October 11, 2010 • 20 mins
Some actors believe it's bad luck to say 'Macbeth' in the theater unless the play is being performed -- but why? In this episode, Katie and Sarah explore the origins of the Macbeth curse and the life of the historical Macbeth. (And, an important note: The error regarding "Our American Cousin" and Abraham Lincoln has already been corrected in the episode He Was Killed By Mesmerism.)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Dowdy, and today we're
revealing a few personal stories because we're talking about plays
(00:21):
and we have both been in plays. Um Mostly I
just liked reading aloud in class, but occasionally I would
get brave enough to be in one, and my shining
moment was as Katie the Cook and Meet Me in St.
Louis in middle school, in which I danced I Think
Maybe and sang in an apron Katie the Cook that
named after you. I'm hoping they didn't pick me just
(00:43):
because of my name and more because they thought I
was incredibly talented. But I was also in some sort
of chorus in Oklahoma, and as a kindergartener in Mary Poppins,
where I got to wear pink Jammy's and my mom
put lipstick on me, which was a huge deal, definitely.
But I am most well known in my family for
a preschool performance in which I got on stage with
(01:06):
the rest of my class and then went and sat
down on the edge of it with my head in
my hands and refused to saying we have photo evidence
of my grumpy, little little three year old things. Do
you have a history on the stage, Um, yeah, I
guess I've been in a few plays. I probably my
biggest one came in elementary school. My class wrote a
(01:26):
play called The Power Plan about power struggles on the playground,
and uh, I was the class president in the play,
I had a solo. I had to stand on the
stage all by myself and saying in front of the audience.
It was all pretty scary, but kind of awesome too.
Not gonna lie, Um, I guess. Let's see. In high
(01:46):
school I was in Fumed Oak. That was a very
violent play. So that was exciting. How are struggles and
violence the Inner world of Sarah Dowdy? Yeah, Probably the
best part in that was there was supposed to be
a violent conference tation about more ham for dinner. We
were a little lax on our props, and so we
didn't bring a ham in. We brought a bag of
(02:07):
potato chips and I was playing the wife, and so
at one point the guy who's playing my husband said
more potato chips for dinner and throws some on the floor.
I prefer the hands. That's a legitimate complaint. I would
say your star, you're on top. Somebody bring you some hams.
You might say in dirty rock. But this is actually
leading up to a point. Believe us or not. Um.
(02:29):
You know how you're never supposed to say good luck
in a theater, you say break a leg or something,
and definitely in belly dance we do the same thing.
We say break a hip or Sarah says break a snake.
But there are more theatrical superstitions than that, and one
is that you never say Macbeth in the theater unless
you're performing. Yeah, call it the Scottish play. And that
(02:51):
is because there's some scary stuff attached to it. This
is a Halloween episode, so you can guess where it's headed.
Suppose said Lee, there is a Macbeth curse. So to
start it off, let's give you a little recap of
the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth. It is a bloody tragedy.
It starts off with three weird sisters who tell Macbeth,
(03:13):
a relative of the King Duncan, that he himself will
be king. They also tell another general, Banqueo, that his
sons and descendants will be kings, but he himself never
will be so Macbeth's wife, Lady Macbeth, vows to help
him achieve this goal of ruling the kingdom by convincing
him to kill King Duncan, his relative. And this is
(03:36):
only the first of many murders in the play. Um
Macbeth is behind the murder of guards, the Thane of
Fife's mcduff's family and everyone in his castle. Lady Macbeth
commits suicide. She's unable to wash the blood from her hands,
and Macbeth is haunted by the ghost of Banquo, and
the play ends with a battle in which McDuff kills
(03:57):
Macbeth and Duncan's son Malcolm has the throne. This is
worse than Lizzie Borden, classic Shakespeare tragedy, everybody dead on
the stage at the end of the play. But there
was in fact a real Macbeth. Yeah. So Macbeth was
an aristocrat in eleventh century Scotland, and during this time
there wasn't primagenitor like we think of most rulers today.
