Three Witchcraft and Drama texts: their interrelation in performance

Three ‘Witchcraft and Drama’ texts: their interrelation in performance.

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Macbeth was probably first performed at court in December 1606. There is no early ‘quarto’ text preserving the play as performed in its first form. Instead the 1623 Folio text was based on a theatre promptbook which post-dated a revival of Macbeth, in c.1609-10 (or later). It shows that certain elements had been added to the initial text - indications of extra material like the first lines of songs (‘Come away, Hecate’ at III v 33, ‘ A charm song about a vessel’ at IV i 43) and a cue for ‘The Witches Dance’.

The Stanley Wells – Gary Taylor Oxford edition of the works of Shakespeare, and Nicholas Brooke’s single volume Oxford edition of the play re-inserted the texts of these songs from Middleton’s The Witch. The Norton Shakespeare, basing its text on the Wells-Taylor edition, does the same thing. Only in these editions will you see the material reconstructed from The Witch. Wells and Taylor felt that Middleton was responsible for Act III scene v (where the Weyard Sisters suddenly acquire a ‘mistress of your charms’ in Hecate, and where, in their extended reconstruction, Hecate exits in the masque-like machinery of a ‘foggy cloud’ with a ‘spirit like a cat’, to aerial music). To Middleton they also assigned the Hecate material in IV i (38-60 and 141-8, lines previously given to one of the witches, not Hecate). Macbeth was accordingly assigned as Shakespeare’s play, but ‘(adapted by Thomas Middleton’).

The assumption made was that the King’s Men had revived the play in 1609-10, and employed Middleton add this extra material (with Shakespeare acceding). The impetus to do this revival would have come from the performance at court on February 2nd 1609 of Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queens. In this court masque, the witches would have been played by professional players from the King’s Men (while aristocratic ladies played the queens). It was traditional that you were allowed to keep your masque costume. The King’s Men had, therefore, some new, elaborate costumes for witches, and new props and dances choreographed for them. They therefore seem to have revived Macbeth with extra materials, to allow these elements to be used.

When Middleton was prompted to write The Witch by the scandal which engulfed Frances Howard in 1615, he had songs and scripted speeches ready written, of his own composition, and re-used them in his new play.

Macbeth, especially as presented by texts based on Wells and Taylor, therefore captures in a single, though composite, text, that progression Diane Purkiss describes towards the ‘all-singing, all-dancing witches’ of the Jacobean stage. The play is uncanny, but is (in the Wells-Taylor reconstructions of the revived play) given over, in places, to entertainment:

Come, sisters, cheer we up his sprites

And show the best of our delights …

Music, The WITCHES dance, and vanish. (IV ii, 143-4; sd at 148)

You should not worry about the rather conjectural details of all this, just be aware of the theory that Middleton sexed-up Shakespeare’s witchcraft dossier.