SOURCE: Wills, Garry. “Lady Macbeth.” In Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth, pp. 75-89. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Wills considers Lady Macbeth as the “fourth witch” in Macbeth and emphasizes the distinctive qualities of this image in theatrical performances of the play.]

Though Lady Macbeth's is not a huge part—she speaks only a third of the lines that Cleopatra does, and under half of Portia's in The Merchant of Venice—two towering (but very different) theatrical reputations were built largely on performances as Lady Macbeth: Sarah Siddons's in the eighteenth century and Ellen Terry's in the nineteenth.¹ Siddons was the lofty terrorizer of her husband, and Terry the pre-Raphaelite spectre who dooms him with her beauty. No actor of modern times—since, that is, the inception of the “curse” on the play—has won such general recognition for excelling in this part, though presumably even Siddons and Terry may have fallen short of the first Lady Macbeth, John Rice.

Shakespeare's greatest parts for women naturally cluster at periods when the playwright had an outstanding boy actor, and the lead boy in 1606-07 had three choice parts in a row—Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, as well as Barnes's Lucretia in The Devil's Charter.² (The actor may, in fact, have had a fourth great role if the view that a boy played the Fool in Lear is right.)³

Who was that boy? All the evidence points to John Rice. He was singled out, along with the lead adult actor Richard Burbage, to appear before the King in an ambitious program financed by the Merchant Taylors of London in the summer of 1607.⁴ Rice was elaborately costumed for the occasion.⁵ Though his speech—specially composed by Ben Jonson—only ran to twelve lines, brilliant delivery was important to the spectacle. Rice's master, John Heminges, was paid forty shillings “for his direction of his boy that made the speech to His Majesty,” while the boy got five shillings.⁶

Burbage and Rice obviously made a winning pair, since they appeared together in at least one other special performance, three years later—this one to welcome Prince Henry's arrival in London. Anthony Munday wrote the lines performed by Burbage as Amphion, and Rice as Corinea.⁷ Rice, who went on to a distinguished acting career as an adult before becoming a clergyman, obviously had grace, good looks, and sweet diction in 1607, when Shakespeare wrote for him the demanding part of Cleopatra, performed at court in the Christmas season of 1606-07.⁸

That was an amazing season. It is known that the King's Men acted Lear on the day after Christmas and The Devil's Charter on Candlemas (February 2). There is growing belief that Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra were also acted in the season—a break-out time after the long closing of the public theatres by the plague.⁹ A remarkable feature of all of these plays is their fascination with witchcraft. Antony constantly refers to Cleopatra as having witch-like powers.¹⁰ Lucretia in The Devil's Charter is not only the daughter of the conjuring male witch, Pope Alexander; she independently calls on hell's assistance for murdering her husband (lines 601-5):

You grisly daughter of grim Erebus,
Which spit out venom from your vip'rous hairs,
Infuse a threefold vigor in these arms,
Immarble more my strong indurate heart,
To consummate the plot of my revenge.

Compare Rice's other great role, as Cleopatra (5.2.238-40):

Of woman I have nothing in me. Now, from head to foot
I am marble-constant.

And compare those lines with Lady Macbeth's (1.5.42-43):

And fill me, from the crown to th' toe, topful
Of direst cruelty.

All these heroines ask to be made inhumanly “indurate” for their evil tasks.

                                        Make thick my blood,
Stop up th' access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose.(11)

This clustering of Rice's roles with a witch-like aspect (Lucretia Borgia, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth) would seem to support those who consider Lady Macbeth the “fourth witch” of the play.¹² Directors have emphasized her evil nature by associating her with the witches visually, or even by having her double the role of Hecate.¹³ It is true that she invokes Night and “murth'ring ministers” (demons)—just as her husband invokes Night and Hecate. Her evil ministers are clearly the fallen counterparts of angelic “ministers of grace” called on by Hamlet (1.4.39).¹⁴

