Episode #250 - Is Macbeth Cursed?

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Friends, there's an image I can't get out of my head. Charlton Heston's flaming thigh. Oh perhaps I should explain. The year was nineteen fifty two. And the actor who would soon be elevated to the level of Hollywood superstar thanks to his role in Cecil B. DeMille's biblical epic The Ten Commandments he was still paying his dues as an aspiring leading man on both stage and screen.

In November of that year he got the opportunity to star in a production of Shakespeare's Macbeth that was being mounted in a unique outdoor theater on the island of Bermuda. The play was being directed by the celebrated American actor and director Burgess Merritt. He's one of those uber respected legends of American drama who is ironically best known for being the penguin on the campy sixties Batman TV show and uh Mickey from Rocky.

This production in Bermuda was notable for its inventive stage and lighting design. The outdoor amphitheater also provided interesting opportunities for novel stage business, like Charlton Heston's memorable entrance in the first act, Riding Bareback on a Horse. The opening performance would ultimately earn accolades from Bermuda's theater critics, but it wasn't without its difficulty.

The day before opening night, Heston crashed his two stroke moped while he was speeding around the island, injuring his arm and his jaw. Thankfully, the injuries were relatively minor, and so the show went on. But then Mother Nature weighed in. Just before the curtain was set to rise, a heavy thunder shower rolled through, which very nearly led to the cancellation of the night's performance.

Luckily the rain stopped in the nick of time, and Macbeth premiered as scheduled. But the night's calamities were not over yet. After Charlton Heston made his dramatic entrance riding bareback, he started feeling an excruciating pain around his thigh. Being a consummate professional, he managed to finish the scene. But when he got off the stage, his legs and groin were burning.

Heston would later recall in his autobiography that he quickly realized that there was something wrong with his tights, and as soon as he got off stage he yelled Get them off me. I imagine sounded I don't know, something like this. Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape! Sorry. Uh I couldn't resist. Anyway, somehow Charlton Heston's costume had been soaked with kerosene before the performance.

The friction and the heat that came from riding the horse had reacted with the highly combustible liquid and had burnt the actor fairly significantly around his groin. Now all of this is confirmed by Charlton Heston's autobiography. But this story has had a way of growing in the retelling. For instance, on the website for Trinity Rep, the State Theater for Rhode Island, we're told that Heston's kerosene soaked tights, quote, caused his legs to catch fire midway through the play.

And lest you think I'm picking on the good people of Rhode Island, Harvard's university newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, simply reported that in nineteen fifty-three, quote, Charlton Heston watched his title Catch on fire end quote. Now, to be fair, I like the version of the story where Mr. Planet of the Apes groin literally goes up in flames while he is performing Macbeth. But by all accounts, that is a huge exaggeration.

Whatever minor burns were suffered by the actor, it clearly wasn't serious enough to even pause the show. Critics who wrote about the performance didn't even notice the issue. The theater scribe for Bermuda's Royal Gazette was downright impressed with Heston's quote physically magnificent Macbeth. raving that, quote, from his horseback entry to his overthrow at the hands of MacDuff, he dominates the scene. End quote. Flaming thighs indeed.

It should not be surprising that this Heston kerosene mishap has been exaggerated to the point where it's become something akin to spontaneous human combustion. The tale fits perfectly within a larger body of theater lore associated with Shakespeare's famous tragedy. As any theater kid can tell you, it's long been rumored that Macbeth is a cursed place.

Heston's moped accident, the sudden thunderstorm on opening night, and the flaming tites have all been held up as evidence that calamity and ill fortune follow the play like the very ghosts that haunt the script. Just like Macbeth's witches, the bad things in Bermuda came in three. Heston's nineteen fifty three turn as the Scottish Thane was certainly not the first nor the last production of Macbeth to be plagued with bad luck.

In 1937, London's Old Vic Theatre staged a particularly infamous production of the play, starring English acting legend Lawrence Olivier. The show opened on november twenty third, and two days later the old Vic's manager, Lillian Bayliss, a British theater legend in her own right, passed away after a long illness.

On top of that, Olivier himself nearly met his end during the nineteen thirty seven run when either a theater light or a heavy sandbag fell from the rafters and nearly took him out while he was on stage. I've also read that during the run, Olivier was suddenly struck mute on a number of occasions, and that the director and Lady Macbeth actress Judith Andrews were nearly killed in a car crash.

I've also read that during one of the many sword fights in Olivier's production, a weapon flew off stage and injured an audience member. or even better, gave that unfortunate theater goer a heart attack right there in the old Vic. But those last few tales have proved harder to verify. You see, when it comes to stories about the curse of Macbeth, many of the most cited examples have a shaggy dog quality. The tites have a way of catching fire, if you get my meaning.

For instance, in 1942, just a few years after Olivier's infamous run at the Old Vic, one of his great contemporaries, John Gilgood, starred as Macbeth at London's Piccadilly Theatre. According to lore, the curse claimed four lives over the course of the play's run. Penguin Publishers reported in a newsletter posted on their UK website that quote, three actors died during the run of the Piccadilly Theaters version, starring John Gilgood and the costume designer committed suicide. End quote.

