Note 166 — Chapter LXV
Reading edition
— This phrase, “sacrilegious murder,” is used by Shakespeare in “Macbeth,” and so precisely does it express the double crime of the Gunpowder plotters that I feel certain that from this allusion — as well as from the evident allusion to the well-known equivocations of Father Henry Garnet (alias Farmer) before the Privy Council — the great dramatist must have had the Gunpowder Plot in his mind the whole time he wrote this finest of his tragedies.
I suggest, too, that the words “The bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan? for it is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell” are an allusion to the mysterious warning bell that the plotters thought they heard whilst working in the mine. — See Jardine’s “Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot,” p. 54.
Compare also Mr. H. W. Mabie’s description of the tragedy of “Macbeth” in his very recent and valuable “Life of Shakespeare” (Macmillan & Co.). Mr. Mabie’s account sounds in one’s ears like a very echo of a recital of the facts and purposes of the Gunpowder Plot.