MACBETH | GLOSSARY

The Adage
The famous feline adage is “the cat wanted to catch the fish, but she didn’t want to get her paws wet.”

Aleppo
Aleppo is a famous trading port in Syria.

Antithesis
Antithesis is one of the central keys to unlocking Shakespeare’s language. Simply put, it’s a word or group of words set against its opposite. The contrast between the two juxtaposed ideas - the antithesis - enriches the imagery and depth of thought. The actor must play the antithesis in order to highlight the meaning of the text. Some recognisable examples of antithesis in Shakespeare are:

To be, or not to be. . .
Fair is foul, and foul is fair. . .
What he has lost, noble Macbeth has won. . .

For more information on antithesis, click here to visit The Basics, and scroll down to Episode 04.

Aroint
We don’t have much information about this, but it means something like “begone!”

Asides
As a little refresher - an aside is a line spoken by a character either to himself or to the audience. It is expressly not spoken to the other people onstage.

Asterix
Honestly, Asterix and his Gaulish friends have absolutely nothing to do with the play, but it’s one of the best Shakespeare puns I’ve ever heard. Back when I began work on Hamlet, I toyed with the idea of tracking every piece of art or literature that used a line from the play - but of course there are far too many to count! Asterix was my favourite comic when I was a child, and so I hope you’ll indulge the reference here…!

Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, First Viscount St. Alban (1561-1626), an almost exact contemporary of Shakespeare, was a statesman and philosopher. The Advancement of Learning, mentioned in this episode, is among his more notable works, but he produced a great quantity of material. As with many of the sophisticated courtiers of Elizabethan England, a great many juicy rumours abound about his private life and even his dealings with the supernatural. He’s also a frequent candidate nominated by theorists desperate to find an alternative author for Shakespeare’s plays.

Banquo
Banquo’s position in history is a little dubious. Banquo - Thane of Lochabar - was not a historical figure. He appears in Holinshed as if he were one, but apparently this is a fiction cooked up by another ‘historian’ Hector Boece. Boece wrote A History of Scotland in 1526, and fabricated Banquo’s importance as a means of legitimising the claim of his patron, King James the Fifth (grandfather of James the Sixth, the First of England.) At best we might call him a semi-historical figure - since he really only came into the spotlight in Holinshed’s Chronicles, published in the 1580s. It was another historian, Frederic von Bossen, who further expanded his history, and that of his son, Fleance. The claim of King James to being his descendant - which Shakespeare certainly plays on in the way he write this play - is perhaps more romantic than factual.

Beards
As mentioned, the essay “What are these faces? Interpreting Bearded Women in Macbeth” is by Dr. Brett Greatley-Hirsch, in Renaissance Poetry and Drama In Context. It’s a great read!

Beelzebub
Beelzebub, or Belzebub, is a major demon of hell. He is associated with Baal, the false idol of the Canaanites, and is sometimes referred to as the Lord of the Flies. He’s one of the seven princes of Hell, and one of the most notorious. The very name is fun to say because it has no echoes elsewhere in English - it sticks out as an ancient, distinct and dangerous word.

Bellona
Bellona is a comparatively obscure Roman goddess: generally the god of war is Mars, but given how much the Romans liked conflict and conquest it’s not surprising that they had more than one war deity to pray to..!

Bells
Bells make something like seventy-two appearances in Shakespeare’s plays. They are always an effective device, and always mean something significant. This particular soliloquy is book-ended by the bell. Macbeth asks for it at the beginning, and then it is sounded at the end.

Caesura
A caesura is a pause or break in a metrical line of poetry. It is frequently suggested by a punctuation mark or the end of a phrase. The caesura is a longstanding feature of rhythmic poetry, very common across multiple languages. They appear throughout Shakespeare, Beowulf, and as far back as Latin and even Ancient Greek. The first lines of two of the greatest classics, The Iliad and The Aeneid, both have notable caesurae in their opening lines. (Indeed, Virgil’s opening line echoes Homer’s - and there’s every chance Shakespeare was emulating both in the opening line of HIS war epic, Henry V…!)

