by Ben Crystal
The Master of the Revels was an immensely powerful man. No play could be performed at Court – where the monarch would be entertained – without his authorisation, and by 1606 he was given control over the plays performed in the public theatres too. The aim was to ensure that the Court received the best possible entertainment, and that no one would be upset too greatly by anything they saw.
Considering recent events, parts of Macbeth might have made the audience a little too uncomfortable, seeing as they’d have been watching the play in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, and perhaps only a short time before Guy Fawkes was to be executed, so Shakespeare would have to be very careful with his phrasing.
But death, murder, and treason aren’t the only fun bits in the play. We’ve also got witches. The play opens with a scene where three witches are incanting a spell, in the middle of a storm of thunder and lightning. This is incredibly important too, and needs contextualising almost as much as the death of a monarch did. Unlike today’s productions of Macbeth, the witches in Shakespeare’s production would probably have caused quite a ruckus, as the Elizabethans would have been watching these scenes in the middle of the European Witch Craze.
The witch-hunts that formed much of the European Witch Craze took place over 400 years, from towards the end of the 13th century to the mid-17th century. England was swept up in the furore too, and the Witchcraft Act of 1541, passed under Henry VIII, stated: ‘It shall be Felony to practise, or cause to be practised Conjuration, Witchcraft, Enchantment or Sorcery.’
The years of the Witch Craze would have been terrifying for people. Fear of witches still abounded in Shakespeare’s time, and far beyond it.
In 1616, the year Shakespeare died, Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician and a close friend to the Emperor, only just managed to save his mother from being burnt at the stake for being a witch, by using the clout he had in the Court. Eighty-six years after Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, the Salem witch trials took place (made famous in modern theatre by Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible).
The witch hunts would have been truly terrifying.
If anybody thought you might be a witch, you would be put under trial, often involving extremely horrible methods of torture, until you either confessed (and were then burnt at the stake while still alive) or you died from the torture. If you cried or were seen to be afraid during the trial, it was a sign you were a witch. If you knew or were kin to a witch, you would be put under trial as a suspected witch. The examiner could look for a diabolical mark on your body, like a birthmark or mole, which was a sure sign you were a witch; if he couldn’t find one, he was perfectly entitled to claim that the mark was invisible, and, you guessed it, you were found to be a witch …
There were plenty of other similarly inescapable ways of proving that someone was a witch, and thousands of innocent people, mostly women, were killed. Estimates for the number of people executed in Europe for participating in witchcraft vary from 12,000 right up to 100,000; more ‘moderate’ estimates come in at 60,000.
Elizabeth I passed a Witchcraft Act in 1563, and James I in particular seemed to have a special interest in witches: as James VI of Scotland not only did he appoint royal commissions whose single task was to hunt witches down, but he’s known to have participated in witch trials too. In 1597 he published a treatise on witchcraft called Daemonologie, although by this time he’d begun an about-turn in his thinking, and revoked those earlier royal commissions.
By the time he had assumed the throne as James I of England, it seems he had become more sceptical of the witch trials, and despite introducing his own, harsher Witch Craft Act in 1604, it was never used in his reign.
A time, then, when even if you were thought to be associated with a witch you could end up trying to hold your breath under water for a very long time, when even greater atrocities were taking place abroad, and a Scots king (known for his interest in all things witchy) takes the English throne …
… and Shakespeare writes a play with witches in the first scene, who then lead a man to commit high treason.
Topical.
We may laugh at witches nowadays; indeed, their scenes in Macbeth are often thought to be the hardest to get right in modern productions. They’re usually the least scary moments, too: we’re simply not afraid of witches any more.
Although we may know that the witch trials of a few hundred years ago were truly horrific, we don’t have access to the kind of fear the Elizabethans would have had, the continual suspicion, not only a terror of witches themselves but an entire ideology that poured from that fear into the minds of the populace – it made people paranoid and trigger-happy, crying Witch! at anybody with a crooked thumb.
For an Elizabethan audience, playing an ace and opening the play with the scariest characters is a pretty gutsy thing to do. Without working out why the witches are there, it’s too easy to dismiss them as worthless plot devices. But Shakespeare uses the witches to help set the tone, and for his audience, they’d be very quickly aware that the tone is a bloody scary one.
Think of a witch now, and some green-skinned, wart-nosed hag from The Wizard of Oz (1939) will probably come to mind. A Dr Who episode in 2007 set in Shakespeare’s London featured witches; they were slightly green-skinned, but they also had pointy teeth and, well, they did scare me. Dr Who has always terrified me, though.
But to get an idea of how terrifying witches would have been to an Elizabethan audience, and how strange and unreal they would seem, bear this in mind: 200 years after Shakespeare was alive (100 or so years after the witch-hunts were over), people were only just beginning to draw witches. Until that point, it seems, they wouldn’t have been comfortable depicting them.
