Something wicked(er) this way comes...

(Image: From DramaTech Theatre’s 2007 production of Macbeth: Michelle Hendrickson, Brittany Roberts, Lee Smith as the Weird Sisters. Much closer to the original “three women fairies or nymphs” reported by Simon Forman in 1611.)

In exploring my reactions to Middleton’s alterations of Macbeth, I find my thoughts falling neatly into two boxes: one labeled “Witches,” and the other, “Everything Else.” I suppose that’s only appropriate: Gary Taylor himself notes the most significant change Middleton made was “to transform into witches the three characters who are identified as ‘weird sisters’ in Shakespeare’s chief historical source and in passages clearly written by Shakespeare.”

We’ve talked about the specifics of that change already: spells, song, dance, and the superfluous character of Hecate. Taylor, in his notes, only delineates the Middletonian material; it falls to that redoubtable scholar, the late Inga-Stina Ewbank, to mount a defense of these additions on artistic grounds. She makes a game attempt, but I find her arguments ultimately unconvincing—and I note that even she is silent on the question of whether the revisions can seriously be taken to constitute an artistic improvement.

Probably the core of her argument is that Middleton’s passages “give the play a new dimension of theatrical magic,” but I would argue that this “new dimension” is at odds with what makes Macbeth such a chilling exploration of the darker places in the human soul. As she puts it, the effect is to make the drama “less focused on the moral self-destruction of Macbeth, and to shift the emphasis on to the witches as being in command, free and unbounded.” Which is exactly the problem: if Macbeth becomes nothing more than a kind of voodoo doll (as he becomes explicitly in the Orson Welles stage and film productions of the last century), why should we ultimately care? What can we take away from such a play—“stay away from witches?” If that were all there was to Macbeth, I doubt we’d still care about it.

In my own condensation of Macbeth for DramaTech Theatre’s 2007 production, I cut the witches deeply, removing not only most of Middleton’s additions, but a fair slice of Shakespeare, too (on the theory that even he “witched up” the characters, possibly to impress King James). Since the two things everyone in the audience knows from Macbeth are, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” and, “Double, double, toil and trouble,” I devoted a large portion of my program notes to explaining why they wouldn’t be hearing one of those lines. I thought I’d quote from those notes in making my rebuttal:

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Of all the cuts we made, perhaps the most missed will be all the witches’ rhymes and spells. So, we might as well get it out of the way up front: tonight’s production of Macbeth will be strictly cauldron-free. No eye of newt, nor tongue of frog, not even the tiniest fillet of a fenny snake.

The witches have been crowd-pleasers for four hundred years, and especially in a Halloween production of Macbeth, their cut lines are conspicuous. But our aim was to strip away those haunted-house trappings and make these characters something much bigger and more powerful, and, yes, scarier than three old crones cackling over a pot. No one in the play or in Shakespeare’s sources ever calls these beings “witches:” they, along with everyone else, call themselves “the weird sisters,” from the Anglo-Saxon wyrd, or “fate.” At bottom, they are the Goddesses of Fate, the Norns, the beings who know what was, and what is, and what shall be:

“All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!”

“All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!”

“All hail, Macbeth—that shalt be King hereafter!”

As always in myth, one of the most terrible things that can happen to you is to catch a glimpse of Fate: it is too big and terrible for a human mind to process; it comes to us in seeming riddles that we interpret, foolishly, by hearing what we want and ignoring the rest. The Sisters never tell Macbeth, “You will be King tomorrow,” or, “You will be King if you kill Duncan,” but his ambition (and Lady Macbeth’s) seizes hold of the idea and his moral sense is not strong enough to win out in the end. When he returns to the Sisters and demands to see the consequences of his murder, the knowledge crushes him: a parade of kings descended not from him, but from Banquo, stretching out “to the crack of doom” (one of the monarchs in Banquo’s mirror—if you believe in the power of Prophesy—would be Queen Elizabeth the Second, sitting on the throne of Scotland nine centuries later).

Even in Shakespeare’s day, Macbeth was being “witched up” with all the haunted-house trimmings, but I think this makes the play a smaller thing. In 21^st-Century America, relatively few of us are genuinely scared of Halloween witches. But who isn’t afraid of the vastness of Time, against which background we all seem so impossibly small and all our actions futile?