(04:21):
You know, your your son becomes king or some relative
descendant becomes king after you die. There wasn't any firstborn inheriting. Instead,
kings would pick their successors, and so you can imagine
that would lead to a lot of strife because it's
not just the kid you ended up with, it's the
rest of the nobleman too. Yeah. So Macbeth's father was
(04:43):
killed by Macbeth's cousins who wanted his throne. Later in life,
Macbeth revenged his father by killing them and married one
of their widows. Grew up the real life Lady Macbeth.
And we're not sure that name is is going to
make a comeback as a baby name. So we're reques
saying that a listener could perhaps name a pet after
(05:03):
grew up, you know, like grew k Lambert. You know,
I don't really think that's gonna work. Perhaps if I
take my imaginary future husband's last name, we can reconsider it.
But Macbeth had a title, though it wasn't the thing
of Glamis, and the King, Malcolm the Second, who is
king at the time of Macbeth, decided to institute this
(05:24):
rule of primogeniture and ended up choosing his nephew Duncan,
and the nobles were angered, as Scottish nobles always are
in every single podcast we have ever done well and
and part of this is you know, maybe personal, why
didn't you pick me? But also Duncan just isn't much
of a ruler. He's not very good in battle. He
(05:44):
doesn't seem like he should be king. And so Macbeth
killed Duncan in battle, and we should note that this
is not a battle against each other, perhaps a friendly
fire sort of situation. Yeah, and then Macbeth in turn
is eventually killed by Duncan's son, who is also named
Malcolm Um. But Macbeth didn't have a bad reputation. I mean,
(06:05):
this seems like your average average stuff back then, just
killing the king kind of semi honorably, maybe not so much,
nothing terrible. So where did the bad rep come from? Well,
Shakespeare's Macbeth was written sometime in the early sixteen hundreds,
which is a good five hundred years after Macbeth's life,
(06:26):
And of course history loves embellishment over the ages, and
Shakespeare used Raphael Holland Sheds Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland,
which was published in fifteen seventies seven, as background information.
But you know, he never planned for it to be
historically accurate. The play. He wanted to build on that. Yeah,
it's a historical drama, not an actual account. So Holland
(06:49):
shed had, of course built on some earlier versions of
the story, and through the centuries we had all these
little bits added in, like the imaginary banquet and this evil,
scary Lady Macbeth, and those were added in the fourteen
hundreds and the early hundreds, So getting a little closer
to the story we know today, poor grew up And yeah,
(07:11):
there was no real life counterpart for Banquo, And that's
a little bit of a big deal because if you
remember how the witches in the play promise him this
line of kings, he was supposedly um the start of
the Steward line, and I think of who's king when
Shakespeare's putting on this play, well exactly, and that may
be part of the reason that he's turned into such
(07:33):
an innocent character in Shakespeare's play, which he wasn't in
earlier versions, trying to impress the James Laster King good. So,
according to the legend, the very first performance of the
play Macbeth in sixteen o six had the actor playing
Lady Macbeth, who was a boy falling ill and dying
(07:55):
right before the start of a mysterious fever, and perhaps
Shakespeare took over the role for him and was really
terrible in it and therefore didn't want to hear the
play's name again. I mean, if you're awful you walk
on stage, is like, don't say the name to me.
Embarrassing performance. Um. There's another theory, though, and that's that
the witches incantations were real, and they were real chance
(08:19):
that Shakespeare lifted, and so they cursed the play forever more.
But why would Shakespeare have done something like that? King
James had authored a book on demonology, which is one
of his chief interests, and as we mentioned, of course
William Shakespeare wanted his favor. But the story goes that
James hated the play and possibly banned it from being performed.
(08:41):
So that brings us to the stories of the curse.
And we have to preface this by saying we're not
saying that any of these stories are true, because only
a few of them can be corroborated. We'll try to
point out some of the ones that can be that
we think are true. Yes, Um, but these are the
stories that so many of you sent us, and the
ones that you'll see most frequently mentioned about the curse.
