I recently read Macbeth and I looked up its history, and apparently there is such a thing as 'The Curse of Macbeth'. The story is as follows:
Shakespeare, in writing the play, included a lot of details about witchcraftery, and their methods i.e. The excerpt below:
Round around the cauldron go;
In the poison'd entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter'd venum sleeping got.
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot…
The story then goes on to say that, the witches of the day, and the socerors were furious with the plubicising of their deeds, so they cast a curse on the play.
The uncanny thing is, there have been an abnormal amount of incidences for this play in history:
• 1st performance,1606 -- Shakespeare himself was forced to play Lady Macbeth when Hal Berridge, the boy designated to play the lady with a peculiar notion of hospitality, became inexplicably feverish and died. Moreover, the bloody play so displeased King James I that he banned it for five years.
• Amsterdam, 1672 -- the actor playing Macbeth substituted a real dagger for the blunted stage one and with it killed Duncan in full view of the entranced audience.
• London, 1703 -- on the day the production opened, England was hit with one of the most violent storms in its history.
• 1721 – during a performance, a nobleman who was watching the show from the stage decided to get up in the middle of a scene, walk across the stage, and talk to a friend. The actors, upset by this, drew their swords and drove the nobleman and his friends from the theatre. Unfortunately for them, the noblemen returned with the militia and burned the theatre down.
• 1775 -- As Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons was nearly ravaged by a disapproving audience.
• New York’s Astor Place, 1849 -- a riot broke out when a crowd of more than 10,000 New Yorkers gathered to protest the appearance of British actor William Charles Macready, who was engaged in a bitter public feud with an American actor, Edwin Forrest. The protest escalated into a riot, leading the militia to fire into the crowd. Twenty-three people were killed, 36 were wounded, and hundreds were injured.
• April 9, 1865 -- Abraham Lincoln chose to take Macbeth with him on board the River Queen on the Potomac River. The president was reading passages, which happened to follow the scene in which Duncan is assassinated, aloud to a party of friends. Within a week, Lincoln himself was dead by a murderer's hand.
• 1882 -- on the closing night of one production, an actor named J. H. Barnes was engaged in a scene of swordplay with an actor named William Rignold when Barnes accidentally thrust his sword directly into Rignold's chest. Fortunately a doctor was in attendance, but the wound was supposedly rather serious.
• 1926 -- Sybil Thorndike was almost strangled by a burly actor.
• Royal Court Theatre, London, 1928 -- during the first modern-dress production at the, a large set fell down, injuring some members of the cast seriously, and a fire broke out in the dress circle.
There are more here: www.getemreading.com/thecurseofmacbeth.doc
So, my question is, is this document a hoax, or are there any studies or investigations into this that confirms its evidence. Does this then prove that The Curse of Macbeth is true or false?
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