The Date and Authorship of the ‘Hecate Passages’ in <i>Macbeth</i>

The ‘Hecate passages’ are lines in Macbeth that most scholars believe are not by Shakespeare. They comprise all of 3.v and two short speeches in 4.i.1 They appear to have been added to the play to introduce three musical numbers from the King’s Men’s production of Thomas Middleton’s tragicomedy The Witch, a play that had been performed at the Blackfriars but whose run was apparently cut short. Since Anne Lancashire’s 1983 article, most scholars have agreed that the play’s short run had something to do with its apparent allusions to the most notorious Jacobean scandal.2 Frances Howard first obtained an annulment of her marriage to the Earl of Essex, then shortly afterwards married Robert Carr, the King’s favourite, and then three years later both Carr and Howard were convicted of murdering Carr’s former friend, Sir Thomas Overbury. The consensus among most commentators is that the play must have been presented in 1616 after the trial. I suggest that a more likely scenario is that the play was on the stage when the divorce proceedings occurred. In May 1613, Howard appeared via her uncle the Earl of Northumberland before an ecclesiastical commission to request an annulment on the grounds that Essex was impotent. He said he was not impotent with other women, only with her, and it was suggested that his impotence with Howard was the result of witchcraft (maleficium); although this accusation was later dropped, it had a ‘powerful effect on public opinion’.3 The Witch’s first act describes how a young man returning from abroad discovers his beloved is about to marry another man. He approaches a witch who gives him a charm to render the new husband impotent on his wedding night; it works, though the husband continues to have sex with a courtesan. This unusual and striking dramatic motif parallels the real-life situation too closely for it not to have been taken at as a direct reference to the divorce, with the implied accusation that Howard used witchcraft. It would certainly be grounds for the Master of the Revels or the Lord Chamberlain (Howard’s father) to close the play, if the company itself did not do so first. In his prefatory note to the manuscript of The Witch Middleton wrote: I have recovered… into my hands (though not without much difficulty) this (ignorantly ill-fated) labour of mine. Witches are (ipso facto) by the law condemned, and that only (I think) hath made her lie so long in an imprisoned obscurity.4 The word ‘ignorantly’ probably means here unknowingly or unintentionally; in religious writings of the period, pagans are often said to sin ignorantly, while Christians sin knowingly (and so more reprehensibly). The parenthetical expression could be a compressed way of saying that the play’s apparent reference to the divorce that caused its ill fate was the result of ignorance rather than deliberate intent. The second sentence could mean something like: as witches are condemned just for being witches, even if they have no ill intent, so the play was condemned for its content, even though there was no ill intent. Lancashire entertains this interpretation as a possible reading of the note; she says Middleton might have written the play before early 1613 and have been astonished when life began to imitate his fictional drama. Perhaps then indeed the play became ‘ignorantly ill-fated’—pulled off the stage because of its purely accidental closeness to contemporary scandal.5 However, although she never entirely rejects this insight, she seems to prefer the idea that Middleton was deliberately alluding to the scandal, including to the murder trial, and this view, which implies a 1616 date for The Witch, is adopted as well by others, including the play’s most recent editor, Marion O’Connor.6 O’Connor provides a comprehensive survey of the issue of the play’s date.7 There are arguments for a 1616 date based on the play’s relation to other Middleton plays, but since almost all of these are of uncertain date, this approach is inconclusive. The fact that John Wilson, who wrote the music for one of the songs, was born in 1595 has caused some critics to question whether he could have been composing as a teenager.8 Wilson, who was apparently a boy performer with the King’s Men, wrote the music to one of the songs in The Masque of Flowers presented on January 6, 1614, and could certainly have been given the task of setting a song from The Witch in 1613.9 It appears that a 1616 date for The Witch must depend almost entirely on its supposed veiled references the murder of Thomas Overbury, the details of which emerged in the trial in that year. The assignment of any date for The Witch after May 1613 depends on the belief that play deliberately but covertly refers to the Howard/Carr affair, that it is a drame à clef designed to titillate a knowing audience. To me, this characterization of the play is not believable; it could not be a more different work from a true drame à clef like A Game at Chess. On the one hand, the treatment of the impotence issue seems too graphic and too dangerous to be a veiled allusion; it would