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The Tragedy of Macbeth (commonly called Macbeth) is a tragedy by William Shakespeare about a man who commits regicide so as to become king and then commits further murders to maintain his power. The play clearly demonstrates the corrupting effect of ambition, but also deals with the relationship between cruelty and masculinity, tyranny and kingship, treachery, violence, guilt, prophecy, and disruption of the natural order.

The play is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607. The earliest account of a performance of what was probably Shakespeare's play is April 1611, when Simon Forman recorded seeing such a play at the Globe Theatre. It was first published in the Folio of 1623, possibly from a prompt book. The play was most likely written during the reign of James I, who had been James VI of Scotland before he succeeded to the English throne in 1603. James was a patron of Shakespeare’s acting company, and of all the plays Shakespeare wrote under James’s reign, Macbeth most clearly reflects the playwright’s close relationship with the sovereign.

Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest and bloodiest tragedy, and tells the story of a brave Scottish general named Macbeth who receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the throne for himself. His reign is racked with guilt and paranoia, and he soon becomes a tyrannical ruler as he is forced to commit more and more murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion. The bloodbath swiftly takes Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into realms of arrogance, madness, and death.

Shakespeare's source for the tragedy are the accounts of King Macbeth of Scotland, Macduff, and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland and Ireland familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. However, the story of Macbeth as told by Shakespeare bears little relation to real events in Scottish history, as Macbeth was an admired and able monarch.

In the backstage world of theatre, some believe that the play is cursed, and will not mention its title aloud, referring to it instead as "the Scottish play". Over the course of many centuries, the play has attracted some of the most renowned actors to the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. It has been adapted to film, television, opera, novels, comic books, and other media.

Characters

Listed below are the dramatis personæ for Macbeth:

Plot

The play opens amidst thunder and lightning, and the Three Witches decide that their next meeting shall be with Macbeth. In the following scene, a wounded sergeant reports to King Duncan of Scotland that his generals—Macbeth, who is the Thane of Glamis, and Banquo—have just defeated the allied forces of Norway and Ireland, who were led by the traitorous Macdonwald and the Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth, the King's kinsman, is praised for his bravery and fighting prowess.

In the following scene, Macbeth and Banquo discuss the weather and their victory (Macbeth's first line is "So foul and fair a day I have not seen"). As they wander onto a heath, the Three Witches enter and have been waiting to greet them with prophecies. Though Banquo challenges them first, they address Macbeth, hailing him as "Thane of Glamis," "Thane of Cawdor," and that he shall "be King hereafter." Macbeth appears to be stunned to silence. When Banquo asks of his own fortunes, the witches inform him that he will father a line of kings, though he himself will not be one. While the two men wonder at these pronouncements, the witches vanish, and another thane, Ross, arrives and informs Macbeth of his newly bestowed title: Thane of Cawdor, as the previous Thane of Cawdor shall be put to death for his traitorous activities. The first prophecy is thus fulfilled, and Macbeth immediately begins to harbour ambitions of becoming king.

King Duncan welcomes and praises Macbeth and Banquo, and declares that he will spend the night at Macbeth's castle at Inverness; he also names his son Malcolm as his heir. Macbeth sends a message ahead to his wife, Lady Macbeth, telling her about the witches' prophecies. Lady Macbeth suffers none of her husband’s uncertainty, and wishes him to murder Duncan in order to obtain kingship. When Macbeth arrives at Inverness, she overrides all of her husband’s objections by challenging his manhood, and successfully persuades him to kill the king that very night. He and Lady Macbeth plan to get Duncan’s two chamberlains drunk so that they will black out; the next morning they will frame the chamberlains for the murder. They will be defenseless, as they will remember nothing.

While Duncan is asleep, Macbeth stabs him, despite his doubts and a number of supernatural portents, including a hallucination of a bloody dagger. He is so shaken that Lady Macbeth has to take charge. In accordance with her plan, she frames Duncan's sleeping servants for the murder by placing bloody daggers on them. Early the next morning, Lennox, a Scottish nobleman, and Macduff, the loyal Thane of Fife, arrive. A porter opens the gate and Macbeth leads them to the king's chamber, where Macduff discovers Duncan's body. In a supposed fit of anger, Macbeth murders the guards (in truth, he kills them to prevent them from claiming their innocence). Macduff is immediately suspicious of Macbeth, but does not reveal his suspicions publicly. Duncan’s sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee to England and Ireland, respectively, fearing that whoever killed Duncan desires their demise as well. The rightful heirs' flight makes them suspects and Macbeth assumes the throne as the new King of Scotland as a kinsman of the dead king. Banquo reveals this to the audience, and while skeptical of the new King Macbeth, remembers the witches' prophecy about how his own descendants would inherit the throne.

Despite his success, Macbeth, also aware of this part of the prophecy, remains uneasy. Macbeth invites Banquo to a royal banquet, where he discovers that Banquo and his young son, Fleance, will be riding out that night. He hires two men to kill them; a third murderer appears in the park before the murder. The assassins succeed in killing Banquo, but Fleance escapes. Macbeth becomes furious: as long as Fleance is alive, he fears that his power remains insecure. At the banquet, Macbeth invites his lords and Lady Macbeth to a night of drinking and merriment. Banquo's ghost enters and sits in Macbeth's place. Macbeth raves fearfully, startling his guests, as the ghost is only visible to himself. The others panic at the sight of Macbeth raging at an empty chair, until a desperate Lady Macbeth tells them that her husband is merely afflicted with a familiar and harmless malady. The ghost departs and returns once more, causing the same riotous anger in Macbeth. This time, Lady Macbeth tells the lords to leave, and they do so.

