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MACBETH

INTRODUCTION

MONG the few of Shakespeare's plays which, as far as we know, were not based in a greater or less degree upon novels or the works of other dramatists, we must place Macbeth. He found the two stories which he interwove into the plot of this tragedy in Holinshed's Chronicles of Scotland. The first is that of the historical hero of the play, a Scottish nobleman, who, being himself the heir apparent to the throne in case of King Duncan's death during the minority of his sons, and being excited by the predictions of three witches that he should be king, attacks and slays his kinsman and his sovereign, usurps the crown, rules tyrannically, murders Banquo, to whom the witches predict that he shall be the father of kings, sacks the castle, and slaughters the family of Macduff, who distrusts him, carries a high hand because the witches tell him that he is invulnerable by any man of woman born, and is finally brought to bay and slain by Macduff, who did not enter the world in the ordinary course of nature. The second is the story of the murder of King Duff (who reigned about three quarters of a century before Duncan) by Donwald, captain of the Castle of Forres, in revenge of real or fancied injuries. He, at the instigation of his wife, caused the king to be slaughtered in the night by four of his (Donwald's) servants, and killed with his own hand the king's chamberlains, to turn suspicion upon them. Shakespeare seems to have been indebted in this play to no other source, either for incident or character, unless we should except the superstitions, written and unwritten, of his day, concerning witches and their spells and incantations. Shakespeare

followed Holinshed's relation of these two stories very closely as far as regards the course of events, and even in the preservation of many minor incidents, such as the occurrence of the prodigies which accompanied the death of the king, and the conversation between Malcolm and Macduff in England, in which the former slanders himself to test the sincerity of the latter. And, as his manner was, he did not even disdain, upon occasion, to adopt the language of the chronicler. The old story also suggested to him the character of Lady Macbeth herself, and her agency in the tragedy. For Holinshed represents Macbeth's wife as "very ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire to bear the name of queen." Donwald's wife, too, as we have seen, incited her husband to the murder of King Duff; pertinaciously devising "the means whereby he might accomplish it"; while he, although he yielded to her fiendish temptations, "greatly abhorred the act in his heart."

The principal points in which Shakespeare deviated from Holinshed's relation of the story of Macbeth are the substitution of the incidents of the murder of King Duff for the chronicler's simple statement that Macbeth "slew the king at Inverness," and the making Banquo innocent of all knowledge of the design upon Duncan's life, although it is recorded that he was chief among Macbeth's partisans in the usurpation and supporters in the regicide. By the former variation Shakespeare gained the opportunity for the grandest exhibition of the pure tragedy of horror that exists in all literature, the second Act of this play, and for two preparatory Scenes (I. v. and vii.) which are surpassed as psychological studies by few even of his own. By the latter he adroitly flattered the newly crowned monarch, James I., whose accession to the throne of England not improbably occasioned the choice of this subject for a new play.

A question has been raised, which cannot be regarded yet as settled, upon the originality of the Scenes of witchcraft in this tragedy. In a play called The Witch [probably later than Macbeth], and assigned to 1610, and which was written by

Thomas Middleton, a contemporary of Shakespeare, but who began his dramatic career about ten years later, there are Scenes which are undeniably either the originals of the incantation Scenes in Macbeth, or copies of them. Shakespeare would not have hesitated a moment about imitating Middleton, or any other writer, had it suited his purpose to do so; but it would seem the Scenes in The Witch are the imitations, not only because they have the air, at once timid, constrained, and exaggerated, which indicates in every art a copy by a very much inferior hand, but because witchcraft was an essential motive power in the very story which Shakespeare had chosen to dramatise. And witchcraft being thus inherent in his plot, and the superstitions of his day [as well as Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584)] furnishing him ample material with which to fulfil this indication, exactly the material, too, which he used, — it is hard to believe that, with his wealth of creative power, he would ever have thought of going to the work of a younger dramatist for the mere supernatural costume with which to dress out such mysterious and unique creatures of his imagination as the three weird sisters of this tragedy.1

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Macbeth was written between 1603 and 1610. The former of these dates is fixed by the vision of the kings in IV. i., in which the last of the line carry "twofold balls and treble sceptres" an allusion which could not have been made

1 It has been plausibly urged that the figure of Hecate in III. v. is incongruous and a palpable intrusion, while the language here, "released from the weird horror or grossness of the other witch scenes trips along in courtly rococo elegance." Some critics therefore regard III. v., IV. i. 39-43, and with these IV. i. 123–130, which are all iambic while the other witch scenes are trochaic, as "of extremely doubtful authenticity."