surely have caused the Master of the Revels to ban the play if it were submitted to him during or after the divorce. On the other hand, the other references to various details of the scandal suggested by O’Connor and Lancashire are too tenuous. In particular, the contention that the play alludes to the murder is unconvincing. Lancashire suggests that the play parallels the Howard/Carr/Overbury story in that it shows ‘the poisoning of an underling in the way of a politically advantageous marriage’, similar to the poisoning of Carr’s friend Overbury, who had opposed his marriage to Howard.10 This proposal is ingenious, but the notion that audiences would recognize this pattern seems farfetched. In the play, the Duchess plans to poison Almachildes, whom she has tricked into becoming her lover and coerced into murdering her husband; although she promises to marry him, she actually plans to dispose of him and seduce the Governor into marriage. This plot line is very different from the circumstances of the Overbury murder and there are no winks or nudges in the text to suggest a deliberate reference to it. Poisoning, often by women, is frequent in Jacobean tragedy. The most distinctive parallel to the Howard story is the Duchess’s approaching of a witch for the poison. The accusation that Howard approached a ‘wise woman’ for poison to murder her husband surfaced in May 1613, and so the presence of this motif is not evidence for a later dating of the play.11 It might rather have played a role in the play’s run being stopped at that time. Another reason to suspect an early 1613 date for The Witch is the fact that the musical numbers transferred to Macbeth included a flying scene for Hecate. This stage effect was rarely used by the King’s Men, but the collaboration with the Queen’s Men on Thomas Heywood’s Ages plays in 1611–12 seems to have brought in new flying technology to the company.12 Flying was used in Cymbeline and The Tempest as well as in the Silver and Brazen Ages but much less before and after this period.13 It is more likely to have occurred in a play produced in early 1613 than in 1616. If I am right that The Witch must have been in the company’s repertoire in May 1613 when it was stopped, we can date the Hecate passages rather precisely. They must have been written, somewhat hurriedly, in late May or June of 1613. The company would have been eager to recoup what it had expended on the music, choreography, and spectacle of The Witch scenes by splicing them as soon as possible into Macbeth. The subsequent stage history of that play, which saw an expansion of the musical witches’ scenes, suggests that they were popular and no doubt profitable for the company. I suggest that Heywood is the most likely author of the Hecate passages. His company’s collaboration with the King’s Men in 1611–12 means that he could have been available when the emergency dramatic transplant was needed. He was famously prolific and could easily have dashed off these uncomplicated bridging passages at short notice. He was a very experienced poet; the hundreds of quite readable stanzas in Troia Britanica (1609), in the difficult form of ottava rima, suggest he had the technical skill to pen Hecate’s lines, which G. K. Hunter calls ‘poetically very accomplished’.14 With the Queen’s Men in trouble after the death in August 1612 of their star attraction, the clown Thomas Greene, he might well have been interested in doing this quick job. The likelihood that he did so depends on the 1613 date; his company’s decline seems to have caused Heywood to abandon playwrighting and perhaps the theatre for about a decade after that year.15 Earlier critics attributed the Hecate passages to Thomas Middleton, largely because he wrote the lyrics to the musical numbers. This fact does not mean he was the one hired to do this routine patching job. More recently, Gary Taylor has defended this attribution, using a stylometric technique that involves dividing the passages into short clusters of words and looking for matches in the works of Middleton, Shakespeare, and other playwrights.16 The brevity of the Hecate passages and their unusual form of octosyllabic couplets might mean they are not an adequate or typical sample of their author’s work. With only about 350 words to analyse, it seems questionable whether the fact that word clusters, such as ‘vessels and’ or ‘ground, and that’, can be found in the Hecate passages and in the large body of Middleton’s work really tells us very much.17 Another approach perhaps more appropriate for such a short text is to look at the uncommon words it contains. The discovery of rare words from the Hecate passages in works from a similar time period by a writer who plausibly might be their author would at least support an attribution. My list of uncommon words in the Hecate passages comprises: ‘Hecate’, ‘beldame’, ‘overbold’, ‘traffic’, ‘contriver’, ‘wayward’, ‘Acheron’, ‘vap’rous’, ‘distill’d’, ‘spightful’, ‘angerly’, ‘amazedly’, ‘i’th’morning’, ‘th’ayre’. This selection is no doubt subjective, but it is not influenced by pre-knowledge of any playwright’s work. Word searches yield quite