strathspey@strathspey.org:63972

Anselm Lingnau

Re: Fair Donald

April 22, 2013, 1:37 p.m. (Message 63972, in reply to message 63971)

Donald Andrews wrote:

>  I am just curious to know why a rather obscure medieval 'King of the
> Scots' is commemorated by two dances, while the very much less obscure
> Macbeth of roughly the same era has no such recognition.

The historical Macbeth, like most early Scottish monarchs, is pretty obscure. 
His modern non-obscurity mostly comes from Shakespeare's play, which as far as 
we can tell plays somewhat fast and loose with the life and times of the real 
Macbeth, and in any event does not exactly portray the king as a sterling 
paragon of honour and probity (to say nothing of the witchcraft). The title 
character in the play might thus possibly not provide the greatest conceivable 
inspiration for light entertainment such as country dances.

(There are claims that the play itself, when it was new, was engineered to 
appeal to King James in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. Holinshed's 
chronicle, which the Shakespeare play is largely based on, has Macbeth and 
Banquo conspiring to murder the incumbent king, Duncan. King James, being 
originally from Scotland, traced his Stuart ancestry back to Banquo – who most 
probably never actually existed, but was introduced by Boethius in the 16th 
century, and remained a popular, and convenient, concept in James's time – but 
of course it would never do for somebody like Shakespeare to publically paint 
the sitting monarch as the great-great-…-grandson of someone who had actually 
killed his own legitimate king. Hence the Bard preferred to instead make poor 
Mrs Macbeth into the conniving monster that she is widely perceived to have 
been today, and Banquo into an upstanding fellow who is uninvolved with the 
assassination of Duncan, generally comes across as the noble and moral foil to 
Macbeth's base ambition, ruthlessness and greed, and whom, later on in the 
play, Macbeth causes to be killed because his existence is too dangerous to 
M's own claim to the throne. Those were the times.)

Now on the other hand Donald III (Donald Bane, or the »Donalbain« from the 
Scottish play) apparently wasn't what one might consider a saint, either, but 
having escaped the attentions of popular playwrights he didn't have the same 
kind of notoriety in the 18th century, when people were making up country 
dances. At any rate, in Donald's time as a monarch he was vastly more popular 
with the Scots, many of which had not been overly thrilled with the 
English/Norman leanings of his immediate predecessors, Malcolm Canmore and 
Duncan II, and this perhaps made him more eligible as the namesake for a dance 
or two later on.

Anselm
-- 
Anselm Lingnau, Mainz/Mayence, Germany ................. xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx
There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike --
information and wit.                                        -- Stephen Leacock