But the story of this particularly fatal production seems to only be partially true. Now it is true that one actor, an older woman named Beatrix Field and Kay, who was playing one of the Weird Sisters, passed away while the play was on tour in Manchester. Two other actors needed to be replaced because of health issues, but neither man died.

While it is true that the show's production designer, not the costume designer, John Minton, did take his own life, that sad event occurred fifteen years after the play closed. Now, obviously there was still some bad luck hanging over that production. But you can see how the fish in the big fish story just keeps getting bigger. Illnesses get upgraded to deaths. The timeline of certain tragedies are adjusted for greater effect.

Still, the production history of Macbeth is just violent enough to give credence to tales of a centuries old Jane. For instance, in 1947, the actor Harold Norman, who was playing Macbeth at the repertory theater of Oldham, died in hospital after he was injured on stage during the climactic sword. Between Macbeth and Macduff. We know that one is true because that accidental stabbing made international news.

Stories like that have been enough to convince many in the theater world that it's not only risky to perform Macbeth, it's dangerous to even say the play's title while inside a theater. Simply invoking the name of the main character or absent-mindedly quoting the play backstage can jinx any production, no matter what it might be. As such, superstitious theater folk have found all sorts of creative workarounds to reference Macbeth without actually saying its polluted title.

It gets called the Scottish play, or sometimes just matched. The title character and his wife are mister and misses McBee. If one is reckless enough to drop the M word in the wrong context, one can only undo the hex by running around the theater or spinning on the spot three times. Spitting, cursing, and then quoting a line from any other Shakespeare play. The curse is only finally broken after the offender has been formally invited back inside the theater. Vampire.

Remedies will vary from theater to theater, so apologies if I did not mention your favorite cleansing ritual.

But we have to ask, where exactly does this curse come from? The play was first performed in London more than four centuries ago in sixteen oh six. Has there been an ill omen hanging over this play since the seventeenth century? It's been claimed that the curse of Macbeth goes back to its origins, emerging as it did from the paranoid atmosphere of London around the infamous gunpowder plot of 1605.

The King of England at the time, James I, had originally been a Scottish monarch, and he was known to have a preoccupation with witches, demons, and the dark forces assaulting the stability of his kingdom. Perhaps in pursuit of great art, and seeking to reflect the anxieties of his own moment, Shakespeare dabbled with the dark forces that coursed through his play's text.

Is it possible that the bard spiced his play with authentic supernatural incantations cribbed from a real seventeenth century witch's coven? Even modern commentators have noted the unsettling power of the play's language. In his 2006 study of Macbeth, Alexander Leggett pointed out that the stories about the so-called curse of Macbeth, quote, embody a truth about the play. There is no work of Shakespeare's, and arguably no work of Western art, that evokes such a powerful sense of evil.

The dialogue is full of invocations of the powers of darkness, and one can sympathize with the belief current among actors that those invocations are genuine and actually work. End quote. There's no doubt that the language of the play is affected. But have actors always feared its supernatural power? Have productions of Macbeth always been plagued with misfortune? Or is this just another grand exaggeration?

How far back can we trace the curse of Macbeth? By the pricking of my thumbs something wicked this way comes, and it's our first time.

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History. My name is Sebastian Major, and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths. cross and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story it simply must be told. Before we get going this week, I just want to remind everyone listening that an ad free version of this podcast is available through Patreon.

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This week we turn our attention to the work of the immortal Bard himself, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's one of those figures who has haunted this podcast like the ghost of a slain friend since season one. One of the earliest episodes of Our Fake History grappled with the question of whether or not a man named William Shakespeare actually wrote the famous play.

Yeah, I get asked all the time if there's a topic I would ever consider redoing, and I honestly think that that might be the one. Our fake history has grown in scope since that first season, and my research has gotten so much deeper. If I was to tackle the authorship controversy today, I'd like to think I would do it with a bit more nuance, a little less snark, and frankly, better research than what I did in season one. So who knows, I may need to revisit that topic one of these days.

But in the meantime, today we are going to proceed with the idea that William Shakespeare from Stratford upon Avon was the man who wrote the famous plays from the late 1500s and the early 1600s. But beyond that one particular Shakespeare episode, the bard has had a way of popping up semi-regularly on this podcast. And this is because the works of Shakespeare are so deeply woven into the fabric of all English-speaking culture.

In fact, you could argue that Shakespeare's global popularity has meant that he's one of the few artists whose influence can be perceived across culture. Because Shakespeare has remained such a part of English language education, his plays have influenced how we understand history. Shakespeare famously wrote an entire series of plays which we categorize as his histories, chronicling the reigns of a number of notable English kings.

But his historical interests did not stop there. Shakespeare was also deeply interested in ancient Rome, and wrote iconic pieces about Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra. Now, of course, all of these are dramatic interpretations of historical stories. Historical accuracy was never as important to Shakespeare as dramatic stakes or the exploration of some deeper theme.

However, I would argue that the cultural pedestal that we've put Shakespeare on, especially since the Victorian period, has given his historical interpretations an added weight. I know that at least in my part of the world, Ontario, Canada, Shakespeare remains a reliable part of the high school curriculum. For generations, these plays were often taught with a certain reverence.

