During the quatercentenary celebrations at Stratford an exhibition was mounted at Hall’s Croft by Mr John Carroll of designs by the Grieves purporting to be for performances of Shakespeare’s plays. This exhibition first drew public attention to a collection of over six hundred Grieve stage designs in the University of London Library, from which a large proportion of the exhibits were drawn. A closer examination of this collection, however, reveals that only eight are actually assigned to Shakespeare plays in contemporary hands, though some others may well have been for performances for which the Grieves painted scenery. Unfortunately there is no evidence to substantiate these. Two hands are involved in the captions, excluding modern additions: one is small and generally in ink on the mounts; the other is large and either in ink or pencil, generally on the drawings themselves but occasionally also on the mounts. Even with the eight captioned designs a caveat must be entered: these are sketches and may have been considerably modified on the stage. All’s Well, however, is cut out as a model and ‘Shylock’s House’ is squared for enlargement.

DISINTEGRATION

All editions of Macbeth derive from one single and authoritative text—that of the First Folio. The number of substantive emendations that modern editors see fit to introduce is quite small; and there are no passages so hopelessly corrupt that the sense is obscured. All this would argue an uncomplex task for the editor, and a simple and mercifully brief narrative for the historian of criticism. This turns out not to be the case. The discovery that the two songs (whose first lines are invoked in III, V and, again, in IV, i) exist in full texts in the manuscript of Middleton’s The Witch has unloosed a flood of disintegration. I am more or less discounting, of course, the views of chronic disintegrators like J. M. Robertson who found (Literary Detection, 1931) that ‘there is clear literary evidence of the past existence of a lost pre-Shakespearean Macbeth by Kyd’; Middleton he found to have written the Witch-scenes, the Porter-scene and the couplet tags throughout the play; there is a case for Heywood’s authorship of the closing scene. IV, iii and I, ii are non-Shakespearian but unassigned. More impressive are the views of Clark and Wright, not given to rashness, who excised whole areas of the play from the Shakespeare canon, finding the bleeding sergeant in I, ii an ‘absurdity’, his metre ‘slovenly’ and his ‘bombastic phraseology . . . not like Shakespeare’s language even when he is most bombastic’.

Few scenes in Shakespeare can have provoked more laughter in the theatre and more discomfort in the classroom than Macbeth, II, iii. At the centre of this paradox lies the character of the Porter, and in particular the obscenities which punctuate his remarks. These obscenities moreover are inextricably linked to a string of references to hell and the devil. How is this scene to be handled by the actor, and how is it to be handled by the schoolteacher?

The experience of being woken up in the middle of the night out of a deep sleep to deal with some disturbance in the house is as irritating as it is common: it is therefore a situation which if exposed to view in the theatre by a good mimic is certain to provide an amusing spectacle. Macbeth’s porter, asleep when he ought to have been awake and on duty, stumbling towards the castle gate still rubbing his bleary eyes and hastily adjusting his costume, arouses a host of personal associations for everyone in the audience and is a sure-fire raiser of laughter in consequence. The fact that in this instance he is suffering from a bad hangover only adds to the fun for adults. Yet it is in this addition that trouble begins; for out of it spring the particular obscenities through which the Porter gives expression in his language both to his predicament and to his feelings.

This is an attempt to see, as if through Elizabethan eyes, the supernatural background of the play and Macbeth’s relation to it. I cannot pretend that this brief study is other than a very rough approximation, because the final impression is really a composite one put together from a wide variety of sources. For good or ill, however, I have ventured into the supernatural world of the Elizabethans because I dislike the ‘character sketch’ approach to Macbeth as much as I dislike the studies of isolated images with their promise of a poetic whole which never quite materializes. Both methods cause fragmentation of the play to such an extent that few commentators nowadays bother much about the Weird Sisters—who or what they ate has become more important than what they do. Perhaps a reluctance to associate Shakespeare with a belief in witchcraft is at the root of this malaise. No one can tell whether Shakespeare believed in hanging witches, but can anyone doubt that he felt the same anxiety about them that obsessed so many of his contemporaries? Shakespeare was no iconoclast like Reginald Scot; Macbeth would certainly not shake a contemporary audience’s belief in witchcraft. I prefer to see in the play the outlines of the same frightful psychic cloud, composed of fear, superstition and religious wrong-headedness, that thundered in the contemporary imagination and destroyed countless thousands of innocent people with its lightning.

