Macbeth First lecture

Professor J. Sears McGee, of history department Second of our series of Renaissance Studies faculty presenting work on the context of Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays. Prof. McGee teaches Tudor and Stuart history, has written on Anglican and Puritan constructions of godliness in the period and on religion and kingship. Check out Renaissance Studies at

“The Scottish Play” There’s an actors’ superstition that you must never say the name of the play or mention either of the Macbeths by name in a theater – unless you are speaking the lines of the play in performance or rehearsal. Instead you refer to “the Scottish Play” and “the Scottish gent” or “Lady M.” If you slip, you must turn around three times, spit or break wind, leave the room and knock to enter. Or you can quote Hamlet: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” Some companies might impose a fine. Moreover, the play is considered unlucky. Lots of accidents and deaths associated with performances of the play. Lincoln was reading the play in the week before he was assassinated. The tradition supposedly begins as early as August 7, 1606, when a boy actor named Hal Berridge who was to play Lady M. took sick and died in the theater. (But there’s absolutely no documentary record to confirm this urban legend; in fact no actual record of the play’s performance until 1611.) And no record of Hal Berridge.

Still, you can’t be too careful... Superstition may come from the witches curses? And a play with sword fighting has its perils. BUT could the superstition come from our sense that this is a play that deals seriously with evil? More than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth seems to be about the genesis of evil. We see a man becoming evil – and by his own volition. The play is steeped in blood from the very beginning. “What bloody man is that?” Duncan asks (I.2). And the “bloody man” recounts a story of blood. Macbeth “unseamed” the “merciless Macdonwald” “from the nave to the chaps/ And fixed his head upon our battlements” (I ). And evokes a scene in which Macbeth and Banquo “bathe in reeking wounds,/ Or memorize another Golgotha” (39-40). And this is all “good” bloodshed, done in the defense of Duncan.

Macbeth’s indecision We need to decide what the relation is between Macbeth’s ambition and the prophecy of the witches. What meaning do the witches have for Mac’s state of mind, his future actions. But we won’t answer that yet. Note the non-committal nature of the letter he sends to Lady Mac at I.5. She worries he may not have the guts to carry out what she believes should be carried out to make the prophecy come true. He’s “too full of the milk of human kindness/ To catch the nearest way.” No question of her decision about what should happen to make Macbeth king: her soliloquy at I.5. 36ff. Mac’s only response: “we will speak further.”

Why does Macbeth want to be king? His soliloquy at I.7: note his backward statement about jumping the life to come. But even the judgment here persuades against the assassination. The image that may make us recall Hamlet: the poisoned chalice forced “to our own lips.” Duncan is Macbeth’s guest “in double trust.” And Duncan’s kingship gives no reason for assassinating him. The image of pity, “like a naked newborn babe.” So where does the impetus for the murder come from? Note the unfinished sentence.

Lady Macbeth’s persuasive image! Her appeal to his manhood: a real man would do this. “I have given suck...” (I.7.54ff) An image that corresponds to Macbeth’s simile for pity? Why should this image persuade? Image of mother and child turned to nightmarish image of horror. In every case, it’s the image of helplessness that somehow stimulates the desire to kill. Because we can do it, we should do it. Lady M’s statement (II.2) that she’d have done the murder herself “Had he not resembled/ My father as he slept.”

Banquo’s dreams II.1: he wants to sleep, but is afraid to dream. Why? And he hands over his sword – and dagger? He has dreamt of the “weird sisters.” Does he want to? Why? Acceptance or rejection of a “dream.” And his response to Macbeth’s invitation to talk over “that business.” And by contrast Macbeth’s “dream”: “Is this a dagger I see before me?” “a dagger of the mind”: with a double meaning? And then the dream-state dagger becomes covered with blood. What does one do with a nightmare or a vision of horror?

Thinking brainsickly Lady M accuses Macbeth of unbending his noble strength “to think so brainsickly of things” (II ). Because he imagines that in killing a sleeping man, he has killed sleep. “Innocent sleep”! And six wonderful metaphors for sleep. And his anxiety over not being able to pronounce “Amen” to the guards’ “God bless us.” “Consider it not so deeply.” But why couldn’t he respond? And why will his hands “rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine/ Making the green one red” instead of washing off the blood? While she insists, “A little water clears us of the deed.” The vast gulf between them?