In 2006 at the Tate Britain in London, there was an exhibition called ‘Gothic Nightmares’. It wasn’t so scary. I wandered through the first half of the exhibition not really appreciating the paintings of imps and ghouls, ghosts and witches sitting on the edge of beds, swirling above someone sleeping, very often visiting someone in prison or surprising someone on a heath.
I found a dark room where a modern projector had been set up to replicate an 18th-century projector – crude cut-out shapes were being placed before a bulb that was being made to flicker like a candle, making cartoon-ish images float from side to side on the wall opposite. It was boring.
Then, out of the middle distance, a pair of yellow eyes loomed.
The eyes belonged to a face that rushed towards me so quickly I tried to jump out of the way.
Fortunately it was dark, so no one saw me make a fool of myself. As I left the room I glanced at my friend who, I was glad to see, also looked a little, ahem, spooked.
I stopped to think. I had been scared by cardboard and light. Me, with my 21st-century head, used to all manner of special effects, horror movies, blood and gore on TV and in the cinema.
If it can scare us, what must it have done to people living 200 years ago, when these images were first made? How terrifying would it be to see a picture move, animatedly? To be sure, if you could take a TV back in time 200 years and show it to someone on the street, their mind probably wouldn’t be able to comprehend what it was seeing.
So I made my way back to the beginning of the exhibition and started again, this time trying to imagine what it must have been like for someone from the 18th century to see these pictures for the first time, to have their nightmares, their worst fears, put into pictorial form.
I came across a painting of a man on a heath, meeting three witches. I thought of this book.
I went back to the beginning of the gallery a third time, and started again, this time trying as hard as I could to dismiss my modern head, and replace it with an Elizabethan’s.
Take a TV 200 years into the past, and you’d freak people out. Take it 400 years back and they’d put you to the stake. Take an Elizabethan 200 years into the future, into the 18th century, show them these paintings, and they’d freak out.
So I was scared. The people in the 18th cen
tury, seeing the worst things imaginable suddenly given shape, would have been scared.
What must the idea of actual, real live witches have been like to the Elizabethans?
400 years ago, Shakespeare took his audience and put witches in front of them, which was a pretty ballsy thing to do. They would have found them very terrifying and very real.
And that’s how you have to think when you come into contact with Shakespeare. You have to think the way an Elizabethan would.
Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man’s season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and the moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone and we all claim him, but it’s wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn’t properly belong to us but to another world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer’s ink and was vigorously dominated by Elizabeth.
Orson Welles, Everybody’s Shakespeare, 1934
Scene 7
A castle, Scotland, 11th century
I’ve gone into the witches in depth, even though I’m not going to look at a witches’ scene. When we realise how horrifically, bone-shakingly fearsome the Elizabethans would have found the witches, their scenes begin to make sense, and it makes it easier to understand why Macbeth believes what they say: he’s told right at the beginning by the witches that he will be king; this starts a domino effect that leads to him killing his king. By listening to their predictions and following their advice, Macbeth is essentially selling his soul to the devil, and that, the Elizabethans knew in the core of their beings, was a surefire path to destruction.
Without any further ado, let’s look at the extract. It’s Act 2, Scene 2, and it begins with Lady Macbeth waiting nervously for her husband to return from killing the king …
Enter LADY MACBETH
LADY MACBETH
That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold;
What hath quench’d them hath given me fire.
Hark! Peace!
It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman,
Which gives the stern’st good-night. He is about it:
The doors are open; and the surfeited grooms
Do mock their charge with snores: I have drugg’d
their possets,
That death and nature do contend about them,
Whether they live or die.
MACBETH
[Within] Who’s there? what, ho!
LADY MACBETH
Alack, I am afraid they have awaked,
And ’tis not done. The attempt and not the deed
Confounds us. Hark! I laid their daggers ready;
He could not miss ’em. Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done’t.
Enter MACBETH
My husband!
MACBETH
I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?
LADY MACBETH
I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.
Did not you speak?
MACBETH
When?
LADY MACBETH
Now.
MACBETH
As I descended?
Actually, stop there. I don’t want to work from this edition of the text. There are hundreds of different editions of Shakespeare available, both online and in shops. This layout is from an online edition of the play that shall remain nameless, though it saddens me to say it’s touted for students and educators.
To be fair, after all my First Folio trumpet-blowing, the Folio text of Macbeth has the same layout. The Folio does have its faults, particularly that the space constraints in printing the book meant that the metre couldn’t always be laid out as the actors may have wanted.
Now take a look below at the way the text is laid out in the Penguin edition. You’ll find this layout (though not the spelling) in any one of the major publishing house editions of the plays. I’ve kept the spellings from the Folio, because I like them, but also because anything that helps to remember that this is an old story from an old time is a Good Thing:
[Enter Lady.]
La.