In a useful article reviewing the trends in Shakespeare criticism during this century, Irving Ribner looks ahead to a new generation which may recognize that even in seemingly contradictory approaches there has been room for reconciliation in terms of a common larger tradition. When faced by the critical deluge occasioned by the quatercentenary, it is difficult to share Ribner’s optimism. For, while a large number of articles do certainly complement each other in their illuminations of scenes, speeches, and whole plays, there are also those which assert conclusions among which there is even less chance of reconciliation than there is between Coriolanus and the tribunes. Symptomatic of such fundamental division between critics—and, one suspects, whole groups of critics—are two papers which appear in a single memorial volume and scowl adjacently. In one, Kenneth Myrick claims that a Christian reading of Lear is the only kind that makes sense and, in the light of popular religious handbooks of the period, argues that the dark view of man found in the play is ‘normal in Elizabethan Christianity’. However, it is just this dark view of man that Nicholas Brooke takes to constitute the greatness of the play which he sees as asserting with superb energy a perfectly complete negation in which there are good and bad values which can have no reference beyond themselves and for which there are no ultimate sanctions. Brooke also develops his view at greater length in a monograph on the play in which he follows the five-act structure because ‘the experience of the play, the sense of its significance, develops the sequence of events; and to deprive the events of that sequence and to discuss them as if they were simultaneous, is to falsify the nature of the drama’.

It is surely unnecessary to argue today that Lady Macbeth’s invocation of the ‘spirits that tend on mortal thoughts’, of the ‘murth’ring ministers’, is a formal stage in demonic possession—though the implications of that statement are rarely if ever pursued. W. C. Curry sufficiently stated the spiritual significance of the invocation in saying that ‘Lady Macbeth deliberately wills that [unclean spirits, wicked angels] subtly invade her body and so control it that the natural inclination of the spirit towards goodness and compassion may be completely extirpated’. But even this statement we may regard as slightly evasive and carrying some of the tones of Coleridge’s examination of her character:

A considerable amount of recent research into early seventeenth-century music manuscripts has not only revealed who were the composers of the music for the King’s Men theatre but has also provided clues to the identity of some of the theatre musicians. So it has become necessary to examine much more carefully than has hitherto been possible Herbert’s 1624 Protection List (Plate V) for the names of those ‘imployed by the Kinge Ma:ties servante in theire quallity of Playinge as Musitions and other necessary attendante’. In particular it is necessary to combine the results of the above research with those of the research into the actors of the company, most exhaustively treated by Professor Baldwin in The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company and by Professor Bentley in volume II of his The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, and with the results of Professor Woodfill’s research into Musicians in English Society from Elizabeth to Charles I.

It is true that Professors Baldwin and Woodfill have each given some passing attention to the music in the theatre, relying heavily on Whitelocke’s observations in 1634 that ‘the Blackefryars Musicke . . . were then esteemed the best of common musitions in London’ and on Frederick Gerchow’s diary reference to the Blackfriars music? Professor Baldwin suggests musical functions for three names of the 1624 Protection List (Wilson, Toyer and Pallant) and remarks of the others that as far as he knows ‘there is no record as musicians’. Professor Bentley adds the identification of one more as a musician, Byland, and cautions about the distinction between a player and a musician not always being very definite. Obviously some theatre musicians would be expected to fill in as minor actors and attendants, especially in those plays which make little use of music.

A good deal has been written about the imagery of Macbeth since Caroline Spurgeon showed that the iterative image was that of a man in ill-fitting garments. It has been pointed out, for example, that the image can be interpreted in more than one way and that we need not necessarily suppose that Shakespeare looked on his hero as a small man in garments too large for him: we may rather suppose that the point of the image is that the garments were stolen or that they symbolize the hypocrisy to which Macbeth is reluctantly committed when he embarks on his career of crime. It has also been pointed out that this particular image should be considered in relation to a wider group of tailoring images, of which the imaginary tailor, admitted by the Porter of Hell-gate, may be regarded as a kind of patron.

What is more important is that, since the publication of R. B. Heilman’s books on King Lear and Othello, W. H. Clemen’s The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery and G. Wilson Knight’s series of interpretations, Miss Spurgeon’s concentration on a single iterative image, even though numerically predominant, is apt to be misleading. The total meaning of each play depends on a complex of interwoven patterns and the imagery must be considered in relation to character and structure.