(09:03):
So remember these are not all real. We're just telling
you what people say. This is a podcast about the
curse exactly. So here goes the hearsay. All right, we're
going to start in the seventeenth century. In one performance,
the actor playing Macbeth supposedly used a real knife instead
of a stage prop and killed the actor playing Duncan
(09:23):
in front of a live audience. During the eighteenth century,
at the opening day of a performance in London. It
also marked the day of one of the worst storms
ever to hit the city. All right, This next one
is one of my favorites. In another performance, we have
an aristocrat walking across the stage. We should mention that
(09:43):
sometimes the very best people would get to sit on
the side of the stage, So he just walks across
the stage in the middle of the play to be
answering your cell phones. It's probably worse than that, but
going to talk to his friend. The actors got very
angry and ran him out, so he came back with
a posse of friends and burned the whole place down.
(10:05):
In seventeen seventy five, famed British actress Sarah Siddons, who
was most famous for her portrayal of the Lady Macbeth
was almost attacked by an audience member, So such as
the power of theater. Moving on to the nineteenth century,
this is a pretty good one too. This one's my
very favorite. Can I steal this home from? Okay, So
we're in the mid eighteen hundreds and there are two
(10:27):
actors who hate each other. One is English William McCready
and one is American Edwin Forrest. And Forest is said
to have started this whole feud by being a very
rude audience member at a McCready performance in London. So
they both stage different productions of Macbeth at the same
time in New York City, and supporters of Forest through
(10:50):
stuff at McCready while he was on stage in his performance,
which I mean it sounds like a cartoon, like throwing
tomatoes at someone. So then there was a riot known
as the astor placed right it, and the militia came
and shot just at the crowd. More than twenty people
died and anywhere between thirty and a hundred people were injured.
It depends on what you're reading, which is absolutely insane. Well,
(11:13):
maybe double the productions, double the curse too. So moving
on to a very famous incident involving the curse. One
week in eighteen sixty five, President Abraham Lincoln was reading
from his favorite play, reading his favorite passage about Duncan's assassination.
The next week he was assassinated. Guess what play he
(11:36):
was at Macbeth. And in another incident in the nineteenth century,
an actor accidentally seriously injured another one with a sword.
And in the nineteen twenties, Lionel Barrymore's performance as Macbeth
was reviewed so scathingly that he never got on a
Broadway stage again. So we're ruining careers now as well
(11:58):
as accidentally or purposely adding people. Yeah, we have a
few more of those stage accidents though. The British actress
Sybil Thorndyke was almost strangled by an actor, which it
seems like it would be hard to do, accidentally almost
strangle someone. Maybe not accident, it's just a really good actress.
And then at a London staging a set collapsed and
(12:19):
hit the cast, and there was also a fire. In
the nineteen thirties, one actress playing Lady Macbeth died right
before the last dress rehearsal, and supposedly during a nineteen
thirty four production, an actor went mute on stage and
the guy who took over for him got a fever
and went to the hospital. Or depending on which story
(12:40):
you read, the one actor went mute from a fever
and had to be hospitalized. Again, there's you know, depending
on what you're in the purse rumors all right. In
nineteen thirty six, or Sinwells put on an all black
production in Harlem, and there was a Haitian witch who
(13:00):
had a role in the play, and when one of
the critics panned the production, he and the drummers, he
being the witch, the witch doctor and some of the
drummers in the play cursed the critic, like really cursed him,
and he died of pneumonia. So oh. Also in the
nineteen thirties, Lawrence Olivier was almost crushed by a stage
(13:24):
weight and in a car accident on separate occasions, and
the proprietor of the theater had a fatal heart attack
on opening night and her dog died on the same day,
Or again depending on what you read, the proprietor died
during a dress rehearsal, and it was an actress who
was in the car accident. Then in the nineteen forties,
there was a very unlucky staging in nineteen forty two
(13:45):
when two of the witches and Duncan died and the
set designer killed himself, and this is a this is
a likely one. In nineteen forty seven in England, one
Mcabeth Harold Norman was accidentally stabbed with the sword during
the end fight scene and died. And the kicker is
that right before he said he didn't believe in the
curse and his ghost haunts the theater. And then this
(14:08):
is a pretty good one. To one. Actress Diana Wynyard
walked off the stage while sleepwalking as Lady Macbeth in
n I mean she wasn't just squinting her eyes kind
of fake closing them. She had them shut and walked
off the stage right into the orchestra pit, which was
like a fifteen foot drop or something. She must have
(14:31):
not been too cursed though, because she got right up
from the fall. The show must go on. Sarah. In
the nineteen fifties, during a Bermuda staging, supposedly during an
attack scene, these flames were blown into the audience near
the castle attack and Charlton Heston who's playing Macbeth, was
severely burned, and Olivier in another production almost blinded another actress.