Macbeth, disturbed, visits the three witches once more and asks them to reveal the truth of their prophecies to him. To answer his questions, they summon horrible apparitions, each of which offers predictions and further prophecies to allay Macbeth’s fears. First, they conjure an armed head, which tells him to beware of Macduff. Second, a bloody child tells him that no one born of a woman shall be able to harm him. Thirdly, a crowned child holding a tree states that Macbeth will be safe until Great Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill. Macbeth is relieved and feels secure, because he knows that all men are born of women and forests cannot move. However, the witches conjure a procession of eight crowned kings, all similar in appearance to Banquo, and the last carrying a mirror that reflects even more kings. Macbeth demands to know the meaning of this final vision, but the witches perform a mad dance and then vanish. Lennox enters and tells Macbeth that Macduff has fled to England. Macbeth orders Macduff's castle be seized, and, most cruelly, sends murderers to slaughter Macduff’s wife and children. Everyone in Macduff's castle is put to death, including Lady Macduff and their young son.

Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth becomes wracked with guilt from the crimes she and her husband have committed. At night, in the king’s palace at Dunsinane, a doctor and a gentlewoman discuss Lady Macbeth’s strange habit of sleepwalking. Suddenly, Lady Macbeth enters in a trance with a candle in her hand. Bemoaning the murders of Duncan, Lady Macduff, and Banquo, she tries to wash off imaginary bloodstains from her hands, all the while speaking of the terrible things she knows she pressed her husband to do. She leaves, and the doctor and gentlewoman marvel at her descent into madness. Her belief that nothing can wash away the blood on her hands is an ironic reversal of her earlier claim to Macbeth that “ little water clears us of this deed” (2.2.65).

In England, Macduff is informed by Ross that his "castle is surprised; wife and babes / Savagely slaughter'd." When this news of his family’s execution reaches him, Macduff is stricken with grief and vows revenge. Prince Malcolm, Duncan’s son, has succeeded in raising an army in England, and Macduff joins him as he rides to Scotland to challenge Macbeth’s forces. The invasion has the support of the Scottish nobles, who are appalled and frightened by Macbeth’s tyrannical and murderous behavior. Malcolm leads an army, along with Macduff and Englishmen Siward (the Elder), the Earl of Northumberland, against Dunsinane Castle. While encamped in Birnam Wood, the soldiers are ordered to cut down and carry tree limbs to camouflage their numbers.

Before Macbeth’s opponents arrive, he receives news that Lady Macbeth has killed herself, causing him to sink into a deep and pessimistic despair and deliver his "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" soliloquy. Though he reflects on the brevity and meaninglessness of life, he nevertheless awaits the English and fortifies Dunsinane. He is certain that the witches’ prophecies guarantee his invincibility, but is struck numb with fear when he learns that the English army is advancing on Dunsinane shielded with boughs cut from Birnam Wood. Birnam Wood is indeed coming to Dunsinane, fulfilling half of the witches’ prophecy.

A battle culminates in the slaying of the young Siward and Macduff's confrontation with Macbeth, and the English forces overwhelm his army and castle. Macbeth boasts that he has no reason to fear Macduff, for he cannot be killed by any man born of woman. Macduff declares that he was "from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd" (i.e., born by Caesarean section) and was not "of woman born" (an example of a literary quibble), fulfilling the second prophecy. Macbeth realizes too late that he has misinterpreted the witches' words. Though he realizes that he is doomed, he continues to fight. Macduff kills and beheads him, thus fulfilling the first part of the prophecy.

Macduff carries Macbeth's head onstage and Malcolm discusses how order has been restored. His last reference to Lady Macbeth, however, reveals "'tis thought, by self and violent hands / Took off her life", leading most to assume that she committed suicide, but the method is undisclosed. Malcolm, now the King of Scotland, declares his benevolent intentions for the country and invites all to see him crowned at Scone.

Although Malcolm, and not Fleance, is placed on the throne, the witches' prophecy concerning Banquo ("Thou shalt get kings") was known to the audience of Shakespeare's time to be true: James VI of Scotland (later also James I of England) was supposedly a descendant of Banquo.

Sources

Macbeth has been compared to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Both Antony and Macbeth as characters seek a new world, even at the cost of the old one. Both are fighting for a throne and have a 'nemesis' to face to achieve that throne. For Antony the nemesis is Octavius, for Macbeth it is Banquo. At one point Macbeth even compares himself to Antony, saying "under Banquo / My Genius is rebuk'd, as it is said / Mark Antony's was by Caesar." Lastly, both plays contain powerful and manipulative female figures: Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth.

Shakespeare borrowed the story from several tales in Holinshed's Chronicles, a popular history of the British Isles known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In Chronicles, a man named Donwald finds several of his family put to death by his king, King Duff, for dealing with witches. After being pressured by his wife, he and four of his servants kill the King in his own house. In Chronicles, Macbeth is portrayed as struggling to support the kingdom in the face of King Duncan's ineptitude. He and Banquo meet the three witches, who make exactly the same prophecies as in Shakespeare's version. Macbeth and Banquo then together plot the murder of Duncan, at Lady Macbeth's urging. Macbeth has a long, ten-year reign before eventually being overthrown by Macduff and Malcolm. The parallels between the two versions are clear. However, some scholars think that George Buchanan's Rerum Scoticarum Historia matches Shakespeare's version more closely. Buchanan's work was available in Latin in Shakespeare's day.

No other version of the story has Macbeth kill the king in Macbeth's own castle. Scholars have seen this change of Shakespeare's as adding to the darkness of Macbeth's crime as the worst violation of hospitality. Versions of the story that were common at the time had Duncan being killed in an ambush at Inverness, not in a castle. Shakespeare conflated the story of Donwald and King Duff in what was a significant change to the story.

Shakespeare made another revealing change. In Chronicles, Banquo is an accomplice in Macbeth's murder of King Duncan. He also plays an important part in ensuring that Macbeth, not Malcolm, takes the throne in the coup that follows. In Shakespeare's day, Banquo was thought to be a direct ancestor of the Stuart King James I. The Banquo portrayed in historical sources is significantly different from the Banquo created by Shakespeare. Critics have proposed several reasons for this change. First, to portray the king's ancestor as a murderer would have been risky. Other authors of the time who wrote about Banquo, such as Jean de Schelandre in his Stuartide, also changed history by portraying Banquo as a noble man, not a murderer, probably for the same reasons. Second, Shakespeare may have altered Banquo's character simply because there was no dramatic need for another accomplice to the murder; there was, however, a need to give a dramatic contrast to Macbeth—a role which many scholars argue is filled by Banquo.

Date and text

Macbeth cannot be dated precisely, owing to significant evidence of later revisions. Many scholars conjecture the likely date of composition to be between 1603 and 1606. As the play seems to be celebrating King James's ancestors and the Stuart accession to the throne in 1603 (James believed himself to be descended from Banquo), they argue that the play is unlikely to have been composed earlier than 1603 and suggest that the parade of eight kings—which the witches show Macbeth in a vision in Act IV—is a compliment to King James. Other editors conjecture a more specific date of 1605–6, the principal reasons being possible allusions to the Gunpowder Plot and its ensuing trials. The Porter's speech (Act II, scene III, lines 1–21), in particular, may contain allusions to the trial of the Jesuit Henry Garnet in spring, 1606; "equivocator" (line 8) may refer to Garnet's defence of "equivocation" , and "farmer" (4) to one of Garnet's aliases. However, "farmer" is a common word, and "equivocation" was also the subject of a 1583 tract by Queen Elizabeth's chief councillor Lord Burghley, and of the 1584 Doctrine of Equivocation by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta, which was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s.

Scholars also cite an entertainment seen by King James at Oxford in the summer of 1605 that featured three "sibyls" like the weird sisters; Kermode surmises that Shakespeare could have heard about this and alluded to it with the weird sisters. However, A. R. Braunmuller in the New Cambridge edition finds the 1605–6 arguments inconclusive, and argues only for an earliest date of 1603. The play is not considered to have been written any later than 1607, since, as Kermode notes, there are "fairly clear allusions to the play in 1607." The earliest account of a performance of the play is April 1611, when Simon Forman recorded seeing it at the Globe Theatre.

Macbeth was first printed in the First Folio of 1623 and the Folio is the only source for the text. The text that survives had been plainly altered by later hands. Most notable is the inclusion of two songs from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch (1615); Middleton is conjectured to have inserted an extra scene involving the witches and Hecate, for these scenes had proven highly popular with audiences. These revisions, which since the Clarendon edition of 1869 have been assumed to include all of Act III, scene v, and a portion of Act IV, scene I, are often indicated in modern texts. On this basis, many scholars reject all three of the interludes with the goddess Hecate as inauthentic. Even with the Hecate material, the play is conspicuously short, and so the Folio text may derive from a prompt book that had been substantially cut for performance, or an adapter cut the text himself.

Themes and motifs

Macbeth
The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap,
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires.
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

Ambition

A main theme within Macbeth is the destruction that follows when ambition goes beyond moral constraints. Macbeth is a brave general who is not naturally inclined to commit evil, yet he is deeply ambitious and desires power. He murders King Duncan against his better judgement and then wallows in guilt and paranoia. Toward the play's end, he is in a kind of boastful madness. Lady Macbeth pursues her goals with greater determination, yet is less capable of dealing with the guilt from her immorality. One of Shakespeare's most forceful female characters, she spurs her husband mercilessly to kill Duncan and urges him to be strong afterward, yet is herself eventually driven to death by the effect of Macbeth's murders on her conscience. In each case, ambition, spurred by the prophecies of the witches, is what drives the couple to commit their atrocities. An issue that the play raises is that once one decides to use violence to further one's quest for power, it is difficult to stop. Macbeth finds that there are always potential threats to the throne — such as Banquo, Fleance, and Macduff — and he is tempted to use violent means to dispose of them.

Masculinity

Lady Macbeth
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!'

Lady Macbeth manipulates her husband by questioning his manhood, wishing herself to be “unsexed,” and does not contradict Macbeth when he says that a woman like her should give birth only to boys. In the same manner that Lady Macbeth goads her husband on to murder, Macbeth provokes the assassins he hires to murder Banquo by questioning their manhood. Such acts show that both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth equate masculinity with naked aggression; whenever they discuss manhood, violence follows. Their understanding of manhood allows the political order depicted in the play to descend into chaos.

However, in "Macbeth", women are prone to contain violence and evil intentions. The witches’ prophecies spark Macbeth’s ambitions and then encourage his violent behavior, while Lady Macbeth provides the drive and the will behind her husband’s plotting. After reading the letter her husband has sent telling of the witches' prophecies about him, Lady Macbeth believes:

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature;

It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it

— Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Act I, Scene IV

Furthermore, the only divine being to appear is Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft. Because "Macbeth" traces the root of chaos and evil to women, some critics argue that it is Shakespeare’s most misogynistic play. The male characters are similarly brutal and prone to evil as the women, but the aggression of the female characters is more striking because it contradicts expectations of how women ought to behave. Lady Macbeth’s behavior certainly shows that women can be just as ambitious and ruthless as men. Whether it is the gender constraints of her society or because she is not fearless enough to kill, Lady Macbeth relies on manipulation of her husband rather than violence to achieve her ends.

The play does put forth less destructive definition of manhood towards the end. When Macduff learns of the murders of his wife and child, Malcolm consoles him unsympathetically with encouragement to take the news in “manly” fashion and use it to fuel his hatred of Macbeth. Macduff tells the young heir apparent that he has a mistaken understanding of masculinity. To Malcolm’s suggestion, “Dispute it like a man,” Macduff replies, “I shall do so. But I must also feel it as a man” (4.3.221–223). After hearing the news of his son's death at the hands of Macbeth, Siward receives this fact somewhat complacently. Malcolm responds: “He’s worth more sorrow / And that I’ll spend for him” (5.11.16–17). Malcolm’s comment shows that he has learned the lesson Macduff gave him on the feeling nature of true masculinity. It also suggests that, with Malcolm’s coronation, order will be restored to the Kingdom of Scotland.