Homer: The Iliad
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ <caesura> Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
(Sing, Goddess, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus…)

Virgil: The Aeneid
Arma virumque cano <caesura> Troiae qui primus ab oris
(Of arms and the man, I sing. || Who first from the shores of Troy...)

Shakespeare: Henry V
O for a muse of fire, <caesura> that would ascend

Edmund Campion
Edmund Campion (1540-1581) was a Jesuit priest. Jesuits in Shakespeare’s time were incredibly daring, moving through secret networks across Protestant Europe hoping to effect a Catholic counter-Reformation and a return to Rome. Campion was captured by priest hunters when he came back from Prague and was subjected to a very grisly death. The essay “The Pilot’s Thumb” by Richard Wilson gives a brilliant insight into the connections between Jesuits, politics, witchcraft and Macbeth, and is a very entertaining read. It is published in The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, a collection edited by Robert Poole. Stirring stuff!

Cleopatra | The Tragedy of Cleopatra
Samuel Daniel’s play The Tragedy of Cleopatra was published in 1594, over a decade before Macbeth. The passage describing Antony and Cleopatra as swimmers clinging to each other in mutually-assured desctuction is as follows:

And since we took of either such firm hold
In th' overwhelming seas of fortune cast,
What power should be of power to reunfold
The arms of our affections locked so fast,
For grapling in the Ocean of our pride,
We suncke each others greatnesse both together;
And both made shipwracke of our fame beside,
Both wrought a like destruction unto either…

Clocks
Shakespeare was the first to coin the phrase “watch the clock” - in Sonnet 57 - and his plays make frequent (and often anachronistic) references to time. If you’d like a deep dive into the various ways that time was measured in his day, click here for a lovely page from the BBC.

Crickets
If you want a REALLY obscure piece of reading, may I direct you to the work of Harry B. Weiss, of New Brunswick, NJ. In the June 1930 issue of the Journal of the New York Entomological Society, he published a short essay on “Insects and Witchcraft”. You can find it on JSTOR, or perhaps in the annals of your local library.

Cruentation
One of the stranger beliefs of the medieval world, cruentation was a process by which a murderer might be identified. It was believed that the body of a murder victim would start to bleed anew in the presence of its murderer. This form of “proof” was used in Germany as late as the 18th century!

Curtained Sleep
Shakespeare’s own experience would have been in beds curtained off to keep them warm. Here’s a picture of a bed in Anne Hathaway’s cottage to give you a sense of it.

Cuts
From the middle of the 17th century, for almost 200 years, the Porter’s scene was cut from the play. It was considered an anomaly that did not belong in such a dark tragedy. (Despite the fact that it very meaningfully ties the play to its historical context AND gives a sense of why Shakespeare wrote it in the first place…) Happily it has regained its standing and its justified place within the text, and is seldom cut any more.

Daggers
I spoke in the episode about how prevalent daggers are in Shakespeare’s plays. There are probably more daggers than there are swords. (As I mentioned, everyone from Juliet to Julius Caesar dies at the point of a dagger…) The dagger is a matter-of-fact weapon. It’s a personal, almost intimate weapon to use to murder one’s houseguest - certainly it’s not at all the kind of ceremonial or formal sword one might use to execute or assassinate a king. As the text mentioned, it would have consisted of a blade and dudgeon - the metal blade, and the wooden dudgeon of the handle.

Diamonds
I mentioned in this episode that diamonds had a slightly different cultural significance in Shakespeare’s time than they do today - that of warding off evil, like an amulet, or something precious. It wasn’t a religious thing, but their brightness and purity were considered powerful as a means of protection. So, there is a looming irony in Duncan giving Lady Macbeth a diamond. For a father more in-depth look at this, see “Shakespeare and the Lore of Precious Stones” by Abby Jane Dubman Hansen, in the 1977 Shakespeare Issue of College Literature.

