The second edition of Charlton Hinman’s Norton Facsimile of the First Folio (1996), with a new introduction by Peter Blayney, is indispensable. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, keyed to the Oxford text, gives a comprehensive survey of the editorial situation for all the plays and poems.

THE GENERAL EDITORS

Introduction

SHAKESPEARE’S SCOTTISH TRAGEDY was written early in the reign of James I, the Scottish king who succeeded Queen Elizabeth on the English throne in 1603. It is impossible to date the play precisely, but certain allusions–especially to the Gunpowder Plot, the Jesuit attempt to blow up Parliament in 1605, and the subsequent trial of the conspirators–suggest a date in 1606. The impulse to write a Scottish play must have been in the broadest sense political: the king who had, as one of his first official acts, taken Shakespeare’s company under his patronage, so that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men became the King’s Men, traced his ancestry back to Banquo. But there is little about the play to suggest that Shakespeare’s purpose was to celebrate his patron’s lineage, just as there is nothing straightforward about the history Shakespeare chose to dramatize.

The play, moreover, comes to us not as it would have appeared from Shakespeare’s pen in 1606, but in a version that is demonstrably a revision; and the reviser was certainly not Shakespeare. It includes songs for the witches that are given in the text only with their opening words (“Come away, come away, etc.” “Black spirits, etc.”). These are songs from Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch, written between 1610 and 1615, where they constitute little divertissements, sung dialogues with dances. The manuscript of Sir William Davenant’s version of Macbeth, prepared around 1664, includes the whole text of the witches’ songs from Middleton, and since The Witch remained unpublished until 1778, Davenant would have taken his text not from Middleton, but directly from the King’s Men’s performing text of Macbeth, to which Davenant had acquired the rights. This, then, is the earliest version of the play to which we have access, the play as the King’s Men were performing it shortly after Shakespeare’s death–for whatever reason, they chose not to return to Shakespeare’s original text when they published the 1623 First Folio. The present edition includes the whole of the two witch scenes–what is implied in the folio’s “etc.”

The play as it stands in the folio is anomalous in a number of other respects as well. Textually it is very unusual: by far the shortest of the tragedies (half the length of Hamlet, a third shorter than the average), shorter, too, than all the comedies except The Comedy of Errors. It looks, moreover, as if the version we have has not only been augmented with witches’ business, but also cut and rearranged, producing some real muddles in the narrative: for example, the scene between Lennox and the lord, III.6, reporting action that has not happened yet, or the notorious syntactic puzzles of the account of the battle in the opening scenes, or the confusion of the final battle, in which Macbeth is slain onstage, and twenty lines later Macduff reenters with his head. Revision and cutting were, of course, standard and necessary procedures in a theater where the normal playing time was two hours; but if theatrical cuts are to explain the peculiarities of this text, why was it cut so peculiarly, not to say ineptly? Arguments that make the muddles not the result of cutting but an experiment in surreal and expressionistic dramaturgy only produce more questions, rendering the play a total anomaly, both in Shakespeare’s work and in the drama of the period.

The elaboration of the witches’ roles could have taken place anywhere up to about fifteen years after the play was first performed, but the presence of the Middleton songs suggests that Shakespeare was no longer around to do the revising, which presumes a date after 1614. Why, only a decade after the play was written, would augmenting the witches’ roles have seemed a good idea? To begin with, by 1610 or so witchcraft, magic, and the diabolical were good theater business. Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens, performed at court in 1609, opens on a witches’ coven with infernal music and dance, and inaugurated a decade of sorcery plays and masques, of which the most famous are The Tempest, The Alchemist, and the revived and rewritten Doctor Faustus.

The ubiquitousness of theatrical magic is perhaps sufficient reason for the elaboration of the witches in Macbeth, but it does not seem to account for everything. When Macbeth, after the murder of Banquo, goes to consult the witches, and they show him a terrifying vision of Banquo’s heirs, the chief witch Hecate proposes a little entertainment to cheer him up:

I’ll charm the air to give a sound

While you perform your antic round,

That this great king may kindly say.

Our duties did his welcome pay.

(IV.1.151–54)

The tone of the scene here changes significantly: the witches are not professional and peremptory anymore; they are lighthearted, gracious, and deferential. We may choose to treat this as a moment of heavy irony, though Macbeth does not seem to respond to it as such; but if it is not ironic, the change of tone suggests that the “great king” addressed in this passage is not the king onstage, but instead a real king in the audience, Banquo’s descendant and the king of both Scotland and England. If this is correct, then the version of the play preserved in the folio is one prepared for a performance at court.

Though there is no record of a court performance, King James surely must have wanted to see a play that included both witches and his ancestors. Indeed, whether or not King James was in the audience, the fact that it is the witches who provide the royal entertainment can hardly be accidental. The king was intensely interested in witchcraft. He attended witch trials whenever he could, and considered himself an expert on the theory and practice of sorcery. His dialogue on the subject, Daemonology, first published in Edinburgh in 1597, was reissued (three times) upon his accession to the English throne in 1603. This and the Basilicon Doron, his philosophy of kingship, were the two works through which he chose to introduce himself to his English subjects: witchcraft and kingship have an intimate relationship in the Jacobean royal ideology.

The presence of the witches is another unusual, if not quite anomalous, feature of the play. Shakespeare makes use of the supernatural from time to time–ghosts in Richard III, in Julius Caesar, and most notably in Hamlet; fairies and their magic in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Prospero’s sorcery in The Tempest; Joan of Arc’s and Marjory Jourdain’s in the Henry VI plays; and Rosalind’s claim to be a magician at the end of As You Like It–but there is no other play in which witches and witchcraft are such an integral element of the plot. This is a culture in which the supernatural and witchcraft, even for skeptics, are as much a part of reality as religious truth is. Like the ghost in Hamlet, the reality of the witches in Macbeth is not in question; the question, as in Hamlet, is why they are present and how far to believe them.

Like the ghost, too, the witches are quintessential theatrical devices: they dance and sing, perform wonders, appear and disappear, fly, produce visions–do, in short, all the things that, historically, we have gone to the theater to see. They open the play and set the tone for it. On Shakespeare’s stage they would simply have materialized through a trapdoor, but Shakespeare’s audience believed in magic already. Our rationalistic theater requires something more theatrically elaborate–not necessarily machinery, but some serious mystification. For Shakespeare’s audience, the mystification is built into their physical appearance, which defies the categories: they look like men and are women. The indeterminacy of their gender is the first thing Banquo calls attention to.