Now, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here. I know that there are many amazing teachers out there who have been reimagining how to teach these plays. But those inventive educators are often having to push against generations of received wisdom on how one should approach these foundational texts in the English canon. For a long time one simply did not question the greatness of the bar.

As such, Shakespeare's interpretations of historical figures have been perceived as more accurate, or perhaps more emotionally truthful, than they really are. For instance, Shakespeare's take on Richard III has profoundly shaped how many of us understand that English king. For Shakespeare, he was a manipulative villain whose physical disability reflected the evil in his soul.

To come to a more nuanced historical understanding of that figure, many of us have to unlearn what Shakespeare taught us, and yes, I will be getting to old Dicky III one of these days.

Now I would argue that another of these figures is Macbeth. You see, there really was a Scottish king from the eleventh century named Macbeth, or more properly, Macbeth MacFindliad. Who reigned from ten forty to ten fifty seven? But unless you are a serious student of medieval Scottish history, then there's a good chance that your only exposure to the story of this Scottish leader was by way of Shakespeare.

Now, interestingly, the playwright's choice to amp up the supernatural elements in the story have made the play feel completely ahistorical. It's rare for a critic or a casual audience member to approach the tragedy of Macbeth as a reflection of a real historical event. I can tell you anecdotally that when I was teaching the play, many of my students were surprised to learn that there really was a King Macbeth.

This is because the play does not seem to take place in a realistic historical setting. Macbeth, Scotland is a stormy nightmare land filled with strange creatures, bloody portents of doom, and ghosts of all descriptions. The play exists in a heightened reality where dark magic is a fact of life. One of the key themes of the text is perception versus reality. Throughout the play, characters will see things that other characters are unable to perceive.

The witches only appear to some of the characters and are invisible to others. Macbeth sees a floating dagger, but is unsure if it's a real apparition or merely a quote unquote dagger of the mind. During the famous banquet scene, Macbeth sees a ghost dripping with blood that is totally invisible to the other characters. Then, of course, the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth sees blood on her hands that will simply not wash off.

Throughout the play, the audience is encouraged to guess at what is real and what exists only in the characters' minds. I would argue that these themes encourage a belief in supernatural. The text is about characters who dabble with the supernatural and are completely undone as a result. The idea that the play itself has been hexed by a type of dark magic seems quite fitting. The stories of bad luck and misfortune that haunt productions of Macbeth tend to hinge on uncanny coincidences.

The play encourages you to ask Did a stage accident happen because of black magic? Or was it just in the heads of the superstitious actors? A dagger of the mind, if you will, was

For those of us interested in separating fact from fiction, the stories of cursed productions of Macbeth are particularly tricky. Not only are the stories of onstage misfortune often hugely exaggerated, many of them are hard to verify. It doesn't help that many normally trustworthy sources tend to repeat bits of theater lore without doing much due diligence concerning their veracity.

For instance If you poke into tales about cursed Macbeth productions, sources as diverse as Australia's National Theatre Company and the Times of London newspaper will inform you that in 1948. The British actress Diana Winward fell off the stage and plummeted fifteen feet into the orchestra pit while performing Lady Macbeth's famous sleepwalking scene. This was after she allegedly gave an interview where she scoffed at the idea of a curse.

But as soon as you start hunting for this alleged interview or any contemporary evidence of this very public fall from the stage, it's impossible to find. Now, of course I may have missed something. One of you out there might find some proper evidence of this I could If I'm skeptical of the Diana Winward story, it's only because it has all the trappings of a historical myth.

The fact that the famous actress was punished for denying the existence of the curse seems just a little too poetic. Now, this is not to say that it did not happen, it's just hard to verify. The curse is as material and hard to pin down as all of the plays witches, spectral daggers, and bloody ghosts. It can seem very real, and then it vanishes on the breeze.

Now, of course, there's no way to prove if the curse of Macbeth is real or not. However, we can try and discover when people started believing it was real. It's been written that the idea that the Scottish play was hexed was a popular belief going back to Macbeth's very first production in sixteen oh six. The proposition is that the curse is as old as the play itself. In fact, you may have even read that the very text of the play is the source of the evil magic.

As all the real Shakespeare heads in the crowd surely know, when the bard uses verse in the plays, that is, when the text becomes more overtly poetic, He uses a poetic meter known as iambic pentameter. This rhythmic convention gives those Shakespeare soliloquies their distinctive flow and feel. However, when the witches in Macbeth slip into verse in scenes where they are conjuring evil magic, they do not use iambic pentameter.

Instead, they use a different, choppier poetic meter known as trochaic tetrameter. And don't worry, those terms aren't going to appear on the text. The point is that when the witches speak, they don't speak like anyone else in the play. They don't speak like the vast majority of Shakespeare characters. This has led to speculation that the incantations used in Macbeth were not simply evil-sounding poems cooked up in the playwright's imagination.

