Mysterious Authorship of Macbeth
Kurt Schreyer explores the incorporation
of sounds in Shakespeare’s Macbeth in
a Globe theatre in reference to the sound techniques adopted by early mystery
plays, especially The Harrowing of Hell.
One of the arguments that he makes is that Shakespeare made many allusions to
the mystery play intentionally so that the audience could take advantage of
their familiarity to the knocking sound in their memory to better understand
the drunken porter’s “knocking joke”.
Although not totally related, that
reminds me of the doubts I had while reading Macbeth. Several times when the three witches appear and sing some
wicked songs, the notes under the bottom of the page would mark something like “Most
consider these lines non-Shakespearean.” That makes me wonder if Shakespeare
adopted the songs from elsewhere for the same reason why he emphasized the
knocking sound. My conjecture is that the songs might also be popular at his
time and by borrowing the songs to the specific context of his play, he is able
to provide the audience a familiar perception about the events happening in the
play since it can be assumed that the audience already knows the main idea of
the songs.
After doing some research about the undetermined authorship, to
my surprise I find that it is not really the case. Instead of Shakespeare
borrowing others’ works into his play, the truth is probably the opposite. The
mainstream theory is that Macbeth was
adapted by Middleton by adding two songs and the role of Hecate from his work The Witch in 1778 (Taylor 2014, 239). While
this theory was later disproved, it is still believed that Macbeth is a work of collaboration by multiple writers. My
assumption failed at this point, but it is still interesting to learn about the
development of various theories by scholars on the authorship of Macbeth.
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