Macbeth - Date and Text

Date and Text

Macbeth cannot be dated precisely, owing to significant evidence of later revisions. As the play appears to celebrate King James's ancestors and the Stuart accession to the throne in 1603 (James believed himself to be descended from Banquo), scholars say that the play is unlikely to have been composed earlier than 1603 and suggest that the parade of eight kings—which the witches show Macbeth in a vision in Act IV—is a compliment to King James. The vast majority of critics think the play was written in 1606 in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot because of possible internal allusions to the 1605 plot and its ensuing trials. In 1605, to commemorate King James’ escape, a medal was struck picturing a serpent hiding among lilies and roses. Shakespeare may allude to the image when Lady Macbeth says to her husband, "Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't" (1.5.74-5). And the Porter's speech (2.3.1–21), in particular, may allude to the trial of the Jesuit Henry Garnet in spring, 1606; "equivocator" (line 8) may refer to Garnet's defence of "equivocation", and "farmer" (4) to one of Garnet's aliases. However, "farmer" is a common word, and "equivocation" was also the subject of a 1583 tract by Queen Elizabeth's chief councillor Lord Burghley, and of the 1584 Doctrine of Equivocation by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta, which was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s.

Scholars also cite an entertainment seen by King James at Oxford in the summer of 1605 that featured three "sibyls" like the weird sisters; Kermode surmises that Shakespeare could have heard about this and alluded to it with the weird sisters. However, A. R. Braunmuller in the New Cambridge edition finds the 1605–6 arguments inconclusive, and argues only for an earliest date of 1603. The play is not considered to have been written any later than 1607, since, as Kermode notes, there are "fairly clear allusions to the play in 1607."

Macbeth was first printed in the First Folio of 1623 and the Folio is the only source for the text. The text that survives had been plainly altered by later hands. Most notable is the inclusion of two songs from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch (1615); Middleton is conjectured to have inserted an extra scene involving the witches and Hecate, for these scenes had proven highly popular with audiences. These revisions, which since the Clarendon edition of 1869 have been assumed to include all of Act III, scene v, and a portion of Act IV, scene I, are often indicated in modern texts. On this basis, many scholars reject all three of the interludes with the goddess Hecate as inauthentic. Even with the Hecate material, the play is conspicuously short, and so the Folio text may derive from a prompt book that had been substantially cut for performance, or an adapter cut the text himself.