Instead, these were real curses that were pilfered from some coven of seventeenth century witches living around London. The theory goes that while researching his play, Shakespeare managed to witness a real black mass and cribbed things that he heard there for his script. Some versions of the story have it that when the witches learned that Shakespeare was using a real incantation on stage, the coven performed a ritual which cursed Macbeth in perpetuity.

Other traditions hold that the curse is renewed every time the incantation scene is performed. By speaking the magic words written in that unusual poetic meter, the actors conjure the bad luck. In other words, when those witches say double double toil and trouble, they are literally creating toil and trouble for the stage production. It's quite a story, but is there anything to it? Have people really been talking of a curse since the 1600s?

Well, let's take a closer look at the play and the historical context that brought it into being and see if we can get a better understanding.

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First, I think we need to ask some questions about Scottish history. If there is a curse that haunts this play, does it have anything to do with the real eleventh century Scottish king? To answer that question, I think we need to start by just getting everyone caught up on what happens in the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Then we can examine how close Shakespeare's adaptation is to what we know of Scottish history. So let's dive in.

The play follows the rise and fall of the titular Scottish Thane, a Thane being a Scottish lord. Macbeth begins the play as a war hero who has just distinguished himself in battle. After leaving the battlefield, Macbeth and his best friend and fellow lord Banquo come upon three witches known as the Weird Sisters. These witches use their magic to prophesize that Macbeth will first be promoted to being a more powerful thane, and then will eventually become king.

The only problem is that Scotland already has a king, Macbeth's kinsman, King Duncan. After the first part of the prophecy comes true and Macbeth is promoted, he then becomes obsessed with the idea that he could, in fact, be king. Even more interested in this idea is Macbeth's wife, Lady Macbeth. who, upon learning about the prophecy, vows to push her reluctant husband to seize the moment, kill King Duncan, and claim the crown for himself.

After all sorts of debate and a tortured weighing of pros and cons, Macbeth and his wife invite Duncan to their home where they get his guards drunk, and then Macbeth stabs the king in his sleep. The murderer is blamed on one of the guards, who Macbeth then also promptly kills before he can be properly questioned. In the aftermath, Duncan's heirs, Malcolm and Donalbain, flee Scotland for England, worried that they might be next. With the heirs in the wind, Macbeth seizes the throne.

But as King Macbeth immediately becomes suspicious and paranoid, he worries that his friend Banquwo suspects him of the crime. Banquwo, who was present with the Weird Sisters on that fateful day, received a prophecy of his own, that his descendants would one day be greater than Macbeth. Macbeth has his best friend killed and even tries to knock off Banquo's young son, Fleence, who just manages to escape. This murder does nothing to calm the paranoid Macbeth.

He deeply worries his guests at a grand banquet that he throws to celebrate his ascension to the throne, when he swears that he can see the bloody ghost of Banquo sitting at his table. Shaken, he returns to the Weird Sisters to get more information, and they present him with a series of terrifying visions that emerge from a cauldron. This is the famous incantation scene. Now, these visions offer prophecies in the form of riddles.

Macbeth is told to beware of Macduff, a suspicious thane who was loyal to Duncan. He is also told that no man of woman born can kill him, and that he will be king until a nearby forest called Burnham Wood uproots and walks to his castle. This convinces Macbeth that he is basically invincible, as long as he eliminates McDuck. Macduff flees Scotland and travels to England to try and bring Malcolm back to save the country from the increasingly tyrannical Macbeth.

Macbeth responds by having Macduff's wife and young child killed. In the meantime, the guilt of all this murder has led Lady Macbeth towards a total mental breakdown. She sleepwalks at night and dreams that her hands are covered with blood that cannot wash off. In the end, Malcolm and Macduff returned to Scotland with a giant English army at their back. To camouflage their approach to the castle, they have the soldiers cut down branches from Burnham Wood.

The effect is that it looks like Burnham Wood is walking towards the castle. Prophecy fulfilled. The Scottish Thanes all desert Macbeth, and the despondent Lady Macbeth takes her own life offstage. After musing on the pointlessness of existence, Macbeth decides that he wants to die with a sword in his hand. Still half believing that he cannot be killed, he heads out to face the invaders. He is eventually confronted by Macduff, and the two have one last climactic sword fight.

Macbeth thinks that no man of woman born can kill him, but at the crucial moment he's told by Macduff that he was born via Caesarean section, which Turns out to be enough of a loophole that he is able to finish off Macbeth and mount his head on a pike. Duncan's heir Malcolm becomes king, and the tragedy is complete.

So, first, let's ask, how much does this plot reflect real history? Did any of the events depicted in the play actually happen? Well, to understand that, we first have to go to Shakespeare's most likely source for the story of Macbeth. This was a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland known as Hollinshed's Chronicles. It was first published in 1577 and then expanded on and reprinted in 1587. Now this book has an interesting reputation in the world of English historiography.

