Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (21 page)

Scene 6

The mind of an Elizabethan, 1605

M
acbeth
isn’t a literary text, it’s a bloody, vicious, scary, turn-the-world-upside-down-and-shake-it-by-the-neck thriller! It really is similar to Al Pacino’s journey in the film
Scarface
– a man told he will be king, who kills everyone in his way, achieves his goal, becomes paranoid, trusts no one, and is eventually brought down.

It’s the only play of Shakespeare’s that is known worldwide to have a curse on it. I know a lot of people who insist that in their day-to-day lives they are not superstitious in the slightest, and yet will categorically NOT speak the name of the play, or its lead character.
Macbeth
is more commonly known in the theatrical world as ‘The Scottish Play’. Even
I
am loath to say it on stage, and I know people who get really upset if you don’t observe the rules that surround The Curse.

While many of Shakespeare’s plays provoke boredom in people who don’t know his work,
Macbeth
seems to cause a certain amount of trepidation. Not without fair reason, too. It has witches, ghosts, blood, death, revenge, con fusion, horses eating each other (I’m serious), and worse than all that, The Killing of a King.

The Curse of Macbeth

It’s held to be incredibly bad luck to mention the name ‘Macbeth’ outside of rehearsal rooms or while the play is being performed. Many people in the profession refuse to call it by its chosen name, preferring ‘The Scottish Play’. But why? Productions have suffered from their actors dying or being injured. King James banned the play for five years after seeing it, perhaps because (as an author of a work on witchcraft) the witches’ incantations were too real for comfort.

There are more down-to-earth reasons:

Lifting the Curse
…

If someone does say ‘Macbeth’ outside of performance or rehearsal, there are a number of cures to the curse. Here are two:

Superstitious?

Some productions that have felt the curse …

There’s a really important scene (Act 2, Scene 4) soon after Macbeth has murdered King Duncan, where an Old Man meets Ross and they discuss the repercussions of the king’s death. The scene is often cut in modern productions, but it’s fantastically important. The first thing the Old Man (Shakespeare was never too worried about names) says is:

Threescore and ten I can remember well;

Within the volume of which time I have seen

Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night

Hath trifled former knowings.

(
Macbeth
, Act 2, Scene 4, lines 1–4)

Ross mentions that it’s so dark during the daytime it seems like night. The Old Man replies with a story of a falcon being killed by an owl (if at all, the norm would be the other way round), and before Macduff enters to talk about what will happen next, the Old Man and Ross speak of Duncan’s horses growing so crazed that they burst from their stables and then
ate
each other …

The picture that is conjured up is of a stormy, dark, tempestuous and chaotic land, where nothing is as it should be. A land without a king. A land without God.

Add to this melting pot of fear, murder and mayhem the Elizabethans’ aforementioned somewhat muscular ability to suspend their disbelief, and you have yourself quite a concoction. Remember: death on stage would have been a different spectacle to witness for them. When they saw someone die on stage, then as far as they were concerned, that person really died.

As it happens, not too many people die on stage in
Macbeth
– Duncan, Lady Macbeth, and Macbeth all die off-stage. Perhaps Shakespeare wrote it this way for the
very reason that the audience would get too scared; or perhaps because the general subject-matter of the play was hard enough for the audience to deal with – you can
talk
about the death of a Scottish king, but maybe
showing
it might have put Shakespeare slightly too close to the edges of treason, or give the Master of the Revels too much to complain about.

The Master of the Revels was an immensely powerful man. No play could be performed at Court – where the monarch would be entertained – without his authorisation, and by 1606 he was given control over the plays performed in the public theatres too. The aim was to ensure that the Court received the best possible entertainment, and that no one would be upset too greatly by anything they saw.

Considering recent events, parts of
Macbeth
might have made the audience a little too uncomfortable, seeing as they’d have been watching the play in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, and perhaps only a short time before Guy Fawkes was to be executed, so Shakespeare would have to be very careful with his phrasing.

But death, murder, and treason aren’t the only fun bits in the play. We’ve also got witches. The play opens with a scene where three witches are incanting a spell, in the middle of a storm of thunder and lightning. This is incredibly important too, and needs contextualising almost as much
as the death of a monarch did. Unlike today’s productions of
Macbeth
, the witches in Shakespeare’s production would probably have caused quite a ruckus, as the Elizabethans would have been watching these scenes in the middle of the European Witch Craze.

The witch-hunts that formed much of the European Witch Craze took place over 400 years, from towards the end of the 13th century to the mid-17th century. England was swept up in the furore too, and the Witchcraft Act of 1541, passed under Henry VIII, stated: ‘It shall be Felony to practise, or cause to be practised Conjuration, Witchcraft, Enchantment or Sorcery.’

The years of the Witch Craze would have been terrifying for people. Fear of witches still abounded in Shakespeare’s time, and far beyond it.

In 1616, the year Shakespeare died, Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician and a close friend to the Emperor, only
just
managed to save his mother from being burnt at the stake for being a witch, by using the clout he had in the Court. Eighty-six years after Shakespeare wrote
Macbeth
, the Salem witch trials took place (made famous in modern theatre by Arthur Miller’s play
The Crucible
).

The witch hunts would have been truly terrifying.

If anybody thought you might be a witch, you would be put under trial, often involving extremely horrible methods of torture, until you either confessed (and were then
burnt at the stake while still alive) or you died from the torture. If you cried or were seen to be afraid during the trial, it was a sign you were a witch. If you knew or were kin to a witch, you would be put under trial as a suspected witch. The examiner could look for a diabolical mark on your body, like a birthmark or mole, which was a sure sign you were a witch; if he couldn’t find one, he was perfectly entitled to claim that the mark was invisible, and, you guessed it, you were found to be a witch …

There were plenty of other similarly inescapable ways of proving that someone was a witch, and thousands of innocent people, mostly women, were killed. Estimates for the number of people executed in Europe for participating in witchcraft vary from 12,000 right up to 100,000; more ‘moderate’ estimates come in at 60,000.

Elizabeth I passed a Witchcraft Act in 1563, and James I in particular seemed to have a special interest in witches: as James VI of Scotland not only did he appoint royal commissions whose single task was to hunt witches down, but he’s known to have participated in witch trials too. In 1597 he published a treatise on witchcraft called
Daemonologie
, although by this time he’d begun an about-turn in his thinking, and revoked those earlier royal commissions.

By the time he had assumed the throne as James I of England, it seems he had become more sceptical of the witch trials, and despite introducing his own, harsher
Witch Craft Act in 1604, it was never used in his reign.

A time, then, when even if you were thought to be
associated
with a witch you could end up trying to hold your breath under water for a very long time, when even greater atrocities were taking place abroad,
and
a Scots king (known for his interest in all things witchy) takes the English throne …

… and Shakespeare writes a play with witches in the first scene, who then lead a man to commit high treason.

Topical.

We may laugh at witches nowadays; indeed, their scenes in
Macbeth
are often thought to be the hardest to get right in modern productions. They’re usually the least scary moments, too: we’re simply not afraid of witches any more.

Although we may know that the witch trials of a few hundred years ago were truly horrific, we don’t have access to the kind of fear the Elizabethans would have had, the continual suspicion, not only a terror of witches themselves but an entire ideology that poured from that fear into the minds of the populace – it made people paranoid and trigger-happy, crying
Witch!
at anybody with a crooked thumb.

For an Elizabethan audience, playing an ace and opening the play with the scariest characters is a pretty gutsy thing to do. Without working out why the witches are
there, it’s too easy to dismiss them as worthless plot devices. But Shakespeare uses the witches to help set the tone, and for his audience, they’d be very quickly aware that the tone is a bloody scary one.

Think of a witch now, and some green-skinned, wart-nosed hag from
The Wizard of Oz
(1939) will probably come to mind. A
Dr Who
episode in 2007 set in Shakespeare’s London featured witches; they were slightly green-skinned, but they also had pointy teeth and, well, they did scare me.
Dr Who
has always terrified me, though.

But to get an idea of how terrifying witches would have been to an Elizabethan audience, and how strange and unreal they would seem, bear this in mind: 200 years after Shakespeare was alive (100 or so years after the witch-hunts were over), people were only just
beginning
to draw witches. Until that point, it seems, they wouldn’t have been comfortable depicting them.

In 2006 at the Tate Britain in London, there was an exhibition called ‘Gothic Nightmares’. It wasn’t so scary. I wandered through the first half of the exhibition not really appreciating the paintings of imps and ghouls, ghosts and witches sitting on the edge of beds, swirling above someone sleeping, very often visiting someone in prison or surprising someone on a heath.

I found a dark room where a modern projector had been set up to replicate an 18th-century projector – crude
cut-out shapes were being placed before a bulb that was being made to flicker like a candle, making cartoon-ish images float from side to side on the wall opposite. It was boring.

Then, out of the middle distance, a pair of yellow eyes loomed.

The eyes belonged to a face that rushed towards me so quickly I tried to jump out of the way.

Fortunately it was dark, so no one saw me make a fool of myself. As I left the room I glanced at my friend who, I was glad to see, also looked a little, ahem, spooked.

I stopped to think. I had been scared by cardboard and light. Me, with my 21st-century head, used to all manner of special effects, horror movies, blood and gore on TV and in the cinema.

If it can scare us, what must it have done to people living 200 years ago, when these images were first made? How terrifying would it be to see a picture move, animatedly? To be sure, if you could take a TV back in time 200 years and show it to someone on the street, their mind probably wouldn’t be able to comprehend what it was seeing.

So I made my way back to the beginning of the exhibition and started again, this time trying to imagine what it must have been like for someone from the 18th century to see these pictures for the first time, to have their nightmares, their worst fears, put into pictorial form.

I came across a painting of a man on a heath, meeting three witches. I thought of this book.

I went back to the beginning of the gallery a third time, and started again, this time trying as hard as I could to dismiss my modern head, and replace it with an Elizabethan’s.

Take a TV 200 years into the past, and you’d freak people out. Take it 400 years back and they’d put you to the stake. Take an Elizabethan 200 years into the future, into the 18th century, show them these paintings, and they’d freak out.

So I was scared. The people in the 18th century, seeing the worst things imaginable suddenly given shape, would have been scared.