The Curse of the Scottish Play

The Curse of the Scottish Play

         Crumpled parchment pieces printed with beetle black ink blew in the wind across chestnut seats. The synchronized chanting of three players on stage rumbled above a dry crinkled straw pit, which was soaking in the heat of the sun.
         
                “Black spirits and white, red spirits and gray;
         Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may.”

         Boldly from stage left, with a deep growling voice, Henry Condell entered with the words,
              “O, well done! I commend your pains;
              And everyone shall share I’the gains.
              And now about the cauldron sing,
              Like elves and fairies in a ring,
              Enchanting all that you put in’t.”

         The three players of the wise women on stage once again engaged in the chanting of black spirits. Midway through the second line, one of the three stopped; silencing the others. Stepping out of character, he squinted down into the straw pit at the playwright.
         Leaned up against a wooden post, arms crossed and chewing the back of his thumbnail intently, the playwright cocked his head up from its musing to investigate the pause in the performance.
         “Will,” the actor began, “d’you think you could write another curse for the witches to say? We’ve already said this one twice.”
         The playwright grunted in response and returned his focus to the ground of dirt and straw, his eyebrows buckling together.
         “Will! Will!” boomed a man of both considerable stature and self-worth, “What’s this stopping? We were about to arrive at my cue!”
         “Just one moment, Master Burbage,” this was the buck-toothed benefactor attempting to console his most promising profit, “Will’s just writing different lines for the witches.”
         “I’m not.”
         The benefactor snapped his head back at Will in perplexed frustration.
         “You’ll have the lines tomorrow.” The playwright answered sullenly, scratching the back of his neck.

         Hurling winds thrashed dark brown branches with wild speed and spit leaves in cycles. Howling thunder heralded lightning stencils in the evanescent sky. The playwright was on a mission. Trudging against the wind and the rain, Will tore through the ominous forest searching for a place he had only been to once before when he had been schoolboy at King Edward’s.
         Deeper and deeper into the woods he went, his boots splashing in the mud. At last, in the heart of the trees and murk, Will came upon what he had been searching for.
         A strange three-forked blast of lightning struck from the blinded heavens down to Earth. The smell of burning bark immediately filled the area. The dark clearing, just past the shrubbery in which Will had buried himself, was suddenly occupied.
         Three lumps of hunchbacked cloth were huddled around the ferocious flames, which were devouring the stricken tree. The lumps of cloth pushed back dark hoods to reveal pale, skeletal skin with long, yarn-like hair.
         The first figure reached its spidery fingers deep within the flames and pulled out a ball of solid fire.
         “Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.”
         “Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined.”
         The second snatched the ball from the former and tossed it at the head of the last,
         “Harpier cries ‘Tis time, ‘tis time!”
         Will, in the shrubbery, had extracted a quill and bottle of ink and began fiercely writing on a bit of parchment all that he could hear. The rain diluted his ink and the darkness hindered his vision but, with an apprentice’s haste, he recorded every word he could hear through the bluster of the storm.
         The deformed faces of the figures were constantly illuminated in the lightning. Grisly features adorned the tight skin, splotched with warts and scars. Flames licking, smoke shimmering, the burning tree became the site of evil magic being brewed.
         “Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing.”
         The tempestuous storm continued. Thunder struck concurrently with lightning and heightened the energy of the squalid enchanters.
         “For a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-brother boil and bubble.”
         The cackling of one witch echoed with the rumbling of thunder behind the croaky screeching of her fellows.
         “Double, double toil and trouble –”

         “- fire burn and cauldron bubble!” the three girls playing the role of the witches, though still in their school clothes, had contorted their faces for a more lunatic appearance and sang in wild voices stereotypical of witches.
         The scene was cut short by a crash of glass backstage. The young man playing Donalbain came out on stage to break the news to the director that the set of glassware for Macbeth’s Castle had accidentally fallen to the concrete floor and shattered to pieces.
         With an aggravated groan, the director dismissed the cast to a ten minute break and told them to get out of the auditorium.
         W.S. High School was putting on a production of Macbeth as a Halloween stint to raise money. Unfortunately, things weren’t going well so far. Two actors had already dropped out and another was still in the hospital having knee surgery. Besides that, both stomach flu and strep throat were circulating among the cast members and, with an Opening Night set for the following week, they had little to no set or costumes to speak of.
         This is just what the teenage cast had been discussing in the foyer adjacent to the auditorium after their jaded director had dismissed them.
         “I just don’t get why so much is going wrong,” sighed the actress playing Lady Macbeth.
         “Yeah, it really sucks,” added another cast member.
         “I know why it’s happening,” the dark-haired boy who played Banquo spoke up from the corner. The cast turned their heads towards him.
         “Don’t you know?” he asked coolly, and then, without waiting for an answer, said, “It’s the curse of Macbeth. You can never say the name Macbeth inside of a theater, such as this one, because it’s bad luck. Shows have been ruined. Actors have died. Just imagine how multiplied that bad luck is when you perform the whole play.”
         The cast was silent. Not out of fear, but out of cynic disbelief. They had been expecting an actual answer to their worries, not some poppycock story about a mythical curse. Even though they ignored Banquo’s story as ludicrous, the cast couldn’t help feeling a tiny shake of fear when Lady Macbeth slipped and fell backwards on stage during Act III Scene IV.

         Four players stood on the stage, small beads of sweat gathering at their temples from the crisp air of the Thames River.
         “I must say, Will, I was concerned about this play at first, but now it is spectacular. I don’t know how you came up with the lines for the witches, but it’s brilliant. Perfect. Well done.”
         Will looked up at the benefactor and nodded. He was once again hunched and leaning with his thumbnail between his teeth. Perfect, yes, the lines were perfect. Too perfect. Will cursed under his breath,
“What I fool I was to stop for those three women!” Will paced out of sight, whispering to himself, “but shadows will lengthen, night will come, and the river runs only to the sea.”


Opening night had arrived. Will was striding back and forth constantly backstage, biting his thumbnail. The show was going flawlessly so far, but the playwright had never been so nervous.
In the audience, at the back of the groundling’s pit, three more audience members slunk in with the arrival of a dark storm cloud blinding the wooden O’. They watched the players on stage with seething anger. The actors playing the roles of the Weird Sisters on stage entered and the witches in the audience needed only hear two words of their sacred curse to be certain that it had been snatched from their own lips.
Of course they had known of the invader on their enchantments that night a few weeks ago. It hadn’t been long before the news came to them that it was a worthless playwright in town who was writing a play about witches. The filthy writer had stolen their spell and used it to mock them.
         The witches would have none of that. With a conjuring of the spirits of the sky, the witches muttered in ancient tongues. They cast a curse on the play for the present, the future, and all of eternity.
         The effects were not immediate, save a sudden down pour of rain, which drenched the groundlings in mud. It was not until the end of Act V Scene X when a scream was heard at Macduff and Macbeth’s exit. Macduff returned on stage in the next scene, not with the false Macbeth head as was staged, but with Richard Burbage’s full body. Richard Burbage’s corpse; stabbed in the heart by a masked man backstage.


         W.S. High School’s Halloween performance of Macbeth had started dreadfully with an infestation of cockroaches in the dressing rooms. The leading actor had been chatting with the three girls playing the Weird Sisters when they began to scream like mad. The leading actor, in horror, looked at his left shoulder the girls were pointing at and screamed himself. Tearing off his doublet and pelting it across the room, he was still shaking in fear.
         Seventeen more cockroaches were found in shoes, pockets, and hats and each discovery was met with a reaction just as loud as the first. The cast was still shivering when the curtain opened, but the warmth of the lights and the energy from the audience propelled their attitudes to concentrate on the show. If only the show itself had been more cooperative.
         Two cues were missed, Lady Macduff’s dress ripped at the seams on stage, Malcom fainted backstage after being hit on the head by a falling light, and the porter had to leave stage early to throw-up from what was later discovered to have been food poisoning.
         Nerves were on edge as the play entered the fast-paced ending. As Macduff and Macbeth were squaring off, an unstaged deafening scream was heard from somewhere in the theatre. The actors on stage tried to continue despite fearing for their lives, but the audience could not keep their attention on the stage. They were in an uproar of fear. The actors still kept going until something shot through the air. From the bleak catwalk above the stage, was thrown a thick, silver dagger stained with fresh blood. It hit the wooden stage standing upright directly in between Macduff and Macbeth’s duel. Screams were now heard all throughout the auditorium. As the backstage crew was hurrying to investigate the mysterious person on the catwalk, the electrical power was extinguished. The theatre was plunged into infinite darkness and we know no more.