ABSTRACT
By 1606, when Shakespeare came to write his own dramatization of Scottish history by choosing the story of Macbeth out of Holinshed and following his 1577 text with detailed fidelity, this son of Mary Stuart, James VI of Scotland, had also, for some three years, been James I of England and the patron of Shakespeare's company of players, the King's Men. Shakespeare's play links Macbeth to James VI and I long before it makes a connection between the new British king and his ancestry, between James and the line of Banquo which Holinshed singularly points out. Perhaps more forcible for Shakespeare's Jacobean audiences, however, was the connection between the idea of imperialism and prophecy. As long ago as 1922, Lilian Winstanley, in an early study of topicality in Shakespeare, noted that the imperialism realized by and for James was the culmination of the traditional British prophecy of Merlin.