positive results for Heywood; in works written or published in the five years prior to 1613 (namely the five Ages, Troia Britanica, An Apology for Actors, and the translation of Sallust), Heywood used ‘Acheron’ twice, ‘Hecate’ three times, ‘th’ayre’ three times, ‘traffic’ sixteen times, ‘beldame’ thirty-two times, ‘spightful’ twice, ‘wayward’ once, ‘i’th’morning’ once and ‘amazedly’ (a very rare word never used by Middleton) twice. Over the same period (from A Trick to Catch the Old One to A Chaste Maid in Cheapside in the Collected Works), Middleton used ‘i’th’air’ once, ‘spightful’ six times, ‘beldame’ once, and ‘i’th’morning’ five times.18 This less positive result probably has little significance; it may simply mean that Middleton’s less extensive writings in this period did not call for many of these words. What is significant is the relatively positive result for the Heywood: there are at least nine uncommon words in these short passages that we know were in his mind prior to the time that they were introduced into Macbeth. It is also worth mentioning that stage-directions of the form ‘enter A meeting B’, which Taylor suggests are distinctive of Middleton, occur nine times in Heywood’s plays, including once in the 1611 Brazen Age. In The Witch, ‘Hecate’ is simply the name of the chief witch, and no connection to the goddess is mentioned in the play. In fact, the only mention of Hecate as a goddess in Middleton’s writings is in the very early poem The Ghost of Lucrece (another instance in The Changeling is in the Rowley subplot). As with most writers of the period, Heywood’s references to Hecate portray her as a goddess of night and the underworld. In the interpolated passages in Macbeth, Hecate’s haughty tone, her claim to be ‘the close contriver of all harms’, and her reference to humans as ‘mortals’, all suggest that she is in fact the goddess, who is also referred to by Shakespeare elsewhere in the play. Brooke and Braunmuller both call her a goddess in their lists of characters. But in the musical number that this passage introduces, Hecate comes across as the ordinary witch that she is in Middleton’s play, a much less intimidating figure who has to be urged by her fellow witches to hurry up as she apparently struggles to ‘’noint’ herself with transvection oil (a requirement for flying not needed by a goddess).19 It seems unlikely that Middleton could have written this inappropriate introduction to a scene from his own play. It is more likely that another writer, such as Heywood, unfamiliar with The Witch and with the preconception of Hecate as a goddess, somewhat hastily wrote it. There is a more telling reason for attributing the passages to Heywood. The Second Part of the Iron Age was probably produced in 1612, jointly by the two companies. The last two acts are a version of the Oresteia, recast as a particularly bloody revenge tragedy. Cethus seeks vengeance on the Greek leaders, whom he holds responsible for his brother Palamedes’ death. He manipulates Egistus and Clitemnestra into a plan to kill Agamemnon, assuring them that ‘the proiect I haue cast with all security,/And safety for your person’.20 As they prepare for the murder, there is this interaction between Cethus and Egistus: Presumably this last comment is an aside to the audience; Egistus does not respond, and it would not be in Cethus’s interest to warn him about the dangers of feeling secure. After the murder, Cethus goads Orestes into seeking vengeance, arranging for him to enter the heavily guarded quarters of Egistus and Clitemnestra in disguise with a letter supposedly from Menelaus acknowledging them as the new rulers; upon reading it Egistus says: Shortly afterwards, Orestes kills them both. At the end of her long speech in the interpolated passages in Macbeth, Hecate describes the effect on Macbeth of the promises of invulnerability that he will receive from the apparitions: Although the prominence and particular usage of the word ‘security’ in both texts is striking, the parallelism between the two texts goes beyond verbal similarity. The supreme and dire risk of feeling secure is the climactic theme of Hecate’s speech and it is graphically and emphatically portrayed in the fates of Egistus and Clitemnestra. The idea that the main enemy of mankind is feeling secure, or that the devil will ruin those who feel most secure, is not a commonplace; its origin might lie in the experience of a sudden precipitous drop from prosperity to ruin, such as that experienced by the Queen’s Men on the unexpected death of Greene. Since we know Heywood wrote The Second Part of the Iron Age, and was involved with the King’s Men close to the time when the Hecate passages were written, it seems likely that he wrote them also. The fact that they contain some uncommon words found also in his works of the previous five years supports this conclusion. No attribution of this kind is iron clad, and more evidence may emerge that supports or refutes this contention. But I hope I have to some degree shaken the entrenched assumption that Middleton wrote the Hecate passages.

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