Maybe don’t kill a guy even if your wife tells you to.
The title character in Shakespeare’s blood-drenched tragedy, “the Scottish play” Macbeth, intrigued by witches’ prophecies and energetically urged on by his ambitious wife Lady Macbeth, begins his descent with regicide, a 16th-century topical issue that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, seems to have struggled with. Macbeth’s guilt morphs into paranoia and leads him on to friendicide, family-icide, and a fatal battle with a guy who has an axe to grind. Before a last decapitation, we can luxuriate in hallucinations, ghosts, sleepwalking, and some weird women giving us the recipe for evil soup.
This oddly short play doesn’t show up in any form until the 1623 First Folio. The play is “seemingly one of the least subjective of all his dramas, though no doubt more so than is generally suspected” (Ogburn and Ogburn 785-786). Looney had nothing to say about the content of the play. But the Earl of Oxford did serve with the English military in northern England and Scotland in 1570; and we find an intimacy with relevant politics in the play that Shakespearean orthodoxy generally cannot acknowledge.
Shakespeare plays fast and loose with history (from Holinshed’s chronicle), where Duncan killed off a branch of his family to gain the throne and was killed by Macbeth in battle. Macbeth reigned as King of Scotland (1040-1057) until killed by Duncan’s son Malcolm. Gruoch, a member of the Duncan family, had a son by a first husband and later married Macbeth (Ogburn and Ogburn 789).
The supposed relevance to the Stuart royal line (concerning James I’s descent from Banquo’s bloodline, and his interest in demonology and witchcraft) has suggested to many that the play was probably written no earlier than 1603. But “The oft-repeated view that Macbeth was written as a compliment to King James deserves a closer look”: it works better as an insult, “like attempting to flatter an Italian-American by writing The Sopranos” (Farina 189).
The first recorded performance of the play was 1611 (Anderson 400). Traditional interpretation likes to read into the play allusions to events in 1607, and although orthodoxy has established 1606 as a date of composition (after de Vere’s death), “There is absolutely nothing in Macbeth which could not have been written between 1588 and ’91” (Ogburn and Ogburn 787). The so-called Doctrine of Equivocation in 1606 is trotted forth, and direct allusions in the play are cited, but there is a much earlier 1583/4 relevance: Burghley complained that Catholics under torture were using evasion and sophistry. A Spanish Doctrine excused Catholics for lying to Protestant inquisitors (Anderson 400; cf. Hazelton 372; cf. Waugaman).
Other textual problems cloud the issue: signs of another author responsible for certain scenes, and the peculiar shortness of the play. This latter issue is attributed sometimes to the notion that the First Folio perhaps used a touring company’s abbreviated version. Eva Turenr Clark and Ruth Loyd Miller make a good case for a 1589 date of composition due to striking parallels with French politics of the 1580s — particularly the assassination of Henry, Duke of Guise, by Henry III of France while the latter’s mother, Catherine de Medici, was in the Château on a stormy night (Clark 809ff; Ogburn and Ogburn 791; Hazelton 376). She also was said to have had a vision of the future kings of France (Clark 812; Ogburn and Ogburn 790), much like Macbeth’s vision of the future kings of Scotland.
William Cecil, Lord Burghley, commissioned this detailed sketch of the crime scene. Click on the image to enlarge.
Richard F. Whalen does the best job debunking the proposed connections to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, pointing out James’ dread of violent death [“No surprise, since his father was assassinated and his captive mother was beheaded” (Whalen, “Shakespeare in Scotland” 56) — making this an unlikely play for his benefit], and showing the many actual connections to the assassination of Lord Darnley, consort to Mary Queen of Scots, by the ambitious James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, who then married the young Queen. A sketch of the assassination site and grounds was sent to Burghley and includes a floating dagger (Whalen 60; Clark 847). See a higher resolution version of the map here, and check out the top right corner for the dagger.
The play, while again “seemingly one of the least subjective of all his dramas” (Ogburn and Ogburn 785-786), may reflect the “regicidal anxiety” of Oxford as juror in the 1586 trial of Mary Queen of Scots (Anderson 401). Indeed, Macbeth is “a tragedy that begins and ends with an offstage beheading and the ritual displaying of the severed head” (Anderson 217).
