However, even Garrick was not above meddling with the Bard. Like any actor at the top of his craft, Garrick cherished the limelight. To this end, in combination with prevailing tastes and the assurance of censorship by his superiors at the royally patented Drury Lane theater, he made a major change to the end of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Macbeth dies onstage but is not dragged off by Macduff who does not then return with Macbeth’s severed head. Instead, Macbeth is given one final speech, alone onstage:
Tis done! The scene of life will quickly close. Ambition’s vain, delusive dreams are fled, And now I wake to darkness, guilt and horror; I cannot bear it! Let me shake it off ‘Two’ not be; my soul is clogg’d with blood I cannot rise! I dare not ask for mercy It is too late, hell drags me down; I sink, I sink, Oh! My soul is lost forever! Oh!
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I want to leave you with one especially entertaining “beheading” of Macbeth to cleanse our palates after a smelly and gruesome discussion of the play’s stage properties. On March 17, 1752, Spranger Barry performed as Macbeth in the manner of David Garrick—full death scene on stage, including the speech written by Garrick. The final scene did not go according to plan, however, as the Drury Lane Journal reported the next day:
Those heroic full-bottomed periwigs, whose bushy expanse is spread over the whole back of the wearer, have lately been exploded on the stage, and a more natural, I mean a less enormous covering for the head substituted in its stead. Unfortunately Mr Barry this night chose to appear in one of the most curiously frizzled out and of the fullest tragical flow I ever saw: When in the last act it was our heroes turn to be kill’d, honest Ryan [as Macduff] being eager to dispatch him, just as he was to plump down upon the carpet, entangled his hand in the vast profusion of Macbeth‘s hair; and by jerking back his sword after the concluding stab, away came poor periwig along with it, while our hero was left expos’d, in the last agonies of death bare-headed. Ryan in the meanwhile with some confusion contemplated Full-Bottom, which he held dangling in his hand, but sadly tumbled out of curl; at length he good naturedly adjusted it on the bald pate of the tyrant, who was then enabled to make his dying speech with proper regularity and decorum.
