Macbeth Read online

  What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

  Belonging to a man. O be some other name!

  What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.

  (II.2.40-44)

  Editors have three early texts of this play to work from, two quarto texts and the folio. Here is how the First Quarto (1597) reads:

  Whats Mountaque? It is nor hand nor foote, Nor arme, nor face, nor any other part.

  Whats in a name? That which we call a Rose, By any other name world smell as sweet:

  Here is the Second Quarto (1599):

  Whats Mountaque? it is nor hand nor foote, Nor arme nor face, o be some other name Belonging to a man.

  Whats in a name that which we call a rose, By any other word would smell as sweete,

  And here is the First Folio (1623):

  What's Mountaque? it is nor hand nor foote, Nor arme, nor face, O be some other name Belonging to a man.

  What? in a names that which we call a Rose, By any other word would smell as sweete,

  There is in fact no early text that reads as our modern text does-and this is the most famous speech in the play. Instead, we have three quite different texts, all of which are clearly some version of the same speech, but none of which seems to us a final or satisfactory version. The transcendently beautiful passage in modern editions is an editorial invention: editors have succeeded in conflating and revising the three versions into something we recognize as great poetry. Is this what Shakespeare "really" wrote? Who can say? What we can say is that Shakespeare always had performance, not a book, in mind.

  Books About the Shakespeare Texts The standard study of the printing history of the First Folio is W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (1955). J. K. Walton, The Quarto Copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare (1971), is a useful survey of the relation of the quartos to the folio. The second edition of Charlton Hinman's Norton Facsimile of the First Folio (1996), with a new introduction by Peter Blayney, is indispensable. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, keyed to the Oxford text, gives a comprehensive survey of the editorial situation for all the plays and poems.

  THE GENERAL EDITORS

  Introduction

  SHAKESPEARE'S SCOTTISH TRAGEDY was written early in the reign of James I, the Scottish king who succeeded Queen Elizabeth on the English throne in 1603. It is impossible to date the play precisely, but certain allusions-especially to the Gunpowder Plot, the Jesuit attempt to blow up Parliament in 1605, and the subsequent trial of the conspirators-suggest a date in 1606. The impulse to write a Scottish play must have been in the broadest sense political: the king who had, as one of his first official acts, taken Shakespeare's company under his patronage, so that the Lord Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men, traced his ancestry back to Banquo. But there is little about the play to suggest that Shakespeare's purpose was to celebrate his patron's lineage, just as there is nothing straightforward about the history Shakespeare chose to dramatize.

  The play, moreover, comes to us not as it would have appeared from Shakespeare's pen in 1606, but in a version that is demonstrably a revision; and the reviser was certainly not Shakespeare. It includes songs for the witches that are given in the text only with their opening words ("Come away, come away, etc." "Black spirits, etc."). These are songs from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch, written between 1610 and 1615, where they constitute little divertissements, sung dialogues with dances. The manuscript of Sir William Davenant's version of Macbeth, prepared around 1664, includes the whole text of the witches' songs from Middleton, and since The Witch remained unpublished until 1778, Davenant would have taken his text not from Middleton, but directly from the King's Men's performing text of Macbeth, to which Davenant had acquired the rights. This, then, is the earliest version of the play to which we have access, the play as the King's Men were performing it shortly after Shakespeare's death-for whatever reason, they chose not to return to Shakespeare's original text when they published the 1623 First Folio. The present edition includes the whole of the two witch scenes-what is implied in the folio's "etc."

  The play as it stands in the folio is anomalous in a number of other respects as well. Textually it is very unusual: by far the shortest of the tragedies (half the length of Hamlet, a third shorter than the average), shorter, too, than all the comedies except The Comedy of Errors. It looks, moreover, as if the version we have has not only been augmented with witches' business, but also cut and rearranged, producing some real muddles in the narrative: for example, the scene between Lennox and the lord, III.6, reporting action that has not happened yet, or the notorious syntactic puzzles of the account of the battle in the opening scenes, or the confusion of the final battle, in which Macbeth is slain onstage, and twenty lines later Macduff reenters with his head. Revision and cutting were, of course, standard and necessary procedures in a theater where the normal playing time was two hours; but if theatrical cuts are to explain the peculiarities of this text, why was it cut so peculiarly, not to say ineptly? Arguments that make the muddles not the result of cutting but an experiment in surreal and expressionistic dramaturgy only produce more questions, rendering the play a total anomaly, both in Shakespeare's work and in the drama of the period.