This article is the account of an investigation of the meaning of a single line in the play Macbeth, a line which had been for many years a puzzle to me, until, in the course of a quite different inquiry, an answer finally suggested itself out of discoveries made in trying to reconstruct a vanished mental world which was quite familiar to Shakespeare and his audiences. My title refers to the point in the play Macbeth just after the discovery of Duncan’s murder by Macduff and the slaughter by Macbeth of the two drugged and innocent grooms. When Macduff, in that dagger-pointed atmosphere of suspicion which always follows assassinations, whether of ancient Scottish kings or of modern American presidents, asks Macbeth ‘Wherefore did you so?’, Macbeth replies:

The end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth saw the production of an enormous number of song-collections (often called ‘garlands)’ designed for the chapman’s market. Costing a penny for eight small pages (the first given over to a title-page adorned with a crudely cut and often irrelevant woodcut), a garland would contain the words—but not the music—of perhaps half-a-dozen songs, covering a wide variety of subjects, and appealing to a number of levels of taste: a sentimental love lyric in eighteenth-century clichés, a humorous poem describing an Irishman’s adventures in London, a poem in praise of the Battle of the Nile, a sailor’s lament at his absence from home, and so forth. These garlands thus throw an interesting light on the state of popular taste at the time.

Reading in a collection of these productions for a purpose remote from Shakespeare turned up the following three songs.2 So far as I know, they have not been quoted or commented on before. They differ from the broadsheet ballads based on Shakespeare's work which appeared until the end of the eighteenth century. The broadsheet ballads are virtually narrative verse, in spite of the occasional appearance of the words ‘To be sung to the tune of. . .’. But the poems in the garlands are more lyrical in shape, even though the garland rarely indicates the tune to be associated with them.

In Bibliography and Textual Criticism Fredson Bowers once more advances claims for the role of bibliography in dealing with textual problems. He argues that bibliography gives a higher order of certainty than the traditional methods of textual criticism, because ‘step by step it rests on the impersonal inductive interpretation of physical facts according to rigorous laws of evidence’, while textual criticism rests only on ‘deductive opinion and comparative estimates of values’ (p. 156). For Bowers, ‘the difference between the critical and the bibliographical explanation lies in the laws governing the treatment of the evidence by which the fact is investigated’ (p. 40). Criticism, dealing with words from the viewpoint of meaning, treats ‘the phenomena in a text on internal grounds as self-sufficient evidence’—i.e. ‘deductively’—while bibliography, dealing with words not primarily as vehicles of meaning but in terms of their forms and order as inked shapes on paper, bases its findings inductively on a wider range of evidence, evidence which is ‘external’ as well as ‘internal’ (pp. 36–41). Bowers maintains that ‘when bibliographical and critical judgment clash, the critic must accept the bibliographical findings and somehow come to terms with them’ (p. 29). Bibliography should ‘set up logical safeguards against unprincipled critical speculation and . . . require that critical judgment conforms to certain prerequisite conditions’ (p. 59).

Not everyone is, perhaps, prepared to say that ‘ Macbeth without Seneca would have been impossible’; but many would agree with Henry N. Paul when he calls Macbeth ‘the most Senecan of all of Shakespeare’s plays’. Scholars and critics have pointed out affinities with Seneca in the structural and rhetorical features of the play, as well as in those less easily definable aspects which are usually grouped together as ‘atmosphere’: the presence in action or language, or both, of night, blood and the supernatural. A number of verbal resemblances to lines in Seneca (both the original tragedies and the translations in the Tenne Tragedies) have also been pointed out, and especially Agamemnon, Hercules Furens and Hippolytus (or Phaedra) have thus been suggested as sources for Macbeth. Some critics feel that in preparation for writing Macbeth Shakespeare may have read, or re-read, at least part of Seneca’s dramatic works; and one of them thinks that, as most of the verbal echoes are from the Hippolytus and the Hercules Furens—both plays in which ‘the protagonist’s crimes are accompanied or followed by violent fear and remorse’—this indicates that Shakespeare, in turning to Seneca, paid particular attention to those plays which, compared with the others, he found ‘closer in spirit to the theme he had chosen for his next drama’. This may sound too deliberate an imitative process to those who like to think of the workings of Shakespeare’s imagination as being less conscious.

The difficulties presented by the character of Macbeth—the criminal as tragic hero—have led some critics to charge Shakespeare with inconsistency, others to seek consistency by viewing the initial Macbeth as in some way morally defective, and still others to normalize the hero by viewing the final Macbeth as in some way morally triumphant. Perhaps a recollection of Lascelles Abercrombie’s enthusiastic phrase, ‘the zest and terrible splendour of his own unquenchable mind’ (1925), and of Wilson Knight’s comparable ‘emerges at last victorious and fearless’ (1930), helped stir L. C. Knights to complain (1933) that ‘the critics have not only sentimentalized Macbeth—ignoring the completeness with which Shakespeare shows his final identification with evil—but they have slurred the passages in which the positive good is presented by means of religious symbols’. Even after this, so unflighty an editor as Kittredge could say that Macbeth ‘is never greater than in the desperate valour that marks his end’. On the other hand, the editor of a Macbeth meant for schools describes Macbeth as a ‘bold, exacting and presumptuous criminal, . . . bent on destruction for destruction’s sake’, ‘the champion of evil’, ‘a monster’, giving ‘the impression . . . of some huge beast who . . . dies lashing out at everyone within range’.