Knowledge that the Seytons were hereditary armor-bearers for the kings of Scotland (Whalen 65) points to Oxford’s experience in Scotland. Apparently, Oxford was afflicted with “nightmare visions” once he returned from “active military duty in Scotland” (Farina 191). The presence of the anachronistic Lennoxes here also points towards Oxford, who was friends with the contemporary Lennoxes. Margaret, Countess of Lennox, was the mother of Lord Darnley, and her family archives held the manuscript source of Macbeth not in print otherwise until the mid-19th century, the Buik of Croniclis of Scotland by William Stewart, whom Shakespeare favors over Holinshed (Anderson 72). The Countess and her children had a better claim to the throne than Elizabeth (Miller, “Notes” 848), and Lord Burghley’s diary reports in 1574 a list of dinner guests that includes Lady Lennox, the Earl and Countess of Oxford, and others.
Underlined in Oxford’s Geneva Bible are verses about not putting one’s hand against “the Lord’s anointed” (1 Samuel 26:11-12), verses which also mention a spear and a cup of water (Anderson 383-384). Anderson also makes much of the relevance of the execution of Mary Stuart, formerly in England in “double trust” (like Duncan in the play) as guest and kin of Queen Elizabeth, albeit in imprisonment (Anderson 217). Supposedly, Macbeth contains quotations from Howard’s libellous Defensative too (see Harlow).
It is a little odd that this play is so popular as a high school infliction. What can a fifteen-year-old glean? Don’t listen to your wife? Don’t kill kings? Not the most relevant of moral messages. Perhaps a Marxist explanation: the administrative mind reduces the play conceptually to a cautionary tale about rebelling against authority and thus promotes its perpetual curricular inclusion. Such a reductive, pro-monarchic, propagandistic reading may have dominated early too, if the play was forcibly applied early on to Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Or else it’s just more pro-breeding propaganda: “Where some have ‘blood’ in the sense of family, issue, children, and lineage, others — like the ‘childless’ Macbeth and Lady Macbeth — have blood in the sense of bloodshed, ultimate disorder rather than orderly sequence, death rather than life, the end of a line rather than a line without end” (Garber 716).
The words “blood” and “night” show up a lot, naturally. More interestingly, watch for uses of the “un-” prefix; Shakespeare coins some pretty strange terms here: unseamed, unfix, unsex, untimely, etc. And he creates some very cool special effects with time, another major theme in the work. “So rapid and foreshortened is their [the Macbeths’] play (about half the length of Hamlet) that we are given no leisure to confront their descent into hell as it happens” (Bloom 518). Our experience resembles Macbeth’s.
The play has gotten a reputation for being bad luck in terms of productions and those who act in it, and so it is frequently referred to as “the Scottish play” to avoid naming it.
Macbeth, Act by Act
Macbeth Intro
Further Resources
Filmography
Macbeth. Starring Orson Welles. 1948. The set is effectively dark and dank, sometimes even oozing. The royal crown is totally weird. Here is the whole play.
Macbeth. Starring Maurice Evans, Judith Anderson. Hallmark Hall of Fame. Made-for-TV, 1954. Remade 1960. Evans in the radio drama from 1947.
Macbeth. Starring Sean Connery. Made for Canadian TV, 1961. Here is the whole play.
Macbeth. Starring Ian McKellen, Judi Dench. The Royal Shakespeare Company Production, 1978. Here is the whole play.
Macbeth. Starring Jeremy Brett, Piper Laurie. Bard Productions Ltd., 1981. Here is the whole play.
Macbeth. Starring Nicol Williamson, Jane Lapotaire. UK TV, 1983. Williamson’s performance and voice modulations are superb. It’s all him: we see no Banquo ghost. “Tomorrow.”
Macbeth. Dir. Roman Polanski. Starring Jon Finch. Columbia Pictures / Playboy Production, 1971. A bloody spectacle, including the showing of Duncan’s murder, especially disturbing since Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate was butchered by the Manson gang not long before. Here are numerous scenes.
Macbeth. Starring Jason Connery. Cromwell Productions, 1997. Here is the whole play.
Macbeth. Starring Sean Pertwee, Greta Scacchi. Shakespeare on Screen, 1998. Here is the whole play.
Macbeth. Starring Anthony Sher. Made-for-TV, 2001. “Tomorrow.”
Scotland, PA. Starring Laura Tierney, Christopher Walken. Abandon Pictures, 2002. Rendered into a dark comedy focused on the nascent fast food industry (think “Mac”). Macduff scene.
Macbeth. Shakespeare Retold. UK TV, 2005. An adaptation set in a Glasgow restaurant. Here is the whole film.
Macbeth. Starring Patrick Stewart. PBS, 2010. Here is the whole play.
The Tragedy of Macbeth. Starring Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand. 2022. “Tomorrow.”
Macbeth. Movie Central!, 2023. Here is the whole play.