In fact, Lady Macbeth's grand invocation at 1.5.40-54 is full of “witch talk.” She orders the evil spirits to “unsex me here”—and witches were famously unsexed, a fact emphasized in Macbeth's three witches, played by men. Banquo remarks on their beards at 1.3.45-47, as Hamlet does on the boy actor who had grown up to adult (bearded) parts at Hamlet 2.2.423. The witches' sexual traffic with devils was considered one consequence of their loss of sexual attractiveness for men. Lady Macbeth plays with the idea of that sexual traffic with devils when she calls the demons: “Come to my woman's breasts / And take my milk for gall.”¹⁵ Witches nursed their familiars from their “marks,” considered as teats for diabolic nourishment. Since the marks were often near witches' “privy parts,” the nursing could be a kind of foreplay preceding intercourse.¹⁶ La Pucelle calls on her familiars with a reminder how “I was wont to feed you with my blood” (I Henry VI 5.3.14).¹⁷ Joan's familiars, when they abandon her, refuse the offered teats, unlike other familiars, who feed onstage. In The Witches of Edmonton, the dog-familiar is seen sucking a mark on Mother Sawyer's arm (2.1.147), and another character describes the way he will “creep under an old witch's coats and suck like a great puppy” (5.1.173-74). Mother Sawyer says her mark has dried up, and asks the dog (4.1.157-60) to

Stand on thy hind legs—up, kiss me, my Tommy,
And rub some wrinkles on my brow
By making my old ribs shrug for joy
Of thy fine tricks. What hast thou done? Let's tickle!

Hecate, who is a witch not a goddess in Middleton's The Witch, calls to her familiar, the actor in a cat costume (3.3.49-50):

Here's one come down to fetch his dues—
A kiss, a coll [hug], a sip of blood.

She has had sex with this familiar (1.2.96-97). In The Late Lancashire Witches, a witch is asked, “Hath thy puggy [little Puck] yet suck'd upon thy pretty duggy?” (line 2017).

The image of witches giving suck to animals was deep in the lore of Shakespeare's time.¹⁸ Some resist having Lady Macbeth use this image; but we should remember that John Rice's other part at the time, Cleopatra, involved a witch-like comparison of the serpent's bite to an animal familiar's sucking (Antony 5.2.309-10):

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast
That sucks the nurse asleep?

Even before her cry to the evil spirits, Lady Macbeth was associated with an animal familiar. Hearing a caw from offstage, she says: “The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal enterance of Duncan / Under my battlements” (1.5.38-40).¹⁹ His entry is fatal, as Hecate works “Unto a dismal and a fatal end” (3.5.21). The raven was a regular “familiar,” and its loud cry from offstage had special theatrical effect. Indeed, one of the more spectacular sound effects of the Elizabethan stage was the massive cawing of ravens that fulfilled a prophecy and defeated an army in Edward III, a play to which Shakespeare may have contributed.²⁰

It is likely that we have already heard the raven that crows over Lady Macbeth's castle. In the opening scene, when familiars summon their witches away, two spirits are named—Graymalkin, a cat, and Paddock, a toad. The third witch answers her spirit's call, “Anon.” The raven's cry was too (yes) familiar to make identification necessary. At 4.1.3, the third witch's animal is addressed as Harpier, an apparent nickname based on Harpy. The raven was a harpy, a food-snatcher.²¹ When carrion birds settled on corpses, popular fear and loathing depicted them as witches' familiars gathering body parts. The witch literature fostered that belief. In Ben Jonson's The Sad Shepherd, a raven waits as huntsmen corner a deer, and its witch is later seen in a chimney corner with a morsel the bird delivered to her.²² In The Masque of Queens, Jonson translated a passage from Lucan, in which a witch waits for a raven to snatch flesh off a corpse and then takes it from the raven.²³ The raven is a particularly unclean bird, whose very presence acts as a curse on a house, as Othello notes (4.1.20-22):

                                                  It comes o'er my memory
As doth the raven o'er the' infectious house
Boding to all.

Thersites, when he dreams of cursing, does so as a raven in his own mind: “I would croak like a raven, I would bode, I would bode” (Troilus 5.2.191). Caliban uses the raven when he curses (Tempest 1.2.321-33):

As wicked dew as e'er my [witch] mother brush'd,
With raven's feather, from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both!

Thus, for Lady Macbeth to welcome the raven's portent puts her in accord with witches' thoughts, with the Hecate of Middleton's The Witch (5.2.40-42):

Raven or screech-owl never fly by the door
But they call in, I thank 'em. And they lose not by't—
I give 'em barley soaked in infant's blood.

Lady Macbeth's castle is an “infectious house” with fatal gates to welcome Duncan.

