30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (27 page)

But although there is no historical basis for the belief that
Macbeth
is jinxed, erroneous beliefs have a habit of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. The myth itself is somehow enough to jinx the play, and anecdotes abound of
Macbeth
-related disasters, from actors' injuries to collapsing sets to onstage death (caused by real weapons instead of props), to rioting audiences.
³

One disastrous production became a commercial hit: Peter O'Toole's
Macbeth
at the Old Vic in 1980, directed by Bryan Forbes. Everything about this production aroused the critics' (satirical) ire. “Eradicating the unnecessarily tragic aspects that have always weighed the play down, the cast sent the first-night audience home rocking with happy laughter,” wrote one reviewer. Robert Cushman wrote: “Chances are he likes the play, but O'Toole's performance suggests that he is taking some kind of personal revenge on it.” When O'Toole appeared after the offstage murder, he was so covered in red that one reviewer said that he looked like Santa Claus. So great were the quantities of stage blood that the production was dubbed “Macdeath.” The lighting design caused practical problems: “it was, of course, the rottenest luck for [O'Toole] to run smack into a wall on his third bravura exit (so much of the play takes place in the dark)” wrote the
Daily Mail
reviewer in mock-sympathy. The
London Evening News
criticized Frances Tomelty's athletic Lady Macbeth who “greeted her husband by leaping at him and achieving a leg-encircling embrace of the kind which illustrates helpful sex manuals.” The witches, Shakespeare's “secret, black and midnight hags” (4.1.64), were sartorially chic in white chiffon, prompting one reviewer to speculate that they shopped in the West End. John Peters wrote that the play was not as bad as other critics made out: it was much worse. The artistic director of the Old Vic, Timothy West, had a public argument with the play's director: West disowned the production and Forbes went on stage to defend it. Crowds arrived in droves and the production sold out for its entire run.
⁴

Actors attribute
Macbeth
's reputation for bad luck to the play's plot: when witches cast spells on stage they somehow transcend fiction and the curses have a real effect. They are what the philosopher of language J.L. Austin calls “performatives” or “speech-acts”: words which themselves enact their content. In short, don't play with magic. In the 1590s it was believed that the spells in another play that staged magic,
Dr Faustus
, had real consequences. Faustus conjures and raises the devil. When the theater company was on tour in Exeter in 1593, the actors suddenly noticed that there was one devil too many on stage. The cast and the audience fled in terror and “the players (as I heard it), contrary to their custom spending the night in reading and prayer, got them out of town the next morning.” A similar story attached itself to a performance of
Dr Faustus
in London about 1588/9.
⁵
These anecdotes notwithstanding,
Dr Faustus
has not gained a reputation for attracting bad luck in the theater. Neither has Verdi's opera
Macbeth
(1842–50). Beerbohm aside, why should Shakespeare's play attract such a mythology?

Macbeth
is one of the shortest plays in the Shakespeare canon—fewer than 2,500 lines. (It is often played without an interval.) Its rapidly moving plot and its lack of subplot give it a concentrated intensity. It is full of spectacle: the spell-making (spell-binding) witches, the “blood-boltered” (4.1.139) ghost of the murdered Banquo who appears to Macbeth at a banquet, the eerie sleepwalking and compulsive handwashing of Lady Macbeth, the unnatural sight of Birnam Wood moving to Dunsinane Castle, the witches' staged visions of the Stewart king's descendants via Banquo in an endless line:
A show of eight kings, the last with a glass
[mirror]
in his hand; and Banquo
(stage direction, 4.1.127). The play's political matter reflects Shakespeare's company's desire to flatter the new monarch (who claimed descent from Banquo—see Myth 28); James also had a documented interest in magic (he had published a book on
Demonology
in 1597). The play may have had a court performance in 1606; if so, its brevity may cater to James I's alleged aversion to long plays. But it is impossible to know if the brevity reflects abridgement for James's short attention span or if it was written as a deliberately short play. If the former, it is hard to imagine what has been cut out, although sometimes a scene in the English court of the “good king” who cures sickness with his “healing benediction” (4.3.148, 157) is proposed.