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And that, in a nutshell, is my case against the Witches…and for the Weird Sisters, spinning their threads of destiny, not even deigning to feel contempt or pity for us mortals. Witches may be powerfully dramatic, even in this age that we flatter ourselves to call “rational”, but I’ll take the Sisters of Fate any day.

Footnote: DramaTech Theatre is the student-run theatrical company of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States, http://www.dramatech.org/, and was my emotional and artistic home through the long years of my undergraduate experience in the 1990s. A bunch of engineers doing theatre? Quixotic, yes, but, like Quixote, capable of occasional moments of grace and wonder.

Anatomy of an Adaptation

Now that we’ve talked about this crazy text of Macbeth, let me lay out the shape of the Middletonian adaptation, according to Gary Taylor’s text and notes. My intent is to take each of the major items in future posts, one by one, and give you the invaluable perspective of a Computer Science major on these difficult matters of textual scholarship. Man, do I love this Internet we built!

The original Macbeth was probably written sometime around 1606—within fifty years of that date, almost certainly. Middleton’s adaptation was done perhaps in 1616, with a similar margin of error. I’ll refer to them as the 1606 and 1616 versions—it’s probably close enough.

The most significant systematic modification Middleton made to the 1606 Macbeth was to make it witchier. The three beings Macbeth and Banquo encounter on a blasted heath are called “wayward sisters” or “weyard sisters” by everyone in the play, themselves included, and this looks back to Shakespeare’s source, Hollinshed’s Chronicles, which called them “weird sisters,” the term that editors generally standardize the spelling to. The women are indeed strange, but “weird” here is from the Anglo-Saxon wyrd, or “fate.” So the Sisters are, originally, the three Fates. Shakespeare made them a little like witches, killing swine and cursing ships, and Middleton turned the dials up to 11, with familiar spirits, dances in a ring, invocation spells. This is important to me, as the most significant systematic modification I made to Macbeth for the 2007 production I worked on was to de-witch the play as thoroughly as possible. Not an eye of newt to be found. I’ll talk about the different visions of these characters in a future post.

Gary Taylor also argues for a second systematic modification, in which Middleton toned down the Catholicism in the 1606 version, even as he cranked up the witchcraft. I’m not sure that I’m on board for that ride, but I’ll call attention to it scene-by-scene.

The 1616 Macbeth presents an account of a battle, told in pieces by various characters that come on stage to report to the King. It’s a disjointed scene, and many people have seen signs of cuts and compressions in the text. Taylor suggests that the 1606 original actually presented the battle, in one of those wonderful swirling scenes with lots of noise and running—such as comes at the end of Henry IV, Part 1, or near the beginning of Coriolanus. He supposes Middleton re-arranged the language and caulked over the seams as best he could with new lines.

The next substantial alteration is the appearance of Hecate, who calls out the other three Witches for reaching out to Macbeth without her oversight. There follows a special-effects spectacular, with spirits in clouds, flying machines, and the first of two songs, lovingly reconstructed from The Witch and Davenant’s later version of Macbeth.

After Hecate roars off into the darkness, there is a shot scene where Lennox and an unnamed Lord feel each other out on the whole Macbeth situation. There’s some lovely, subtle verse there:

Lennox:
…the gracious Duncan
Was pitied of Macbeth. Marry, he was dead,
And the right valiant Banquo walked too late—
Whom you may say, if’t please you, Fleance killed,
For Fleance fled. Men must not walk too late.

Taylor suggests Middleton cut this scene down, and meant to cut it further, but some intended deletions remained in the manuscript. I don’t have an opinion to offer yet.

Back to the witches now, and Hecate’s second song, after which Macbeth arrives to demand more prophesies, because that’s worked out so well for him thus far. The argument here is interesting. Taylor believes there was a cauldron as far back as 1606, but that the three apparitions were Middleton’s innovation—the prophesies were originally spoken by the Weird Sisters themselves. Interesting. If so, it’s the one element of the 1616 Macbeth that I can whole-heartedly embrace. After the witches vanish, Macbeth has a chilling soliloquy that Taylor credits, mostly, to Middleton:

Macbeth:
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
The castle of Macduff I will surprise,
Seize upon Fife, give to the edge o’th’ sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line…

(You know, I’m starting to enjoy adding punctuation to the text as I type it. With this edition, everyone can be an editor!)