In all these ways, Lady Macbeth certainly tries to become an intimate of evil, a communer with murdering ministers, fatal ravens, spirits who will give her suck. Does that make her a witch? Not in any technically legal or theological sense that King James (for instance) would have recognized. She does not enter into supernatural dealings with devils or their agents. There is no reciprocal activity of the sort Macbeth engages in at the necromancy. She is a witch of velleity and gestures, while he is one in fact. She forms no pact with the devil. Hecate does not appear to comfort her.

All these are important indicators of the way the part should be played. Lady Macbeth's relation to her husband resembles that of Barnes's Lucretia Borgia to her incestuous father. We see Pope Alexander strike his bargain with the devil, and pay for it; but Lucretia's invocation of evil spirits is mainly a way of steeling herself to kill her husband. In that sense, it works. Like Lady Macbeth she is a murderess. Macbeth will take calculated steps deeper and deeper into collaboration with hellish forces, but Lady Macbeth falters early—as Macbeth realizes. After the murder of Duncan, he no longer relies on her help. He is looking to more powerful auxiliaries. “Be inn'cent of the knowledge, dearest chuck …” (3.2.45) was said with a kind of bemused tone of farewell by Olivier to Vivien Leigh. She is not hardened for the voyage he is taking by that time.²⁴

Olivier seemed to some critics to underplay his early scenes because he was carefully counting the cost of his crime. He weighs the pros and cons of Duncan's murder. He observes his own reactions, testing his pulse as he moves forward. His moves are less impulsive—and less shallow—than his wife's immediate enthusiasm for the crime. When she wavers, it is from collapse, not calculation. She cannot kill the king because he looks like her father. She nerves herself with drink, claiming that it steadies her: “That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold” (2.2.1). But the drink is wearing off after the murder. She faints in the discovery scene—a genuine faint, not some shrewd attempt to distract people from Macbeth's embarrassment. Some have said it is impossible for an actress to make it clear why she is fainting. But of Vivien Leigh's faint it was written: “Genuine? Feigned? No need to ask the question. Her collapse was as inevitable a result of the dramatic process as is the spark when two charged wires are brought together.”²⁵

The trouble with the majestic Sarah Siddons approach to Lady Macbeth is that it plunges the character too abruptly into collapse after her time of splendid power. The long absence of Lady Macbeth from the play makes the contrast less bridgeable. The Byam Shaw production of 1955 made the later Lady Macbeth shine through the bravado of the earlier one. When Macbeth launched into his own baroque description of the way he executed the grooms, Olivier experienced a strange power in his ability to describe as well as to do the act—he was finding himself oddly at home in his crime, horrified but also fascinated. He is becoming a connoisseur of the sensations of evil. But Lady Macbeth is stunned by his glib description of the murder. As he speaks, she reacts hypnotically, moving toward him over an abyss. “The two seemed drawn together by the compulsion of their common guilt to the center of the stage.”²⁶ She cannot complete the passage over the chasm opening between them. She faints just as she is about to reach him.

The two are similarly divided in the banquet scene—Macbeth living inside his murder of Banquo, his wife kept outside, trying (ineffectually) to mediate between him and the external world. They are never seen together again—in fact, she is seen only one more time. What explains her long absence from the play? One naturally thinks, in a theater so dependent on doubling (especially where boys are concerned), that John Rice must be busy in another role.²⁷ We have already seen that some directors want the modern actress to double Hecate; but that was impossible for Shakespeare. “Poel's Rule” states that a character who exits at the close of one scene does not enter at the opening of the next.²⁸ It is even less feasible, in the fluid conditions of Jacobean performance, for an actor to leave as one character and come right back on as another. Besides, Hecate would need some form of gorgeous costume to suggest her supernatural status—more than could be thrown on for instant reappearance.

But there is another role Rice could have doubled—Macduff's wife. The power of this doubling was suggested in Trevor Nunn's staging of the play in the close arena of Stratford's small Other Place. All the actors sat around the charmed circle of the play's action, stepping on when their parts called for it, watching the action when it did not. There was great power in the presence of Lady Macbeth at the murder of Lady Macduff's son. The woman who said she would tear her own child from her nipple and dash it to the ground now saw something like that imagined scene made real. This helped explain her disintegration in the sleepwalking scene.²⁹ Modern cinema could accomplish the same thing by showing the queen's imagination of the infanticide when she first heard of it. Shakespeare accomplished it by having one actor play both the self-violative mother and the cruelly violated Lady Macduff.³⁰

In the well-lit open condition of the theater in Shakespeare's time, audiences recognized a doubling actor in his new guise. In fact, their favorites were meant to be recognized—e.g., the comic actor Armin: the Porter's jokes were carried by a comic persona he had developed and made popular. The spectators would know he was also playing a witch. But they accepted the convention that a new costume created a new part—just as they accepted the convention that a boy was a woman. This made disguises “convincing” in a way that it is hard for modern audiences to accept. (It seems odd to us that Viola could be so readily taken as identical in appearance to Sebastian in Twelfth Night.)

But the piquancy of some doubling would strike an audience, even under those conditions. Others have noticed the appropriateness of King Lear's two loyal but truth-telling attendants, his quiet daughter, and his “allowed” satirist, being played by the same boy.

A similar increase in dramatic power comes from our seeing Lady Macbeth again only after Rice has played the womanly anguish of Lady Macduff. The impact of the sleepwalking scene was undoubtedly increased by that interval. We, in effect, fill up the void created by Lady Macbeth's absence with a communal female suffering. The fact that Lady Macduff was innocent and Lady Macbeth guilty just increases the pathos of the queen's repentance—for that, in effect, is what the scene amounts to. The first indication of this is the brief stage direction in the Folio: Enter Lady with a Taper. The punishment of a penitent witch involved her parading her crime by holding a taper (the symbol of witches' rites, which used candles as Catholic masses did, liturgically). Shakespeare made the Duchess of Gloucester submit to this form of “pillorying” in II Henry VI 2.4.17ff. The stage direction is: Enter the Duchess in a white Sheet, and a Taper burning in her hand. She tells her husband she is “mailed up in shame” by this penitential garb. We know this was the legal form of shaming, either before execution or (in lesser offences) as a substitute for it. The Chronicle of London describes the event Shakespeare put into his play:

Landed at the Temple Bridge out of her barge … [she] openly, barehead, with a kerchief on her head baring, she took a taper of wax of two pounds in her hand, and went so through Fleet Street, on her feet and hoodless, into Paul's, and there she offered up her taper at the high altar.³¹

The Duchess was a repentant witch—and so, in her own mind, is Lady Macbeth. The stage direction names the taper, a huge one in the Duchess's case (two pounds, the size of the taper was gauged by the seriousness of the crime). There is a suggestion of something out of the ordinary in the Doctor's question: “How came she by that light?” The woman has told us the queen threw on her nightgown, and the scene is usually played barefoot, like the Duchess's. The taper-barefoot-sheet cluster said, to Shakespeare's audience, “repentant sorceress.”

And we have other indications of Lady Macbeth's sense of guilt. She never became a witch, like her husband; but she entertained witch fantasies, which have come back to haunt her. She acts like a witch when she tries to rub out or efface her “damn'd spot” (5.1.35). The bloody spot most feared by those suspected of witchcraft was the devil's mark left on them when they sealed their compact.³² Marlowe made much of this bloody sign when he had Faustus's blood congeal at the horror of what he was doing (A2.1.61-72). When at last the mark is made, it becomes a damned spot indeed, forming the words “Fly, man!” (Home fuge). Spots were evidence of the devil's ownership, a brand, a seal that could not be disowned. People arrested for witchcraft tried to cut or rub off any moles or blemishes that could be used against them. A Staffordshire investigator found that one Alice Gooderidge had “upon her belly a hole, of the bigness of two pence, fresh and bloody, as though some great wart had been cut off the place.”³³

Lady Macbeth, trying to rub out the sign of her guilt (while still holding the taper—there was no place to deposit it on the Jacobean stage as there is in modern productions), was a startling image of the captured witch. Her guilt made her act that role as she remembered the sight of “so much blood” streaming from Duncan's body. The image would soon be repeated when John Rice played Lucretia Borgia's repentance scene before her death in Barnes's play. Lucretia, too, sees the blood that streamed from her murdered husband, and cries out (lines 2283-88):

You see in my soul deformed blots.
Deliver me from that murthered man—
He comes to stab my soul! I murdered him.
O Gismond, Gismond, hide those bleeding wounds.
My soul bleeds drops of sorrow for thy sake.
Look not so wrathful! I am penitent!

