Another idea which needs to be cleared out of the way is that of the unusual enormity of Lady Macbeth's crime in contriving the death of a man who was her guest. Shakespeare's audience knew that a sovereign was never immune from assassination. Queen Elizabeth's life became the mark for assassin after assassin. Moreover, the Catholics contended that "good Queen Bess," by beheading Mary Stuart, had murdered a woman who was her guest and who had come into her kingdom assured of protection. There was something childish about Duncan's credulity in face of the treachery he had already experienced from the first Thane of Cawdor. In a monarch whose position was open to attack from the jealousy of his nobles, Duncan's conduct showed an almost incredible want of caution. In fact, it was his unguarded confidence which brought about his death. No onlooker in the Globe playhouse ever thought the murder of this King at Inverness to be an improbable or unusual occurrence. And this inference suggests another of even more importance, namely, the period in which Shakespeare's tragedy is placed. When the poet-dramatist demanded that his actors should hold the mirror up to Nature, it was not the nature of the Greeks, nor of the Romans, nor of the early Britons that he meant. The spirit of the Italian Renaissance, with its humanism and intellectuality, had taken too strong a hold upon the imagination of Englishmen to allow of their playgoers being interested in the puppets of a bygone age. Shakespeare had no need to look beyond his own time to find his Lady Macbeth. There were many women still existing who were uninfluenced by the didactic teaching of the Puritans and their love of moral introspection. Queen Elizabeth herself was an instance. As the historian Green points out, we track her through her tortuous maze of lying and intrigue until we find that she revelled in byways and crooked ways, and yet was adored by her subjects for a womanliness she, in reality, never possessed. And this love of shuffling and lack of all genuine religious emotion failed utterly to blur the brightness of the national ideal. Or, to take her rival, Mary Stuart. The rough Scottish nobles owned that there was in her some enchantment whereby men were bewitched. "Her beauty," writes Green, "her exquisite grace of manner, her generosity of temper and warmth of affection, her frankness of speech, her sensibility, her gaiety, her womanly tears, her manlike courage, the play and freedom of her nature ... flung a spell over friend or foe which has only deepened with the lapse of years." And yet this piece of feminine fascination visited her sick husband, Darnley, in his lonely house near Holyrood Palace, in which he was lodged by her order, kissed him, bade him farewell, and rode gaily back to a dance within two hours of the terrible explosion which deprived him of his life, a murder that was attributed to Bothwell, and at which Mary herself may easily have connived.