Analysis

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Macbeth is an anomaly among Shakespeare's tragedies in certain critical ways. It is short: more than a thousand lines shorter than Othello and King Lear, and only slightly more than half as long as Hamlet. This brevity has suggested to many critics that the received version is based on a heavily cut source, perhaps a prompt-book for a particular performance. That brevity has also been connected to other unusual features: the fast pace of the first act, which has seemed to be "stripped for action"; the comparative flatness of the characters other than Macbeth; the oddness of Macbeth himself compared with other Shakespearean tragic heroes.

As a tragedy of character

At least since the days of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, analysis of the play has centred on the question of Macbeth's ambition, commonly seen as so dominant a trait that it defines the character. Johnson asserted that Macbeth, though esteemed for his military bravery, is wholly reviled. This opinion recurs in critical literature, and, according to Caroline Spurgeon, is supported by Shakespeare himself, who apparently intended to degrade his hero by vesting him with clothes unsuited to him and to make Macbeth look ridiculous by several nimisms he applies: His garments seem either too big or too small for him – as his ambition is too big and his character too small for his new and unrightful role as king. When he feels as if "dressed in borrowed clothes", after his new title as Thane of Cawdor, prophesied by the witches, has been confirmed by Ross (I, 3, ll. 108–109), Banquo comments: "New honours come upon him, / Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould, / But with the aid of use" (I, 3, ll. 145–146). And, at the end, when the tyrant is at bay at Dunsinane, Caithness sees him as a man trying in vain to fasten a large garment on him with too small a belt: "He cannot buckle his distemper'd cause / Within the belt of rule" (V, 2, ll. 14–15), while Angus, in a similar nimism, sums up what everybody thinks ever since Macbeth's accession to power: "now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / upon a dwarfish thief" (V, 2, ll. 18–20).

Like Richard III, but without that character's perversely appealing exuberance, Macbeth wades through blood until his inevitable fall. As Kenneth Muir writes, "Macbeth has not a predisposition to murder; he has merely an inordinate ambition that makes murder itself seem to be a lesser evil than failure to achieve the crown." Some critics, such as E. E. Stoll, explain this characterisation as a holdover from Senecan or medieval tradition. Shakespeare's audience, in this view, expected villains to be wholly bad, and Senecan style, far from prohibiting a villainous protagonist, all but demanded it.

Yet for other critics, it has not been so easy to resolve the question of Macbeth's motivation. Robert Bridges, for instance, perceived a paradox: a character able to express such convincing horror before Duncan's murder would likely be incapable of committing the crime. For many critics, Macbeth's motivations in the first act appear vague and insufficient. John Dover Wilson hypothesised that Shakespeare's original text had an extra scene or scenes where husband and wife discussed their plans. This interpretation is not fully provable; however, the motivating role of ambition for Macbeth is universally recognised. The evil actions motivated by his ambition seem to trap him in a cycle of increasing evil, as Macbeth himself recognises: "I am in blood/Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o'er."

As a tragedy of moral order

The disastrous consequences of Macbeth's ambition are not limited to him. Almost from the moment of the murder, the play depicts Scotland as a land shaken by inversions of the natural order. Shakespeare may have intended a reference to the great chain of being, although the play's images of disorder are mostly not specific enough to support detailed intellectual readings. He may also have intended an elaborate compliment to James's belief in the divine right of kings, although this hypothesis, outlined at greatest length by Henry N. Paul, is not universally accepted. As in Julius Caesar, though, perturbations in the political sphere are echoed and even amplified by events in the material world. Among the most often depicted of the inversions of the natural order is sleep. Macbeth's announcement that he has "murdered sleep" is figuratively mirrored in Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking.

Macbeth's generally accepted indebtedness to medieval tragedy is often seen as significant in the play's treatment of moral order. Glynne Wickham connects the play, through the Porter, to a mystery play on the harrowing of hell. Howard Felperin argues that the play has a more complex attitude toward "orthodox Christian tragedy" than is often admitted; he sees a kinship between the play and the tyrant plays within the medieval liturgical drama.

The theme of androgyny is often seen as a special aspect of the theme of disorder. Inversion of normative gender roles is most famously associated with the witches and with Lady Macbeth as she appears in the first act. Whatever Shakespeare's degree of sympathy with such inversions, the play ends with a thorough return to normative gender values. Some feminist psychoanalytic critics, such as Janet Adelman, have connected the play's treatment of gender roles to its larger theme of inverted natural order. In this light, Macbeth is punished for his violation of the moral order by being removed from the cycles of nature (which are figured as female); nature itself (as embodied in the movement of Birnam Wood) is part of the restoration of moral order.

As a poetic tragedy

Critics in the early twentieth century reacted against what they saw as an excessive dependence on the study of character in criticism of the play. This dependence, though most closely associated with Andrew Cecil Bradley, is clear as early as the time of Mary Cowden Clarke, who offered precise, if fanciful, accounts of the predramatic lives of Shakespeare's female leads. She suggested, for instance, that the child Lady Macbeth refers to in the first act died during a foolish military action.

Witchcraft and evil

In the play, the Three Witches represent darkness, chaos, and conflict, while their role is as agents and witnesses. Their presence communicates treason and impending doom. During Shakespeare's day, witches were seen as worse than rebels, "the most notorious traytor and rebell that can be." They were not only political traitors, but spiritual traitors as well. Much of the confusion that springs from them comes from their ability to straddle the play's borders between reality and the supernatural. They are so deeply entrenched in both worlds that it is unclear whether they control fate, or whether they are merely its agents. They defy logic, not being subject to the rules of the real world. The witches' lines in the first act: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air" are often said to set the tone for the rest of the play by establishing a sense of confusion. Indeed, the play is filled with situations where evil is depicted as good, while good is rendered evil. The line "Double, double toil and trouble," communicates the witches' intent clearly: they seek only trouble for the mortals around them.

