Timeline for What does Lady Macbeth mean by "what thou art promised"?
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10 events
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| Oct 19 at 21:14 | comment | added | Gareth Rees | The First Folio edition (1623) of Macbeth begins, "Thunder and lightning. Enter three witches". So the use of "witch" for the weird sisters is not a case of "modern tampering". | |
| May 6, 2020 at 12:00 | comment | added | Ed999 | If you examine the text of Macbeth, one thing you'll notice is the amount of modern tampering it has undergone. Even the 1916 Oxford Collected works, edited by Craig, includes editorial revisions which show the bias: he names all the weird sisters as "witches" -- First witch, Second witch, etc -- even though the dialogue (the only portion of the text which genuinely can be ascribed to Shakespeare) does not call them this. The characters do not call themselves thus! In Act 1 scene III, at line 32, you'll notice how they only call themselves the weird sisters. | |
| May 6, 2020 at 11:52 | comment | added | Ed999 | I'm writing from England: I took A-level English lit, some years ago, and we studied various Shakespearean texts on the course. So that's where these notions come from. The idea that Middleton had revised 'Macbeth' after Shakespeare's death was much in vogue at the time. Middleton's play, written in 1616, was first performed concurrently with Shakespeare's death that same year, and this was 7 years before the 1st Folio printing in 1623 (which is the only printed source for this play). 'Macbeth' enjoyed some popularity (with us, as students!) because it is so short. | |
| Apr 27, 2020 at 9:16 | comment | added | Malted_Wheaties | This is a really great answer! It is interesting to realise that the play might not completely how Shakespeare originally envisioned it to be. I had the idea in my head that the witches were included because at the time the play was being performed the idea of witchcraft was prominent in society and there was a spate of killing related to people being accused. This would have made the audience genuinely fearful. Even if the Weird Sisters were not expressly referred to as witches, wouldn't the audience have made the connection themselves? | |
| Apr 26, 2020 at 7:42 | comment | added | Gareth Rees | Where are you getting this theory from? I think you might have misremembered. There is a theory that the Hecate scene (III.5) and the cauldron spell (opening of IV.1) were added at some point prior to the 1623 First Folio, based on similar scenes in Middleton's 1616 The Witch. But the first scene with the witches (I.3) comes straight out of Shakespeare's source (Holinshed's Chronicles) and no one thinks this is an interpolation. | |
| Apr 26, 2020 at 5:50 | comment | added | Rand al'Thor♦ | Interesting, I didn't know that. By the way there's another question on this site specifically about the witches in Macbeth, and a lot of this info could fit well in an answer over there too. | |
| Apr 26, 2020 at 0:11 | history | edited | Ed999 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 26, 2020 at 0:00 | history | edited | Ed999 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 25, 2020 at 23:49 | review | First posts | |||
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| Apr 25, 2020 at 23:43 | history | answered | Ed999 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |