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
<english.ucsb.edu/faculty/oconnell/renstudies>
“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.2.22-23).
• 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.2.48-49).
• 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?