ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Macbeth registered a novel ambivalence in Shakespeare's treatment of Scotland, Kinney attributed the play's multivalent Scottishness to the pressures exerted by the Jacobean succession. Yet Shakespeare's Elizabethan works featuring Scottish characters better support F. J. Harries's earlier and more cautious pronouncement that 'the attitude of Shakespeare towards Scotsmen generally was apparently not unfriendly before the accession of James I'. Arthur Kinney, 'Shakespeare's Macbeth and the Question of Nationalism', in Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson, Literature and Nationalism. For Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland between 1565 and 1571, the Scots who served under the O'Neills of Ulster not only justified English colonialism there, but also posed a significant threat to it; according to Roger B. Manning, 'Sidney's colonizing efforts were motivated by his recognition that the O'Neills of Ulster could never be reconciled to English rule nor could the Scots mercenaries be ejected without establishing a military presence by colonization'.