The play was popular throughout the Jacobean period. It was revised in 1616 (presumably for a stage revival) by Thomas Middleton, who added the Hecate scenes and marked some speeches for deletion. Middleton also adapted
Measure for Measure
, written by Shakespeare in 1604 (the Oxford editors date the adaptation to 1621). Like
Macbeth
,
Measure for Measure
reflects James's interests. It is a play about authority and royal rule. James had published a book on kingship,
Basilikon Doron
, in 1599, revised and reprinted in 1603 when he assumed the throne of England. Many of Duke Vincentio's sentiments and images in
Measure for Measure
coincide with those in James I's book—the image of a ruler as one placed upon a stage, meeting and spying on one's subjects incognito, King James's and Duke Vincentio's love of theatrical coups, and their paranoia about slander, for instance.
⁶

In production, and especially with Middleton's additions, the supernatural aspects of
Macbeth
eclipse the political, making it easy to see this as a drama about evil rather than about government. This is also true of its generic placing in the First Folio. Despite having the same historical source as the English history plays (Raphael Holinshed's multi-volume
History of England, Scotland, and Ireland
, 1587),
Macbeth
appears in the collected Folio edition of 1623, prepared by Shakespeare's fellow actors and company manager, Henry Condell and John Heminge, in the section of tragedies. Obviously, to Englishmen, only English histories qualify as “history.” But
Macbeth
's sweep is also larger: the battlegrounds of the play are not (just) England and Scotland but heaven and hell, apocalyptic territory. We can see this in the play's debts to its medieval predecessors. In the scene in which the Porter opens the castle door to dawn visitors, he compares Macbeth's castle to hell mouth (hell was represented as a castle on the medieval stage). The speech in which Lennox describes the unnaturalness of the previous night's storm—“the earth / Was feverous and did shake”—prompts Macbeth's laconic response, “'Twas a rough night.” Lennox continues, “My young remembrance cannot parallel / A fellow to it” (2.3.58–63). But as Glynne Wickham pointed out long ago, “an older memory might”: Lennox's speech corresponds to the descriptions of phenomena which preface disaster in the medieval Harrowing of Hell plays.
⁷

But if the play is medieval in literary influences and historical setting (the historical Macbeth reigned
c
.1005–57), in the Shakespeare canon it also anticipates the late romances to which it is close in date. (
Macbeth
was written in 1606,
Pericles
in 1607.)
Macbeth
is presented “through theatrical means that belong to the traditions of masque, romance, and folk-tale, the tradition of Shakespeare's last plays. Spectacle and ceremony, processions and banquets, riddles and prophecies, idealized visions of a golden world under a perfect king …”
⁸
None of the late plays has the jinxed associations of
Macbeth
. This may be because their supernatural forces are positive: the appearance of the goddess Diana to Pericles in a vision; the descent of Jupiter on an eagle in
Cymbeline
to reassure Posthumus; the theatrical conjurations of the magician Prospero in
The Tempest
; the spirits who accompany Queen Catherine to heaven in
Henry VIII
. For comparable malign supernatural conjurings we must look to
2 Henry VI
, but, far from being jinxed, this play has enjoyed a very successful performance history, on stage and television, in our own time (although the fact that it is not performed as often as
Macbeth
prevents meaningful comparison).

Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, chose
Macbeth
to open the newly restored Memorial Theatre in 2011. Boyd replaced the three witches with three children—the children of Macduff—and the play became a proleptic revenge tragedy in which the as-yet-unmurdered children manipulated Macbeth to his destruction. If
Macbeth
's jinx is associated with the play's witchcraft, this (highly successful) de-witched production seemed to have broken the association—at least, until Jonathan Slinger (Macbeth) had a traffic accident and broke his arm in two places. One producer of an earlier production attributed its accidents to the fact that it had cut Middleton's Hecate scenes. Clearly, witchcraft works two ways—it operates when staged or when cut—perhaps appropriately in a play structured round double meanings, riddling prophecies, and misleading, double-edged statements.

