Shakespeare

Yet Shakespeare wrote with only one eye upon the king. Macbeth was also designed to entertain everyone else. It ushers on to the stage ghosts as well as bloodshed and magic. What could be more appealing to an early seventeenth-century audience than royalty and mystery combined? The scene at the banquet, in which Banquo’s ghost appears to Macbeth, mightily impressed itself upon Shakespeare’s contemporaries. It is a play that acquired an almost Celtic sense of doom and the supernatural. That is why actors refuse to name it Macbeth, but to this day continue to call it “the Scottish play.” It is as if Shakespeare, deep in his Scottish sources, was possessed by a new form of imagination; it is a tribute to his extraordinary sensitivity and to his unconscious powers of assimilation.

Macbeth is one of the shortest plays that Shakespeare ever wrote – in fact only The Comedy of Errors is shorter – and has a playing time of approximately two hours. It is also remarkably free of oaths and profanities, as a result of a measure passed by Parliament in March 1603; a parliamentary act to “restrain the abuses of players” forbade irreverence or blasphemy on the public stage. It has been suggested that the relative brevity of the play is an indication of the king’s span of attention, but this is unlikely. It may have been the result of cuts by the Master of the Revels. More likely, however, is that the play itself demanded this length. The intensity and concentration of the fatal action require a series of drumbeats. Although the slight ambiguity in the respective roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth suggests that Shakespeare may have begun the play without knowing which of them would kill the king, there is a consistency of effect. The verse is shaped and pared down so that it becomes echoic; it is almost relentless in its pace, and there are images throughout of rushing action. “Time” is mentioned on forty-four occasions. There are no puns, and only one “comic” scene in which the Porter responds to the knocking at the gate; it is hardly comic, however, since the Porter is modelled upon the keeper of Hell’s gates and the elaborate references in the Porter’s monologue to the details of the recent conspiracy are pervaded by a chilling gallows’ humour.

The Porter is indeed an image of the Hell Porter in the mystery plays, and it has been well observed that the banqueting scene in the play is related to the scene of feasting in that part of the mystery cycle entitled “The Death of Herod.” The death and doom of the ancient plays survive in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, as another layer of darkness and supernatural fear. Shakespeare is much more concerned with the ancient forces of the earth than with the omens of the sky. Macbeth is a poem of the night. Yet, in any discussion of Macbeth himself, the concept of darkness is not required. He is the most vital and energetic character within the play, a natural force, surpassing any conventional notion of good and evil. He partakes of the sublime. Like many of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, he seems actively to seek out his fate.

Since the play is mentioned in a production by the Children of St. Paul’s in early July 1606, it must have been performed at the Globe before that date. So Macbeth was played during the season that ran from Easter on 21 April until the middle of July, when once more the playhouses were closed as a result of the plague. The King’s Men remained in the neighbourhood of London for a short period, however, in order to entertain King Christian of Denmark, who was the brother-in-law of James; he remained in England from 15 July to 11 August, and Heminges was paid for “three playes before his Majestie and the kinge of Denmarke at Greenwich and Hampton Court.” It has plausibly been asserted that one of these plays was Macbeth, performed before the royal parties in the early days of August.

It is not at all clear, however, that King Christian and his hosts attended to the great drama. The Danish king was a heavy drinker, who on one evening was carried out of the entertainments in a state of insensibility. Everyone seemed to follow his example, according to Sir John Harington, and the English nobles “wallow in beastly delights” while their ladies “roll in intoxication.” He added that “I ne’er did see such lack of good order, discretion and sobriety. The Gunpowder fright is got out of all our heads …”⁵ The men fell down and the women were sick, an apt token of the change that had taken place since the days of Elizabeth. If it was a new society, it was not necessarily a more decorous one.