In 1960 when Peter Hall became Director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon he spoke of forming a company. He wanted a policy. He did not want each production to be a shot at a target chosen by its director in the light of his own limited experience and to serve his individual career. He did not want to provide vehicles for star actors with established reputations and established mannerisms. He talked about creating a real company with its own distinctive character, whose members could gain strength from each other and from a common purpose. Nothing like this existed in England but Peter Hall persuaded a great number of persons to work with him so that in five years he has achieved the best part of his ambition.

Now the Stratford programme can display the company's wide-ranging activity. There are ‘artists under long-term contract’, associate directors and associate designers, teachers engaged for speech, singing, music and movement. The public is assured that the company ‘develop in private in their studio the agility and freedom that Shakespeare’s plays demand’.

In the Introduction to the revised Arden edition of Macbeth (1951) Kenneth Muir notes as ‘one of the predominant characteristics of the general style of the play’ the fact that ‘it consists of multitudinous antitheses’. He connects ‘this trick of style with the “wrestling of destruction with creation” which Mr Wilson Knight has found in the play, and with the opposition he has pointed out between night and day, life and death, grace and evil’. Muir also refers to Mgr Kolbe, who sees the play as picturing ‘a special battle in a universal war’, the war between sin and grace, with a ‘two-fold contrast . . . —Darkness and Light, as a parable, Discord and Concord as a result’. What I wish to say in the present essay is related to the general conception of antithesis: and, more particularly, it is related to the themes identified and analysed by L. C. Knights in How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (1933). Knights states that ‘Two main themes, which can only be separated for the purpose of analysis, are blended in the play—the themes of the reversal of values and of unnatural disorder. And closely related to each is a third theme, that of the deceitful appearance, and consequent doubt, uncertainty and confusion.’ Some of the passages to which I shall refer are discussed by Knights.

Leslie Hotson’s Mr. W.H. is an ambitious attempt to solve most of the problems of Shakespeare’s biography. The conclusions are drawn from ‘Shakespeare’s allusive and symbolical method in his personal or lyrical poetry’. The evidence that Shakespeare used such a method derives from the results that Dr Hotson achieves by assuming that he did. And these results are, as the author is happy to admit, astonishing. The use of regal imagery for the youth of the sonnets implies that he was, factually or fictionally, of regal status. He was, Dr Hotson believes, the Prince of Purpoole, leader of the Gray’s Inn revels. This office was held in 1588 by a Mr W.H.—William Hatcliffe. Dr Hotson finds his very name buried in many of the sonnets. More often than not, one part of the formation derives from those not uncommon words ‘what’ and ‘that’; the occurrence of one of them within a line or two of ‘live’, ‘leave’, ‘left’, etc. is held to be significant. (Apparently Shakespeare’s ingenuity did not extend to indicating the ‘-cliffe’ form of the name.) There are also remarkable ramifications involving true-love knots, coats of arms, one of Hilliard’s best-known miniatures (a portrait, we are told, of Hatcliffe), and Pompey the Great.

A list compiled from its records by the Shakespeare Memorial Library, Birmingham.

JANUARY

13 The Winter's Tale: Adam House Theatre, Edinburgh. Producer: IDA WATE.

27 Richard II: The Playhouse, Nottingham. Producer: JOHN NEVILLE.

FEBRUARY

Not known Twelfth Night: David Lewis Theatre, Liverpool. Producer: ALAN SPENCER.

2 King Lear: Oxford University Dramatic Society at the Playhouse, Oxford. Producer: PETER BAYLEY.

8 Twelfth Night: Civic Theatre, Chelmsford and on tour. Producer: CHARLES VANCE.

12 A Midsummer Night's Dream: Tavistock Repertory Company, Tower Theatre, London. Producer: JESSICA TAYLOR.

16 Much Ado About Nothing: National Theatre Company, Old Vic Theatre, London. Producer: FRANCO ZEFHRELLI.

16 The Tempest: The Playhouse, Sheffield. Producer: COLIN GEORGE.

16 Henry IV, Part I: Empire Theatre, Sunderland. Producer: ANTONY CARRICK.

23 Macbeth: Everyman Theatre, Liverpool. Producer: JOHN RUSSELL BROWN