  The elaboration of the witches' roles could have taken place anywhere up to about fifteen years after the play was first performed, but the presence of the Middleton songs suggests that Shakespeare was no longer around to do the revising, which presumes a date after 1614. Why, only a decade after the play was written, would augmenting the witches' roles have seemed a good idea? To begin with, by 1610 or so witchcraft, magic, and the diabolical were good theater business. Ben Jonson's Masque of Queens, performed at court in 1609, opens on a witches' coven with infernal music and dance, and inaugurated a decade of sorcery plays and masques, of which the most famous are The Tempest, The Alchemist, and the revived and rewritten Doctor Faustus.

  The ubiquitousness of theatrical magic is perhaps sufficient reason for the elaboration of the witches in Macbeth, but it does not seem to account for everything. When Macbeth, after the murder of Banquo, goes to consult the witches, and they show him a terrifying vision of Banquo's heirs, the chief witch Hecate proposes a little entertainment to cheer him up:

  I'll charm the air to give a sound

  While you perform your antic round,

  That this great king may kindly say.

  Our duties did his welcome pay.

  (IV.1.151-54)

  The tone of the scene here changes significantly: the witches are not professional and peremptory anymore; they are lighthearted, gracious, and deferential. We may choose to treat this as a moment of heavy irony, though Macbeth does not seem to respond to it as such; but if it is not ironic, the change of tone suggests that the "great king" addressed in this passage is not the king onstage, but instead a real king in the audience, Banquo's descendant and the king of both Scotland and England. If this is correct, then the version of the play preserved in the folio is one prepared for a performance at court.

  Though there is no record of a court performance, King James surely must have wanted to see a play that included both witches and his ancestors. Indeed, whether or not King James was in the audience, the fact that it is the witches who provide the royal entertainment can hardly be accidental. The king was intensely interested in witchcraft. He attended witch trials whenever he could, and considered himself an expert on the theory and practice of sorcery. His dialogue on the subject, Daemonology, first published in Edinburgh in 1597, was reissued (three times) upon his accession to the English throne in 1603. This and the Basilicon Doron, his philosophy of kingship, were the two works through which he chose to introduce himself to his English subjects: witchcraft and kingship have an intimate relationship in the Jacobean royal ideology.

  The presence of the witches is another unusual, if not quite anomalous, feature of the pla
y. Shakespeare makes use of the supernatural from time to time-ghosts in Richard III, in Julius Caesar, and most notably in Hamlet; fairies and their magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream; Prospero's sorcery in The Tempest; Joan of Arc's and Marjory Jourdain's in the Henry VI plays; and Rosalind's claim to be a magician at the end of As You Like It-but there is no other play in which witches and witchcraft are such an integral element of the plot. This is a culture in which the supernatural and witchcraft, even for skeptics, are as much a part of reality as religious truth is. Like the ghost in Hamlet, the reality of the witches in Macbeth is not in question; the question, as in Hamlet, is why they are present and how far to believe them.

  Like the ghost, too, the witches are quintessential theatrical devices: they dance and sing, perform wonders, appear and disappear, fly, produce visions-do, in short, all the things that, historically, we have gone to the theater to see. They open the play and set the tone for it. On Shakespeare's stage they would simply have materialized through a trapdoor, but Shakespeare's audience believed in magic already. Our rationalistic theater requires something more theatrically elaborate-not necessarily machinery, but some serious mystification. For Shakespeare's audience, the mystification is built into their physical appearance, which defies the categories: they look like men and are women. The indeterminacy of their gender is the first thing Banquo calls attention to. This is a defining element of their nature, a paradox that identifies them as witches: a specifically female propensity to evil-being a witch-is defined by its apparent masculinity. This also is, of course, one of the central charges leveled at Shakespeare's theater itself, the ambiguity of its gender roles, the fact that on Shakespeare's stage the women are really male. But the gender ambiguity relates as well to roles within the play: Lady Macbeth unsexes herself, and accuses her husband of being afraid to act like a man. What constitutes acting like a man in this play? The answer would seem to be, only killing. Lady Macbeth unsexing herself, after all, renders herself, unexpectedly, not a man but a child, and thus incapable of murder: "Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done't" (II.2.12-13). Indeed, the definitive relation between murder and manhood applies to heroes as well as villains. When Macduff is told of the murder of his wife and children and is urged to "Dispute it like a man," he replies that he must first "feel it as a man" (IV.3.220-21). Whatever this says about his sensitivity and family feeling, it also says that murder is what makes you feel like a man.

