Here is some more trivia on one of the plays we recently finished. When
this play was performed at a theater, saying the name Macbeth inside the
theater was believed to bring bad luck to the play and anyone that was acting
in it. There was an exception though when the word is spoken as a line within
the play. In order to reverse the bad luck from saying the name Macbeth, the
actor who said it would have to spin around three times, spouting profanity as
they do so. They then have to ask for permission to come back inside.
Some variations of this superstition say that the person
would have to repeat the words “Thrice around the circle bound, evil sink into
the ground”. To avoid the curse in the first place, many actors would refer to
Macbeth commonly as “The Scottish Play”, which was actually broadly based on
the real life King Macbeth of Scotland. I myself wonder how this whole
superstition started. Why was saying Macbeth considered bad luck…is it due to
the nature of the play? Why wasn’t saying Hamlet bad luck or why wasn’t Hamlet
referred to by actors as “The Danish Play”?
That’s actually pretty funny – I didnt know it was bad luck to say Macbeth outloud. If I had to take a guess I would imagine there was a production of Macbeth that went terribly wrong or something, and thus the superstition was born. But the nature of the play theory is definitely plausible too. There was never a chance it was going to end well for Hamlet; he was contemplating suicide the first time he was introduced to the audience. Atleast Macbeth had some hope lol
The best explanation I’ve seen is that when touring companies were losing money, they fell back on Macbeth as their most popular money-maker and put it on on short notice. But that was rarely enough to save the season, so it became known that if your company was reduced to putting on the Scottish Play, you were going to lose your shirts. That’s a good note to end a Shakespeare class in a school predominantly associated with business!