"Of two songs which according to the stage direction were to be sung during the representation of Macbeth (III. v. and IV. i.), only the first line of each is noted there, but songs beginning with the same lines are set out in full in Middleton's play; they were probably by Middleton, and were interpolated by actors in a stage version of Macbeth after its original production."— Sidney Lee's Life, p. 240. (R)

As

before James I. had united in his person the sovereignty of the three kingdoms known as Great Britain and Ireland. The latter limit was determined by the discovery of a record of the performance of Macbeth at the Globe Theatre on the 20th of April, 1610, in the manuscript diary of Dr. Simon Forman, which is preserved in the Ashmolean Museum. James was not proclaimed King of Great Britain and Ireland until October, 1604, and as the remarkable circumstance of the union of the kingdoms under his sceptre would have been likely to direct Shakespeare's attention to his favourite historical authority for the subject of a new play, we may perhaps safely conclude that Macbeth was produced in 1605. In August of that year King James visited the University of Oxford, and was, of course, received with elaborate welcome and formal entertainment. At St. John's College he was met by three students personating the three weird sisters, who chanted a dialogue in which he was named as the descendant of Banquo, whose happy reign over the three kingdoms they had prognosticated so many centuries before.1 To regard this performance as the origin of the brief passage in the tragedy which refers to the same prediction and its event would appear to reverse the usual and natural relations of transmitted thought. It would seem rather that the masking at the University was a scholastic elaboration of Shakespeare's incidental allusion; and we need have little hesitation in referring the production of Macbeth to the period between October, 1604, and August, 1605.2

1 "Tres adolescentes concinno Sibyllarum habitu induti, è Collegio prodeuntes, et carmina lepida alternatim canentes, Regi se tres esse illas Sibyllas profitentur, quæ Banchoni olim sobolis imperia prædixerant, jamque iterum comparere, ut eadem vaticinii veritate prædicerent Jacobo, se jam et diu Regem futurum Britanniæ felicissimum et multorum regum parentem, ut ex Banchonis stirpe nunquam sit hæres Britannico diademati defuturus." Wake's Rex Platonicus, 1607, pp. 18, 19.

2 Others, among them Sidney Lee, place the date a year later, 1606. The allusion to the "equivocator . . . who committed treason" is thought by some to refer to the defence and execution, early in 1606,

One is the more inclined to this opinion from the indications which the play itself affords that it was produced upon an emergency. It exhibits throughout the [rapid] execution of a grand and clearly conceived design. But the [rapidity] is that of a master of his art, who, with conscious command of its resources, and in the frenzy of a grand inspiration, works out his conception to its minutest detail of essential form, leaving the work of surface finish for the occupation of cooler leisure. What the Sistine Madonna was to Raphael, it seems that Macbeth was to Shakespeare-a magnificent impromptu ; that kind of impromptu which results from the application of well-disciplined powers and rich stores of thought to a subject suggested by occasion. One may well regard Macbeth as, for the most part, a specimen of Shakespeare's unelaborated, if not unfinished, writing, in the maturity and highest vitality of his genius. It abounds in instances of extremest compression and most daring ellipsis, while it exhibits in every Scene a union of supreme dramatic and poetic power, and in almost every line an imperially irresponsible control of language. Hence, probably, its lack of formal completeness of versification in certain passages, and also some of the imperfection in its text, the thought in which the compositors were not always able to follow and apprehend. The only authority for the text of Macbeth is the folio of 1623, the apparent corruptions of which must be restored with a more than usually cautious hand. Without being multitudinous or confusing, they are sufficiently numerous and important to test severely the patience, acumen, and judgment of any editor.1

The period of the action of this tragedy is the middle of the eleventh century, and its incidents occurred in the course of about twenty years. Duncan was killed about 1040, and

Macbeth defeated and slain about 1060. . . .

of a Jesuit, Henry Garnett, who was concerned in the Gunpowder Plot. (R)

1 Macbeth was reproduced in 1674 with changes by Davenant. (R)