Best Editions
Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 6th ed. Pearson Education Inc., 2009. 1255-1292.
Clark, Sandra and Pamela Mason, eds. Macbeth. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd Series. 2015.
Furness, Horace Howard, ed. Macbeth. A New Variorum Edition. Vol. 2. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1873.
Weller, Philip, ed. Macbeth. Shakespeare Navigators. This online full text version has line numbering and annotations.
Whalen, Richard, ed. Macbeth. 2nd ed. The Oxfordian Shakespeare Series. Llumina Press, 2013. Annotated from an Oxfordian perspective.
Other Valuable Oxfordian Perspectives
Chandler, David. “Lady Macbeth’s Curds and Whey.” Elizabethan Review 5.2 (1997): 126-127. Here.
Clark, Eva Turner. Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays. 3rd ed. by Ruth Loyd Miller. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974. 809-825.
Farina, William. De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006. 189-194.
Gilbert, Sky. “Macbeth: A Language Obsessed, Heretical Play.” The Oxfordian 19 (2017): 45-68. Here.
La Greca, Donald. “Dynasticide: A Note on Macbeth.” Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter 20.1-2 (Spring 1984): 7-8. Here.
Hazelton, Sally. “The Tragedie of Macbeth.” In Dating Shakespeare’s Play’s. Ed. Kevin Gilvary. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Parapress, 2010. 368-378. Here.
Miller, Ruth Loyd. “The Porter in Macbeth — Shakespeare’s Farewell to Leicester.” In Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays, by Eva Turner Clark. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974. 826-835.
Miller, Ruth Loyd. “A Recipe from an Elizabethan Cook-Book: Macbeth — A 16th-Century Marble Cake.” In Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays, by Eva Turner Clark. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974. 836-853.
Moore, Peter R. “Epicurean Time in Macbeth.” Brief Chronicles I (2009): 141-154. Here.
Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & The Reality. 2nd ed. McLean, VA: EPM Publications, Inc., 1992.
Ogburn, Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn. This Star of England. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Pub., 1952. Esp. 785-803.
Showerman, Earl. “Shakespeare’s Greater Greek: Macbeth and Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Brief Chronicles III (2011): 37-70. Here.
Waugaman, Richard M., M.D. It’s Time to Re-Vere the Works of “Shake-speare”. 2nd ed. Middletown, DE: 2017. Chapter 9: “‘Equivocation’ in Macbeth.”
Whalen, Richard. Letters to the Editor: “Richard Whalen Replies to Macbeth Review.” Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter 49.3 (Fall 2013): 7. Here.
Whalen, Richard F. “An Overlooked Sub-Plot in Macbeth Reveals Oxford’s Hand.” Shakespeare Matters 7.3 (Spring 2008): 6, 28-31. Here. The focus is on the slimy character Ross[e], as the type of courtier Oxford would have known first-hand.
Whalen, Richard F. “Scottish/Classical Hybrid Witches in Macbeth.” Brief Chronicles IV (2013): 57-70. Here.
Whalen, Richard F. “Shakespeare in Scotland.” The Oxfordian 6 (2003): 55-70.
Whalen, Richard F. “What Really Happens in Macbeth? Brief Chronicles 5 (2014): 61-68.
And Other General Resources
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare. Vol. 2. NY: Gramercy Books, 1970. 148-203.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.NY: Riverhead Books, 1998. 516-545.
Carey, Gary, ed. Cliffs Notes on Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Lincoln, NE: Cliffs Notes, Inc., 1999.
French, Marilyn. Shakespeare’s Division of Experience. NY: Summit Books, 1981.241-250.
Garber, Marjorie. “Macbeth: The Male Medusa.” Profiling Shakespeare. NY: Routledge, 2008. 76-109.
Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. NY: Pantheon Books, 2004. 695-723.
Goddard, Harold C. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Vol. 2. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951. 107-135.
Harlow, C.G. “Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama.” Studies in English Literature 5.2 (Spring 1965): 269-281.
Macrone, Michael. Brush Up Your Shakespeare!. NY: Harper & Row Pub. Inc., 1990.
Smidt, Kristian. Unconformities in Shakespeare’s Tragedies. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. 150-162. Smidt finds numerous time discrepancies suggesting significant revision, compression, and rearrangement.
Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare: A Life in Drama. NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995. 282-299.
Shakespeare Authorship Organizations
The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Browse, get hooked, become a member.
The De Vere Society. Our Oxfordian friends and collaborators across the pond.
The Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable. We consider all possible authors behind the “Shakespeare” name.
The Shakespeare Foundation. You say you want a revolution.