A Scene from the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre 1572

Ronsard was a great admirer of Marguerite de Navarre and was the court poet of her mother Catherine de Medici. During the St Bartholomew's Night Massacre, the just-married Marguerite de Navarre saved her husband and other Huguenots from murder by bringing them into her own bedroom. This Massacre blackened the reputation of Catherine de Medici and her son, King Charles IX.

It is quite likely that details of the murders by Shakespeare's Macbeths were taken from accounts of this massacre. Like Lady Macbeth, Catherine de Medici was the driving force behind the King of France, her son, when he approved Coligny’s assassination, as Lady Macbeth forced Macbeth to kill Duncan. Malcolm says Lady Macbeth is a “fiend­like queen” (5.8.70). Catherine de Medici used a church bell as the signal to kill Coligny. In the play, Macbeth has Lady Macbeth ring a bell as a signal to kill Duncan. “The bell invites me,” he says. “Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell/that summons thee to heaven or to hell” (2.1.32, 63-5). The neurotic reactions of King Charles IX after the Massacre resemble Macbeth's neuroses at the banquet (see Bullough, Geoffrey, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol 7, New York: Columbia U.P., 1975). Painter Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard, 1836. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia)