Dr Rory Loughnane of the School of English has revealed for us the details of a version of Macbeth previously performed and now lost to the ages:
‘On this day 409 years ago, Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish play’ was performed by the King’s Men at the Globe Theatre. We know this because an audience member wrote some well-preserved notes about the performance. Simon Forman, a well-known astrologer and medical practitioner, attended a series of performances at the Globe in early 1611. Apart from Macbeth, he also reviewed performances of the anonymous lost play Richard the Second, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline. Forman’s notes in his “The Bocke of Plaies and Notes therof”, now held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, primarily outline the plots of the various plays he attended.
‘Forman also uses these notes to highlight lessons drawn from the play plots that he wishes to recall. Having observed the behavior of Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, he writes a reminding note to “beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellonse”. Forman’s account can be read in full on Shakespeare Documented.
‘Forman’s notes about Macbeth seem at first ordinary. He moves through the plot swiftly, highlighting memorable details from the play such as the Macbeth and Banquo’s encounter with the witches (he identifies them as “3 women feiries or Nimiphes”, how Macbeth “contriued” to kill King Duncan “thorowe the persuasion of his wife”, the murder of Banquo and his ghostly appearance at the banquet, the murder of MacDuff’s wife and children, and Macduff’s eventual killing of Macbeth.
‘As a medical practitioner, Forman was particularly interested in Lady Macbeth’s encounter with the doctor: “Obserue Also howe Mackbetes quen did Rise in the night in her slepe & walke and talked and confessed all & the docter noted her wordes’. Forman does an admirable job of recounting the plot and some of his descriptions help us to imagine the play in early performance. He recalls the moment when Macbeth first sees the Ghost of Banquo: “And [Macbeth] turninge About to sit down Again sawe the goste of banco [Ghost of Banquo] which fronted him so. that he fell in to a great passion of fear & fury.” It is not difficult to imagine how this dramatic episode was staged.
‘Forman’s notes for Macbeth are of greater interest, however, because they record the performance of an early version of the ‘Scottish play’. Though Forman’s 1611 account records the first known performance of Macbeth, Shakespeare first wrote the play in June-July 1606 and it would have been intermittently part of his company’s active repertory thereafter. The play was only first published in 1623 in the ‘First Folio’ play collection of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. This is the only print version of the play that is preserved, and the copy upon which all editions of the play are based. This is the version of Macbeth that is read, studied, and performed today. This is not, however, the version of the play that Forman saw performed. That version is lost.
‘The 1623 printing of Macbeth includes cues for two songs in stage directions (3.5 and 4.1) that appear in Thomas Middleton’s The Witch. As Middleton’s play was likely written in 1616, and therefore post-dating Shakespeare’s retirement from writing for the stage if not his death (April 1616), the songs must have been added for a revival of the play by Shakespeare’s old company. In revival, the King’s Men may have turned to Middleton, with whom they were working often at this time, to adapt the play to better cater for new audience tastes. In a similar vein, Middleton would later write ‘new additions’ to All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Titus Andronicus.
‘It is now suspected that the song additions in the First Folio edition of Macbeth only partially represent Middleton’s interventions and that, in a process of extensive adaptation, he introduced new material to, and cut material from, the underlying play, thereby essentially creating a new version of Macbeth. The printed play is anomalously short for a Shakespearean tragedy–some 30% shorter than Antony and Cleopatra and 29% shorter than King Lear, both written in the same period–and it is probable that Middleton cut the original version significantly.
‘He may also have changed some details. For example, Forman’s description of the witches as “feiries or Nimiphes” suggests that in Shakespeare’s original version they were beautiful figures rather than the fearsome “filthy hags” present in the First Folio text. Such a depiction would, in fact, be closer to how the trio are described, and depicted in a woodcut image, in Shakespeare’s primary source, Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577, 1587). Middleton’s interventions may even extend to re-arranging the sequence of some scenes, as well as to cutting additional historical material found in Shakespeare’s sources that may have been included in the original.
‘As only the First Folio version is preserved, any reconstruction of Shakespeare’s original version would be necessarily speculative. But we can say with some certainty that the version of Macbeth Forman saw performed four hundred and nine years ago was significantly different to the version we can see for ourselves today.’
Dr Rory Loughnane, is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Early Modern Studies in the School of English. He is an award-winning scholar of early modern textual studies, authorship, intellectual history, and literary criticism. He joined the University in the summer of 2016.
Dr Loughnane’s research interests include: Editing and Textual Studies, Authorship (practices of, attribution studies), History of Ideas (memory, death, love, rhetoric, conduct) and Literary Criticism (transgression and normality, nationality, feminism and gender studies).