Written early in the reign of James I (1603-1625), Shakespeare's Macbeth is a typical "Jacobean" tragedy in many important respects. Superstitiously referred to by the actors as "the Scottish play", the script commemorates James' national legacy by describing events that occurred in the years 1040 to 1057 in his native Scotland. The work also celebrates the ruler's intense interest in witchcraft and magic, which was recorded in a book he wrote in 1597 entitled Demonology. Further topical allusions to the king include any passages in the script that mention insomnia, which are relevant since James was a known insomniac. The most memorable references to Jacobean England in the play, however, are those recounting the events of the infamous Gunpowder. Plot: A conspiracy by Catholic sympathizers to blow up the Parliament building and all the heads of state on 5 November 1605, about a year before Shakespeare's play was written. On that date, Guy Fawkes and his band of Jesuit-sponsored Papists smuggled a huge amount of gunpowder into a vault under Parliament, which would have killed everyone in the building in a cataclysm of fire if the king had not detected explosives before their detonation. . According to a recent book by Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), James claimed to have discovered the plan by "inspiration" of God, who wished to save England from Rome's "popish plot." Through popular mythology following the event, the Jesuits were branded as "equivocators" who had attempted to attack both England and the Reformation through a perverse use not only of gunpowder ("the devil's invention"), but also of very nature of language, who used double and triple meanings to hide their diabolical intentions from the king and his court. It is no surprise that Shakespeare's work reflects these Jacobean current events through word choice, plot, and themes in an intriguing blend of Scottish history, contemporary political events, and authorial creativity. The language of the work, for example, includes a litany of references to the Gunpowder Plot that would have been familiar to any loyal subjects of the king in 1605. Terms such as "turn", "mine", "coup", "devils", ““fuse,” “dust,” “confusion,” “corpses,” “spirits,” and “combustion” create a linguistic landscape through which Macbeth and the witches kill a king and seize his throne in a mirror image of popish plot aborted during the reign of James Likewise, the work's enigmatic prophecies mimic the ease with which the Jesuits equivocated between truth and falsehood, good and evil...