(14:54):
So we're thinking, I'm thinking like maybe that was his
last taking new role. Um the sixties skipped the curse
skips the sixties, so they were busy. And then in
the nineteen seventies there's an actor's strike and fires and
multiple robberies. In Planski's ninety one film, a camera operator
(15:16):
was almost killed. And then finally we get to the
nineteen eighties where in nine and one production there were
twenty six cases of flu, lots of injuries, lots of directors,
lots of actors, and lots of stage managers. That doesn't
sound like occurs so much to me. It's just a bad,
prescarably run production. Yes, but we've got some possible explanations
(15:38):
of course for this. Yeah, for this high rate of
accidents and trouble with Macbeth. One thing, there are a
lot of fight scenes and that equals a lot of
chances for injury. You noticed most of what we read
here is uh, people getting stabbed accidentally or walking off
the stage accidentally being injured in something action path act
(16:00):
and dramatic. And there are lots of dark scenes, of course,
and this is also a popular play, and it's a
short play, so it's been considered a good choice for
failing companies to put on. And then, of course it's
not the place fault that a company fails. It already was.
The play just perhaps sounded the death knell. But still
that ties into the whole curse thing, and all plays
(16:22):
have things go wrong. We just concentrate on Macbeth because
supposedly there is a curse, and since it is such
an old play, we've got centuries and centuries of time
for all of these things to happen. I mean, perhaps
we'll have a new one for Ibsen, say in in
a few centuries. But it's confirmation bias because you start
(16:43):
looking for all the things that back up your belief
instead of paying any attention to all the things that don't.
And you know, surely there's another terrible storm that's taken
place at the at the beginning of a production, or
an actor dies during a play. Those things aren't entirely unusual. Yeah,
in college, I actually did a project on theaters in
(17:04):
nineteenth century London, and I mean the accidents were insane.
If if you go back and look at the London
Times archives. There's just every terrible thing that could possibly
happen to you would happen during these stage productions like
fancy ones too, terrible falls and knife fights and swords
and falling through the trapdoor. Yeah. So I'm going to
(17:27):
go ahead and say that I don't think that there's
a Ma Bath curse, Sarah, But I'm not going to
say that because you don't want to harold Normana. Yeah,
the guy who says he doesn't believe in the curse.
I mean, I don't know if this curse extends to podcasts,
but I don't I don't want to be too bold
about it. We're more in a studio than a theater,
so I'm I mean, notice our list of curses stops
(17:49):
in nine. We don't know what's been going on for
the past twenty years, and if maybe the curse has
jumped to new media, is it a time for revival hubs?
Certainly mont. We do have some tips though, if you
happen to say the play's name in a theater, and
we might do it now that we're done in this
podcast in case, the tradition is that if you say Macbeth,
(18:11):
in a theater, you leave the room, you spend three
times over your right shoulder, you spit, and then you
knock on the door and ask to come back in.
So if there are any theater people listening who have
a Macbeth tale to tell, please email us at History
Podcast at how stuff works dot com. And that brings
(18:31):
us to our listener mail for today. Brian from Brooklyn
sent us what's supposed to be a concert poster with
copies for both of us to hang in our cubes.
But it says s Y MHC Presents and these are
all bands and they're all things that were brought from
our podcast, so it's it's not obscene. For the first one,
(18:55):
um the penis Thieves, Moda Harri and the Sinister salam
As the murdered Meta Cheese with a special appearance by
King Ludvig. The second at the lamber Dowdy Amphitheater. It's
ten dollars and no Darnley's will be allowed to enter,
strictly enforced, and it would be strictly enforced if I
had my way. So again, you can email us at
(19:18):
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We've also
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(19:42):
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out the stuff you missed in the History Glass blog
on the how stuff Works dot com home page. Wh
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Dowdy, and today we're
revealing a few personal stories because we're talking about plays
(00:21):
and we have both been in plays. Um Mostly I
just liked reading aloud in class, but occasionally I would
get brave enough to be in one, and my shining
moment was as Katie the Cook and Meet Me in St.
