“Double, double, toil and trouble…”
Trouble: That is William Shakespeare’s Macbeth with a capital “T”. Since it’s creation in the early 1600s, the play, more specifically, the people involved in the play itself, have been plagued with bad luck, accidents, disasters and on some occasions… death. The play itself is overflowing with deception, witchcraft, murder and betrayal. Spell-casting is followed soon after by sword fights, murderous plots and a slow spiral into madness. For some, just the mere utterance of its name can send the most devoted theater curse dweller, and even the not so devoted, into a panicked frenzy until just the right ritual is performed. Even then one must be wary. And if care is not taken, you just might feel the wicked lash of the curse’s tail yourself.
It is said that Shakespeare first created the play to get in the good graces of King James I. One of the king’s pet projects was demonology and he had recently published a book on how to identify witches. So Shakespeare, thinking he was being quite clever, incorporated three women (witches) into the play and gave them incantations to recite and had them perform black magic rituals in which they dance around a black cauldron casting spells and cooking up potions. True practitioners of the art were not amused by this very public and slanderous exposure of their sacred craft. As punishment, they placed an everlasting curse on the play before it had even been put on.
The first performance was just the beginning. On August 7, 1606, before the show, the boy who was to play Lady Macbeth, Hal Berridge, became feverish and died backstage. Shakespeare himself had to step into the role and it is told that he did a poor job of it. King James was not thrilled with the performance or with the deliberate display of witchcraft, and he banned Macbeth for five years, severely angering Shakespeare who refused to have the name of the play said in his presence for a long time after. Thus, Macbeth’s curse was born and over the years it has left a trail of fear and demise in its wake.
“Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill…”
In 1672, during a production in Amsterdam, the actor who was playing Macbeth substituted a real dagger for the stage prop and killed the actor playing Duncan in full view of the audience. On opening day in London 1703, England was hit with one of the most violent storms ever recorded. During a 1721 performance, a nobleman decided to get up out of the audience and walk across the stage to talk with a friend. Furious, the actors drew their swords and chased the nobleman and his friend from the premises. Unfortunately, the nobleman returned with the militia and they burned the theater to the ground. In 1775, the woman playing Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons, was nearly attacked by an audience disapproving of a woman on stage.
British actor William Charles Macready and American actor Edwin Forrest were putting on competing performances of Macbeth in New York, 1849. Ten thousand New Yorkers gathered to protest Macready’s Macbeth and threw fruit and chairs at him during his performance at the Astor Place Opera House. A riot ensued and the militia was called. They shot into the crowd where more than twenty people were killed and over thirty were wounded. On April 9, 1865, Abraham Lincoln chose to take Macbeth onto the River Queen. While on board, he read passages aloud to a party of his friends, passages that just happened to follow the scene where Duncan was assassinated. Within the week, Lincoln was himself assassinated. And in 1882, on closing night, actor J.H. Barnes was engaged in a swordfight with an actor named William Rignold when Barnes accidentally thrust his sword into Rignold’s chest. The wound was thought to be fairly serious.
The curse raged on during the twentieth century. In 1926, Sybil Thorndike, who was playing Lady Macbeth, was nearly strangled by a fellow actor. Two years later, during the first modern-dress production at the Royal Court Theatre in London, a large set collapsed, injuring a few of the cast members…and a fire broke out in the dress circle. Lillian Boylis took on the role of Lady Macbeth in the early thirties but died the day of final dress rehearsal. A portrait of her was hung in the theater and during opening night of the production, the portrait fell from the wall.
While onstage during a performance in 1934, actor Malcolm Keen became mute and his replacement, Alistair Sim, like Hal Berridge before him, became feverish backstage and had to be hospitalized. Three years later, Laurence Olivier, playing Macbeth, was rehearsing onstage when a heavy counterweight crashed only inches away from him. During that same show, the director and the actress playing Lady Macduff, were involved in a car accident on the way to the theater. The proprietor of that theater died of a heart attack during final dress rehearsal.