That which hath made the[m] drunk, hath made me bold:
What hath quench’d them, hath giuen me fire.
Hearke, peace: it was the Owle that shriek’d,
The fatall Bell-man, which giues the stern’st good-night.
He is about it, the Doores are open:
And the surfeted Groomes doe mock their charge
With Snores. I haue drugg’d their Possets,
That Death and Nature doe contend about them,
Whether they liue, or dye.
[Enter Macbeth.]
Macb.
Who’s there? what hoa?
Lady
Alack, I am afraid they haue awak’d,
And ’tis not done: th’ attempt, and not the deed,
Confounds vs: hearke: I lay’d their Daggers ready,
He could not misse ’em. Had he not resembled
My Father as he slept, I had don’t.
My Husband?
Macb.
I haue done the deed:
Didst thou not heare a noyse?
Lady
I heard the Owle schreame, and the Crickets cry.
Did not you speake?
Macb.
When?
Lady
Now.
Macb.
As I descended?
Lady
I.
Macb.
Hearke!
Who lyes i’th’ second Chamber?
Lady
Donalbaine.
Macb.
This is a sorry sight.
Lady
A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight.
Macb.
There’s one did laugh in’s sleepe,
And one cry’d Murther, that they did wake each other:
I stood, and heard them: But they did say their Prayers, And addrest them againe to sleepe.
Lady
There are two lodg’d together.
Macb.
One cry’d God blesse vs, and Amen the other,
As they had seene me with these Hangmans hands:
Listning their feare, I could not say Amen,
When they did say God blesse vs.
Lady
Consider it not so deepely.
Macb.
But wherefore could not I pronounce Amen?
I had most need of Blessing, and Amen
Stuck in my throat.
Lady
These deeds must not be thought
After these wayes: so, it will make vs mad.
You can see there are a number of differences between the two versions I’ve shown you. I’m not even going to start talking about the number of extra exclamation marks there are in the online version, because I may begin to rant, and that will do no good.
Obviously the spellings in the second version are a little odd, but once you get used to the letter u printed as a v, the j printed as i, and the extra e scattered about, it isn’t so hard. This second version of the text is the one that Shakespeare’s actors would have authorised, had they the printing space.
They would want the text to be laid out as they remembered it, which is to say for the purposes of performing, and we can work out from the metre how that would look. As it’s unlikely there were directors in those days, Shakespeare would have had to write into the text his directions for his actors – actors he had worked with for years, whose strengths and weaknesses he knew he could write to.
Scene 8
221b Baker Street
There is, of course, no one interpretation of any piece. You can make your own, if you like. But first, I’m going to take you through mine.
The first clue is to examine the metre.
You’ll remember from Act 4 that Shakespeare wrote many of his plays almost entirely in verse, and that when he wr
ote in verse he wrote mostly in iambic pentameter, and that in iambic pentameter lines of verse have ten syllables in them. Supposedly.
So. Exercise Number One.
Let’s go through the scene from Macbeth and count how many syllables there are in each line. As this is supposed to be in iambic pentameter, we’d expect every line to have ten syllables.
When a line of metre is shared by two characters, I’ve marked the second half of the line to show how it makes up ten syllables (and so a complete line of pentameter), e.g. 7–10. I’ve also marked lines as 9/10 or 10/11, to show that depending on how you articulate a word in that line, the number of syllables can change slightly:
When a scene is written in metre, and the words don’t start on the far left of the page underneath the character name, like in the lines ‘When?/Now./As I descended?’, then they are not new lines of metre, but shared lines, which we looked at briefly in Act 4 – one line of metre broken up and shared across two or more characters:
Which makes up a perfect ten.
As you can see from my syllable count, there are a lot of lines that don’t make up a perfect ten. Plenty of lines, in fact, that are far from having ten syllables.
In fact, as we’re getting all numerical, in 34 lines of text, there are only twelve pure, unbroken lines of pentameter. That’s a little odd, isn’t it …?
If we include shared lines, or lines that could be made ten if we work them a little when speaking them, the total can reach seventeen. But even if we do include those extras, that means there are still seventeen lines that have been messed about with, and that are either a little under ten syllables, or a little over.
Let’s not underestimate the significance of these sums.
If something is supposed to have ten syllables in it, then it should have ten syllables in it. Period.
Shakespeare, when he wrote this, was intending to write in iambic pentameter. And he is. But like a jazz musician, he plays around the riff of ten syllables.
Take Lady’s first speech again:
Look at the syllable counts! Shakespeare starts with a ten – this is the melody, the main tune that he’s going to play with – then he plays another ten (though it could be spoken as a nine if you speak the word fire monosyllabically), then a cheeky eight, whacks it up to eleven, back to ten for two lines (to remind you of the tune), down to another cheeky eight, up to a ten/eleven (about’em/about them), and then to finish the speech, a ten (though it’s split by a line break).