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Updated: June 24, 2025
He belonged to a family long settled in or near Dublin and of some note in municipal annals. Under the direction of the Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, Stanyhurst wrote a Description, as well as a portion of the History, of Ireland for Holinshed's Chronicles, published in 1577.
They all delighted in ingenuities of phrase, in neat turns and conceits; it was a compliment then to be called a "conceited" writer. Of all the guides to Shakespeare's time, there is none more profitable or entertaining than William Harrison, who wrote for Holinshed's chronicle "The Description of England," as it fell under his eyes from 1577 to 1587.
Such a loose narration cannot be relied upon if the text in question contains any evidence at all rebutting the conclusion that the sisters are intended to be "women fairies, or nymphs." The second piece of evidence is the story of Macbeth as it is narrated by Holinshed, from which Shakspere derived his material. This is all that is heard of these "goddesses of Destinie" in Holinshed's narrative.
The poet himself has been dead for three hundred years and has left behind him not a syllable concerning Lady Macbeth except in the text of the tragedy. Therefore according to my opinion nothing remains but to keep to this. At the most we can draw upon Holinshed's chronicle, which Shakespeare so frequently followed literally.
Stubbs, a Puritan chronicler, whose book The Anatomy of Abuses is a valuable aid to the study of Tudor social history, and Harrison, whose description of England prefaces Holinshed's Chronicles, both deal in detail with the Italian menace, and condemn in good set terms the costliness in dress and the looseness in morals which they laid to its charge.
In Holinshed's Chronicle of Englande, Scotlande and Irelande, published in 1577, there is a chapter on the "maner of buylding and furniture of our Houses," wherein is recorded the costliness of the stores of plate and tapestry that were found in the dwellings of nobility and gentry and also in farm-houses, and even in the homes of "inferior artificers."
Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, published when Shakespeare was fourteen years old, gives the stories of Lear, Cymbeline, Macbeth, and of all the English kings who are the heroes of the historical plays. As Holinshed is very dry reading, if Shakespeare had followed him closely, for instance, in King Lear, the play would have lost its most impressive parts.
In Saxo's version of the story about Hroar and Helgi, he is called Siward, but there his proper relationship to the other characters is obscured. Siward was related to Duncan by marriage, some versions, Holinshed's for instance, having it that Duncan was married to Siward's daughter; similarly, Sævil was married to Halfdan's daughter.
Among Holinshed's collaborators was one William Harrison, chaplain to Lord Cobham, and later Rector of Radwinter in Essex and Canon of Windsor. To him was allotted the task of writing the "Descriptions of Britain and England" from which the following chapters are drawn.
I should consider it as something accomplished if the reader did not say at the close, "The case of Lady Macbeth contradicts all that has been heretofore discovered," as it will appear at first. We will begin with the literary source for Macbeth, Holinshed's "History of Scotland."
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