30 Great Myths about Shakespeare
Page 20
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 l
east, 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).
Myth 24
Shakespeare did not revise his plays
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. L3r)
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.
Romeo Friar
The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night, The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,
Chequering the Eastern clouds with streaks of light, Checking the Eastern clouds with streaks of light,
And darkness fleckled, like a drunkard reels And fleckled darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day's pathway made by Titan's wheels. From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels.
Shakespeare presumably wrote this speech for Romeo, then decided to give it to the Friar. When he reassigned it to Friar Laurence he extended it: the four lines continue with the Friar saying that he must collect medicinal herbs from his garden before the sun gets too high. Thus, the speech seems to “belong” more to the Friar in that he has a reason for talking about the time. (The fact that it is moveable should perhaps be factored into our discussion of character in Myth 29: does Shakespeare think of the speech first and the character second?)
In fact, in Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare did more than simply swap the speaker. He tinkered with the speech in aesthetic ways: “chequering” and “checking” are variant forms of a verb meaning to “variegate with rays or bands of different colours” (OED 2). He changed the word order from “darkness fleckled” to “fleckled darkness.” The biggest change affects the last line, where in Friar Laurence's version the sun god's chariot has acquired an adjective, “fiery”; this then forces the rearrangement of the meter and the separation of one image into two (path and wheels rather than a wheel-created path). Whether Shakespeare failed adequately to signpost his deletion of Romeo's speech or the compositor misread the signs is unknowable. But the printshop compositor's error in setting both versions enables us to look over Shakespeare's shoulder and watch him at work—revising.
We see the same thing again in a comedy written about the same time: Love's Labour's Lost (1595), whose first printed edition of 1599 has two sequential versions of the dialogue in which Rosalind imposes tasks on Berowne. The second dialogue was clearly intended to replace the first; instead they are printed sequentially, and the result is duplication but with variant phrasing. However, in Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare's second thoughts are not confined to expression but extend to plot. Shakespeare first intended that Berowne should woo Katherine, not Rosaline: Berowne's first sparring dialogue in 2.1 takes place with the character called “Katherine” (seven speeches); later in the same scene he questions Boyet about “Katherine.” In the rest of the play the plot links him with Rosaline and by the time the text was reprinted in 1623, the red herrings of 2.1 had been cleared up: the speech prefixes and dialogue references to “Katherine” have been replaced by “Rosaline.”
These are obviously revisions that took place while Shakespeare was actually composing; they concern small units of text, and both versions coexist in a single text. When we find differences of large episodes across texts (as when a scene is present in one printed text but not in another), questions arise as to whether Shakespeare made this excision, when he made it (immediately or later), or whether it was made (subsequently) by someone else. In the 1604–5 text of Hamlet, for example, Horatio has a long speech in Act 1, scene 1, just before the Ghost's appearance, in which he describes portents in ancient Rome before Caesar's death; later in the play, Fo
rtinbras's brisk and brief crossing of the stage to invade Poland prompts a soliloquy from Hamlet in which he reproaches himself for delay. Neither of these moments appears in the Folio. The reasons for the cuts are conceivably theatrical. It is essential that the Ghost seem scarily supernatural; if spectators watch him walk on (as they might do if their attention wandered during a long speech) the ghostly impact of his surprise appearance is lessened. Preventing audience attention flagging may also lie behind the removal of Hamlet's soliloquy in Act 4. (Interestingly, when Shakespeare texts exist in plural versions, there is a high concentration of cuts in the fourth act when spectator stamina—or is it actor stamina?—can wane.)
We need to remember that Shakespeare is a dramatist as well as a poet; sometimes poetry has to be sacrificed to drama. The need for such cuts may not have been apparent until the play was staged. Who made the cuts? Maybe they were obvious to Shakespeare after a run through, or after the first performance. But if they were suggested by the actors, they presumably had Shakespeare's approval (he was a shareholder in his own company). Theater is a collaborative art (see Myth 17).