Macbeth
Macbeth is the shortest tragedy William Shakespeare wrote, more than a thousand lines shorter than Othello and King Lear. It runs at barely half the length of Hamlet. Estimated to have first been performed in 1606, it dramatises the violent and damaging psychological effects of political ambition. A brave Scottish general meets three witches on a heath. They tell him he will be king. From that single prophecy comes a chain of murder, guilt, and paranoia that ends with two corpses and a severed head. The play has drawn some of the most renowned actors to its central roles. It has also acquired a reputation for bad luck so strong that performers refuse to say its name inside a theatre. What did Shakespeare borrow, and what did he invent? Why did he write a Scottish king-killing for an England that had just gained a Scottish king? And how did a four-hundred-year-old play become a curse?
Amid thunder and lightning, three witches decide their next meeting will be with Macbeth, Thane of Glamis. He and his fellow general Banquo have just crushed a rebellion led by the traitorous Thane of Cawdor, allied with forces from Norway and Ireland. King Duncan rewards Macbeth with the dead traitor's title.
Wandering on a heath, the two generals meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and king hereafter. To Banquo they say he will father a line of kings though never be one himself. When the Thane of Ross arrives to confirm the Cawdor title, the first prophecy comes true and Macbeth begins to harbour nervous ambitions of the throne.
Lady Macbeth, reading her husband's letter, resolves at once that Duncan must die. She persuades Macbeth to kill the king that very night under their own roof at Inverness. They plan to get Duncan's two chamber attendants drunk, then frame them for the crime the next morning.
That night, despite a hallucination of a blood-smeared dagger, Macbeth stabs the sleeping king. He returns so shaken that he is still clutching the bloody daggers, and his wife must take them back to the chamber herself. Knocking at the gate sends the couple hurrying to bed.
A drunken porter admits Macduff, the Thane of Fife, and the nobleman Lennox. Macduff discovers the murder. Macbeth, claiming to act in vengeance, kills the grooms before they can protest their innocence. Duncan's sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee the country, and their flight makes them the prime suspects. Macbeth, as Duncan's next of kin, takes the crown.
Banquo's role in the prophecy gnaws at the new king, who fears the witches promised the throne to another man's heirs. Macbeth hires two murderers, then adds a third, to ambush Banquo and his young son Fleance. The killers strike Banquo down, but Fleance escapes into the dark.
At a royal banquet, Banquo's ghost takes the empty seat meant for the king. Visible only to Macbeth, it sends him raving at an empty chair. Lady Macbeth covers for him, telling the startled lords that her husband suffers a harmless lifelong illness, then dismisses the guests as the apparition returns.
Returning to the witches, Macbeth demands the truth. They summon an armoured head that warns him to beware Macduff. A bloody child tells him no one born of woman can harm him. A crowned child holding a tree promises he is safe until Great Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill. Comforted, he watches in horror as eight crowned kings parade past, the last holding a mirror, with Banquo's ghost pointing to the line of his descendants.
Macbeth orders Macduff's castle seized and every inhabitant slaughtered, including his wife and young son. Macduff is in England with Prince Malcolm, who tests his loyalty by pretending he would make a terrible king. When Macduff proves he loves Scotland above any single ruler, Malcolm reveals the lie and the news that he has raised an army with the help of the English King Edward.
At Dunsinane a doctor and a gentlewoman watch Lady Macbeth sleepwalk, scrubbing at imaginary bloodstains and bemoaning the murders aloud. Her guilt-ridden confessions astonish her observers, who can only marvel.
Malcolm's forces gather at Birnam Wood, swelled by Macduff and by Scottish thanes defecting in alarm at Macbeth's barbarities. Malcolm orders his soldiers to cut tree boughs and carry them as camouflage, turning the witches' impossible prophecy into a marching army.
Word reaches Macbeth that his wife has suddenly died, prompting his despairing "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" soliloquy. Still he trusts the promise that no man of woman born can kill him, until a servant reports the forest itself advancing on the castle.
