143 APPENDIX B-The Editions of 1673 and 1674 . APPENDIX C-Shakespeare's Historical Authority 145 INTRODUCTION 1. LITERARY HISTORY OF THE PLAY THE Tragedy of Macbeth, like most of Shakespeare's later plays, was not printed separately in quarto form during his lifetime. It first appeared in the collected edition issued by John Heminge and Henry Condell in 1623, seven years after the poet's death. Here it stands between Julius Cæsar and Hamlet. In the preface to this edition, known as the First Folio, Heminge and Condell claim to have taken great care to present an accurate text of the plays, "absolute in their numbers as he conceived them." But it would not be safe to put overmuch confidence in this boast. The text of Macbeth, in particular, is very unsatisfactory. It is full of printer's errors. Verse-passages are printed as prose, or cut up into irregular lines without regard to metre. And in many places the original sense has been reduced to nonsense.1 Some of these mistakes were corrected in the Second Folio of 1632; some have been emended by the ingenuity of Theobald and his fellow commentators; others are perhaps beyond the reach of scholarship. It is improbable that the version of the play from which the First Folio text was taken was in the state in which Shakespeare left it. Opinions differ as to the extent to which it may have been modified. The Clarendon Press editors think that it had been freely touched up by Thomas Middleton. They profess to be able to trace his hand in certain rhyming tags and passages "not in Shakespeare's manner." Attempts in a similar direction have been made by Mr. F. G. Fleay.2 Middleton was a younger contemporary of Shakespeare's, and wrote for the King's Company between 1615 and 1624. If it was found necessary during that period to make any alterations in Macbeth, it would have been nat1 Instances of the state of the First Folio text will be found in the notes on i. 1. 10; i. 3. 28 ii. 2. 2; ii. 2. 16. 2 See the Transactions of the New Shakspere Society for 1874; Mr. Fleay's Shakespeare Manual, p. 245, and a later paper in Anglia, vol. vii. On the passages attributed to Middleton by these critics see Appendices E, F, and G. ural enough to intrust the task to him. But I cannot believe that it is possible to disentangle such alterations from the original stuff of the piece; and, in spite of Coleridge, a criticism that can attribute the Porter's speech in act ii. sc. 3 to any other than Shakespeare appears to me strangely untrustworthy.1 It is not unlikely, however, that the First Folio was printed from a copy of Macbeth that had been "cut" and 66 written up" for stage purposes.2 This theory would account for the unusual shortness of the play; 3 for certain discrepancies in the incidents; and for the number of incomplete lines, which may very well be due to the excision of speeches or parts of speeches.5 I think also that there has been some tampering with the witch scenes by the introduction of a superfluous personage, Hecate, and of a few lines lyrical in character and incongruous to the original conception of the weird sisters. This condemnation would cover act iii. sc. 5, and act iv. sc. 1. II. 39-43; 125–132. These passages are very likely the work of Middleton, for they closely resemble in style certain scenes in a play of his called The Witch. This play was discovered in MS. in 1778, and its importance was at once observed, and perhaps exaggerated, by Shakespearian critics. Steevens assumed that The Witch was written before Macbeth, and inferred from certain parallels between the two plays that Shakespeare borrowed hints from his fellow-dramatist. A saner scholarship has, however, led to the conclusion that The Witch was probably not written before 1613, and consequently that Middleton was the borrower. Having written his own play, he may have interpolated a few lines in a similar style into Macbeth, with the object, perhaps, of introducing a musical element. It is noteworthy that in the stage-directions to two of the doubtful passages appear the titles of songs which are given in full in The Witch." Three possible dates have been suggested for the original production of Macbeth. The latest of these is 1610. It depends upon the testimony of one Simon Forman, an astrologer. Forman was in the habit of keeping a manuscript book, and entering in it his 1 See Appendix F. 2 Similar instances of such stage-versions are probably to be seen in the Folio Hamlet and the First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet. 3 Macbeth has 1993 lines; the only play that is shorter is Comedy of Errors, which has 1770. The longest play, Antony and Cleopatra, has 3964, and the average length is 2857. 4 See notes on i. 2. 53; i. 3. 73; i. 3. 108; iii. 6. 49. 5 See Essay on Metre, § 5 (iii). |
