Macbeth: The State of Play

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• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781408159828
• eBook ISBN: 9781472503190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

A "freeze frame" volume showcasing the range of current debate and ideas surrounding one of the most familiar of Shakespeare's tragedies. Each chapter has been carefully selected for its originality and relevance to the needs of students, teachers and researchers. Key themes and topics covered include: The Text and its Status
History and Topicality
Critical Approaches and Close Reading
Adaptation and Afterlife All the essays offer new perspectives and combine to give readers an up-to-date understanding of what's exciting and challenging about Macbeth. The approach based on an individual play, unlike that of topic-based series, reflects how Shakespeare is most commonly studied and taught.

PART ONE

The Text and its Status

1

Notes and Queries Concerning the Text of Macbeth

Anthony B. Dawson

I want to begin by outlining a few salient features of the text of Macbeth. Many of these are well known but tend to be forgotten in the rush to interpretation.

I. The Folio (F) text is among the shortest in the collection (only Comedy of Errors and The Tempest are shorter). In comparison especially with the other tragedies, its brevity would seem to be anomalous.

II. It contains two scenes (3.5 and parts of 4.1) that feature a character called Hecate who appears unexpectedly, is mentioned nowhere else in the play, and graces no other drama of the whole period except Middleton’s The Witch.

III. The latter play (The Witch) gives the full text of two songs which are cited in F but (uniquely for songs in the Folio) are not printed (or, to be precise, a part line of each is printed).

IV. Macbeth was first composed some time around 1606. The date of The Witch is unknown but the Oxford Middleton, following other recent scholars, argues for a date of mid-1616.1 Musical settings for the two songs named in F and printed in The Witch exist, and are attributed to composers who worked with the King’s Men at Blackfriars in the second decade of the seventeenth century.

V. In April 1611, Simon Forman saw Macbeth at the Globe and recorded his impressions in the idiosyncratic style which he adopted for his theatrical criticism. There are a number of small discrepancies between what he writes and the play as we have it, plus there are several important parts of the play that he fails to mention (including the Hecate scenes).

Va. Forman describes the figures called Witches or weyard/weyward sisters2 in the play as ‘women feiries or Nimphes’.

VI. The opening stage direction of 1.2 uses the word ‘meeting’ for the arrival on stage of a) Duncan and his train, and b) the ‘bleeding captain’. This formulation recurs at the opening of 3.5 (Enter the three Witches meeting Hecat) and occurs frequently in Middleton (much more often than in the work of any other contemporary playwright) and only once in Shakespeare’s undisputed plays (King Lear [quarto only] 2.1.0).

VII. The sequence from 3.6 to 4.1 has been questioned as introducing contradiction, with particular reference to Macduff’s flight to England and its effect on Macbeth. In 3.6, an unnamed Lord tells Lennox that Macduff ‘Is gone to pray the holy king [Edward] upon his aid / To wake Northumberland and warlike Siward … And this report / Hath so exasperate their king that he / Prepares for some attempt at war’ (3.6.29–39).3 Exactly what the report consists of is ambiguous, and the phrase ‘their king’ which appears to refer to Edward has frequently been emended to ‘the king’ and hence made to refer to Macbeth. The reason for this is that Lennox’s response (‘Sent he to Macduff?’; l. 40) almost certainly refers to Macbeth, and is so understood by the Lord, who then goes on to describe Macduff’s frosty reception of Macbeth’s messenger. Despite this indication that Macbeth knows about Macduff’s flight, Macbeth soon afterwards (at 4.1.139ff.) expresses shock at Lennox’s news that ‘Macduff is fled to England’ and resolves on immediate violent action. Critics who are concerned about this discrepancy tend to ascribe it to revision.

VIII. F’s stage directions for the final duel between Macbeth and Macduff are contradictory: the combatants exit ‘fighting’ and, after ‘Alarums’, they re-enter, ‘Fighting, and Macbeth slaine’; Malcolm and his men then enter, paying no attention to the apparently slain Macbeth or his vanquisher (in fact they are anxious that Macduff is ‘missing’). Shortly thereafter comes the climactic stage direction: Enter Macduffe, with Macbeths head. Editors have found their way around this problem by adding directions such as ‘Exit Macduff with Macbeth’s body’4 after the duel and sometimes by beginning a new scene.5 Several have suggested that the two sets of directions indicate different stagings: one in which Macbeth is killed offstage and his head carried on and displayed; the other, more dramatic perhaps, where he is killed (and beheaded?) onstage.

Here are some recurrent questions relating to the peculiarities just described:

1Is the text we have a product of adaptation or revision?

2If so, was the play radically abridged in the process of undergoing adaptation?

3Assuming the answer to (1) is yes, is Thomas Middleton the likely candidate for the role of adapter?

4Is the Folio text a ‘theatrical’ one – i.e. a ‘promptbook’ or a transcript thereof?