Louis in middle school, in which I danced I Think
Maybe and sang in an apron Katie the Cook that
named after you. I'm hoping they didn't pick me just
(00:43):
because of my name and more because they thought I
was incredibly talented. But I was also in some sort
of chorus in Oklahoma, and as a kindergartener in Mary Poppins,
where I got to wear pink Jammy's and my mom
put lipstick on me, which was a huge deal, definitely.
But I am most well known in my family for
a preschool performance in which I got on stage with
(01:06):
the rest of my class and then went and sat
down on the edge of it with my head in
my hands and refused to saying we have photo evidence
of my grumpy, little little three year old things. Do
you have a history on the stage, Um, yeah, I
guess I've been in a few plays. I probably my
biggest one came in elementary school. My class wrote a
(01:26):
play called The Power Plan about power struggles on the playground,
and uh, I was the class president in the play,
I had a solo. I had to stand on the
stage all by myself and saying in front of the audience.
It was all pretty scary, but kind of awesome too.
Not gonna lie, Um, I guess. Let's see. In high
(01:46):
school I was in Fumed Oak. That was a very
violent play. So that was exciting. How are struggles and
violence the Inner world of Sarah Dowdy? Yeah, Probably the
best part in that was there was supposed to be
a violent conference tation about more ham for dinner. We
were a little lax on our props, and so we
didn't bring a ham in. We brought a bag of
(02:07):
potato chips and I was playing the wife, and so
at one point the guy who's playing my husband said
more potato chips for dinner and throws some on the floor.
I prefer the hands. That's a legitimate complaint. I would
say your star, you're on top. Somebody bring you some hams.
You might say in dirty rock. But this is actually
leading up to a point. Believe us or not. Um.
(02:29):
You know how you're never supposed to say good luck
in a theater, you say break a leg or something,
and definitely in belly dance we do the same thing.
We say break a hip or Sarah says break a snake.
But there are more theatrical superstitions than that, and one
is that you never say Macbeth in the theater unless
you're performing. Yeah, call it the Scottish play. And that
(02:51):
is because there's some scary stuff attached to it. This
is a Halloween episode, so you can guess where it's headed.
Suppose said Lee, there is a Macbeth curse. So to
start it off, let's give you a little recap of
the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth. It is a bloody tragedy.
It starts off with three weird sisters who tell Macbeth,
(03:13):
a relative of the King Duncan, that he himself will
be king. They also tell another general, Banqueo, that his
sons and descendants will be kings, but he himself never
will be so Macbeth's wife, Lady Macbeth, vows to help
him achieve this goal of ruling the kingdom by convincing
him to kill King Duncan, his relative. And this is
(03:36):
only the first of many murders in the play. Um
Macbeth is behind the murder of guards, the Thane of
Fife's mcduff's family and everyone in his castle. Lady Macbeth
commits suicide. She's unable to wash the blood from her hands,
and Macbeth is haunted by the ghost of Banquo, and
the play ends with a battle in which McDuff kills
(03:57):
Macbeth and Duncan's son Malcolm has the throne. This is
worse than Lizzie Borden, classic Shakespeare tragedy, everybody dead on
the stage at the end of the play. But there
was in fact a real Macbeth. Yeah. So Macbeth was
an aristocrat in eleventh century Scotland, and during this time
there wasn't primagenitor like we think of most rulers today.
(04:21):
You know, your your son becomes king or some relative
descendant becomes king after you die. There wasn't any firstborn inheriting. Instead,
kings would pick their successors, and so you can imagine
that would lead to a lot of strife because it's
not just the kid you ended up with, it's the
rest of the nobleman too. Yeah. So Macbeth's father was
(04:43):
killed by Macbeth's cousins who wanted his throne. Later in life,
Macbeth revenged his father by killing them and married one
of their widows. Grew up the real life Lady Macbeth.