Dollars
This mention of a currency called a dollar is extremely rare in Shakespeare. (The word appears again in The Tempest, but nowhere else.) The word had a very long process of development, given how it’s one of the most common words in the world today. For more information on its long history, click here.

A Drum
We will talk about it next time, but we have to acknowledge the strangeness of this sound effect. Macbeth and Banquo arrive alone, so who is banging this drum? I think it’s more to do with the thunder that prefigured the witches’ arrival, and a general desire to punctuate and dramatise Macbeth’s long-delayed entrance. (There’s some fun to be had with thumbs and drums and hither comes, but, again, we’ll get to that later…)

Caesura
A caesura is a pause or break in a metrical line of poetry. It is frequently suggested by a punctuation mark or the end of a phrase. The caesura is a longstanding feature of rhythmic poetry, very common across multiple languages. They appear throughout Shakespeare, Beowulf, and as far back as Latin and even Ancient Greek. The first lines of two of the greatest classics, The Iliad and The Aeneid, both have notable caesurae in their opening lines. (Indeed, Virgil’s opening line echoes Homer’s - and there’s every chance Shakespeare was emulating both in the opening line of HIS war epic, Henry V…!)

Homer: The Iliad
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ <caesura> Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
(Sing, Goddess, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus…)

Virgil: The Aeneid
Arma virumque cano <caesura> Troiae qui primus ab oris
(Of arms and the man, I sing. || Who first from the shores of Troy...)

Shakespeare: Henry V
O for a muse of fire, <caesura> that would ascend

Edmund Campion
Edmund Campion (1540-1581) was a Jesuit priest. Jesuits in Shakespeare’s time were incredibly daring, moving through secret networks across Protestant Europe hoping to effect a Catholic counter-Reformation and a return to Rome. Campion was captured by priest hunters when he came back from Prague and was subjected to a very grisly death. The essay “The Pilot’s Thumb” by Richard Wilson gives a brilliant insight into the connections between Jesuits, politics, witchcraft and Macbeth, and is a very entertaining read. It is published in The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, a collection edited by Robert Poole. Stirring stuff!

Cleopatra | The Tragedy of Cleopatra
Samuel Daniel’s play The Tragedy of Cleopatra was published in 1594, over a decade before Macbeth. The passage describing Antony and Cleopatra as swimmers clinging to each other in mutually-assured desctuction is as follows:

And since we took of either such firm hold
In th' overwhelming seas of fortune cast,
What power should be of power to reunfold
The arms of our affections locked so fast,
For grapling in the Ocean of our pride,
We suncke each others greatnesse both together;
And both made shipwracke of our fame beside,
Both wrought a like destruction unto either…

Clocks
Shakespeare was the first to coin the phrase “watch the clock” - in Sonnet 57 - and his plays make frequent (and often anachronistic) references to time. If you’d like a deep dive into the various ways that time was measured in his day, click here for a lovely page from the BBC.

Crickets
If you want a REALLY obscure piece of reading, may I direct you to the work of Harry B. Weiss, of New Brunswick, NJ. In the June 1930 issue of the Journal of the New York Entomological Society, he published a short essay on “Insects and Witchcraft”. You can find it on JSTOR, or perhaps in the annals of your local library.

Cruentation
One of the stranger beliefs of the medieval world, cruentation was a process by which a murderer might be identified. It was believed that the body of a murder victim would start to bleed anew in the presence of its murderer. This form of “proof” was used in Germany as late as the 18th century!

Curtained Sleep
Shakespeare’s own experience would have been in beds curtained off to keep them warm. Here’s a picture of a bed in Anne Hathaway’s cottage to give you a sense of it.

Cuts
From the middle of the 17th century, for almost 200 years, the Porter’s scene was cut from the play. It was considered an anomaly that did not belong in such a dark tragedy. (Despite the fact that it very meaningfully ties the play to its historical context AND gives a sense of why Shakespeare wrote it in the first place…) Happily it has regained its standing and its justified place within the text, and is seldom cut any more.