Some of the elements listed above lend weight to the proposition that the play was indeed revised. The references to the two songs from The Witch along with the unexpected appearance of a new head-witch in act 3, when no mention has been made of her earlier, suggest that Hecate may be an addition; this view is supported by the fact that she does nothing to advance the plot, and the verse she is given differs materially from the trochaic tetrameter of the witches’ earlier speeches (it’s a mix of doggerel pentameters and iambic tetrameter). One thing that the Hecate scenes do provide, however, is an enhanced witchy spectacle and some singing. That these elements of the play were at some point popular is attested to by Davenant’s revival in the 1660s, a text of which was published in 1674, where the operatic opportunities offered by the witches are given full voice.6 So, I think we are safe in concluding what scholars since the nineteenth century have argued, namely that the Hecate material was added to Shakespeare’s original text at some point (probably around 1616, when The Witch and the extant musical settings were composed). Can we also conclude that Thomas Middleton was the culprit? If the revisions were indeed composed in 1616, then Middleton is certainly the best candidate. Most recent editors have argued that he was involved – even Braunmuller, who is more careful and cautious than proponents such as Gary Taylor and Nicholas Brooke.7 But Brian Vickers, armed with statistical evidence, has suggested that Shakespeare himself was the reviser, and that these scenes should be dated earlier – for a revival in 1610–118. Whoever added the Hecate scenes, there is nothing to indicate that either the ‘contradiction’ discussed in VII or the inconsistency of staging outlined in VIII, both of which could be ascribed to changes made for a revival, is linked to the additions.

One odd feature of the apparently additional material is that Hecate’s role in 3.5 is slightly different from that in 4.1. In 3.5, she is clearly in command; she scolds the weird sisters for acting without her authority, and prepares them and the audience for the coming interview with Macbeth and its ‘illusion[s]’, which will ‘draw him on to his confusion’ (28–9). In 4.1, she displays much less authority; indeed, the sisters have stirred up the cauldron on their own before Hecate’s arrival and, despite her earlier chastisement, she restricts herself to commending them for their work and there is another ‘Song. Blacke Spirits, &c.’. She then has nothing to say or do for the rest of the scene; there is no suggestion that she, rather than the sisters, is responsible for the apparitions, which, almost everyone thinks, were part of the original text.9 Should she and her three attendant witches (i.e. those who entered with her, not the three original sisters) exit at this point (4.1.43)? Such is what many editors, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, have thought. This would make her stay onstage very brief – five lines plus the song, which, as G. K. Hunter pointed out some time ago,10 needn’t be sung in full. It might be comprised of just a few lines to cover the (noisy?) exit of Hecate via some kind of flying machine. Perhaps, indeed, that is the reason it isn’t given in full in F. If, on the other hand, we recall that F seems to be derived from a theatrical text (perhaps a transcript of a play-book), the allusion to the song could be a kind of bookkeeper’s shorthand for the full song. Thus the existence of just a few words, both here and in 3.5, can be used as an argument for either view: that the song was performed in toto or that it was merely a short transitional strategy. In any case, there seems little dramatic justification for the intervention.

Responding to the perceived need for fuller theatrical treatment of both 3.5 and Hecate’s brief appearance in 4.1, and perhaps, in the latter case, seeking to provide some dramatic advantage to a seemingly pointless sequence, Oxford and Brooke insert interludes derived from Middleton’s The Witch at both points. In doing so they also draw on Davenant’s operatic rendition from after the Restoration as well as on other versions of the song; for the 4.1 sequence, they keep Hecate onstage until the moment, signalled in F’s stage direction, when all ‘The witches dance and vanish’ (131 stage direction). (In this scenario, she presumably directs the show in which her attendants sing and dance.) It seems extraordinary to me that in editing a text from F, editors interpolate two substantial sequences from a completely different play (and by a different playwright), with the authority only of ‘Come away, come away, &c.’ and ‘Blacke Spirits &c.’

Since the two scenes pose somewhat different problems, I will deal with them separately. In 3.5, the sequence goes like this:

Musicke, and a Song.

Hearke, I am call’d: my little Spirit see

Sits in a Foggy cloud, and stayes for me.

Song within. Come away, come away, &c.

1 Come, let’s make hast, shee’l soone be

Backe again.

(TLN 1464–9)

Here the song is clearly called for as a beckoning from offstage. We can assume that the Song mentioned in the two stage directions is the same one, and is heard coming from within, there being no indication at all that the spirits(s) appear onstage. (Hecate’s admonition to the witches to ‘see’ the little Spirit no doubt implies a gesture offstage and up, and needn’t be taken to refer to a literal descent of a cloud-riding spirit.) If, as in Oxford and Brooke and now also the Oxford Middleton, a long sequence is inserted before she exits, we have to ask why, after being called away, does she remain behind for so long?...

Table of contents

• The Arden Shakespeare State of Play Series
• Title
• Contents 
• Series Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction Ann Thompson
• Part 1 The Text and its Status
• 1 Notes and Queries Concerning the Text of Macbeth Anthony B. Dawson
• 2 Dwelling ‘in doubtful joy’: Macbeth and the Aesthetics of Disappointment Brett Gamboa
• Part 2 History and Topicality
• 3 Politic Bodies in Macbeth Dermot Cavanagh
• 4 ‘To crown my thoughts with acts’: Prophecy and Prescription in Macbeth Debapriya Sarkar
• 5 Lady Macbeth, First Ladies and the Arab Spring: The Performance of Power on the Twenty-First Century Stage Kevin A. Quarmby
• Part 3 Critical Approaches and Close Reading
• 6 ‘A walking shadow’: Place, Perception and Disorientation in Macbeth Darlene Farabee
• 7 Cookery and Witchcraft in Macbeth Geraldo U. de Sousa
• 8 The Language of Macbeth Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore
• Part 4 Adaptation and Afterlife
• 9 The Shapes of Macbeth: The Staged Text Sandra Clark
• 10 Raising the Violence while Lowering the Stakes: Geoffrey Wright’s Screen Adaptation of Macbeth Philippa Sheppard
• 11 The Butcher and the Text: Adaptation, Theatricality and the ‘Shakespea(Re)-Told’ Macbeth Ramona Wray
• Index
• Copyright