And we're not sure that name is is going to
make a comeback as a baby name. So we're reques
saying that a listener could perhaps name a pet after
(05:03):
grew up, you know, like grew k Lambert. You know,
I don't really think that's gonna work. Perhaps if I
take my imaginary future husband's last name, we can reconsider it.
But Macbeth had a title, though it wasn't the thing
of Glamis, and the King, Malcolm the Second, who is
king at the time of Macbeth, decided to institute this
(05:24):
rule of primogeniture and ended up choosing his nephew Duncan,
and the nobles were angered, as Scottish nobles always are
in every single podcast we have ever done well and
and part of this is you know, maybe personal, why
didn't you pick me? But also Duncan just isn't much
of a ruler. He's not very good in battle. He
(05:44):
doesn't seem like he should be king. And so Macbeth
killed Duncan in battle, and we should note that this
is not a battle against each other, perhaps a friendly
fire sort of situation. Yeah, and then Macbeth in turn
is eventually killed by Duncan's son, who is also named
Malcolm Um. But Macbeth didn't have a bad reputation. I mean,
(06:05):
this seems like your average average stuff back then, just
killing the king kind of semi honorably, maybe not so much,
nothing terrible. So where did the bad rep come from? Well,
Shakespeare's Macbeth was written sometime in the early sixteen hundreds,
which is a good five hundred years after Macbeth's life,
(06:26):
And of course history loves embellishment over the ages, and
Shakespeare used Raphael Holland Sheds Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland,
which was published in fifteen seventies seven, as background information.
But you know, he never planned for it to be
historically accurate. The play. He wanted to build on that. Yeah,
it's a historical drama, not an actual account. So Holland
(06:49):
shed had, of course built on some earlier versions of
the story, and through the centuries we had all these
little bits added in, like the imaginary banquet and this evil,
scary Lady Macbeth, and those were added in the fourteen
hundreds and the early hundreds, So getting a little closer
to the story we know today, poor grew up And yeah,
(07:11):
there was no real life counterpart for Banquo, And that's
a little bit of a big deal because if you
remember how the witches in the play promise him this
line of kings, he was supposedly um the start of
the Steward line, and I think of who's king when
Shakespeare's putting on this play, well exactly, and that may
be part of the reason that he's turned into such
(07:33):
an innocent character in Shakespeare's play, which he wasn't in
earlier versions, trying to impress the James Laster King good. So,
according to the legend, the very first performance of the
play Macbeth in sixteen o six had the actor playing
Lady Macbeth, who was a boy falling ill and dying
(07:55):
right before the start of a mysterious fever, and perhaps
Shakespeare took over the role for him and was really
terrible in it and therefore didn't want to hear the
play's name again. I mean, if you're awful you walk
on stage, is like, don't say the name to me.
Embarrassing performance. Um. There's another theory, though, and that's that
the witches incantations were real, and they were real chance
(08:19):
that Shakespeare lifted, and so they cursed the play forever more.
But why would Shakespeare have done something like that? King
James had authored a book on demonology, which is one
of his chief interests, and as we mentioned, of course
William Shakespeare wanted his favor. But the story goes that
James hated the play and possibly banned it from being performed.
(08:41):
So that brings us to the stories of the curse.
And we have to preface this by saying we're not
saying that any of these stories are true, because only
a few of them can be corroborated. We'll try to
point out some of the ones that can be that
we think are true. Yes, Um, but these are the
stories that so many of you sent us, and the
ones that you'll see most frequently mentioned about the curse.
(09:03):
So remember these are not all real. We're just telling
you what people say. This is a podcast about the
curse exactly. So here goes the hearsay. All right, we're
going to start in the seventeenth century. In one performance,
the actor playing Macbeth supposedly used a real knife instead
of a stage prop and killed the actor playing Duncan
(09:23):
in front of a live audience. During the eighteenth century,
at the opening day of a performance in London. It
also marked the day of one of the worst storms
ever to hit the city. All right, This next one
is one of my favorites. In another performance, we have
an aristocrat walking across the stage. We should mention that
(09:43):
sometimes the very best people would get to sit on
the side of the stage, So he just walks across
the stage in the middle of the play to be
answering your cell phones. It's probably worse than that, but
going to talk to his friend. The actors got very
angry and ran him out, so he came back with
a posse of friends and burned the whole place down.