Daggers
I spoke in the episode about how prevalent daggers are in Shakespeare’s plays. There are probably more daggers than there are swords. (As I mentioned, everyone from Juliet to Julius Caesar dies at the point of a dagger…) The dagger is a matter-of-fact weapon. It’s a personal, almost intimate weapon to use to murder one’s houseguest - certainly it’s not at all the kind of ceremonial or formal sword one might use to execute or assassinate a king. As the text mentioned, it would have consisted of a blade and dudgeon - the metal blade, and the wooden dudgeon of the handle.

Diamonds
I mentioned in this episode that diamonds had a slightly different cultural significance in Shakespeare’s time than they do today - that of warding off evil, like an amulet, or something precious. It wasn’t a religious thing, but their brightness and purity were considered powerful as a means of protection. So, there is a looming irony in Duncan giving Lady Macbeth a diamond. For a father more in-depth look at this, see “Shakespeare and the Lore of Precious Stones” by Abby Jane Dubman Hansen, in the 1977 Shakespeare Issue of College Literature.

Dollars
This mention of a currency called a dollar is extremely rare in Shakespeare. (The word appears again in The Tempest, but nowhere else.) The word had a very long process of development, given how it’s one of the most common words in the world today. For more information on its long history, click here.

A Drum
We will talk about it next time, but we have to acknowledge the strangeness of this sound effect. Macbeth and Banquo arrive alone, so who is banging this drum? I think it’s more to do with the thunder that prefigured the witches’ arrival, and a general desire to punctuate and dramatise Macbeth’s long-delayed entrance. (There’s some fun to be had with thumbs and drums and hither comes, but, again, we’ll get to that later…)

Equivocation
As a formal definition, equivocation is to call two things by the same name. Within an argument, it is a means of using multiple meanings of a word to stretch and inflate the truth. It relies on ambiguity and interpretation, with the speaker able to retract and insist that they only meant one thing rather than all possible meanings. It was heavily relied upon by Catholic - particularly Jesuit - dissidents when they were interrogated in the Protestant England of Shakespeare’s time.

Euphemism
Shakespeare uses various forms of euphemism in the play - there aren’t many jokes in Macbeth but one big laugh relies on it. Here, we see Lady Macbeth in particular using calculated language to describe her murderous plan. She never describes it plainly, but instead it becomes their “great business”. Their plan is that King Duncan be “provided for” - it’s all euphemism.

Familiars
A clear sign of a witch - in this period in which women were so easily vilified for being different - was that she would have a familiar, a small creature that would assist her in her wicked encounters and practices. Shakespeare mentions them here to ensure that there’s no doubt in our mind about these strange figures; they are witches and they are somehow bidden to these supernaturally-controlled figures. Graymalkin is a cat, and Paddock is a toad. These are considerably more sinister than the pets kept by the students of Hogwarts in a more recent story of witches and wizards - there are no familiars in that world. It’d be a much darker story if there were.

Fife
Fife is Macduff’s home and family seat; he is the Thane of Fife. He is absolutely associated with the place, and so when this portion of the scene begins with Ross explaining that this is where he has come from, it’s fairly reasonable to assume that his news concerns its Thane. Teasing out this idea has cracked open my opinion of this scene, since most of my readings of the play to date have left me assuming that the entire scene is describing Macbeth’s exploits. But having this introduction to Macduff as a comparative equal in valour makes things significantly more dramatic, don’t you think?

Gallowglasses
Another kind of mercenary - this word can apply to Irish and Scottish fighters. (It was originally Scottish, but fast came to apply to Irish fighters too.

Henry Garnet
Henry Garnet was a Jesuit priest, executed for his association with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Robert Catesby, who was at the heart of the plot, explained its details to Garnet under the seal of confession, and so Garnet felt bound not to reveal the information. Eventually he was caught and arrested, and after a trial in which he relied very heavily on equivocation, he was found guilty and hanged, drawn and quartered on May 03, 1606. Among Garnet’s known aliases were Farmer, Darcy, Roberts and Philips.

