OK, folks, we all know how Shakespeare picks and chooses (a) from whom he steals, (b) how much he steals, and (c) how much he massages those stolen goods. And that’s in his fictional plays. In the histories, he’s been known to compress time, changes ages, and make wholesale changes to his sources. Macbeth, though a tragedy, is no different.
Now, having already taken a look at his borrowings from Holinshed for the human characters and Scot for the not-so-human, let’s take a look at the “real” history, shall we?