The Scottish Play

Canon Club podcast: Macbeth

‘We were exorcising evil spirits. Being but a mere butler, you will not know the great theatre tradition that one does *never* speak the name of the “Scottish Play”.’

- David Keanrick, thespian, to Edmund Blackadder

The new Canon Club podcast is out, on the subject of Macbeth. and for the second episode we spoke to Neema Parvini of Buckingham University, and author of Shakespeare’s Moral Compass.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is one of The Bard’s most popular plays, one of the darkest and also one of the shortest. Pored over both by literary analysts and psychologists, it famously poses deep questions about free will, fate, the supernatural, guilt, insanity and most of all ambition - and also gave us one of the most intriguing female antagonists in the form of Lady Macbeth. Indeed it is perhaps the pre-eminent study of the lust for power and its dangers, and its influence can be seen right up to the golden age of television with Breaking Bad.

The play also gave the English language such familiar phrases as ‘one fell swoop’, ‘the milk of human kindness’, and - perhaps most famously - ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’

Macbeth was a real king of medieval Scotland, a contemporary of Edward the Confessor, although Shakespeare’s character bears no resemblance to the historical figure, who was a respected and legitimate king, or at least no more murderous than your average 11^th century monarch. Indeed, the play is far more relevant to an altogether different Scottish king, James VI, who had succeeded to the English throne in 1603, three years before the play appeared.

The playwright took his material from Holinshed's Chronicles, written in the 1580s, although he made a number of changes to the source material, which depicts Macbeth as a more sympathetic character and his victim Duncan as weak. Shakespeare also altered the character of Banquo, who in the Chronicles is a a scheming accomplice in the murder of King Duncan. This would have been sensible, since Banquo was seen as King James’s ancestor, although we know now that he was fictional and created to give legitimacy to the House of Stuart, who were in reality living in Brittany at the time of Macbeth’s reign. Neither Banquo, Lady Macbeth nor the witches appeared in any medieval source and are only first mentioned in 1527 by Hector Boece in his Historia Gentis Scotorum - although there was presumably a real Lady Macbeth.

The play famously opens with three witches, the ‘Weird Sisters’, who predict that the protagonist will become Thane of Cawdor and then king, and that Banquo’s descendants will one day also rule as kings. Macbeth is then indeed made Thane of Cawdor and so their forecasting skills are confirmed, setting Macbeth on his path to doom.

James VI/I was obsessed with witches, and even wrote a book on witchcraft, his Daemonologie, from which Shakespeare took material for the play - so this must have been catnip to him. Indeed, because Macbeth is so short by Shakespeare’s standards, some believe the final manuscript to be an edited version staged at a special performance, perhaps in front of the king himself.

The witches bring horrible visions to the would-be king, including an armoured head which tells him to beware of Macduff, a bloody child who tells him that no one born of woman can harm him and finally a child bearing a crown and holding a tree who declares that he will safe as long as the forest of Great Birnam Wood does not come to Dunsinane Hill. This is a relief to Macbeth, since forests obviously can’t move.

Macbeth stays with King Duncan and, urged on by his wife, kills him; Duncan’s son Malcolm and his aide Macduff then flee south, but the new king’s ambition propels him to commit further atrocities. He eventually falls to revolt when he is killed by Macduff, who was born by Caesarean (so not ‘born of woman’), and who had ordered his soldiers to cut down Great Birnam Wood, who carry the branches as camouflage.

As well as foretelling the rise of the House of Stuart, the play also makes allusions to the previous year’s Gunpowder Plot, including a reference to an ‘equivocator’ by the porter: Jesuit Henry Garner, who was tried after the plot, had justified his failure to inform the authorities through equivocation, lying for the sake of the faith.

Lady Macbeth is one of the most noted female antagonists in literary history, as well as politics, a label often used as ammunition against political wives, in recent years attached to Hillary Clinton and even Jill Biden. Lady Macbeth has also been the subject of a huge amount of feminist literary criticism, a character who has inverted the normal order of gender roles in marriage just as her husband upended the natural order by seizing the throne. Having said that, Harold Bloom observed that the Macbeths are the happiest married couple in all of Shakespeare’s plays – indeed they are something of a power (mad) couple. Their barrenness is also key - although she has a son by a previous marriage - and Macbeth behaves more like a child than a husband to her. Bloom also speculated on whether the play is about impotence, and it of course includes the most famous line about alcohol and lechery: ‘it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance’. 

The play also concerns the issue of free will. ‘Of all Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, Macbeth is the least free’, Bloom wrote, ‘in contrast to Lady Macbeth, who is pure will until she breaks apart.’ Her descent into madness, featuring the famous scene where she appears holding a candle and tries to wash off imaginary bloodstains from her hands, is also one of the most studied accounts of psychology in theatre; it even gave rise to a term, the Lady Macbeth Effect, in which people feel more inclined to wash after feeling shame - which apparently did not replicate.

‘The Scottish Play’ is also famously cursed, although the origins of this superstition are debated; one likely explanation for why so many actors were injured is that it was simply performed more, being popular and mercifully short. Like so many Shakespeare plays, it has also been placed in countless settings, and across cultures, one of the most notable being Orson Welles’s all-black Voodoo Macbeth in 1936.

It also famously inspired a riot in 19^th century New York when the city saw two rival performances, one featuring American actor Edwin Forrest at the Broadway Theatre and another with upper-class English thesp William Macready at the Astor Place Opera House. Forrest had previously hissed Macready at a performance of Hamlet and his working-class, anti-British fans now heckled him as he tried to perform in the Scottish Play. This would make a great black comedy, except that after an angry mob gathered outside the theatre the militia had to be called and 31 rioters were killed - well, at least people cared about high culture back then.