Author Archives: Ilya Mavashev

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”?

There is a lot of interesting background on this play. First of
all it was not even performed for almost 300 years after he wrote it. I find
this strange because it seems perfect for the stage. Having had done a small
section of it with my group for the scene study really made me appreciate it
more than simply reading it in class. Reading and interpreting the lines, and
then acting them out convincingly makes you understand the characters, the
setting, and the point of everything much more. It really drives home the point
that Shakespeare’s work is best appreciated on the stage, by good actors,
performers, sound, design, and music, than simply reading the lines, act by act, in your head.

It was also considered Shakespeare’s least successful and most
unpopular play until the last few decades. The story focuses on Troilus and
Cressida, two characters that never existed in Homer’s Iliad, which Shakespeare
drew inspiration for from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. One of the things
that bothered me, or at least made me a little disappointed, is that none of
the gods found in Homer’s poems are present here. It would have been
interesting to see Shakespeare’s take on the supernatural in terms of Greek
gods than having grounded the play much more heavily in realism.