Macduff confronts him and reveals that he was born by Caesarean section, and so was never of woman born in the ordinary way. Macbeth is killed offstage. Macduff reenters carrying his severed head. Malcolm, implying that Lady Macbeth's death was a suicide, promotes his thanes to earls and invites all to see him crowned at Scone.
Shakespeare drew his story from Holinshed's Chronicles of 1587, a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland that he and his contemporaries knew well. He fused two similar accounts: one about a man named Donwald who, pressured by his wife, kills King Duff in his own house, and another about Macbeth, an eleventh-century Scottish king who reigned for ten years before Macduff and Malcolm overthrew him.
The real history barely resembles the play. No medieval account mentions the Weird Sisters, Banquo, or Lady Macbeth, and apart from the wife it is probable none of them existed. The Scottish historian Hector Boece first introduced these figures in 1527 in his Historia Gentis Scotorum, hoping to denigrate Macbeth and strengthen the House of Stuart's claim to the throne. Boece made Banquo an ancestor of the Stuart kings and added the prophecy that Banquo's line would rightfully rule. Holinshed accepted Boece's version at face value.
Shakespeare changed the murder's setting deliberately. No earlier version has Macbeth kill the king inside his own castle; common versions had Duncan ambushed at Inverness instead. By making Duncan a guest, Shakespeare borrowed the detail from the Donwald story and made the crime the worst possible violation of hospitality.
He also rewrote Banquo. In the Chronicles Banquo is an accomplice to the murder, but in Shakespeare's day he was thought to be an ancestor of King James I. Portraying a king's ancestor as a murderer would have been risky. In the nineteenth century it was established that Banquo is unhistorical, and that the Stuarts actually descend from a Breton family that migrated to Scotland slightly later than Macbeth's time.
King James I, patron of Shakespeare's acting company, looms over the whole tragedy. Of all the plays Shakespeare wrote during his reign, Macbeth contains the most allusions to James. Most scholars date the writing to 1606 and read the parade of eight kings shown to Macbeth as a compliment to a king who believed himself descended from Banquo.
The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 echoes through the script. The Porter's speech welcomes an equivocator to hell, taken as an allusion to the Jesuit Henry Garnet, who was tried on the 28th of March 1606 and executed on the 3rd of May 1606. Garnet used the alias Farmer and had defended equivocation, the practice of giving deceptive answers under interrogation. Garnet possessed A Treatise on Equivocation, and in the play the Weird Sisters equivocate too, promising Macbeth safety until Birnam Wood moves while meaning only the branches their enemies would carry.
Lady Macbeth's line about looking like the innocent flower but being the serpent under it may allude to a medal struck in 1605 to mark the king's escape, showing a serpent hiding among lilies and roses. Critic Robert Crawford called Macbeth a play for a post-Elizabethan England facing what it might mean to have a Scottish king.
The play even argues with James directly. In his 1598 book The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, James held that subjects must endure even a tyrant and never rebel. Shakespeare, by contrast, defends the right to overthrow a tyrant king. Critic Andrew Hadfield noted the contrast between the saintly English King Edward the Confessor, able to cure scrofula with the royal touch, and the bloody chaos of Scotland.
Actors refuse to say the name Macbeth inside a theatre, calling it The Scottish Play, The Bard's Play, or Mr. and Mrs. M instead. The superstition holds that speaking the title brings bad luck, injury, or death to a production. The origins have been traced to a satirical article by the humorist and theatre critic Max Beerbohm, written from the perspective of Samuel Pepys, claiming the boy actor playing Lady Macbeth fell fatally ill and Shakespeare himself had to step in.
Real misfortunes gave the legend its fuel. During a 1672 performance in Amsterdam, the actor playing Macbeth committed murder on stage. Riots broke out at a London performance in 1721. The theatre manager Lilian Baylis died the night before a 1937 run began at the Old Vic. A 1953 outdoor production in Bermuda, directed by Burgess Meredith and starring Charlton Heston, was plagued by mishaps, including Heston being burned when his tights caught fire.