Back at Fife, Middleton evidently expanded or revised the dialogue between Lady Macduff and her son. The argument turns on vocabulary and an odd, redundant quality to the existing text that I noticed when I made my own edit.

The final substantial innovation comes in that interminable scene in England, where Macduff, Ross and Malcolm launch their rebellion, and it’s one of the most surprising items in this edition—Taylor argues that, in 1606, Edward the Confessor actually appeared on stage, cured the sick, anointed Malcolm as Scotland’s rightful King, and loaned him an army. True or not, it’s a striking idea, and I can’t help thinking that it would make for a much more effective scene than what we have today. Why would Middleton cut it? Here’s where we get back to the Catholicism argument—Edward was a Catholic saint, and, for political reasons, he had to go.

The rest of the play proceeds as we all remember: sleepwalking, Birnam Wood, Homeric duels. The confusing way Macbeth seems to be killed both off-stage and on may point to a final Middleton edit, or may not.

Of course, we’ll never see all the lines of the 1606 Macbeth that Middleton cut, but the remarkable quality of this edition is to present the Shakespearean original as much as the Middletonian adaptation. It makes me wonder if some gutsy director might not try to put Edward Confessor back on the stage…there’s a very fine line between clever and stupid, as they say; I wonder which side of the line that would come down on?

On Sitting Down to Read Thomas Middleton

Ready and equipped at last to begin the voyage. Acquiring my own 13 pound ration of Middleton proved to be a bit of work, as I first tried to save a penny with the cut-rate third party sellers on Amazon.com. This works brilliantly, except when it doesn’t, and then it’s extra helpings of delay and frustration. Week and a half to get so much as an acknowledgement from the seller, then the wait for the refund and more time to buy again at list price, refreshing the UPS tracking page every fifteen minutes on delivery day, because I’m pretty sure they monitor that and tell the drivers to prioritize the packages for the anxious customers.

But that’s all done now. The ingredients are at hand: the Collected Works, the Companion, and an evening to survey the field. Truly not a book to be tossed aside lightly—one could sprain a wrist trying. Nor a book, it seems to me, to be embarked upon lightly. I pour a bracing drink and begin my reconnaissance.

The bulk of the book is itself a message, of course, and the message is something along the lines of, “THIS IS AN IMPORTANT AUTHOR.” I’ve been reading about the plans the Department of Energy is making to mark our radioactive waste dumps for the next 10,000 years, and the size of those markers is a message in the same way: 40-foot earthworks, 100-ton granite obelisks, massive concrete bunkers all proclaim, “This message is important—please pay attention!” So does a 2,016 page book. It is impossible not to compare it with the Oxford Shakespeare, also featuring Gary Taylor as a general editor. I don’t own a copy of that august work—yet—but I stopped by the bookstore to give it an experimental heft, and the new Middleton easily wins on pounds. I can’t believe that’s any kind of accident. The old comedy show “The Kids in the Hall” began a sketch once with a preacher asking, “Which weighs more: the Bible, or the Koran?” Isn’t Taylor inviting a similar comparison?

I open the book—it creaks a bit as the spine adjusts—and am delighted to see that Taylor does not disappoint. The first words following the title page trumpet his manifesto: “Thomas Middleton (1580-1627)—‘our other Shakespeare’—is the only other Renaissance playwright who created acknowledged masterpieces of comedy, tragedy, and history…” At least he has the courage of his convictions: spite of cormorant, devouring time, our other Shakespeare is rescued from the dust. Magnificent! I can tell I’m going to enjoy this journey immensely, even if I end up hating Middleton.

But it also makes me wonder about this enterprise. I was drawn to this brassy new edition of Middleton because I distrusted the cult of personality that had grown up around Shakespeare, and was getting a bit uneasy about my own devotion to that cult. Now I think—am I really changing my outlook, or just dabbling in the cult of Middleton, too? How much better is two cults than one? Then again, perhaps I’m just a bit unnerved at the way the book is already cutting off the circulation to my lower legs, and I’m looking for a way to second-guess myself. A quick pause to chafe the feet, then onward.