Glamis
Glamis is a village in Angus, Scotland. The name is usually pronounced with one syllable (rhyming with “alms”) but at certain points in the text of Macbeth Shakespeare seems to give it two syllables. Glamis is the site of Glamis Castle - although the play does not take place here.

Golgotha
Golgotha means skull in Aramaic; some sources suggest that that it actually looked like a skull, and this inference found its way into several depictions in art and literature. The more well-known version of the name, Calvary, also takes its etymology from the Latin for skull.

Gospel of John
There’s an oblique echo of The Gospel of St. John in this scene - John 13:27 says “after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly.” The idea of doing, and doing things quickly, is how this scene starts. Between this correlation, and the consistent language of “all hails” that echo Judas Iscariot, make Macbeth sound a bit like Judas stepping out from the Last Supper to worry about betraying Jesus, while Macbeth worries about the implications of betraying - and killing - his divinely anointed king.

Hangmen
Public execution was very much a part of life in Shakespeare’s London. On a walk through the city, even if you didn’t see an actual execution in process, you would probably see severed heads - or other body parts - on public display. The executioner’s job was a grim one. Those lucky enough to have their heads cut off were spared the agony of other forms; the most grisly death was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The victim would be hanged until they were almost dead, then emasculated, and then have their midsection cut open and their entrails pulled out. (Hence “drawn” - they were quite literally drawn out of the body.) Thereafter they were decapitated and the body was cut into four pieces. It is quite the nastiest form of execution possible. While one might think that hanging would be a bloodless death, the full details of this form of execution - usually reserved for high treason - explain why Macbeth looks so horrified at the blood on his “hangman’s hands”.

The Harrowing of Hell
This was a popular mystery play, depicting the apocryphal story of Christ’s descent into hell between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. The entrance to hell was often depicted as a demonic mouth, but in this story Christ’s arrival was preceded by a very loud knocking. Hell is often depicted as a castle, or a prison, or a dungeon - the Porter has all of these echoes to play with as he imagines what it would be like to be an employee there. In various versions of The Harrowing of Hell, there is a porter, called Ribald, and he is a servant of Beelzebub. So the references in Macbeth are entirely appropriate to this.

Hautboys
A distant ancestor of the modern oboe (in name and in character), the hautboy was also known as a shawm. Since it’s almost impossible to describe music with words, here’s a video. There’s an extensive introduction, so if you just want to hear the sound, click to the 2:00 mark! Video here.

Hecate
Hecate was an ancient Greek goddess associated with witchcraft and the blackest hours of the night.

Hercules Furens
“The Mad Hercules” - Hercules Furens - is a play by Seneca. At its conclusion, the title character comes to his senses after an outburst of madness in which he murders his wife and children. It is only when he sees the blood on his hands that he realises what he has done. Although tempted to commit suicide, he instead moves to atone for his crimes. The echo here in Macbeth is interesting, since by contrast Macbeth takes no steps towards remorse or redress for what he has done.

Holinshed’s Chronicle
As early as the 1540s, a London printer called Reginald Wolfe wanted to publish a comprehensive history of the world. This would obviously be a massive undertaking, and indeed poor Wolfe died before he got anywhere close to completing it. The project morphed into a chronicle of the British Isles, and it is named instead after Raphael Holinshed, a writer employed by Wolfe to help out. Holinshed and a consortium of fellow writers completed the first edition in 1577, but thanks to censorship a complete version would not see print for a few hundred years. The Chronicles were used as source material for several famous works of the period - first among them Shakespeare’s histories, King Lear, Cymbeline and of course Macbeth.

