Macbeth (1918) Yale/Appendix B
APPENDIX B
History of the Play
Macbeth was probably written in 1606; but any precise dating must be recognized as conjectural. The references to King James's 'treble sceptre' could not have been made earlier than 1604; and the porter's jests about equivocation seem to have owed their point to events of the spring of 1606. There are other apparent references to the same events in IV. ii. 46–49, and V. v. 43. A certain Dr. Simon Forman recorded in his notebook that he saw a performance of Macbeth on the twentieth of April, 1610. There is no documentary proof of the existence of the play before this date; but allusions to it are suspected in plays written as early as 1606 and 1607. For example, we find this sentence in The Puritan (published in 1607): 'Instead of a jester, we'll have the ghost in the white sheet sit at the upper end of the table.' But the allusion here to Macbeth is at best no more than highly probable. The evidence of style and versification supports the inference that the play was written in 1606. Shakespeare's style and versification changed progressively as he grew older; and it seems clear that Macbeth was written before Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, or The Tempest; before Antony and Cleopatra or Coriolanus; before so many of the latest plays, in fact, that we are driven to give it as early a date as the allusions to 'equivocation' will permit. Macbeth, however, seems to have been the last of the four great tragedies. It was later than Hamlet or Othello, and it was probably later than King Lear.
Macbeth appears to have been one of Shakespeare's popular successes, but not one of the greatest of them. Allusions to it, by his contemporaries or immediate successors, would have been pointless if the play had not been well known; but there are others of his plays to which such allusions are much more frequent. It must have been a revival of the play that Dr. Forman saw in 1610; and it was doubtless another revival for which the additional witch scenes were written. Forman's account shows that he was profoundly impressed by the performance; and it also affords interesting information as to how the play was then presented. The following extract, especially, has a bearing upon certain questions which have recently been disputed:
'Then was Mackbeth crowned kinge, and then he for feare of Banko, his old companion, that he should beget kinges but be no kinge him selfe, he contriued the death of Banko, and caused him to be Murdred on the way as he Rode. The next night, being at supper with his noble men whom he had bid to a feaste to the which also Banco should haue com, he began to speak of Noble Banco, and to wish that he were ther. And as he thus did, standing vp to drincke a Carouse to him, the ghoste of Banco came and sate down in his cheier be-hind him. And he turning A-bout to sit down Again sawe the goste of banco, which fronted him so, that he fell in-to a great passion of fear and fury, Vtteringe many wordes about his murder, by which, when they hard that Banco was Murdred they Suspected Mackbet.'
At some time after 1660, Sir William Davenant produced an altered version of Macbeth, which was published in 1674, and which held the stage until 1714. Davenant's version was in effect a new play, so sweeping were his changes. He simplified the language throughout; he introduced a certain external unity into the play by writing new scenes for Macduff and his wife in the first three acts, and by bringing back Donalbain and Fleance at the end; but especially he introduced much spectacular business and still more music and dancing, so that a contemporary described his play as 'in the nature of an opera.' The witches were not hags, but ladies with beautiful voices. The diarist Pepys, who saw Macbeth many times, described it in 1664 merely as 'a pretty good play, but admirably acted'; but in 1667 it was 'a most excellent play in all respects, but especially in divertisement, though it be a deep tragedy; which is a strange perfection in a tragedy, it being most proper here, and suitable.' Perhaps the first of these entries refers to Shakespeare's Macbeth, and the second to Davenant's.
After this period, and for three-quarters of a century, the public saw only Davenant's version. Many illustrious critics and editors (Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer) never saw Shakespeare's play; and in eighteenth-century criticism the two versions are sometimes curiously confused. Thus Richard Steele, in his essay on the great tragic actor Betterton, quotes the following as part of a speech of Macbeth's:
'To-morrow, to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in a stealing pace from day to day
To the last moment of recorded time!
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
To their eternal night!'
(Cf. V. v. 19–23.)
In 1744 Garrick effected a partial restoration of Shakespeare's play; but the witches kept their operatic character till 1847, when Samuel Phelps had the courage to present them in their proper guise. In Davenant's play, or in Shakespeare's, or in intermediate compromises between the two, all the greatest English-speaking actors of the last two and a half centuries have achieved distinction, from Betterton to Booth; and the part of Lady Macbeth was one of the notable triumphs of the great Mrs. Siddons.