Following the three tables of contents (chronological, alphabetic and by genre—“generic?”), I am grateful to find a little five-page User Manual, “How to Use This Book.” It forms a neat précis of the major editorial decisions that shaped this edition, and I admire Taylor for hanging his laundry out like this for us to see. I’ve gradually been growing more aware of how four hundred years of editing have shaped the way we read Shakespeare: act and scene divisions, names of characters, names of the plays, even. Taylor doesn’t have those four centuries of practice, and has to write his own rules.

I generally like the look of things, although my spider sense starts tingling when he talks about the “federal” properties of the edition—taking different approaches to spelling, commentary, presentation, from one text to the next. He calls it “mak[ing] a virtue out of multivocality,” but I think it has a certain quality of throwing lots of spaghetti at the wall and then seeing what sticks—as if the general editors weren’t quite sure what they wanted to do, or (perhaps more likely) found it impossible to ride herd on the 61 other named contributors at the front of the volume. Then, too, uniformity can be stifling. My own “Complete Shakespeare” is a crazy-quilt of different editions: Signets, Ardens, Folgers, Cambridges, what-have-you. My wife can’t understand why I’d need three different Macbeths, but I know that they’re all different. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Eighty-odd pages of introductory essays follow the warm-up essay. I’ll probably read “Thomas Middleton: Lives and Afterlives” right away, and save the pieces on London and the theatres of the period for later.

At last, I come to the main event: the collected works of our other Shakespeare. It’s getting late—or my glass is getting empty—or both—so I’m not going to start a serious assault on a play tonight, but it is impressive to flip through for a while.

For all the talk of following the approach of the Oxford Shakespeare, this book gets one thing right that the earlier work got disastrously wrong: it includes footnotes with the plays. I still am baffled by the idea of presenting an edition of Shakespeare to general readers without footnotes (and saying that they’re all in a companion volume is a pretty shoddy defense). Middleton, who we haven’t been hearing all our lives, would have been impossible without them. And the quality seems just about perfect—“false friends” in the vocabulary, obscure references elucidated, but nothing to try the patience or insult the intelligence.

The running titles on the pages have come in for a lot of notice, and I notice them, too. A single play might have five or six different titles, all in different typefaces (or even handwritten). So, the play called “The Puritan Widow” will have at the top of each page one of the following:
The Puritan Widow
THE PURITAINE WIDOW.
THE WIDDOW of Watling-ftreete. (I know it’s a long ‘s,’ not an ‘f.’ Give me a break—I’m new to Blogspot.)
The Puritaine Widdow.
THE PURITAINE

It may be a bit disorienting, but I rather like it. In a modern omnibus edition, it is necessary to homogenize the texts to some extent, but I think this is a nice way of calling attention, almost subliminally, to the rich, contradictory, frustrating, endlessly rewarding mess that is textual scholarship. It gives us access to a little bit of the richness, with very little of the pain.

My eye is drawn toward some familiar titles: Timon of Athens. Measure for Measure. Macbeth.

Macbeth. The warm feeling I am developing for this book cools. The only text of Macbeth we have today is the one that Middleton monkeyed around with, interpolating his silly song-and-dance numbers from The Witch and fundamentally debasing the whole play. Shakespeare gave us the awful majesty of Fate, and Middleton turned the Weird Sisters into the Three Witches, a Haunted-House attraction. Sorry to sound emotional like that. I put together an adaptation of Macbeth last year, and I came to believe that a big part of what I was doing was un-adapting Middleton’s adaptation. It bugs me that I’ll never get to read Shakespeare’s original, and it bugs me to see the complete text of Macbeth in Middleton’s Collected Works. Back in high school, I myself wrote a puerile “new ending” to Romeo and Juliet. So do I get to include the first four acts of the original in my “works?” Would even George Bernard Shaw have the pluck to publish the first four acts of Cymbeline under his name, on the basis of his new fifth act?

I’ll have more to say about Macbeth, I’m sure. But this is bringing me down, and I don’t want to lose that happy glow. Just a touch more Scotch (of course), and a quick thumb through the Companion. The meat of this book is a “textual apparatus” for each of the works in the main volume—lovely term, evocative of scaffolding and gears and pulleys. Mark Scroggins, who blogged his own impressions of this book, and who, I wish, would write more about Middleton, took exception to sticking all the textual notes in an ancillary volume, but I think this isn’t so bad. Too many notes slow down the “pace” of a text—I find the Arden Shakespeare almost unreadable, except as a reference work. Having these notes in a separate volume means I can have both books open at once if I’m really scouring a passage.

