm sent men out to kill her. He sent men out across the kingdom to find where she is and to kill her. It's quite clear that that was the intention. Of course, the good reasons why Shakespeare wrote it the way that he wrote it.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was going to say, what like, what do you think when you've got a situation like that? It's pretty easy for us in the modern period to say, oh, well, this kind of looks like a question of succession and a question of simply wishing to secure things. But Shakespeare comes about it in a really different way. I guess, what do you think was motivating him to depict the Macbeths in this very particularized way?

• 35:34Speaker 04

  Politics, plain and simple. There was a new king on the throne in London, who was a Scottish king, James VI and I, who was notorious for his hatred of witches. He wrote a book about the awfulness of witches. So that explains why it was important to have a bunch of horrible witches at the heart of this. Behind the motive engine for the whole thing is these three eldritch witches on the moor telling Macbeth, he's going to be king hereafter, so you better do something about it, son. And at the time also, James was descended from Banco's side of the equation, not from Macbeth's side of the equation. And a less, in some ways, less justifiable claim on the throne of Scotland through ancestry. But it was a way of suking up to the king.

• 36:17Speaker 04

  It was important to suke up to the king because at that time, there were no actual theatres as such, really. You succeeded because you had royal patronage. Getting to put your plays on at court was a key element to your success as a theatre company. And if you were putting on plays that the king didn't like, you weren't going to do very well. So for all sorts of reasons, Shakespeare was a shareholder in his theatre company. He wasn't just the jobbing playwright or a jobbing actor. He was part of the, if you like, the management. So it was part of his job to make sure that the theatre company persisted. And so let's put on a really good play that warmed the cockles of the king's heart. I'll go away and look in the history books to see what I could come up with. And I think that's probably, I mean, plain and simple.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  And then he thought, oh, this is a great story. I could do something with this. And off he went. I can't feel angry with him about it. I can't blame him for it. You know, the guy had a living to make. He had a wife and family back in Stratford that were like, you know, needed his, his income and his own life in London that needed his income. So I think that's the story behind it, no more, no less.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that all artists, to a certain extent, are saying, fair enough. When you hear about things like this, you know, it's not his fault if everyone took a play seriously as a piece of history, you know?

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Because it's such a good play, because it's such a powerful piece of dramaturgy, it has become the historical record. People think it's what happened. People think that Lady Macbeth is this absolute avatar for being a bad wife. It's a hard image to break down. I just, I'm not having it.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  Isn't quite right, too.

• 38:06Speaker 01

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• 38:34Speaker 05

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• 39:03Speaker 03

  Do you have any hopes for what the novel is going to achieve in the face of this really solidified idea of Lady Macbeth as a character?

• 39:13Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, there's always hope that someone might make a movie out of it, you know, or a television adaptation. That would shift the dial rather more than a small novella being published by an indie publishing house in Scotland. You know, we've sold a lot of books and we've reached a lot of people, but nothing like the kind of outreach that Shakespeare has, you know. So if there's anybody out there who would like to make a movie of Lady Macbeth, you know, feel free to get in touch.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Contact Val.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  Contact my agent first.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Look, this is a movie that I want, you know, and I think this is interesting though, because to a certain extent, I do think the public imagination, or at least, I mean, perhaps I'm here preaching to the choir, you know, listeners to this show in particular, have an interest in myth busting these essentialist ideas. I mean, certainly, let's just look at what the discovery of Richard III's body did for the reevaluation of Richard III, which was again largely colored by what Shakespeare had to say for quite some time.

• 40:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, Josephine Tay wrote The Daughter of Time way back in the 50s, which debunked the Princess in the Tower thing of Richard. But she was a writer, she was a novelist. It had a big impact on a lot of people, but it didn't reach the wider consciousness. So yeah, it took the rediscovery of Richard's body to start things, the dial really moving. So you need to find a way of reaching the opinion formers, the opinion makers. So like I said, I think the only thing that would really shift the dial for Macbeth is a film. And I don't see why nobody's shown an interest in making the film yet, because, I mean, you know, we all loved Braveheart.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:40Speaker 04

  Didn't we? You're in a Scotland.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, you know, medieval historians don't hate that movie at all.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  But you need something that gets right into the heart of popular culture. You know, I'm a writer, I love books, I love reading, I love writing. But, you know, I do acknowledge that if you really want to change people's view on a wider scale, you need to get into a different kind of popular culture.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Well, and I guess that's where Shakespeare's got a leg up on all of us, is that, you know, people like plays, people like movies, and I don't blame them. But, well, I mean, speaking of plays, kind of a random question to ask you at the end. So we spent this entire time talking about a play and a couple of people whose name is associated with bad luck. So I'm sure you've been asked this a million times, but I'm gonna do it anyway. So have you particularly experienced in anything weird and unlucky while you were writing a book trying to save the good name of Lady Macbeth?

• 41:34Speaker 04

  It's really weird that you should say that. I hadn't even thought about that. I hadn't even thought about that, but we have had the worst year. I mean, truly, we've had the worst year.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 04

  Beginning of the year, my partner nearly died. She was really ill. Took her quite a while to recover. And then my back completely gave up on me. Very swiftly, very suddenly, went really downhill. And I spent the summer having a major spinal surgery that I'm just recovering from. And I did not write a novel this year for the first time in 40 years.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Oh, it's the Curse of Macbeth. It happened. Oh, my God.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  You completely devastated me this morning.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  We've just moved house as well. We love this house. It's fabulous new house. Oh, God. I just said, this has been the, this has been the year of living disastrously. So.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  You think it's Macbeth?

• 42:22Speaker 03

  Well, let's just say that it is, because then that way you've kind of exercised it.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  Well, we should have, because if I go from the publication date, it's been more than a year since it was published. So maybe I've come out the other side of it. And my back's much better. I'm fine. I'm walking about. Everything's fine.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  So see, this is what we're going with. I choose to believe. Hey, Val, come on the podcast so I can scare you.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  I didn't even thought about it. We keep walking about the house, Sid. This has been the worst year.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  There you go. I'm blaming Macbeth. That's it. That's it. But, yeah, or maybe Shakespeare. Let's just, let's blame Shakespeare instead. Let's not make it about the Macbeths.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, Val, thanks for coming by so I could freak you out, I guess.

• 42:59Speaker 04

  Just lovely. It's been a real pleasure.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 43:02Speaker 04

  All the steamy apart. I would have struggled to make the book as strong as it is without this podcast. I really leaned heavily into it. So thank you for that.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Seriously, the pleasure has been all mine, and I'm sorry for scaring you.

• 43:13Speaker 04

  Very early in the morning, but I have to go and have a stick of whiskey.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Thanks so much to Val McDermid once again and to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my series, Meet the Normans, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. My co-host Matt Lewis will be back again on Friday, and as always, I'll see you again next Tuesday. Until next time.

• 44:11Speaker 07

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• 44:46Speaker 01

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