Notes

¹
 Max Beerbohm,
Around Theatres
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953), pp. 1–2, 8–9.

²
 Stanley Wells, “Shakespeare in Max Beerbohm's Theatre Criticism,”
Shakespeare Survey
, 29 (2001), pp. 133–45.

³
 For a selection of cursed productions, including several with fatalities, see Marjorie Garber,
Shakespeare's Ghost Writers
(London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 88–9. See also Richard Huggett,
The Curse of Macbeth with Other Theatrical Superstitions and Ghosts
(London: Picton Publishing, 1981).

⁴
 Stephen Pile,
Cannibals in the Cafeteria
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 17.

⁵
 John Jump (ed.),
Dr Faustus
, Casebook series (London: Routledge, 1965), p. 43.

⁶
 Harriet Hawkins,
Measure for Measure
, New Critical Introductions (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), pp. 33–5.

⁷
 Glynne Wickham, “Hell-Castle and its Door Keeper,”
Shakespeare Survey
, 19 (1966), pp. 68–76 (p. 73).

⁸
 Alexander Leggatt, “
Macbeth
and the Last Plays,” in J.C. Gray (ed.),
Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), pp. 189–207 (p. 206).

In the twentieth century a prominent textual critic, W.W. Greg, wrote that revision is “probably not found in Shakespeare's plays though it is well known elsewhere.”
¹
This pronouncement is both cavalier—note its basis in assumption (“probably”)—and bardolatrous in that, although it acknowledges that revision is an Elizabethan phenomenon, this known practice does not apply to Shakespeare. Shakespeare is a god; a god does not have second thoughts; ergo, Shakespeare does not revise.

Almost no Shakespeare critic would now assent to this view; indeed, there is abundant evidence to the contrary. Let us look at some of this evidence before we consider why it seemed unpalatable to a previous generation of scholars.

Revision in Shakespeare can be plotted on a spectrum from immediate second thoughts by Shakespeare to later adaptation by someone else (see Myth 17). Although we do not have any complete Shakespeare manuscripts,
Romeo and Juliet
gives us two examples of immediate self-correction (we can deduce what was in Shakespeare's manuscript because the compositor has typeset both the first and second thoughts). Romeo enters the Capulet tomb where the dead body of Juliet lies. Addressing the corpse (as he thinks), Romeo muses on his wife's beauty:

Ah, dear Juliet,

Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe

That unsubstantial death is amorous,

And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps

Thee here in dark to be his paramour?

(5.3.101–5)

(A paraphrase of these lines might run: how can you still be so beautiful? Shall I believe that the figure of Death is in love with you and keeps you in this vault as his mistress?)

Here's how the passage looks in the 1599 quarto, printed from Shakespeare's manuscript (we have modernized the spelling for ease of comparison but have not made any other changes):

Ah, dear Juliet,

Why art thou yet so fair? I will believe,

Shall I believe that unsubstantial death is amorous,

And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps

Thee here in dark to be his paramour?

(sig. L3
^r
)

You can immediately see two problems. The first is the stutter of “I will believe” / “Shall I believe.” What we are looking at is a false start. Shakespeare first wrote a future-tense statement, then decided it would be better as a rhetorical question (and presumably forgot to delete the first phrase). Although we might be tempted to argue that this duplication is deliberate—that it is rhetorically effective, registering the escalation of Romeo's incredulity—the second problem argues against this. And that problem is that the next line is hypermetrical: “Shall I believe that unsubstantial death is amorous” has twelve iambic feet instead of ten (see Myth 11). “I will believe” is clearly superfluous.

Something similar happens earlier in the play, this time extended over four lines. In the 1599 quarto, Romeo leaves the Capulet orchard after the ball, en route to visit Friar Laurence; he exits with a lyrical four lines about the dawn. Friar Laurence begins the next scene with the same speech. We have placed the two speeches in parallel columns. Again, we take the speeches from the 1599 quarto, changing only the spelling.