(10:05):
In seventeen seventy five, famed British actress Sarah Siddons, who
was most famous for her portrayal of the Lady Macbeth
was almost attacked by an audience member, So such as
the power of theater. Moving on to the nineteenth century,
this is a pretty good one too. This one's my
very favorite. Can I steal this home from? Okay, So
we're in the mid eighteen hundreds and there are two
(10:27):
actors who hate each other. One is English William McCready
and one is American Edwin Forrest. And Forest is said
to have started this whole feud by being a very
rude audience member at a McCready performance in London. So
they both stage different productions of Macbeth at the same
time in New York City, and supporters of Forest through
(10:50):
stuff at McCready while he was on stage in his performance,
which I mean it sounds like a cartoon, like throwing
tomatoes at someone. So then there was a riot known
as the astor placed right it, and the militia came
and shot just at the crowd. More than twenty people
died and anywhere between thirty and a hundred people were injured.
It depends on what you're reading, which is absolutely insane. Well,
(11:13):
maybe double the productions, double the curse too. So moving
on to a very famous incident involving the curse. One
week in eighteen sixty five, President Abraham Lincoln was reading
from his favorite play, reading his favorite passage about Duncan's assassination.
The next week he was assassinated. Guess what play he
(11:36):
was at Macbeth. And in another incident in the nineteenth century,
an actor accidentally seriously injured another one with a sword.
And in the nineteen twenties, Lionel Barrymore's performance as Macbeth
was reviewed so scathingly that he never got on a
Broadway stage again. So we're ruining careers now as well
(11:58):
as accidentally or purposely adding people. Yeah, we have a
few more of those stage accidents though. The British actress
Sybil Thorndyke was almost strangled by an actor, which it
seems like it would be hard to do, accidentally almost
strangle someone. Maybe not accident, it's just a really good actress.
And then at a London staging a set collapsed and
(12:19):
hit the cast, and there was also a fire. In
the nineteen thirties, one actress playing Lady Macbeth died right
before the last dress rehearsal, and supposedly during a nineteen
thirty four production, an actor went mute on stage and
the guy who took over for him got a fever
and went to the hospital. Or depending on which story
(12:40):
you read, the one actor went mute from a fever
and had to be hospitalized. Again, there's you know, depending
on what you're in the purse rumors all right. In
nineteen thirty six, or Sinwells put on an all black
production in Harlem, and there was a Haitian witch who
(13:00):
had a role in the play, and when one of
the critics panned the production, he and the drummers, he
being the witch, the witch doctor and some of the
drummers in the play cursed the critic, like really cursed him,
and he died of pneumonia. So oh. Also in the
nineteen thirties, Lawrence Olivier was almost crushed by a stage
(13:24):
weight and in a car accident on separate occasions, and
the proprietor of the theater had a fatal heart attack
on opening night and her dog died on the same day,
Or again depending on what you read, the proprietor died
during a dress rehearsal, and it was an actress who
was in the car accident. Then in the nineteen forties,
there was a very unlucky staging in nineteen forty two
(13:45):
when two of the witches and Duncan died and the
set designer killed himself, and this is a this is
a likely one. In nineteen forty seven in England, one
Mcabeth Harold Norman was accidentally stabbed with the sword during
the end fight scene and died. And the kicker is
that right before he said he didn't believe in the
curse and his ghost haunts the theater. And then this
(14:08):
is a pretty good one. To one. Actress Diana Wynyard
walked off the stage while sleepwalking as Lady Macbeth in
n I mean she wasn't just squinting her eyes kind
of fake closing them. She had them shut and walked
off the stage right into the orchestra pit, which was
like a fifteen foot drop or something. She must have
(14:31):
not been too cursed though, because she got right up
from the fall. The show must go on. Sarah. In
the nineteen fifties, during a Bermuda staging, supposedly during an
attack scene, these flames were blown into the audience near
the castle attack and Charlton Heston who's playing Macbeth, was
severely burned, and Olivier in another production almost blinded another actress.
