That thou wilt use the wars as thy redress,

And not as our confusion. All thy powers

Shall make their harbour in our town till we

Have sealed thy full desire.

ALCIBIADES ⌈throwing up a glove⌉

Then there’s my glove.

Descend, and open your uncharged ports.

Those enemies of Timon’s and mine own

Whom you yourselves shall set out for reproof

Fall, and no more; and to atone your fears

With my more noble meaning, not a man

Shall pass his quarter or offend the stream

Of regular justice in your city’s bounds

But shall be remedied to your public laws

At heaviest answer.

BOTH SENATORS ’Tis most nobly spoken.

ALCIBIADES Descend, and keep your words.

⌈Trumpets sound. Exeunt Senators from the walls.⌉

Enter Soldier, with a tablet of wax

SOLDIER

My noble general, Timon is dead,

Entombed upon the very hem o’th’ sea;

And on his gravestone this insculpture, which

With wax I brought away, whose soft impression

Interprets for my poor ignorance.

Alcibiades reads the epitaph

ALCIBIADES

‘Here lies a wretched corpse,

Of wretched soul bereft.

Seek not my name. A plague consume

You wicked caitiffs left!

Here lie I, Timon, who alive

All living men did hate.

Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass

And stay not here thy gait.’

These well express in thee thy latter spirits.

Though thou abhorred‘st in us our human griefs,

Scorned’st our brains’ flow and those our droplets which

From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit

Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye

On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead

Is noble Timon, of whose memory

Hereafter more.

⌈Enter Senators through the gates⌉

Bring me into your city,

And I will use the olive with my sword,

Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each

Prescribe to other as each other’s leech.

Let our drums strike.

⌈Drums.⌉ Exeunt ⌈through the gates⌉

MACBETH

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (ADAPTED BY THOMAS MIDDLETON)

SHORTLY after James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne, in 1603, he gave his patronage to Shakespeare’s company; the Lord Chamberlain’s Men became the King’s Men, entering into a special relationship with their sovereign. Macbeth is the play of Shakespeare’s that most clearly reflects this relationship. James regarded the virtuous and noble Banquo, Macbeth’s comrade at the start of the action, as his direct ancestor; eight Stuart kings were said to have preceded James, just as, in the play, Banquo points to ‘a show of eight kings’ as his descendants (4.1.127.1-140); and in the play the English king (historically Edward the Confessor) is praised for the capacity, on which James also prided himself, to cure ’the king’s evil’ (scrofula). Macbeth is obviously a Jacobean play, composed probably in 1606.

But the first printed text, in the 1623 Folio, shows signs of having been adapted at a later date. It is exceptionally short by comparison with Shakespeare’s other tragedies; and it includes episodes which there is good reason to believe are not by Shakespeare. Most conspicuous are Act 3, Scene 5 and parts of Act 4, Scene I: 38.I-60 and 141-8.1. These episodes feature Hecate, who does not appear elsewhere in the play; they are composed largely in octosyllabic couplets in a style conspicuously different from the rest of the play; and they call for the performance of two songs that are found in The Witch, a play of uncertain date by Thomas Middleton. Probably Middleton himself adapted Shakespeare’s play some years after its first performance, adding these and more localized details, and cutting the play elsewhere. We do not attempt to excise passages most clearly written by Middleton, because the adapter’s hand almost certainly affected the text at other, less determinable points. The Folio text of Macbeth cites only the opening words of the songs; drawing on The Witch, we attempt a reconstruction of their staging in Macbeth.

Shakespeare took materials for his story from the account in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicle of the reigns of Duncan and Macbeth (AD 1034-57). Occasionally (especially in the English episodes of Act 4, Scene 2) he closely followed Holinshed’s wording, but essentially the play’s structure is his own. He invented the framework of the three witches who tempted both Macbeth and Banquo with prophecies of greatness. His Macbeth is both more introspective and more intensely evil than the competent warrior-king portrayed by Holinshed; conversely, Shakespeare made Duncan, the king whom Macbeth murders, far more venerable and saintly. Some of the play’s features, notably the character of Lady Macbeth, originate in Holinshed’s account of the murder of an earlier Scottish king, Duff; he was killed in his castle at Forres by Donwald, who had been ‘set on’ by his wife.

Macbeth is an exciting story of witchcraft, murder, and retribution that can also be seen as a study in the philosophy and psychology of evil. The witches are not easily made credible in modern performances, and Shakespeare seems deliberately to have drained colour away from some parts of his composition in order to concentrate attention on Macbeth and his Lady. It is Macbeth’s neurotic self-absorption, his fear, his anger, and his despair, along with his wife’s steely determination, her invoking of the powers of evil, and her eventual revelation in sleep of her repressed humanity, that have given the play its long-proven power to fascinate readers and to challenge performers.

THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY

KING DUNCAN of Scotland

A CAPTAIN in Duncan’s army

MACBETH, Thane of Glamis, later Thane of Cawdor, then King of

Scotland

A PORTER at Macbeth’s castle

Three MURDERERS attending on Macbeth

SEYTON, servant of Macbeth

LADY MACBETH, Macbeth’s wife

BANQUO, a Scottish thane

FLEANCE, his son

MACDUFF, Thane of Fife