“A horse! A horse! My kingdom…”

(Image: Macbeth, Banquo and the Weird Sisters, from Holinshed's Chonicles.)

Reading through Gary Taylor’s remarkable text of Macbeth and his supporting notes, I keep veering between admiration and exasperation, sometimes quickly enough to induce dizziness. He supports one item with such an overwhelming surge of evidence and such well-reasoned argument that only a fool would stand against him, like Canute ordering back the tide. Then his next point appears to be based on little more than a hunch, and bolstered by such scanty documentation that you’re afraid to breathe on it, lest it evaporate.

Let me talk about one last example. It doesn’t make a big difference to our understanding of the play, but it illustrates how far Taylor is willing to go when the mood takes him. In Act I, Scene 3, Macbeth and Banquo make their first appearances on the stage, and meet the Witches or Weird Sisters. Taylor has concluded that the two Thanes (see footnote) made their big entrance “on horseback” in Shakespeare’s original play, and has changed the stage directions accordingly.

How could he come to such a conclusion? It seems a fellow by the name of Simon Forman saw Macbeth at the Globe sometime around 1611, and left a written account of his impressions. He described Macbeth and Banquo as “riding through a wood” when they encounter “three women fairies or nymphs.” So, voila: horses on stage.

To call this evidence “thin” is too generous. In the first place, they are clearly not in “a wood,” but “upon the heath,” or even a “blasted” heath, to use Macbeth’s own adjective. So Forman’s phrasing is immediately cast into doubt. If, in spite of this, you want to put such credence in a literal reading of the word “riding," what should we make of the later passage, where he writes that Macbeth “contrived the death of Banquo, and caused him to be murdered on the way as he rode.” (Emphasis mine) More horses? Of course not: in this case, Shakespeare has taken the trouble of explaining in the dialogue why characters are not on horseback when they logically ought to be:

First Murderer:
His horses go about!

Third Murderer:
Almost a mile, but he does usually.
So all men do, from hence to the palace gate
Make it their walk.

Shakespeare usually doesn’t bother with this (perhaps all the talk of “riding” earlier on made him conscientious). It’s just an unspoken convention of the stage that there are no horses, even when the characters would have been on horseback in the “real world.” Why would this be the one scene, in all of Shakespeare’s 38 or so plays, that explicitly calls for them? Messengers, generals, Kings: all walk when they really ought to be riding. There’s even an (abortive) joust in Richard II—all without benefit of horses.

In any case, look at the rest of the scene: after the Witches/Sisters vanish, Ross and Angus enter with messages from the King. Are they on horseback too? Wouldn’t it look odd if they weren’t? If they aren’t, how do they all exit at the end of the scene: some walking, some riding? Or maybe they double up with Macbeth and Banquo? And why aren’t they still riding when they get back to Duncan in the next scene?

It just doesn’t make sense. Far, far simpler to conclude that in this scene, as in every other scene of every other play by Shakespeare, there are no horses.

Two Notes:

Banquo was a Thane too—The Thane of Lochaber. Lots of people—even people who have played Banquo—are a little confused about just what his job is, but his title is in Holinshed’s Chronicles.

Simon Forman’s “Bocke of Plaies” is a remarkable document, containing reflections on Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth, and a play about Richard II that was not Shakespeare’s. It’s short and well worth reading, especially to see what he did and did not find memorable about the three Shakespeare plays. For instance, he completely neglects to mention the “statue scene” at the end of The Winter’s Tale. And there’s a passage I find completely hilarious, where he’s trying to explain the impossibly tangled plot of Cymbeline, and just gives up, ending a very long sentence with a hopeless “&c” (et cetera). Additional information at that most wonderful of Shakespeare blogs, Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet.

"And question this most bloody piece of work, to know it further..."

(Image: From DramaTech Theatre's 2007 production of Macbeth: Gene Hullender as Macbeth, Lee Smith as a Weird Sister. Photo by Jon Drews.)

We’ve talked about the treatment of the Weird Sisters in Middleton’s adaptation of Macbeth, and, for what it’s worth, I’ve given you my opinion on those changes: negative, although granting they make a potent spectacle in the theatre. The one thing I’d add, because I don’t think I touched on this, is how much better the Hecate material reads in the “reconstructed” form in Gary Taylor’s text, compared to the drab “Music and a song: ‘Black spirits,’ &c.” in the First Folio and most modern texts of Macbeth. I still can’t stand the Hecate stuff, but at least I have a much better appreciation of how it would have looked and sounded and impressed an audience in the Blackfriars in 1616. I wish all editors would do something similar.