  The unsettling quality of the witches goes beyond gender. Their language is paradoxical-fair is foul and foul is fair; when the battle's lost and won. One way of looking at this is to say that it constitutes no paradox at all: any battle that is lost has also been won, but by somebody else. The person who describes a battle as lost and won is either on both sides or on neither; what is fair for one side is bound to be foul for the other. The witches' riddles and prophecies mislead Macbeth, but in an important sense, these double-talking creatures are also telling the truth about the world of the play-that there really are no ethical standards in it, no right and wrong sides. Duncan certainly starts out sounding like a good king: the rhetoric of his monarchy is full of claims about its sacredness, the deference that is due to it, how it is part of a natural hierarchy descending from God, how the king is divinely anointed, and so forth. But in fact none of this is borne out by the play. Duncan's rule is utterly chaotic, and maintaining it depends on constant warfare-the battle that opens the play, after all, is not an invasion, but a rebellion. Duncan's rule has never commanded the deference it claims for itself-deference is not natural to it. In upsetting that sense of the deference Macbeth feels he owes to Duncan, perhaps the witches are releasing into the play something the play both overtly denies and implicitly articulates: that there is no basis whatever for the values asserted on Duncan's behalf; that the primary characteristic of his rule, perhaps of any rule in the world of the play, is not order but rebellion.

  Whether or not this is correct, it must be to the point that women are the ones who prompt this dangerous realization in Macbeth. The witches live outside the social order, but they embody its contradictions: beneath the woman's exterior is also a man, just as beneath the man's exterior is also a woman; nature is anarchic, full of competing claims, not ordered and hierarchical. To acknowledge our divided selves and the anarchy of nature is also to acknowledge the reality and force and validity of the individual will-to acknowledge that all of us have claims that conflict with the claims about natural order, deference, and hierarchy. This is the same recognition that Edmund brings into King Lear when he invokes Nature as his goddess. It is a Nature that is not the image of divine order, but one in which the strongest and craftiest survive-and when they survive, they then go on to devise claims about Nature that justify their success, claims about hierarchies, natural law and order, the divine right of kings. Edmund is a villain, but if he were ultimately successful, he would be indistinguishable from the Duncans and Malcolms (and James I's) of Shakespeare's world.

  The complexities and ambiguities of Shakespeare's story are firmly based on history. The real Macbeth was, like Richard III, the victim of a gigantic and very effective publicity campaign. Historically, Duncan was the usurper-that is what the rebellion at the beginning of the play is about, though there is no way of knowing it from Shakespeare. Macbeth had a claim to the throne (Duncan at one point in the play refers to him as "cousin"[I.4.14]-they were first cousins, both grandsons of King Malcolm II). Macbeth's murder of Duncan was a political assassination, and Macbeth was a popular hero because of it. The legitimate heir to the throne, whose rights had been displaced by the usurping Duncan, was Lady Macbeth. When Macbeth ascended the throne, he was ruling as Protector or Regent until Lady Macbeth's son came of age (she did have children-it is Shakespeare who deprives her and Macbeth of those heirs). Macbeth's defeat at the end of the play, by Malcolm, Macduff, and Siward, the Earl of Northumberland, constituted essentially an English invasion-the long-term fight was between native Scottish Celts and Anglo-Norman invaders, with continental allies (such as the Norwegian king) on both sides. One way of looking at the action is to say that it is about the enforced anglicization of Scotland, which Macbeth is resisting.