While the witches do not tell Macbeth directly to kill King Duncan, they use a subtle form of temptation when they tell Macbeth that he is destined to be king. By placing this thought in his mind, they effectively guide him on the path to his own destruction. This follows the pattern of temptation used at the time of Shakespeare. First, they argued, a thought is put in a man's mind, then the person may either indulge in the thought or reject it. Macbeth indulges in it, while Banquo rejects.

According to J. A. Bryant Jr., Macbeth also makes use of Biblical parallels, notably between King Duncan's murder and the murder of Christ:

No matter how one looks at it, whether as history or as tragedy, Macbeth is distinctively Christian. One may simply count the Biblical allusions as Richmond Noble has done; one may go further and study the parallels between Shakespeare's story and the Old Testament stories of Saul and Jezebel as Miss Jane H. Jack has done; or one may examine with W. C. Curry the progressive degeneration of Macbeth from the point of view of medieval theology.

Superstition and "the Scottish play"

While many today would say that any misfortune surrounding a production is mere coincidence, actors and other theatre people often consider it bad luck to mention Macbeth by name while inside a theatre, and sometimes refer to it indirectly, for example as "the Scottish play", or "MacBee", or when referring to the character and not the play, "Mr. and Mrs. M", or "The Scottish King".

This is because Shakespeare is said to have used the spells of real witches in his text, purportedly angering the witches and causing them to curse the play. Thus, to say the name of the play inside a theatre is believed to doom the production to failure, and perhaps cause physical injury or death to cast members. There are stories of accidents, misfortunes and even deaths taking place during runs of Macbeth.

One particular incident that lent itself to the superstition was the Astor Place Riot. The cause of the riots was based on a conflict over two performances of Macbeth, and is usually ascribed to the curse.

Several methods exist to dispel the curse, depending on the actor. One, attributed to Michael York, is to immediately leave the building the stage is in with the person who uttered the name, walk around it three times, spit over their left shoulders, say an obscenity then wait to be invited back into the building. A related practice is to spin around three times as fast as possible on the spot, sometimes accompanied by spitting over their shoulder, and uttering an obscenity. Another popular "ritual" is to leave the room, knock three times, be invited in, and then quote a line from Hamlet. Yet another is to recite lines from The Merchant of Venice, thought to be a lucky play.

Performance history

Shakespeare's day

Apart from the one mentioned in the Forman document, there are no performances known with certainty in Shakespeare's era. Because of its Scottish theme, the play is sometimes said to have been written for, and perhaps debuted for, King James; however, no external evidence supports this hypothesis. The play's brevity and certain aspects of its staging (for instance, the large proportion of night-time scenes and the unusually large number of off-stage sounds) have been taken as suggesting that the text now extant was revised for production indoors, perhaps at the Blackfriars Theatre, which the King's Men acquired in 1608.

Restoration and 18th century

In the Restoration, Sir William Davenant produced a spectacular "operatic" adaptation of Macbeth, "with all the singing and dancing in it" and special effects like "flyings for the witches" (John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, 1708). Davenant's revision also enhanced the role of Lady Macduff, making her a thematic foil to Lady Macbeth. In an 19 April 1667, entry in his Diary, Samuel Pepys called Davenant's MacBeth "one of the best plays for a stage, and variety of dancing and music, that ever I saw." The Davenant version held the stage until the middle of the next century. The famous Macbeths of the early 18th century, such as James Quin, employed this version.

David Garrick returned much closer to the Shakespearean original in a 1744 production. He restored much of Shakespeare's language, which Davenant had simplified, and restored most of the characters to their original roles. However, he retained the witches' songs and added a moralizing speech for Macbeth to the conclusion. Garrick's Macbeth was celebrated; Thomas Davies claims that when the Duke of Parma asked Garrick to demonstrate his acting ability, he acted the scene of Banquo's ghost. Garrick's Lady Macbeth was Hannah Pritchard, and he did not act the role after her death in 1768.

Charles Macklin, not otherwise recalled as a great Macbeth, is remembered for performances at Covent Garden in 1773 at which riots broke out, related to Macklin's rivalries with Garrick and William Smith. Macklin performed in Scottish dress, reversing an earlier tendency to dress Macbeth as an English brigadier; he also removed Garrick's death speech and further trimmed Lady Macduff's role. The performance received generally respectful reviews, although George Steevens remarked on the inappropriateness of Macklin (then in his eighties) for the role.

After Garrick, the most celebrated Macbeth of the 18th century was John Philip Kemble; he performed the role most famously with his sister, Sarah Siddons, whose Lady Macbeth was widely regarded as unsurpassable. Kemble continued the trends toward realistic costume and to Shakespeare's language that had marked Macklin's production; Walter Scott reports that he experimented continually with the Scottish dress of the play. Response to Kemble's interpretation was divided; however, Siddons was unanimously praised. Her performance of the "sleepwalking" scene in the fifth act was especially noted; Leigh Hunt called it "sublime." The Kemble-Siddons performances were the first widely influential productions in which Lady Macbeth's villainy was presented as deeper and more powerful than Macbeth's. It was also the first in which Banquo's ghost did not appear on stage.