The actor Sir Donald Sinden offered a different explanation. He argued that struggling repertory theatres would pull a failing show and replace it with Macbeth, a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, so its sudden appearance in the listings signalled another play had flopped. More actors, he noted, have died during performances of Hamlet than of the Scottish play.
Elaborate rituals exist to dispel the curse. One, attributed to Michael York, is to leave the building, walk around it three times, spit over the left shoulder, utter an obscenity, and wait to be invited back. Another is to step outside, knock three times, and on reentering quote a line from Hamlet. Patrick Stewart claimed that anyone who has played the Scottish thane may say the title any time, anywhere.
The only eyewitness account of Macbeth in Shakespeare's lifetime came from Simon Forman, who saw it at the Globe on the 20th of April 1610. After the Puritan government closed all theatres in 1642, the Restoration brought Sir William Davenant's adaptation, which expanded the witches with songs, dances, and flying and dominated the stage for around eighty years. The diarist Samuel Pepys saw the play repeatedly, recording it as admirably and most excellently acted.
In 1744 David Garrick revived the play advertised as written by Shakespeare, though he kept much of Davenant's witch business and cut more than ten percent of the text, including the drunken porter. Hannah Pritchard, his greatest partner, premiered as his Lady Macbeth in 1747. Later the towering Sarah Siddons became a legend in the role, her sleepwalking scene mesmerising audiences. Hazlitt wrote that she glided on and off the stage almost like an apparition.
The play repeatedly spilled into real conflict. The Astor Place riot of 1849 erupted in Manhattan over rival performances by the American Edwin Forrest and the English Macready, leaving 31 rioters dead and over 100 injured. Charlotte Cushman, who debuted as Lady Macbeth in New York in 1836, became unique among nineteenth-century interpreters for achieving stardom in roles of both genders.
In the twentieth century the dictator reshaped the title role. Orson Welles directed an all-black Voodoo Macbeth in Harlem in 1936, setting the action in Haiti. Three landmark stagings began at Stratford-upon-Avon: Laurence Olivier in 1955, Ian McKellen in 1976, and Antony Sher in 1999. Akira Kurosawa transposed the story to feudal Japan in his 1957 film Throne of Blood, which he postponed after learning of Orson Welles' own Macbeth of 1948.
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Common questions
Who wrote Macbeth and when was it first performed?
Macbeth was written by William Shakespeare and is estimated to have been first performed in 1606. It was first published in the First Folio of 1623, the only source for the text. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy.
What is the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth?
A Scottish general named Macbeth receives a prophecy from three witches that he will become King of Scotland. Spurred by his wife, he murders King Duncan and takes the throne, then commits further murders out of guilt and paranoia. He and Lady Macbeth descend into insanity and death, and Macbeth is finally killed by Macduff.
What was Shakespeare's source for Macbeth?
Shakespeare drew his story from Holinshed's Chronicles of 1587, a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland. He combined two similar accounts, one about a man named Donwald and another about Macbeth, an eleventh-century Scottish king. The events in the play differ extensively from the history of the real Macbeth.
Why do actors call Macbeth the Scottish Play?
Actors avoid saying the name Macbeth inside a theatre because of a superstition that it brings bad luck, injury, or death to a production. They call it The Scottish Play, The Bard's Play, or Mr. and Mrs. M instead. The superstition's origins have been traced to a satirical article by the critic Max Beerbohm.
How is Macbeth connected to King James I and the Gunpowder Plot?
King James I was the patron of Shakespeare's acting company, and Macbeth contains the most allusions to James of all the plays Shakespeare wrote during his reign. Many scholars link the play to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, citing the Porter's speech as an allusion to the Jesuit Henry Garnet, executed on the 3rd of May 1606. The parade of eight kings is read as a compliment to James, who believed himself descended from Banquo.
How does Macbeth die at the end of the play?
Macbeth is confronted by Macduff at Dunsinane after Birnam Wood appears to move toward the castle. Trusting the prophecy that no man of woman born can kill him, Macbeth is undone when Macduff reveals he was born by Caesarean section. Macbeth is killed offstage, and Macduff returns carrying his severed head.
All sources
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