  Shakespeare knows some of this. In Holinshed's Chronicles, from which Shakespeare took his history, Macbeth not only has a claim to the throne, he also has a legitimate grievance against Duncan. Moreover, in Holinshed, Banquo is fully Macbeth's accomplice, and the murder of Duncan has a good deal of political justification. All this would be very touchy for Shakespeare precisely because Banquo is King James's ancestor, and if Duncan is a saint, then Banquo is a real problem, the ancestor one wants to forget. In fact, Banquo's connection with the Scottish royal line materializes only two centuries after the events of the play, when one of his descendants, a steward in the royal household, married into the royal family-hence King James's family name, Stewart or Stuart. Shakespeare's way of handling Banquo fudges a lot of issues. Should he not, as a loyal thane, be pressing the claim of Malcolm, the designated heir, after the murder? Should he remain loyal to Macbeth as long as he does?

  This is precisely the sort of question that shows how close the play is to Hamlet: in both plays, the issue of legitimacy remains crucially ambiguous. Nobody in Macbeth presses the claim of Malcolm until Malcolm reappears with an army to support him, any more than anyone in Hamlet presses the claim of Hamlet. In both plays, there is deep uncertainty about the relation between power and legitimacy-about whether legitimacy constitutes anything more than the rhetoric of power backed by the size of its army. Duncan tries to legitimize his son's succession by creating Malcolm Prince of Cumberland on the analogy of the Prince of Wales, thus declaring him heir to the throne. But this is not the way the succession works in Scotland: Cumberland is an English county, which was briefly ceded to the Scottish crown, and Malcolm's new title is the thin edge of the English invasion. Analogously, Malcolm confirms his victory at the end of the play by transforming his Scottish thanes into En
glish earls, "the first that ever Scotland / In such an honor named" (V.8.63-64)-heredity requires a great deal of ceremonial apparatus to make it appear a natural mode of succession. James I himself became king of England not because he was the legitimate heir (he was one of a number of people with a distant claim to the throne), but because he was designated the successor by Queen Elizabeth; or at least several attendants at her death claimed that he was, and the people in control supported him. This is much closer to the situation in Hamlet and Macbeth than it is to any system of hereditary succession. And Macbeth is, even in the play, a fully legitimate king, as legitimate as Duncan: like Hamlet's Denmark, this is not a hereditary monarchy. Macbeth is elected king by the thanes, and duly anointed. The fact that he turns out to be a bad king does not make him any less the king, any more than the rebellion that opens the play casts doubt on Duncan's right to the throne.

  The play is less about legitimacy and usurpation than about the divided self, and like Hamlet, it focuses to an unprecedented extent on the mind of the hero. Suppose we try to imagine a Hamlet written from Claudius's point of view, in the way that Macbeth is written from Macbeth's. The murder Claudius commits is the perfect crime; but the hero-villain quickly finds that his actions have unimagined implications, and that the political world is not all he has to contend with. As it stands, Hamlet is a very political play, and does not really need the ghost at all. Hamlet has his suspicions already; Claudius tries to buy him off by promising him the succession, but this is not good enough. It turns out that the problem is not really conscience or revenge, it is Hamlet's own ambitions. He wanted to succeed his father on the throne; Claudius, Hamlet says, "Popped in between th' election and my hopes." The ghost is merely a deus ex machina. But in a Hamlet that did not center on Hamlet, Claudius's guilty conscience, which is not much in evidence in the play, would have a great deal more work to do. So would the ghost-who should, after all, logically be haunting Claudius, not Hamlet. This play would be not about politics but about how the dead do not disappear; they return to embody our crimes, so that we have to keep repeating them-just as in Macbeth. In this version of Hamlet, Hamlet is hardly necessary, any more than in Macbeth, Malcolm and Macduff are necessary. The drama of Macbeth is really a matter between Macbeth and his ambition, Macbeth and the witches and his wife and his hallucinations and his own tortured soul, the drama of prophecies and riddles, and how he understands them, and what he decides to do about them, and how they, in themselves, constitute retribution.