(14:54):
So we're thinking, I'm thinking like maybe that was his
last taking new role. Um the sixties skipped the curse
skips the sixties, so they were busy. And then in
the nineteen seventies there's an actor's strike and fires and
multiple robberies. In Planski's ninety one film, a camera operator
(15:16):
was almost killed. And then finally we get to the
nineteen eighties where in nine and one production there were
twenty six cases of flu, lots of injuries, lots of directors,
lots of actors, and lots of stage managers. That doesn't
sound like occurs so much to me. It's just a bad,
prescarably run production. Yes, but we've got some possible explanations
(15:38):
of course for this. Yeah, for this high rate of
accidents and trouble with Macbeth. One thing, there are a
lot of fight scenes and that equals a lot of
chances for injury. You noticed most of what we read
here is uh, people getting stabbed accidentally or walking off
the stage accidentally being injured in something action path act
(16:00):
and dramatic. And there are lots of dark scenes, of course,
and this is also a popular play, and it's a
short play, so it's been considered a good choice for
failing companies to put on. And then, of course it's
not the place fault that a company fails. It already was.
The play just perhaps sounded the death knell. But still
that ties into the whole curse thing, and all plays
(16:22):
have things go wrong. We just concentrate on Macbeth because
supposedly there is a curse, and since it is such
an old play, we've got centuries and centuries of time
for all of these things to happen. I mean, perhaps
we'll have a new one for Ibsen, say in in
a few centuries. But it's confirmation bias because you start
(16:43):
looking for all the things that back up your belief
instead of paying any attention to all the things that don't.
And you know, surely there's another terrible storm that's taken
place at the at the beginning of a production, or
an actor dies during a play. Those things aren't entirely unusual. Yeah,
in college, I actually did a project on theaters in
(17:04):
nineteenth century London, and I mean the accidents were insane.
If if you go back and look at the London
Times archives. There's just every terrible thing that could possibly
happen to you would happen during these stage productions like
fancy ones too, terrible falls and knife fights and swords
and falling through the trapdoor. Yeah. So I'm going to
(17:27):
go ahead and say that I don't think that there's
a Ma Bath curse, Sarah, But I'm not going to
say that because you don't want to harold Normana. Yeah,
the guy who says he doesn't believe in the curse.
I mean, I don't know if this curse extends to podcasts,
but I don't I don't want to be too bold
about it. We're more in a studio than a theater,
so I'm I mean, notice our list of curses stops
(17:49):
in nine. We don't know what's been going on for
the past twenty years, and if maybe the curse has
jumped to new media, is it a time for revival hubs?
Certainly mont. We do have some tips though, if you
happen to say the play's name in a theater, and
we might do it now that we're done in this
podcast in case, the tradition is that if you say Macbeth,
(18:11):
in a theater, you leave the room, you spend three
times over your right shoulder, you spit, and then you
knock on the door and ask to come back in.
So if there are any theater people listening who have
a Macbeth tale to tell, please email us at History
Podcast at how stuff works dot com. And that brings
(18:31):
us to our listener mail for today. Brian from Brooklyn
sent us what's supposed to be a concert poster with
copies for both of us to hang in our cubes.
But it says s Y MHC Presents and these are
all bands and they're all things that were brought from
our podcast, so it's it's not obscene. For the first one,
(18:55):
um the penis Thieves, Moda Harri and the Sinister salam
As the murdered Meta Cheese with a special appearance by
King Ludvig. The second at the lamber Dowdy Amphitheater. It's
ten dollars and no Darnley's will be allowed to enter,
strictly enforced, and it would be strictly enforced if I
had my way. So again, you can email us at
(19:18):
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We've also
got a Twitter page at mist in History, and we
have a Facebook fan page, which is a really good
way for us to keep up with you on a
on a day to day basis and respond to stuff
because it takes us a little bit when it comes
to email. And if you're looking for more on Shakespeare
and Shakespearean manuscripts and theater history, you can try searching
(19:42):
our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
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