Lucretia has been poisoned by her father, and her penitent death scene is contrasted with his despairing fall into the devil's clutches at the play's conclusion. Unlike Alexander or Faustus, she can still plead for forgiveness (lines 2312-15):

Merciful Father, let not Thy mercy pass!
Extend Thy mercy where no mercy was.
Merciful Father, for Thy Son's dear merit
Pardon my sinful soul. Receive my spirit.

Expirat Lucrece.

Shakespeare is more subtle than Barnes; but his sinning lady is also shown in penitent collapse, tortured by guilt and visions of blood. The pity of the physician, with his own hope for mercy, states indirectly the themes made blatant by Barnes: “Yet I have known those which have walk'd in their sleep who have died holily in their bed … God! God! Forgive us all!” (5.1.59-61, 75). It is a hope Macbeth, sealed up in the false confidence of his witches' assurance, has long ago forfeited. He must end like Pope Alexander, or Doctor Faustus—beyond repentance, defiant to the end.

Notes

1. Line counts for the various roles are taken from the tables in T. J. King, Casting Shakespeare's Plays: London Actors and Their Roles (Cambridge University Press, 1992). They come to 263 lines for Lady Macbeth, by contrast with 693 for Cleopatra and 557 for Portia.

2. Boy actors of the requisite diction, memory, and ability to sing and dance were hard to come by in the public theater, where their very presence was under continual assault by moralists (see Chapter 2, note 7). Good boy performers had a short time to learn and perfect their skills before losing the female parts when their voices changed. Shakespeare's great termagant roles of the early 1590s, and his roles for a matched comic pair (a tall boy and a short boy) in the middle nineties, indicate how Shakespeare tailored parts for the troupe's apprentices—as he did for its clowns, and for Burbage himself.

3. See note 28 below.

4. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford University Press, 1967), Vol. 2, p. 213.

5. One of the Merchant Taylors' men was paid thirteen shillings “for things for the boys that made the speech, viz. for garters, stockings, shoes, ribbons, and gloves.” The Merchant Taylors Company's account books cited in Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642 (Princeton University Press, 1984), 126.

6. Compare the coaching of Moth, the “pretty knavish page,” in Love's Labour's 5.2.98-99:

   Action and account did they teach him there.
   “Thus must thou speak,” and “Thus thy body bear.”

7. Chambers, op. cit., 4: 72.

8. That Rice was still performing as a boy in 1610 means that he was probably no older than thirteen in 1607. The prime of a boy's acting years is illustrated in the case of John Honeyman, who played a woman in The Roman Actor when he was thirteen, and in The Deserving Favorite and The Picture when he was sixteen, but changed to an adult male part in The Soddered Citizen when he turned seventeen (King, op. cit., 77, 117, 119, 121, 122).

9. See Appendix One [Wills, Gary. Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth.]

10. Antony twice calls Cleopatra a “witch” (at 4.2.37 and 4.12.47). Her soothsayer is called a male witch (1.2.40). Antony also calls her a “gypsy,” another word for witch (4.12.28), and cries, “These strong Egyptian fetters I must break” (1.2.116). For the connection of gypsy magic with Egypt, see Othello on his charmed handkerchief (3.4.56) and the reference to Egyptian magic at Pericles 3.2.84-86. Cleopatra is an “enchanting” figure (1.2.128) who makes Antony “the noble ruin of her magic” (3.10.18). Pompey describes her power over him (2.1.20-23):

                                                                                    All the charms of love,
    Salt Cleopatra, soften they wan'd lip!
    Let witchcraft join with beauty, lust with both.
    Tie up the libertine. …

    Binding and tying were the work of magic. Spells chain the enthralled—as Brabantio says Desdemona was charmed by Othello's spells (“if she in chains of magic were not bound,” Othello 1.2.65). Antony bids Cleopatra to “chain mine arm'd neck,” to leap into his breast and ride on its panting sighs (4.8.14-16)—like a witch riding the air. See also Chapman, Homer's “Odysses” 10.500: “Dissolve the charms that their forc'd forms enchain” (said of Circe's bewitchment of Odysseus' men).

11. Macbeth 1.5.43-46. The thickening of blood, to stop its flow, was attributed to the black “humor” that caused both melancholy and diabolic incursions into the human system. Cf. King John 3.2.42-43: “that surly spirit, Melancholy / Had bak'd thy blood and made it heavy, thick. …” The “baked blood” keeps out mirth in the King John passage, as it keeps out compunction in Lady Macbeth's dark prayer.

12. Mark Rose claimed that Lady Macbeth “practises witchcraft” (Shakespearean Design, Harvard University Press, 1972, 88). W. Moelwyn Merchant described “Lady Macbeth's willed submission to demonic power, her unequivocal resolve to lay her being open to the invasion of witchcraft” (Aspects of Macbeth, edited by Kenneth Muir and Philip Edwards (Cambridge University Press, 1977), 51).

13. The witches hovered near Lady Macbeth in a 1964 Austrian production of the play (Rosenberg, 201). For the same actress doubling the Lady and Hecate, see ibid., 492.

14. For ministers as angels, see Isabella's prayer at Measure for Measure 5.1.115: “Then, O you blessed ministers above. …” See also Laertes's “A minist'ring angel shall my sister be” (Hamlet 5.1.248). For devils as ministers, see “minister of hell” at I Henry VI 5.4.93 and Richard III 1.2.46, and Sycorax's “potent ministers” at Tempest 1.2.275. Prospero's intermediate spirits are “ministers of fate” (Tempest 3.3.61, 65, 87).

15. “Take” can mean “blast” or “wither,” a witch-usage as at Merry Wives 4.4.31 (the phantom “blasts the trees and takes the cattle”) or Hamlet 1.1.163-64, on the blessed Christmas time:

                                                                                    then no planets strike
    No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm.

    Or the verb can mean take in exchange for—her milk becomes the watery “gall” that ran when witches' marks were cut into. A witch named Alice Samuels had her mark cut open in 1593, and it ran “yellow with milk and water,” then clear (non-white) “milk,” then blood. See C. L'Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (Heath Cranton Ltd., 1933), 173.

16. See Newes from Scotland (1591): “the Devil doth generally mark them with a privy mark, by reason the witches have confessed themselves that the Devil doth lick them with his tongue in some privy part of their body before he doth receive them to be his servants” (Barbara Rosen, Witchcraft in England: 1558-1618 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 194).

17. Joan fed several devils at once, since witches often had multiple mole-teats. Margaret Wyard confessed in 1645 that “she had seven imps like flies, dors [bees], spiders, mice, and she had but five teats, and when they came to suck, they fight like pigs with a sow.” C. L'Estrange Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (Kegan Paul, 1929), 306. Since devils were bodiless spirits, they could appear to men only if they created phantasms of “thick air,” spoke through dead human bodies, or used live animals' bodies. They could use human semen in incubus-intercourse, but they had to take it from animals' bodies to have real physical coupling. When Lady Macbeth invokes the murthering ministers' “sightless [invisible] substances” at 1.5.49, she is referring to demons who have not taken familiars' animal bodies.

18. They also use their familiars to suck the life from others—the fair Rosamund was killed by toads, acting under orders from their witch. See George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Atheneum, 1972), 182-83. The conjurer-pope in Barnes's play uses serpents at the breast to kill his pederastic victims (lines 2770-89). The evil Queen Elinor in Peele's Edward I (lines 2094-96) kills a critic of her acts the same way.

19. Compare the “fatal raven” of Titus 2.3.97.

20. King John in the play is given two portents (two adynata) to assure him, just as Macbeth was. John will not fall until stones fight men and birds defeat armies. Then, to a deafening clamor of birds sent ahead of the French army, the earth is darkened and the English army breaks and runs, done in by “a flight of ugly ravens.” Cf. The Raigne of King Edward III, edited by Fred Lapides (Garland Publishing, 1980). The ravens “made at noon a night unnatural / Upon the quaking and dismayed world”—like “night's predominance … When living light should kiss [the earth] at Macbeth 3.4.8-9. The ravens fly in “corner'd squares,” like the “brave squares of battle” at Antony 3.11.4 or “our squares of battle” at Henry V 4.2.28. For the possibility of Shakespearean authorship, see Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare as Collaborator (Barnes & Noble, 1960), 10-55, and Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Clarendon Press, 1987), 136-37.

21. Harpy, from Greek harpazein, to snatch, corresponded with the Jacobean word “gripe” for carrion birds. (This word is used for Seneca's vultur in the Elizabethean translations.) “Harpyr” at I Tamburlaine 2.7.56 is emended to “harpy” by Marlowe's editors.