In 1942, a show starring John Gielgud had three actors die (Duncan and two of the witches). The set designer of that show committed suicide. During a performance at the Coliseum Theatre in Oldham in 1947, actor Harold Norman was stabbed during the final swordfight and succumbed to his wounds. It is said that his ghost haunts the theater to this day. Just a year later, the woman playing Lady Macbeth at Stratford, Diana Wynard, chose to play the sleepwalking scene with her eyes closed and walked right off the stage and fell fifteen feet. In the grand tradition of “the show must go on”, she got back up on stage and finished the show.
Charlton Heston starred in an open-air production in Bermuda in 1953. On opening night, when the soldiers storming Macbeth’s castle were to burn it to the ground onstage, a gust of wind came up and blew smoke and flames into the audience. Heston suffered severe burns to his groin and legs because his tights had been accidentally soaked in kerosene. Two years after, Olivier was once again starring in Macbeth, this time in Stratford and during the final fight with Macduff, nearly blinded his fellow actor. That same year, during a production in St. Paul, Minnesota, the actor playing Macbeth suffered a heart attack and died during the first scene of Act III.
Rip Torn’s production in 1970 was hindered by an actors’ strike. David Leary’s run in 1971 had two fires and seven robberies. Later that year, Roman Polanski made a film version of Macbeth during which a camera operator was almost killed by an accident occurring on the very first day of shooting. The Broadway production starring Glenda Jackson and Christopher Plummer in 1988 went through three directors, five Macduffs, six cast changes, six stage managers, two set designers, two lighting designers, twenty-six cases of the flu, torn ligaments and groin injuries. During an Off-Broadway production, Alec Baldwin, playing Macbeth, somehow sliced open the hand of his Macduff in 1998.
And finally, in 2001, during a production by the Cambridge Shakespeare Company, Macduff injured his back, Lady Macbeth hit her head, Ross broke a toe, and two cedar trees from Burnham Wood toppled over destroying the set.
These are by no means the only stories. Many more have their own personal reasons that Macbeth is hexed. I myself have had several occurrences having seen it performed several times and been a part of the production a few times as well. While watching the show, I have seen actors fall off the stage, fall off the stairs or the set, lose their voice, trip, drop furniture and break props. And that was just what I saw on-stage. Who knows what was going on back stage.
One of the extras in Santa Rita High School’s production of Macbeth was helping carry a heavy table off the stage, (I was holding the curtain), and had his hand slammed into the stair railing, breaking his thumb and forefinger. My younger brother, who was playing Macduff’s son, fell off the set a few times, luckily gaining nothing more than bruises. The student playing Lady Macduff suffered a sprained ankle during a rehearsal and was almost replaced. I was learning stage combat from an actor in the play during lunch break and I slipped and slammed my head onto the stage floor, knocking myself unconscious for a few moments but left with nothing more than a mild concussion.
There are many ways to cleanse yourself or the theater of this curse, mainly after someone has said Macbeth, or has directly quoted from the play when the production was not being put on. Each theater is different, but runs along similar lines. You must leave the theater and turn in a circle, clockwise, three times or circle the building three times clockwise; spit over your left shoulder; say the foulest curse word you can think of; then knock on the stage door three times and ask for permission to reenter. A quick solution if you can’t do any of these things is to say one of the following three times, thereby asking Shakespeare himself for help:
“Thrice around the circle bound, evil sink into the ground.”
The most known quote is from Hamlet:
“Angels and Ministers of Grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d…”
If you don’t do something to remedy the curse, you forget, or refuse, you could be banished from the theater until you do, depending on how superstitious your director and fellow cast mates are. A theater in and of itself has its own curses and hauntings already from years of performances. Adding the Macbeth curse to the picture is just asking for bad luck and evil doings to strike. Do you want to be the one who caused disaster?
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty face from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Dare to Dream