Kemble's Macbeth struck some critics as too mannered and polite for Shakespeare's text. His successor as the leading actor of London, Edmund Kean, was more often criticised for emotional excess, particularly in the fifth act. Kean's Macbeth was not universally admired; William Hazlitt, for instance, complained that Kean's Macbeth was too like his Richard III. As he did in other roles, Kean exploited his athleticism as a key component of Macbeth's mental collapse. He reversed Kemble's emphasis on Macbeth as noble, instead presenting him as a ruthless politician who collapses under the weight of guilt and fear. Kean, however, did nothing to halt the trend toward extravagance in scene and costume.

Nineteenth century

The Macbeth of the next predominant London actor, William Charles Macready, provoked responses at least as mixed as those given Kean. Macready debuted in the role in 1820 at Covent Garden. As Hazlitt noted, Macready's reading of the character was purely psychological; the witches lost all supernatural power, and Macbeth's downfall arose purely from the conflicts in Macbeth's character. Macready's most famous Lady Macbeth was Helena Faucit, who debuted dismally in the role while still in her mid-20s, but who later achieved acclaim in the role for an interpretation that, unlike Siddons', accorded with contemporary notions of female decorum. After Macready "retired" to America, he continued to perform in the role; in 1849, he was involved in a rivalry with American actor Edwin Forrest, whose partisans hissed Macready at Astor Place, leading to what is commonly called the Astor Place Riot.

The two most prominent Macbeths of mid-century, Samuel Phelps and Charles Kean, were both received with critical ambivalence and popular success. Both are famous less for their interpretation of character than for certain aspects of staging. At Sadler's Wells Theatre, Phelps brought back nearly all of Shakespeare's original text. He brought back the first half of the Porter scene, which had been ignored by directors since Davenant; the second remained cut because of its ribaldry. He abandoned the added music, and reduced the witches to their role in the folio. Just as significantly, he returned to the folio treatment of Macbeth's death. Not all of these decisions succeeded in the Victorian context, and Phelps experimented with various combinations of Shakespeare and Davenant in his more than a dozen productions between 1844 and 1861. His most successful Lady Macbeth was Isabella Glyn, whose commanding presence reminded some critics of Siddons.

The outstanding feature of Kean's productions at the Princess's Theatre after 1850 was their accuracy of costume. Kean achieved his greatest success in modern melodrama, and he was widely viewed as not prepossessing enough for the greatest Elizabethan roles. Audiences did not mind, however; one 1853 production ran for twenty weeks. Presumably part of the draw was Kean's famous attention to historical accuracy; in his productions, as Allardyce Nicoll notes, "even the botany was historically correct."

Henry Irving's first attempt at the role, at the Lyceum Theatre, London in 1875, was a failure. Under the production of Sidney Frances Bateman, and starring alongside Kate Josephine Bateman, Irving may have been affected by the recent death of his manager Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman. Although the production lasted eighty performances, his Macbeth was judged inferior to his Hamlet. His next essay, opposite Ellen Terry at the Lyceum in 1888, fared better, playing for 150 performances. At the urging of Herman Klein, Irving engaged Arthur Sullivan to write a suite of incidental music for the piece. Friends such as Bram Stoker defended his "psychological" reading, based on the supposition that Macbeth had dreamed of killing Duncan before the start of the play. His detractors, among them Henry James, deplored his arbitrary word changes such as "would have" for "should have" in the speech at Lady Macbeth's death, and also his "neurasthenic" and "finicky" approach to the character.

Twentieth century to present

Barry Vincent Jackson staged an influential modern-dress production with the Birmingham Repertory in 1928; the production reached London, playing at the Royal Court Theatre. It received mixed reviews; Eric Maturin was judged an inadequate Macbeth, though Mary Merrall's vampish Lady was reviewed favourably. Though The Times judged it a "miserable failure," the production did much to overturn the tendency to scenic and antiquarian excess that had peaked with Charles Kean.

Among the most publicised productions of the 20th century was mounted by the Federal Theater Project at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem from 14 April to 20 June 1936. Orson Welles, in his first stage production, directed Jack Carter and Edna Thomas, with Canada Lee playing Banquo, in an all African American production. It became known as the Voodoo Macbeth, because Welles set the play in post-colonial Haiti. His direction emphasised spectacle and suspense: his dozens of "African" drums recalled Davenant's chorus of witches. Welles later directed and played the starring role in a 1948 film adaptation of the play Macbeth.

Laurence Olivier played Malcolm in the 1929 production and Macbeth in 1937 at the Old Vic Theatre in a production that saw the Vic's artistic director Lilian Baylis pass away the night before it opened. Olivier's makeup was so thick and stylised for that production that Vivien Leigh was quoted as saying "You hear Macbeth's first line, then Larry's makeup comes on, then Banquo comes on, then Larry comes on". Olivier later starred in what is among the most famous 20th-century productions, by Glen Byam Shaw at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955. Vivien Leigh played Lady Macbeth. The supporting cast, which Harold Hobson denigrated, included many actors who went on to successful Shakespearean careers: Ian Holm played Donalbain, Keith Michell was Macduff, and Patrick Wymark the Porter. Olivier was the key to success. The intensity of his performance, particularly in the conversation with the murderers and in confronting Banquo's ghost, seemed to many reviewers to recall Edmund Kean. Plans for a film version faltered after the box-office failure of Olivier's Richard III. Kenneth Tynan asserted flatly of this performance that "no one has ever succeeded as Macbeth"—until Olivier.

Olivier's co-star in his 1937 Old Vic Theatre production, Judith Anderson, had an equally triumphant association with the play. She played Lady Macbeth on Broadway opposite Maurice Evans in a production directed by Margaret Webster that ran for 131 performances in 1941, the longest run of the play in Broadway history. Anderson and Evans performed the play on television twice, in 1954 and 1962, with Maurice Evans winning an Emmy Award the 1962 production and Anderson winning the award for both presentations. A film adaptation in 1971 titled The Tragedy of Macbeth was directed by Roman Polanski and executive-produced by Hugh Hefner.

A Japanese film adaptation, Throne of Blood (Kumonosu jô, 1957), features Toshirô Mifune in the lead role and is set in feudal Japan. It was well received, and, despite having almost none of the play's script, critic Harold Bloom called it "the most successful film version of Macbeth."

One of the most notable 20th-century productions is that of Trevor Nunn for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976. Nunn had directed Nicol Williamson and Helen Mirren in the play two years earlier, but that production had largely failed to impress. In 1976, Nunn produced the play with a minimalist set at The Other Place; this small, nearly round stage focused attention on the psychological dynamics of the characters. Both Ian McKellen in the title role and Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth received exceptionally favourable reviews. Dench won the 1977 SWET Best Actress award for her performance and in 2004, members of the RSC voted her performance the greatest by an actress in the history of the company.

Nunn's production transferred to London in 1977 and was later filmed for television. It was to overshadow Peter Hall's 1978 production with Albert Finney as Macbeth and Dorothy Tutin as Lady Macbeth. An infamous version was staged at the Old Vic in 1980. Peter O'Toole and Frances Tomelty took the leads in a production (by Bryan Forbes) that was publicly disowned by Timothy West, artistic director of the theatre, before opening night, despite being a sellout because of its notoriety." As critic Jack Tinker noted in the Daily Mail: "The performance is not so much downright bad as heroically ludicrous."

On the stage, Lady Macbeth is considered one of the more "commanding and challenging" roles in Shakespeare's work. Other actresses who have played the role include Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Janet Suzman, Glenda Jackson, and Jane Lapotaire.

In 2001 the film Scotland, PA was released. The action is moved to 1970s Pennsylvania and revolves around Joe Macbeth and his wife Pat taking control of a hamburger cafe from Norm Duncan. The film was directed by Billy Morrissette and stars James LeGros, Maura Tierney and Christopher Walken.

A performance was staged in the real Macbeth's home of Moray, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, to take place at Elgin Cathedral. Professional actors, dancers, musicians, school children, and a community cast from the Moray area all took part in what was an important event in the Highland Year of Culture (2007).

In the same year there was general consent among critics that Rupert Goold's production for the Chichester Festival 2007, starring Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood, rivalled Trevor Nunn's acclaimed 1976 RSC production. And when it transferred to the Gielgud Theatre in London, Charles Spencer reviewing for the Daily Telegraph pronounced it the best Macbeth he had ever seen. At the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2007 the production won both the Best Actor award for Stewart, and the Best Director award for Goold. The same production opened in the US at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2008, moving to Broadway (Lyceum Theatre) after a sold-out run. In 2010 a film version of their production Macbeth was produced for television. Goold again directed and Stewart and Fleetwood starred. It aired as part of PBS' Great Performances series on 6 October 2010 and on BBC Four on 12 December 2010.

In 2003, the British theatre company Punchdrunk used The Beaufoy Building in London, an old Victorian school to stage "Sleep No More", the story of Macbeth in the style of a Hitchcock thriller, using reworked music from the soundtrack of classic Hitchcock films. Punchdrunk re-mounted the production, in a newly expanded version, at an abandoned school in Brookline, Massachusetts in October 2009 in association with the American Repertory Theatre,and again in 2011 in New York City in the McKittrick Hotel, as Sleep No More (2011 theatrical production).

In 2004, Indian director Vishal Bharadwaj directed his own adaptation to Macbeth, titled Maqbool. Set in the contemporary Mumbai underworld, the movie starred Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapur, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah and Piyush Mishra in prominent roles.

Sequels by other authors

In 2008, Pegasus Books published The Tragedy of Macbeth Part II: The Seed of Banquo, a play by American author and playwright Noah Lukeman which endeavoured to pick up where the original Macbeth left off, and to resolve its many loose ends.

David Greig's 2010 play Dunsinane took Macbeth's downfall at Dunsinane as its starting point, with Macbeth's just-ended reign portrayed as long and stable in contrast to Malcolm's.

References

• Coursen, Herbert (1997). Macbeth. Westport: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30047-X.
• Kliman, Bernice (2005). Latin American Shakespeares. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 0-8386-4064-8. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