And of course there’s loads of interesting essays, on printing technology, music, seemingly anything you’d care to know about the period. My mind is an infamous junk-drawer of odds and ends, and I know I’m going to suck greedily all of this information.

But for now, it’s time to put the book back on the shelf—remembering to lift from the knees and avoid twisting motions. I see the clock has turned over and today is become tomorrow. April 23, the traditional birthday of William Shakespeare, “our other Middleton”. My entire life is suddenly full of portents. What could be more appropriate?

A beginning is a very delicate time...

So I’ve been in love with Shakespeare for most of my life. For all the usual reasons, I suppose: those people live so big, and die so big, triumph, rejoice, despair and are vanquished on a level that is so grand it is almost out of an ordinary person’s comprehension. And those words…oh, those words, that feel like lightning and echo faintly in your mind the rest of your life. Even his crummy plays—and he wrote a few, no mistake—have at least a passage or two of pure gold. And the best ones? Horatio can’t even say, “It’s getting light; let’s go find the prince,” without uttering some of the finest poetry in English.

I acted in a little Shakespeare in college while I was supposed to be studying for my Computer Science degree, and I recently went back to my alma mater to assist with a production of Macbeth, for which I coached the actors and produced a very tight 90-minute version of the script of which I’m kind of proud. Last year, I made it a project to read all of Shakespeare (some of it for the first time), and experience all of the plays in production (some live, some video, some audio)—a wonderful journey that my overheated little brain is still processing; resonances and connections float up to my conscious mind from time to time.

And yet, fantastic as it was, I couldn’t help feeling a bit small-minded about it, even a bit guilty…particularly as I slogged my way through the approximately five billion stanzas of Lucrece, which I didn’t enjoy at all. I’ve always had this nagging awareness that Shakespeare was just one figure—albeit a titanic one—in the story of the English Renaissance. He didn’t write the forty best plays of the period, but it’s much, much easier to find a production of an indifferent Shakespeare (Two Gentlemen of Verona, say), than of the masterpieces of Jonson, Marlowe, Webster, and so on. And here I sat, indulging in the cult of Shakespeare. I felt cheap.

I decided it was time to spread out, try to find some of that magic in the words of the people who wrote at the same time for the same stage. If nothing else, I would deepen and refine my understanding of one of the great treasures of human art. And if there’s another Shakespeare out there, waiting to be read…

Enter, at that moment, Gary Taylor, with his 20-years-in-the-making, cast-of-thousands edition of the collected works of Thomas Middleton. “Our other Shakespeare,” he likes to call him. You haven’t ever been able to read him properly, but now, for the first time in 400 years, you can.

Cassius:
You know that I held Epicurus strong
And his opinion: now I change my mind,
And partly credit things that do presage.

I have to take a chance on an omen like this. I have my doubts—a bushel of them. Gary Taylor is an infamous name in some Shakespeare circles; he makes me awfully suspicious. And Middleton? I mostly think of him as the hack who scribbled all over Macbeth in 1616 or so, and prevented us from ever being able to read Shakespeare’s original. But I’m going to give it a go. Amazon.com has my money, and soon I hope to open the steel-reinforced box bearing my very own copies of Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works and Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, 3,200 pages in all. And I bet there aren’t even pictures.

I’m not committing to the lot, you understand. But I’m going to give Middleton the fairest shake I can. Falling in love with Shakespeare was hard work, sometimes, but worth it in the end. If you’re interested in the journey, gentle reader, I will use this blog to post dispatches along the way. Perhaps, I can show you some new and undreamed-of treasures…or at worst, warn you away from the quicksand.

I’m not offering heroics, like Julie Powell did when she cooked every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of one year (though perhaps I should; she got a book contract and a movie deal for her trouble); I’m going to go at my own pace, and if I want to sneak off and read some Shakespeare in the middle of it, I’m gonna. I’m sure I could force myself to get through ten pages of Middleton a day, and just as sure that it would pass almost unimpeded out the other side of my mind. Taylor spent, after all, a good chunk of his professional life on this project—I owe it enough time to take it seriously. Check in with me once in a while, and we’ll see if I have something worth sharing with you.

Yours,

Craig