22. Ben Jonson, Works, edited by C. H. Herford (Oxford University Press, 1941), Vol. 7, 23.

23. Ben Jonson, The Complete Masques, edited by Stephen Orgel (Yale University Press, 1969), 127 (lines 142-45), with Jonson's own note at 532-33.

24. “Macbeth” Onstage: An Annotated Facsimile of Glen Byam Shaw's 1955 Promptbook, edited by Michael Mullin (University of Missouri Press, 1976), 113, 131.

25. Richard David, “The Tragic Curve,” Shakespeare Survey 9 (1956): 129.

26. Ibid.

27. None of the plays Shakespeare's troupe acted in the 1606-07 Christmas-to-Lent season needs more than three boys. In Macbeth, if Hecate appeared with three boys as the witches, that would make four women on the stage at once—an additional reason for concluding that the witches were played by men. The first witch would most likely be played by the expert in grotesque roles, Robert Armin, who would also double the Porter. In only two scenes are two boy actors on the stage at the same time—Lady Macduff with her son, and the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth with her woman attendant. In widely separated scenes, the same boy could play Macduff's son and the woman attendant. The shortage of boy actors in the public theater could be filled in private performances, where choristers were recruited for the large number of female roles in (for instance) A Midsummer Night's Dream. But in the festive calendar of the 1606-07 “twelve days of Christmas,” choirs and boy performers would have their own events to prepare for, making them unavailable to the public players.

28. For Poel's Rule, see David Bradley, From Test to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 18. This forbids the most famous thematic doubling of the modern stage—Peter Brook's use of the same pair of actors to play Theseus with Hippolyta and Oberon with Titania. It does not interfere with the most famous supposed doubling, that of Cordelia and the Fool in King Lear. The long absence of each character from the action is hard to explain except by doubling. According to this theory, Lear's calling Cordelia his fool at 5.3.305 is an author's slip that confuses the actor's two roles. See Richard Abrams, “The Double Casting of Cordelia and Lear's Fool,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 27 (1985): 354-77. Armin, the regular fool, could play the grotesque part of “mad” Edgar.

29. See Bernice W. Kliman, Shakespeare in Performance: “Macbeth” (Manchester University Press, 1992), 100.

30. The shortage of boy actors helps explain another overworked mystery of the play—why Lady Macbeth's child or children do not appear. (Macduff's anguished “He has no children” is said to Malcolm, at that moment giving him cold comfort.) When Lady Macbeth says she has given suck, there is no reason to doubt her. Her husband says “Bring forth men-children only” (1.7.72)—something he could not say if she had already brought forth a girl child, but could if she had borne at least one son. Macbeth's frenzy at the thought of Banquo's heirs inheriting would be baseless if Macbeth had no heir to be supplanted. The progeny are mentioned but not dwelt on as a matter of theatrical economy. The same consideration explains why one child stands for Macduff's “children” in the murder scene (4.2).

31. Chronicle of London, quoted in C. L'Estrange Ewen, Witch Hunting, 40.

32. See, for instance, Newes from Scotland (in Rosen, op. cit., 193): “They, suspecting that she had been marked by the Devil, as commonly witches are, made diligent search about her and found the Enemy's mark to be in her forecrag (or forepart) of her throat. Which being found, she confessed. …”

33. C. L'Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft, 177. Even birthmarks could be a sign of a curse on certain people's offspring—like Richard III's portentous teeth formed in the womb (Richard III 4.4.49) or the “Vicious mole in nature” of the Hamlet Quarto (1.4.24) that predisposes its bearer to evil. Some held that people were marked at their birth hour by their stars' influence, and the astrologer Simon Forman noted his clients' markings when casting their horoscope—for instance: “She hath a wart or mole in the pit of her throat, or near it … She hath a wart under her right cheek” (Simon documents in A. L. Rowse, Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), 100, 207). The magic avoidance of such blots is the gift of Oberon to the offspring of Theseus and Hippolyta (Midsummer Night's Dream 5.1.395-400):

    And the blots of Nature's hand
    Shall not in their issue stand.
    Never mole, harelip, nor scar,
    Nor marks prodigious, such as are
    Despised in nativity,
    Shall upon their children be.