Of all the other items Taylor argues for making up Middleton’s revisions, only two strike me as having much impact artistically: the condensation of the opening battles in Act 1, Scene 2, and the cuts to the “England Scene,” Act 4, Scene 3, in which, supposedly, Edward the Confessor originally appeared in person. Both of these changes are primarily cuts, rather than additions, and are harder to judge without the benefit of the original text. Perhaps, thinking about these things at all is the kind of exercise in imagination that says more about the writer than the subject. It seems that’s always a huge risk in Shakespeare…but, fool that I am, I rush in:

The Opening Battles

Shakespeare loved a swirling melee on the stage, but the audience of 1616 found this sort of thing “old-fashioned and ridiculous” as Taylor puts it. He mentions Ben Jonson’s sneer (in the prologue to the revised edition of Every Man in His Humor) at the absurdity of staging a battle with “three rusty swords and help of some few foot- and half-foot words.” So Middleton moved the battles against Norway, Macdonwald, and Cawdor off-stage, and glued together some bits of the dialogue to narrate the story.

Convincing? Middleton’s fingerprints abound in this scene: vocabulary, phrasing, imagery. Taylor’s analysis of it all is enthralling, and perfectly convincing. Particularly telling is his discussion of the stage direction “Enter…meeting a bleeding captain.” The “enter…meeting” formulation is a Middleton hallmark; Shakespeare used “enter…severally,” or “enter X at one door, Y at another.” It seems certain Middleton condensed and re-wrote this scene, and what else could he have been cutting, but one of those old-fashioned Shakespeare battles?

But is it good? Times change, and tastes change, and a big battle is the highlight of many a modern Shakespeare production. Even in this age of summer blockbusters, we’re perfectly thrilled to see those three rusty swords on the stage. And I think it’s telling that both of the productions of Macbeth I’ve worked with have seen fit to restore some kind of on-stage battle in Act I. I can’t say the scene we have is bad—it’s often quite effective—but I sure wish we had the original.

Edward the Confessor

The “England Scene,” Act 4, Scene 3, is almost always the low point of a Macbeth production: overlong and endlessly talky. Macduff’s reaction to the death of his family is heartbreaking, but comes after so much ineffective dialogue that the audience has generally nodded off by this point. And yet the scene can’t be eliminated: it is here that the revolution begins, the long march to Dunsinane and final victory. In my script, I cut this scene savagely, wondering all the time how Shakespeare had left such a dud at this critical moment in the story.

Taylor argues for a very different interlude in England, in which Edward the Confessor is not merely a vague presence off-stage, but comes on to perform healing miracles in person and anoint Malcolm as Scotland’s rightful King. In a play that started dark and has grown ever bleaker, this is the first ray of light: a sign that Good is a force in the world, and will not allow Evil to rule forever.

Why would Middleton cut this material? Partly, to give the supernatural spotlight completely to his greatly expanded witches, and partly to downplay the significance of the Catholic saint, King Edward.

Convincing? I just don’t know. Taylor’s vision for this scene does feel right…but a feeling isn’t evidence, and the evidence here is quite slim. None of those obvious Middltonian tics in the language or the stage directions, no ragged edges in the verse or sudden shifts in style. That English Doctor is odd, with his speech about Edward curing skin diseases, but far more understandable if you think of the play being performed in front of King James I—he is praising the virtue and goodness of all English monarchs, not just Edward the Confessor. The most important item Taylor produces is an account of Macbeth on the stage written around 1611—before Middleton’s revision—which mentions the play is set in the time of “Edward the Confessor” (the existing text of Macbeth mentions “Edward,” but doesn’t give him the “Confessor” tag). It’s a slender enough reed to prop up such a weighty theory. While it stirs the blood to imagine the possibility, I think the only safe course is a healthy skepticism.

But is it good? If Middleton made this change, I would find it hard to praise him for it. What a wonderful scene the original might have been!

Other Changes

Most of the remaining changes Taylor ascribes to Middleton don’t seem to make much difference to a modern audience. Most significantly, he argues that Middleton added lines to the scene between Lady Macduff and her son (everything between the two places Lady Macduff says, “How wilt thou do for a father?”), punching up the dialogue with topical references to the Overbury treason trials of 1615. It seems convincing, but we’re left with much the same scene in the end.

Of course, what we can’t see—even with Gary Taylor’s literary X-Ray Glasses—are the potentially many, many deletions from the 1606 text. Based on the length of Shakespeare’s other tragedies, as much as one quarter of the original Macbeth may have been left on the Jacobean version of the cutting-room floor. From my experience editing Macbeth for performance, I can attest that it is possible to razor out a great deal of a Shakespeare play without leaving obvious gaps. Perhaps Macbeth was always a conspicuously short text, but it seems to me that we must credit Middleton for at least some of the “tightness” and “intensity” of the play we have today.

On the whole, though, and basing my judgment on the items we can most confidently ascribe to Middleton, I have to take a dim view of the revision. I mentioned that Inga Stina-Ewbank declined to argue (in her introduction to the text) that Middleton’s changes constituted an artistic improvement, and I will make so bold as to say that she did not because they do not.

The revised Macbeth was certainly a popular success, and I don’t deny that Middleton had to pay his bills like everyone else, but I will have to keep reading to find the proof that this is “our other Shakespeare.”

Happily, that is just what I mean to do. I’m not sorry I read this remarkable treatment of Macbeth first, but I’m hungry for the real article: some genuine Thomas Middleton drama. I’m starting with The Changeling, next week, and trembling with anticipation.

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:

...

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?

...

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?