Hospitality
Macbeth worries about his responsibilities to Duncan as his cousin, and his subject, but also as his host. Duties of hospitality are familiar all over the world, traceable back to the ancient Greek idea of philoxenia - literally “love of the foreigner”. A host would certainly have had a duty to ensure that their guest was not murdered under their roof…

The Humours
Although milk is certainly not one of them, the four humours date back at least to medicine in the time of Hippocrates. Ancient Greek medicine identified four humours - black bile (whose name in Greek gives us the word melancholy), yellow bile, phlegm and blood. Galen suggested that an excess of any of these led to one of four personality types as mentioned in the episode - melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic and sanguine. Although rejected by most of modern medicine, in this breakdown we do have the seeds that grew into personality indicators like the Meyers-Briggs test and its many off-shoots.

Incarnadine
Shakespeare is at his most fantastically poetic here, creating a verb for how the blood on Macbeth’s hands could turn a whole ocean red. He uses the word nowhere else.

Insomnia
This portion of the play contains some of Shakespeare’s most famous descriptions of sleep - and lack thereof. For a piece of literary curiosity - utterly fictitious, but entertaining! - you can check out the fanciful “Shakespeare’s Insomnia - and The Causes Thereof”. It’s an 1886 piece written by Franklin H. Head. It’s available in full here.

Kerns
The word kern is an adaptation of the Middle Irish word ceithern, which means a collection of people, more specifically fighting men. An individual member is a ceithernach. Kerns were called “uncivil” in Shakespeare’s own Henry IV Part 2, and in Macbeth we get a sense that they aren’t terribly reliable - they fight for money rather than for country, and our last image is of them “skipping” away.. Have a look for “The Image of Irelande” - an engraving from 1581 - and you’ll see a very famous depiction of them.

King James Bible
As a project designed to unite the church and the nation, King James commissioned an English translation of the Bible. It was completed in 1611.

Lady Macbeth
The historical Lady Macbeth - that is, the wife of the historical figure Macbeth - was called Gruoch. We know maddeningly little about her; we have no dates of birth or death, no useful information at all. Shakespeare seems to have invented this titan of a character from a very small reference in Holinshed’s chronicle: “The words of the three Weird Sisters also (of whom before ye have heard) greatly encouraged him hereunto; but specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she was very ambitious, burning with an unquenchable desire to bear the name of a queen.”

Largesse
Duncan has clearly been generous to Macbeth’s household. It’s not quite a tip, so much as a generous recognition of the hosts’ (and their employees’) generosity.

Macbeth / The Scottish Play
Probably the greatest Shakespearean superstition - if not the greatest superstition in the history of the theatre. The play’s relationship with evil and trickery and blood and terror is more than enough to explain how it has come to be such a taboo name. Theatrical tradition is such that it is considered extremely bad luck to say the name of the play: as a result it is invariably referred to as The Scottish Play by anyone not directly working on it. (I slipped up and said the name in a rehearsal once, and this so distressed the lead actor that I indulged him and performed the apparent antidote to the ‘curse’ - one must leave the room, turn around three times, spit or curse and then be invited to come back in. I have not made this mistake again. (You’ll often hear people referring to the play as Mackers, or any number of such variants…!)

MacDonald / Makdonwald
In Holinshed’s Chronicles, there’s considerably more detail about the skirmishes in Scotland during Duncan’s reign. MacDonald’s rebellion is separate to the attack from the Norwegians - and Shakespeare chooses to ignore further aggressions from the Danes. (King James’ wife was Danish, as discussed during our trek through Hamlet, and so perhaps he opted to leave them out of this ghastly bloodbath…) It is true to Holinshed (and history) that Macbeth defeated MacDonald.

Martlet
The martlet, also known more commonly as the house martin, is a very cute bird. The Ornithology of Shakespeare has a very sweet entry about it, describing how Shakespeare also mentioned this bird in The Merchant of Venice. There too, it was in reference to how this bird makes its nest in existing buildings for safety.

Mystery Plays
Mystery plays - and Morality plays - were among the earliest dramatic performances in medieval Europe. Mysteries dealt with stories from the Bible, and were presented by a town’s various guilds. Very often a guild might take responsibility for a story connected to their trade - so shipwrights might present Noah’s Ark, or vintners might perform the miracle of the wine at the Wedding at Cana.