Notes

1. "Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, Line 38". shakespeare-navigators.com.
2. See On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.
3. Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 1, Line 72.
4. Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3, Line 204.
5. Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, Lines 17–28.
6. Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 8, Lines 15–16.
7. "Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 8, Lines 71–72". shakespeare-navigators.com.
8. Sparknotes 101: Shakespeare. Spark Educational Publishing. 2004. p. 136. ISBN 1-4114-0027-5. Retrieved 18 August 2011. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
9. Coursen (1997, 11–13)
10. Coursen (1997, 15–21)
11. Coursen (1997, 17)
12. ^ Nagarajan, S. (1956). "A Note on Banquo". Shakespeare Quarterly. 7 (4): 371–376. JSTOR 2866356.
13. Palmer, J. Foster (1886). "The Celt in Power: Tudor and Cromwell". Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. 3: 343–370. doi:10.2307/3677851.
14. Banquo's Stuart descent was disproven in the 19th century, when it was discovered that the Fitzalans actually descended from a Breton family.
15. Maskell, D. W. (1971). "The Transformation of History into Epic: The 'Stuartide' (1611) of Jean de Schelandre". The Modern Language Review. 66 (1): 53–65. JSTOR 3722467.
16. Charles Boyce, Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare, New York, Roundtable Press, 1990, p. 350.
17. A.R. Braunmuller, ed. Macbeth (CUP, 1997), 5–8.
18. Braunmuller, Macbeth, pp. 2–3.
19. Kermode, Frank (1974). "Macbeth". The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p. 1308. ISBN 0-395-04402-2. For details on Garnet, see Zagorin, Perez (1996). "The Historical Significance of Lying and Dissimulation—Truth-Telling, Lying, and self-Deception". Social Research. 63 (3): 863–912.
20. Anderson, Mark (2005). Shakespeare By Another Name. New York: Gotham Books. pp. 402–403. ISBN 1-59240-103-1.
21. ^ Kermode, Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1308.
22. Braunmuller (1997). Macbeth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 5–8. ISBN 0-521-29455-X.
23. If, that is, the Forman document is genuine; see the entry on Simon Forman for the question of the authenticity of the Book of Plays.
24. Brooke, Nicholas, ed. (1998). The Tragedy of Macbeth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 57. ISBN 0-19-283417-7.
25. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us. In: John Wain (ed.): Shakespeare. Macbeth. A Casebook. Bristol: Western Printing Services (1968), pp. 168–177
26. Kliman, 14.
27. Perkins, William (1618). A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, So Farre forth as it is revealed in the Scriptures, and manifest by true experience. London: Cantrell Legge, Printer to the Universitie of Cambridge. p. 53. Retrieved 24 June 2009.
28. Coddon, Karin S. (1989). "'Unreal Mockery': Unreason and the Problem of Spectacle in Macbeth". ELH. 56 (3): 485–501. JSTOR 2873194.
29. ^ Frye, Roland Mushat (1987). "Launching the Tragedy of Macbeth: Temptation, Deliberation, and Consent in Act I". The Huntington Library Quarterly. 50 (3): 249–261.
30. "Full text of "Hippolyta S View Some Christian Aspects Of Shakespeare S Plays"". Archive.org. 28 August 1960. Retrieved 1 November 2009.
31. "Internet Archive: Free Download: Hippolyta S View Some Christian Aspects Of Shakespeare S Plays". Archive.org. Retrieved 1 November 2009.
32. ^ Robert Faires, "The curse of the play", Austin Chronicle, 13 October 2000.
33. Tritsch, Dina (April 1984). "The Curse of 'Macbeth'. Is there an evil spell on this ill-starred play?". pretallez.com. Retrieved 28 November 2010.
34. Dunning, Brian (7 September 2010). "Toil and Trouble: The Curse of Macbeth". skeptoid.com. Retrieved 28 November 2010.
35. Babylon 5 – The Scripts of J. Michael Straczynski, Volume 6 by J. Michael Straczynski, Synthetic Labs Publishing (2006).
36. Garber, Marjorie B. (2008). Profiling Shakespeare. Routledge. p. 77. ISBN 978-0-415-96446-3.
37. For the date of acquisition, see, for instance, Adams, J. Q., Shakespearean Playhouses, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917: 224; Bentley, G. E. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941: 6.13–17; Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923: 2.498. For Macbeth as an indoor play, see, for instance Bald, R.C., "Macbeth and the Short Plays," Review of English Studies 4 (1928): 430; Shirley, Frances, Shakespeare's Use of Off-stage Sounds, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963: 168–89.
38. ^ Sylvan Barnet, "Macbeth on Stage and Screen," in Macbeth, ed. Sylvan Barnet, A Signet Classic, 1998, p. 188.
39. F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1965, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964; pp. 294-5.
40. Odell, George Clinton Densmore (1921). Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving. 274. Vol. 2. C. Scribner's sons. Retrieved 17 August 2009.
41. "Henry Irving as Macbeth", PeoplePlay UK website.
42. Information about Sullivan's incidental music to Macbeth in 1888, The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive.
43. Odell, George Clinton Densmore (1921). Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving. 384. Vol. 2. C. Scribner's sons. Retrieved 17 August 2009.
44. Robert Tanitch, Olivier, Abbeville Press (1985).
45. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: 1999. ISBN 1-57322-751-X, p. 519.
46. A Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Study of Rehearsal and Performance Practice in the 1980 Royal Court Hamlet and the Old Vic Macbeth: An Actor’s View by Kevin Quarmby, Shakespeare, 1 (2005): 174-87Quarmby, Kevin (13 December 2006). "Old Vic Macbeth". Shakespeare. Retrieved 24 August 2011.
47. London Stage in the 20th Century by Robert Tanitch, Haus Publishing (2007) ISBN 978-1-904950-74-5.
48. Brown, Langdon. Shakespeare around the Globe: A Guide to Notable Postwar Revivals. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986: 355.
49. Spencer, Charles (27 September 2007). "The best Macbeth I have seen". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 23 October 2009.
50. "Winning performances on the West End stage | News". Evening Standard. UK. Retrieved 1 November 2009.
51. "Punchdrunk website – Sleep No More". punchdrunk. Retrieved 16 May 2009.
52. "ART website Sleep No More". ART. Retrieved 20 December 2009.
53. "Emersive website Sleep No More". Emursive. Retrieved 18 December 2011.

External links

Performances

• Footage of Orson Welles' landmark "Voodoo Macbeth" – with informative annotations
• Performances and Photographs from London and Stratford performances of Macbeth 1960–2000 – From the Designing Shakespeare resource
• The Shakespeare Video Society edition (Google Video – 2 hours 12 mins)
• Macbeth on Film
• PBS Video directed by Rupert Goold starring Sir Patrick Stewart

Audio recording

• Macbeth: Free Full-length Recording on ejunto.com

Text of play

• Annotated Text at The Shakespeare Project -– annotated HTML version of Macbeth.
• Macbeth Navigator – searchable, annotated HTML version of Macbeth.
• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare – Entire play in basic HTML.
• Classic Literature Library – HTML version of Macbeth.
• Project Gutenberg: Macbeth – ASCII plain-text from Project Gutenberg
• shakespeareNet – Act by Act summary of Macbeth
• No Fear Shakespeare – By Sparknotes – Original Text and a Modern Translation side-by-side

Commentary

• Macbeth Analysis and Textual Notes
• Annotated Bibliography of Macbeth Criticism
• Shakespeare and the Uses of Power by Steven Greenblatt

Maps

• Macbeth's Scotland on Google Maps This map shows some of the primary locations in Macbeth.

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