The book came out right as the discipline of history was going through a bit of a transformation in Britain and Northern Europe. The medieval style of chronicle writing was starting to be seen as old-fashioned and lacking critical insight. the famous English historian Edmund Bolton, who came a generation later, thought that the English historians who created things like Hollinshed's Chronicle were drawn from the quote dregs of the common people, end quote, and they had quote,

Stained and defiled history with the most fusty fooleries end quote. Oh man, fusty fooleries. Now what were these fusty fooleries? Well, it was thought that the book's author, Raphael Hollinshed, and his collaborators, had no style. There was no flow to the history. There was no reasoning for why one event led into another. Like the chronicles of old the book could sometimes read like a list of things that happen.

On top of that, the chronicle had a way of reporting legends alongside more verifiable historical facts. Hollinshed's chronicle was not always discerning or skeptical when it came to what stories from the past were included in its telling of history. But despite these shortcomings, Hullingshed's Chronicles was clearly one of the most read history books in late Elizabethan London.

Experts see the influence of this book on the work of almost every major playwright of the period, from Ben Johnson to Christopher Marlowe to, of course, William Shakespeare. It's been guessed that the plots of Shakespeare's King Lear, Cymbeline, and Macbeth were all adapted from accounts that appear in Hollinshid's Chronicle.

But modern research has demonstrated that the history of Macbeth's reign in the chronicles is not particularly accurate. It's been determined that there was indeed a King Macbeth in Scotland, who seems to have ruled between 1040 and 1057 AD, at a time when the Scottish Kingdom was known as the Kingdom of Alba. Like the Macbeth in the play, this king came to power after a King Duncan met an untimely death.

However, the earliest sources record that King Duncan was not killed treacherously in his bed. Rather, he died in battle, likely in an attempt to punish Macbeth, who may have been a rebellious lord. I say may have been because the records are a little foggy on this point. But it seems like the real Macbeth came to power after defeating the old king in battle. And he seems to have had a fairly prosperous reign.

The real Macbeth does not seem to have been regarded as a tyrant by his contemporaries, nor was there any talk of murder or supernatural dealings in the earliest sources. One medieval verse history called The Prophecy of Birkan refers to him as the quote-unquote generous king. Commenting on his attractive red hair, the prophecy proclaims the red, tall, golden haired one, he will be pleasant to me among them.

Scotland will be brimful west and east during the reign of the furious red one, end quote. Now, of course, this could very well be royal propaganda, but I think it's worth noting that Macbeth's bad reputation took a few centuries to develop. But we do know that the real Macbeth was ultimately dethroned after an English army invaded Scotland. The early Scottish sources tell a fairly convoluted tale of aristocratic politics, where various noble families were constantly vying for the kingship.

By the time Hollingshid's chronicle was compiled in the late fifteen hundreds, the story had clearly changed. Macbeth was now presented more unambiguously as a usurper. Hollingshed's Chronicles also added the story of Macbeth's rise being predicted by supernatural creatures. The chronicle describes these prophets as quote three women in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of the elder world end quote.

Now, interestingly, in the Chronicle, these women are not explicitly identified as witches, and may have been understood more like forest spirits or nymphs. But this is where the witchy element gets introduced. Hollinshed also introduces the idea that Macbeth was encouraged to seize the throne by his ambitious wife. So, two of the most important aspects of Shakespeare's play seem to have entered the Macbeth story fairly late in the game.

Shakespeare's adaptation of Macbeth follows Hallingshed's version of things fairly closely, except for a few key differences. Even though Macbeth is far more villainous in the chronicle than he is in earlier historical sources, the chroniclers still credit him with reigning over a decade of prosperity in Scotland.

They take time to list his kingly achievements, including what they deem to be wise pieces of legislation. By contrast, Shakespeare's Macbeth is a pure tyrant. There's no honeymoon period for Macbeth's reign. But perhaps most significantly, Shakespeare changes the circumstances of King Duncan's murder.

where the chronicle agrees with earlier sources that Duncan was slain in battle. Shakespeare, of course, has Duncan killed in his sleep, That scene seems to have been inspired by a different historical account in Hollinshed's Chronicle. Roughly a century before the reign of Macbeth, there was a Scottish king known as King Duck. According to Hollinshed, King Duff was invited to one of his lord's castles.

There, the lord, whose name was Donwald, and his wife, conspired to kill King Duff in his sleep, and blamed the attack on one of the king's chamberlains. It seems that Shakespeare appreciated the drama and the more serious betrayal in the King Duff story, so he mashed it up with the story of Macbeth. The result is that Shakespeare's Macbeth has only the loosest connection to the real Scottish King.

There was nothing particularly supernatural, witchy, or especially treacherous about the original Macbeth's reign. We have Hollinshed to thank for the introduction of the three female forest spirits. From there, Shakespeare seems to have doubled down on this horrific imagery. He borrowed from other historical incidents to make the play bloodier and more disturbing.

His Macbeth does not kill his king in the heat of battle, he does it while his king is sleeping, knowing full well that it is morally wrong. All of this is to say that the name Macbeth was not always synonymous with treason and the dark arts. Hollingshed introduced those themes and Shakespeare amped them up.

If there is a curse, it's not connected to the real history of King Macbeth. But what about the idea that Shakespeare took the language used by the witches from a real witch's coven? Macbeth, the man may not have been cursed, but Shakespeare may have cursed his character and his namesake play by using verboten witchy incantations. Shakespeare expert Gary Wills has argued that around the time of Macbeth's composition in sixteen oh six, other well known plays included similar conjuration scenes.

Most notable among them was a play called The Devil's Charter, written by Barnaby Barnes and performed by Shakespeare's theater company, The King's Men. The Devil's Charter was a deeply anti Catholic play in which the Pope Alexander VI is depicted making a deal with the devil to aid in his rise to power. Both The Devil's Charter and Macbeth came out in 1606. That was just one year after a group of Roman Catholic conspirators very nearly blew up the English Parliament in the 1605 gunpowder plot.

Remember, remember the 5th of November? We've talked about it on this podcast before. Now, this was a time in England when Catholicism, Jesuits, and the Papacy were all being conflated with witchcraft and devil worship. Sure enough, in the Devil's Charter, there's a scene where a black mass takes place and a number of demons are conjured on stage. Stage directions from the text tell us that a demon identified as Asteroid.

the Grand Duke of Hell appears on stage, quote, riding upon a lion or a dragon, end quote. Whoa, that sounds uh honestly kind of incredible. Now, I bring this up because this scene is very similar to the conjuring scene in the latter part of Macbeth. The witches in Macbeth summon the goddess Hecate, who arrives on stage much like the Grand Duke of Hell.

The fact that the King's Men performed both of these plays around the same time is evidence that witchy conjuration scenes were a bit of a trope. Especially in what Gary Wills calls gunpowder plagues. These were plays written in the aftermath of the 1605 gunpowder plot that seem especially concerned with treason, conspiracy, and demonic packs. Macbeth and the Devil's Charter are part of what Will sees as a mini genre of early 17th century plays that indulged in faux witchcraft on stage.

In context, Macbeth's witch scenes, while certainly memorable, were not so out of the ordinary. Also, it's worth noting that while it's interesting that Macbeth's witches use trochaic tetrameter when they break into verse, it's not totally unheard of in the world of Shakespeare. Shakespeare also uses this little poetic trick in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In that play, the mischievous puck spirit, Robin Goodfellow, also uses the same unconventional meter.

Like the witches, this gives his moments of verse an otherworldly sing song quality. So trochaic tetrameter is not proof that a real witch wrote the witch lines. The story of real witches cursing Macbeth only seems to start turning up in newspaper articles and in theater programs in the 20th century. Now, I haven't been able to find the precise origin of this story, but there's no doubt that this is a relatively recent addition to what we might call Curse Lore.

No one was talking about witches literally cursing Macbeth until the 1900s. Alright, so if the curse is not connected to the historical Macbeth or any historical witches, then how do we explain all the bad luck? It's been claimed that ill fortune has plagued Macbeth from its very first performance. In fact, some have claimed that the very first person to ever play Lady Macbeth died just before he was supposed to take the stage.

Does this run of fatal bad luck really go back all the way to sixteen oh six? Well let's take one more break and when we come back we'll get into it.

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In 1898, England's Saturday Review published a short piece titled Macbeth and Mrs. Kendall. Where the famously sharp critic Max Beerbaum weighed the merits of a recent production of the Scottish play in London. Specifically, he commended the performance of an actor named Madge Kendall, who he believed had done an exceptional job in the notoriously challenging role of Lady Macbeth.

In that review, Beerbaum, known affectionately as the Incomparable Max, pointed out that the role of Lady Macbeth has had a spotty performance here. He went so far as to cite the seventeenth century English biographer John Aubrey's account of the very first performance of Macbeth. Beerbaum wrote According to Aubrey, the play was first acted in sixteen oh six at Hampton Court in the presence of King James.

It is stated that Hal Barridge, the youth who was to have acted the part of Lady Macbeth, quote, and he is quoting from Aubery here. Fell sudden sick of a pluricy, wherefore Master Shakespeare himself did enact in his stead. Bierbaum then continues, quote, One wishes that Aubrey gave some account of the poet's impersonation. So, according to this source, the very first production of Macbeth was beset by tragedy.

The actor playing Lady Macbeth fell sick, and Shakespeare himself had to take the stage. Now, you can find many variations of this story online. For instance, the Shakespeare Company of Calgary, Alberta reports on its website that the young actor dropped dead right before he was set to take the stage in the first production of Macbeth. They also propose that King James I, for whom the play was performed, was so offended by Macbeth that he banned all future productions of the play.

This idea also made it into a nineteen ninety-eight Washington Post story, where it was reported that quote, Shakespeare's attempt to please the king, who was both a Scot and a published expert on witchcraft, sorely misfired. The play was immediately banned for five years, end quote. So if that indeed was the fallout from the first ever production of Macbeth, you could understand how Tales of a Curse might have taken root.

But as soon as you start poking at this story, it very quickly falls apart. First, we can say definitively that James I did not ban Macbeth. There's absolutely no evidence that the play was ever banned, or that James had any strong opinions on it. There's also no evidence that the first performance occurred at Hampton Court in the presence of the king.

In fact, we don't know exactly when the first production of Macbeth took place. Experts have surmised that it was likely first performed in sixteen oh six. But the first proper description we have of a performance comes from a London doctor named Simon Foreman, who took in a performance of Macbeth at the famous Globe Theatre on april twentieth, sixteen ten. The play was obviously not banned at that point.

Now, in the journal, Dr. Foreman summarized the plot of the play, so we know that he saw Shakespeare's Macbeth, but he didn't really provide much criticism of the performance. He certainly did not mention anything about Shakespeare himself jumping on stage and performing the role of Lady Macbeth. In his article, Max Bierbaum claimed that he found this story in the writings of the August biographer John Aubrey.

The truth is that John Aubrey never once wrote anything about performances of Macbeth. The incomparable Max seems to have invented the entire thing. Now, as someone who's spent the last eleven years exploring historical myths, I think I need to doff my cap to Max Beer Bomb here. This is how you create fake history and get away with Instead of just making up some vague and unsubstantiated historical claims, Bierbaum went out of his way to cook up a fake authority.

Or rather, a fake quote from a real authority. He also invented a fake actor who fell ill before he could perform as Lady Macbeth, and gave him the very real sounding Elizabethan name, Hal Barry. But beyond that one eighteen ninety eight theater review, there's no evidence that Hal Barridge ever existed. Now, interestingly, Shakespeare expert Gary Wills believes that he knows the actor who likely performed first as Lady Macbeth.

This was a young man named John Rice, who was noted for playing many of the female roles for Shakespeare's company, The King's Men. Wills has proposed that, quote, Shakespeare's greatest parts for women naturally cluster at periods when the playwright had an outstanding boy actor, end quote. Wills has guessed that the challenging female roles of Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra may have been written knowing that the talented John Rice could pull them off.

As far as we know, John Rice did not die around the time that he was playing Lady Macbeth. Now, why did Max Beerbaum invent this story? Well, the incomparable Max was a noted wit, a humorist, and a caricature artist. He enjoyed literary pranks. He seems to have done it just to amuse himself. So, the story of a misfortune-wracked opening night for Macbeth is a textbook historical myth. This is important because that story acts as the cornerstone of the Macbeth curse mythology.

But we should ask, does the idea of the curse predate Max Bierbaum's eighteen ninety-eight article? Interestingly, stories of misfortune associated with the play from before the 20th century are very rare and are hard to verify. For instance, you may have read that during a 1672 performance in Amsterdam, the actor playing King Duncan was killed on stage when a real dagger was used instead of a stage prop.

I've seen this story repeated on the websites of a handful of different theater companies, but I cannot seem to find any proper historical source that supports it. Also, as fans of the play know, Duncan is famously killed off stage. So even the mechanics of the story are a little sketchy. The only truly verifiable story of misfortune that seems to predate the 1898 article is the so called Asterplace riot in New York.

It is true that in 1849, a violent mob disrupted a performance of Macbeth at New York's Astor Opera House. The riot became so intense that the local authorities called in the troops to try and quell the unrest. When it was all over, twenty members of the crowd had been killed, and more than one hundred and twenty were injured. Now, the reasons for the riot actually had little to do with the choice of play, beyond the fact that it was Shakespeare.

The Fracas was the result of a long running feud between the American actor Edwin Forrest and the British actor William McCready. McCready was playing Macbeth when discontent over the British actors' presence in New York became a full-on riot. Now, the Asterplace riot really needs its own podcast to be properly deconstructed, but there were many reasons why this riot occurred. It was partially to do with American pride, nativism, and a growing anti-British sentiment.

It also had to do with class, that is, working and middle class New Yorkers venting their frustration with the Anglophile tastes of the rich. It is significant that the play that touched off the riot was by Shakespeare, as Americans were keen to demonstrate that they could perform the works of the Bard as well or better than the English. But the fact that the play was specifically Macbeth seems to have been incidental.

Notably, none of the contemporary newspaper accounts of the Asterplace riots mention the curse of Macbeth. In eighteen forty nine, no one seemed to think that this riot was part of a long tradition of bad luck that surrounded the place. The curse of Macbeth simply did not exist until after eighteen ninety eight.

There's no evidence that there was a popular superstition about the play before the incomparable Max invented the tale of the disastrous opening night in the Saturday Review. But to be clear, it's not like Max Beerbaum made a passing reference in a theater review, and voila, the next day there was a full blown belief in a curse. It seems to have taken a solid twenty years before this belief fully became part of theater lore.

Shakespeare expert Alexander Leggett has guessed that this had less to do with Max Bierbaum's article than And more to do with the rise of spiritualism and other ghostly superstitions that came after the First World War. He writes, quote, The verifiable stories of misfortune and the superstition itself cannot confidently be traced before the 1920s.

The sense that evil forces are at work in Macbeth may be a product of the aftermath of the First World War, whose horrific death toll produced a new interest in the spirit world. and those who had lost loved ones tried to contact them through Ouija boards and table tapping. Those beliefs have faded, though not vanished. The belief in the Macbeth curse remains. End quote.

The thinking here is that in the 1920s, more people were experimenting with seances and improvised rituals meant to summon spirits. At that time, more people were willing to believe that the scenes in Macbeth where the witches summoned apparitions actually were. When looked at from the right angle, those scenes seemed like they could be the ancient basis for modern seance.

Sure enough, it's not until the nineteen twenties that we start seeing references to the curse of Macbeth appearing in print. By 1927, you can find reports like this one from the British newspaper The Era, which explained, quote, Another superstition amongst those who dwell in theatrical circles is the foredoomed failure and ill-luck that is predicted for any production of Macbeth. The implicit faith that actors and managers have in this superstition is truly uncanny and amazing.

Whether it is the gloomy atmosphere of the sublime tragedy that accounts for its unpopularity is a debatable point. But it is certainly argued, even by lovers of Shakespeare, that to produce Macbeth is to court disaster.

So clearly the superstition was in full swing by 1927. Interestingly, though, the article goes on to explain that there was an even more intense superstition around the incidental music that was composed for the play by Matthew Locke around the year 1671. The ERA article insists that, quote, even those who laugh at the dismal Jimmies when discussing the tragedy itself are frequently far more superstitious with regard to law.

this weird and wonderful music that was composed for it. Woe betide the luckless artist who thoughtlessly sings or unconsciously hums a few bars within the precincts of the theater. End quote. Oh man, the dismal Jimmies. I like that one. Um so if we trust the era, then for a time the music of Macbeth may have been understood as more cursed. than any language spoken in the play.

It's also been proposed that the very popularity of the play Macbeth may have contributed to the growth of the curse legend. In an article that appeared in The Guardian in twenty twenty, culture writer Miriam Gillison explained that quote Legend goes that if an actor hears the word Macbeth uttered in the theater, it's because, being a big money spinner, it is being touted as a replacement for their own failing play, end quote.

It's been suggested that because Macbeth was so popular, it was often staged after a disastrous play, or was brought in as a last-ditch effort to save a struggling theater. The theory goes that Macbeth got a bad reputation because if you performed the play, it often sounded the death knell of your struggling theater company. This is one of those explanations that is very satisfying, seems very reasonable, and aligns with common sense.

I've not come across a shred of data or even anecdotal evidence that supports It's possible that this is just another myth, just a far more reasonable sounding myth.

What's clear is that the curse of Macbeth is a thoroughly modern invention. It has nothing to do with the history of the real Scottish King. It has nothing to do with the language used in the play, nor is it connected to any famous misfortunes that occurred during the early performances. In the nineteenth century, there seems to have been some unease around the creepy incidental music written for the play, and then the incomparable Max Beerbaum invented a memorable origin story for the curse.

After World War I, as interest grew in ghosts, spiritualism, and conjuring rituals, a proper superstition developed around Macbeth. But once the curse became common knowledge, it became a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. Accidents and mishaps that occurred during runs of Macbeth were noted, remembered, and were given a more supernatural significance. Let's take it back to the great Lawrence Olivier.

The fact that he had a near miss with a heavy object that fell from the rafters during the nineteen thirty seven run of Macbeth at the Old Vic is often pointed to as evidence of the curse. But did you know that two years earlier, Olivier broke his ankle while performing Romeo and Juliet? In nineteen fifty-five, he was shot in the leg with an arrow while he was filming an adaptation of Richard III. By any metric, those were worse accidents.

Neither were chalked up to any kind of supernatural curse. The widespread belief in the curse has created a type of confirmation bias around Macbeth. You could look into the production history of literally any play, especially one as old as Macbeth, and find all sorts of tales of injury, death, financial ruin, and on stage embarrassment. you need a myth to give that random collection of anecdotes some meaning. The curse of Macbeth provides exactly that kind of meaning.

Poetically, the paradox of self fulfilling prophecies is one of the themes of Macbeth. Macbeth is told by the witches that he will be king, and this knowledge inspires him to act in order to fulfill the prophecy. Would the prophecy have come true if he had never been exposed to the prophecy? The play encourages you to grapple with this unsolvable riddle. Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Once we started saying that Macbeth was cursed, did we effectively curse Macbeth?

Okay, that's all for this week. Join us again in two weeks' time when we will explore an all new historical myth. If you had any questions about today's episode, you can always send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com. Or if you are a patron, go to our patrons only chat and put your question there. I will be answering your questions on an upcoming bonus episode. Patrons, keep checking your feed this week because before the week is out, you will

see the new extra episode on the seven wonders of the ancient world. I will also be uh alerting you to that through social media and through the Patreon page. Before we go this week, of course, I need to give some shout-outs, big ups to Jack Song, to Peter, to Snakob, to Timothy J. Griffith. To Connor Mann, to Connor, I wonder if you're the same person, to Paul Albertson, to Clara Steele, and to Petros Vorobio.

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Thousands of free. TV shows. We're coming at you with everything we got! And we love you. Pluto TV is always free. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Välkommen till SB. Jo, om det är så att jag och min kille ska flytta ihop och ta ett bolon tillsammans. Och vi båda har helt jobb, men jag känner lite mer än vad han gör. I alla fall just nu. Om vi vill köpa något gemensamt. Men vi behöver förstå ungefär hur mycket vi kan låna, och om månadskostnaderna landa på. Kan ni på SGB hjälpa oss då?

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