The Ornithology of Shakespeare
This is a fabulous book, which appears to list and describe every bird mentioned in Shakespeare. Best of all, it’s old enough to be out of copyright, and so you can find it online - right here!

The Other Devil’s Name
Shakespeare refers to Satan and Lucifer on several occasions elsewhere in his plays - comedies, more often than not. It’s always a lighthearted thing to invoke these dangerous names; to do so in earnest would be unthinkable. Even Lady Macbeth doesn’t put a name on the spirits she summons, since it would be far too dangerous to do so. Whatever about Beelzebub, that chewy and strange-sounding word, the Porter, in his hung-over state, is taking no further chances.

Owls
In my excitement to get the podcast out and recorded this week, I overlooked the full text of The Rape of Lucrece. During that awful night, the full line says that there was “no noise but owls, and wolves”…! So it’s even more ominous that Macbeth has already made us think of Murder and his wolves as sentinels, howling, and now Lady Macbeth is hearing owls. It paints a very scary picture.
As promised, here’s a link to the extended survey of owls in Shakespeare: click here.

Painted Devils
Lady Macbeth chastises her husband for being afraid of things that cannot harm him. She says it is the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil; children were often scared by the threat of a bugbear, a kind of bogeyman that would frighten them into obedience. (Our modern sense of bugbear, as a pet peeve or a nuisance, has little to do with it.) A painted devil is one that has been constructed, one that is artificial. And therefore it is childish to be afraid of it.

Possets
Lady Macbeth’s possets - second only to whatever poison Claudius prepared for his brother in Hamlet - are among the most notorious poisons in Shakespeare. Nowadays we associate possets with dessert - and perhaps rightly, since they are a mixture of eggs, cream and sugar. But in Shakespeare’s time they were also made with alcohol, and were believed to have medicinal as well as nutritional properties. No accident, then, that Lady M could find a way to slip a little something into the mix as she prepared them. If you’d like to read more about possets, and indeed find a workable recipe for one (albeit without poison or drugs) click here for a fabulously detailed history from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Prayer
A significant amount of resesarch has been emerging in recent years about the function of prayer in Shakespeare’s plays - whether in its depiction on stage, or in moments like this wherein a character panics at being unable to pray at all. (See also Claudius in Hamlet, when his “thoughts remain below”.)

Primroses
Shakespeare is very fond of the primrose, and this flower appears in several plays. Its name, loosely dervied from Latin, means the first flower of spring. When he mentions the primrose path - both here and in Hamlet - he’s imagining a path of luxury, strewn with flowers. Nothing good leads in that direction!

Regicide on Stage
Violence on stage was a tricky issue for Shakespeare. It was not acceptable to kill the king on stage, certainly, and this is why Duncan’s murder takes place offstage.

Runyon
As mentioned, a derogatory term for a woman.

Saint Colm’s Inch / Inchcolme
This is a small island in the Firth of Forth, not far from Edinburgh. There was a famous monastery there - it sometimes feels like every small island in Scotland had a monastery - and indeed the name derives from Inis - island - and Colm, or Columba, one of the country’s most famous saints. As mentioned in the episode, it was frequent practice to bury the dead on islands because the mainland was beset with wolves and wild dogs that might dig up the corpses.

Seneca
In ancient Rome Lucius Annaeus Seneca was primarily a philosopher, but also a playwright. His plays are seldom performed today, since we tend to be more enthralled by the ancient Greek dramas that preceded them (and often tell the same stories…) But Shakespeare would very likely have read and enjoyed Seneca’s tragedies, and some might even make the claim that without Seneca, there would be no Macbeth. For a very convincing argument - if your library has access - you can explore Inga-Stina Ewbank’s 1967 essay “The Fiend-Like Queen: A Note on Macbeth and Seneca’s Medea”. (It’s in Shakespeare Survey No. 19 via the Cambridge University Press.)

Se’'nnight
Seven nights make up a week. Fourteen nights make two weeks. And as such a se’ennight is a contraction that means a week, and a fortnight - which people in my part of the world certainly still say - means two weeks.

