1606 Shakespeare probably wrote Macbeth early in 1606. There are allusions in the play to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the trial of the conspirators early the following year – particularly in the play made by the porter in Act II, scene iii on the word ‘equivocation’, not just a facetious comment on the double-dealing and double-speaking going on in the play, but also the theological concept posed by one of the conspirators, the English Jesuit Henry Garnett, as a justified tactic against injustice.
But when and where was it first performed? The earliest documentary account places the play in the Globe Theatre on the South Bank in 1611, with legendary tragedian Henry Burbage in the leading role. But it’s more likely that the play saw first light at Hampton Court on this day, when a number of works were presented by the King’s Men before King James and his brother-in-law, King Christian IV, then visiting from Denmark.
Shakespeare seems to have been keen to flatter both parties, leaving the Danes out of the Scandinavian attack on Scotland at the beginning of the play, playing up to James’s interest in witchcraft, and celebrating the long lineage of Banquo, as shown in the masque presented by the witches in Act IV, scene i, down through eight happy generations, culminating in James himself – the sixth of Scotland, and first of England. Macbeth is horrified:
Another yet! A seventh! I’ll see no more.
And yet the eighth appears, who bears a glass
Which shows me many more; and some I see
That twofold balls and treble sceptres carry:
Horrible sight! Now I see ’tis true;
In this most psychological of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth’s soliloquies have struggled between his conscience and ambition. Now that he realises he has been shut out of history, that gap between desire and act closes down. ‘From this moment’, he says just after the witches depart with their dumb show, ‘The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand’. Everything contracts, shuts down; in this shortest of the tragedies time seems to accelerate almost to an apocalyptic crisis.