Seward and Divers Servants
It’s unusual enough for Shakespeare to give such specific stage-directions, particularly listing actual titles and figures. A sewer, as mentioned, is something like a head waiter. Evidently the Macbeths are putting on a big dinner if there are this many servants serving it.

Shared Lines
I mention these all the time because they are important to the rhythm of the piece - especially in performance. When a line is shared between two characters, there’s almost always an angle to play. Here, we have Angus interrupting Ross’ convoluted message. Then he also finished Macbeth’s confused line about borrowed robes - his answer is direct and important. This play in particular is a symphony of shared lines of pentameter. They get even more complicated later in the play!

Sinel
The historical Macbeth’s father was called Findláech of Moray, Thane of Angus. As mentioned in the episode, the name became Sinel in the play perhaps because of the similarity between typographies for F and S in renaissance printing. It’d probably be more accurate to call him Finel, but somehow I’m attached to Sinel because that’s the line as I learned it…!

Sleep No More
Punchdrunk, an English theatre company specialising in extraordinary immersive theatre events, created a version of Macbeth called Sleep No More at the McKittrick Hotel in New York. It premiered in 2011 and, at time of writing, is still running - it is an immensely successful theatrical event.

Tailor
There is a suggestion that “tailor” was a slang term for the penis. So, an English tailor busying himself with French hose could have a great many double meanings. Some have suggested that “stealing” should be read as “staling” - ie urinating - and thereby the the description gets even dirtier.

Tarquin
Sextus Tarquinius, Tarquin, is the awful villain of The Rape of Lucrece. He is notorious as the man who raped Lucretia (Lucrece), the wife of his political enemy Collatinus. The historical Tarquin was the son of Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome. Indeed, Tarquin Junior’s disgraceful acts were among the key events that led to the end of the monarchy and the rise of the Roman Republic. It’s worth bearing in mind that Macbeth is here making reference to Hecate, the goddess of witches, Murder, personified as a nighttime monster with wolves as his sentinels, and Tarquin, the most notorious rapist. These are the main agitators at this time of night, and Macbeth is starting to feel like he should be counted among them.

The Tiger
As mentioned, Edward Loomis’ article “The Master of the Tiger” appeared in the autumn 1956 edition of Shakespeare Quarterly. (You can probably find it online or via your library.) The tie-in between the real voyage and Shakespeare’s witchy threat seems so specific that it must be true - although there’s always room for a coincidence!

Time
As I mentioned in the episode, I found a very helpful article about this scene that has a really interesting conception of how Time is invoked here. It’s by John B. Harcourt, from Shakespeare Quarterly in 1961. Like this episode itself, it’s called “I Pray You, Remember The Porter”. You can find the full piece on JSTOR or other academic resources, but the bit worth mentioning is: “As critics are wont to observe, the play of Macbeth is dominated by an obsession with time - characters rush about in frantic haste, the action strains forward, the present is only a stepping stone to the future. It is precisely here that Macbeth encounters his real defeat, for though he may compel the present by sheer force, the future belongs to Malcolm and to Banquo’s seed. It seems to me, therefore, to be doubly appropriate that the Porter’s words be read as “Come in, Time”, for that relentless figure presides over the action of the play. As Shakespeare observed in Sonnet XII:
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defense
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

Trammel
A trammel was a complicated kind of net - Macbeth is implying that, all things being equal, he’d love to scoop up all consequences and “catch” success as a result of Duncan’s death.

Thyestes
Thyestes was one of Seneca’s more grisly tragedies.

Western Isles
Most likely the Hebrides, but of course Ireland is also to the west of Scotland.

Witches
There are those who might insist that the play’s famous trio are not actually witches, or that the word witch isn’t spoken aloud in the play. They are called Weird Sisters, and many other things; this is all fine. But the script calls them witches, and so does the sailor’s wife they mention. I think we can accept that they are witches, since if they’re not, what’s the point of having them?