Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Dowdy, and today we're revealing a few personal stories because we're talking about plays and we have both been in plays. Um Mostly I just liked reading aloud in class, but occasionally I would get brave enough to be in one, and my shining moment was as Katie the Cook and Meet Me in St. Louis in middle school, in which I danced I Think Maybe and sang in an apron Katie the Cook that named after you. I'm hoping they didn't pick me just because of my name and more because they thought I was incredibly talented. But I was also in some sort of chorus in Oklahoma, and as a kindergartener in Mary Poppins, where I got to wear pink Jammy's and my mom put lipstick on me, which was a huge deal, definitely. But I am most well known in my family for a preschool performance in which I got on stage with the rest of my class and then went and sat down on the edge of it with my head in my hands and refused to saying we have photo evidence of my grumpy, little little three year old things. Do you have a history on the stage, Um, yeah, I guess I've been in a few plays. I probably my biggest one came in elementary school. My class wrote a play called The Power Plan about power struggles on the playground, and uh, I was the class president in the play, I had a solo. I had to stand on the stage all by myself and saying in front of the audience. It was all pretty scary, but kind of awesome too. Not gonna lie, Um, I guess. Let's see. In high school I was in Fumed Oak. That was a very violent play. So that was exciting. How are struggles and violence the Inner world of Sarah Dowdy? Yeah, Probably the best part in that was there was supposed to be a violent conference tation about more ham for dinner. We were a little lax on our props, and so we didn't bring a ham in. We brought a bag of potato chips and I was playing the wife, and so at one point the guy who's playing my husband said more potato chips for dinner and throws some on the floor. I prefer the hands. That's a legitimate complaint. I would say your star, you're on top. Somebody bring you some hams. You might say in dirty rock. But this is actually leading up to a point. Believe us or not. Um. You know how you're never supposed to say good luck in a theater, you say break a leg or something, and definitely in belly dance we do the same thing. We say break a hip or Sarah says break a snake. But there are more theatrical superstitions than that, and one is that you never say Macbeth in the theater unless you're performing. Yeah, call it the Scottish play. And that is because there's some scary stuff attached to it. This is a Halloween episode, so you can guess where it's headed. Suppose said Lee, there is a Macbeth curse. So to start it off, let's give you a little recap of the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth. It is a bloody tragedy. It starts off with three weird sisters who tell Macbeth, a relative of the King Duncan, that he himself will be king. They also tell another general, Banqueo, that his sons and descendants will be kings, but he himself never will be so Macbeth's wife, Lady Macbeth, vows to help him achieve this goal of ruling the kingdom by convincing him to kill King Duncan, his relative. And this is only the first of many murders in the play. Um Macbeth is behind the murder of guards, the Thane of Fife's mcduff's family and everyone in his castle. Lady Macbeth commits suicide. She's unable to wash the blood from her hands, and Macbeth is haunted by the ghost of Banquo, and the play ends with a battle in which McDuff kills Macbeth and Duncan's son Malcolm has the throne. This is worse than Lizzie Borden, classic Shakespeare tragedy, everybody dead on the stage at the end of the play. But there was in fact a real Macbeth. Yeah. So Macbeth was an aristocrat in eleventh century Scotland, and during this time there wasn't primagenitor like we think of most rulers today. You know, your your son becomes king or some relative descendant becomes king after you die. There wasn't any firstborn inheriting. Instead, kings would pick their successors, and so you can imagine that would lead to a lot of strife because it's not just the kid you ended up with, it's the rest of the nobleman too. Yeah. So Macbeth's father was killed by Macbeth's cousins who wanted his throne. Later in life, Macbeth revenged his father by killing them and married one of their widows. Grew up the real life Lady Macbeth. And we're not sure that name is is going to make a comeback as a baby name. So we're reques saying that a listener could perhaps name a pet after grew up, you know, like grew k Lambert. You know, I don't really think that's gonna work. Perhaps if I take my imaginary future husband's last name, we can reconsider it. But Macbeth had a title, though it wasn't the thing of Glamis, and the King, Malcolm the Second, who is king at the time of Macbeth, decided to institute this rule of primogeniture and ended up choosing his nephew Duncan, and the nobles were angered, as Scottish nobles always are in every single podcast we have ever done well and and part of this is you know, maybe personal, why didn't you pick me? But also Duncan just isn't much of a ruler. He's not very good in battle. He doesn't seem like he should be king. And so Macbeth killed Duncan in battle, and we should note that this is not a battle against each other, perhaps a friendly fire sort of situation. Yeah, and then Macbeth in turn is eventually killed by Duncan's son, who is also named Malcolm Um. But Macbeth didn't have a bad reputation. I mean, this seems like your average average stuff back then, just killing the king kind of semi honorably, maybe not so much, nothing terrible. So where did the bad rep come from? Well, Shakespeare's Macbeth was written sometime in the early sixteen hundreds, which is a good five hundred years after Macbeth's life, And of course history loves embellishment over the ages, and Shakespeare used Raphael Holland Sheds Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, which was published in fifteen seventies seven, as background information. But you know, he never planned for it to be historically accurate. The play. He wanted to build on that. Yeah, it's a historical drama, not an actual account. So Holland shed had, of course built on some earlier versions of the story, and through the centuries we had all these little bits added in, like the imaginary banquet and this evil, scary Lady Macbeth, and those were added in the fourteen hundreds and the early hundreds, So getting a little closer to the story we know today, poor grew up And yeah, there was no real life counterpart for Banquo, And that's a little bit of a big deal because if you remember how the witches in the play promise him this line of kings, he was supposedly um the start of the Steward line, and I think of who's king when Shakespeare's putting on this play, well exactly, and that may be part of the reason that he's turned into such an innocent character in Shakespeare's play, which he wasn't in earlier versions, trying to impress the James Laster King good. So, according to the legend, the very first performance of the play Macbeth in sixteen o six had the actor playing Lady Macbeth, who was a boy falling ill and dying right before the start of a mysterious fever, and perhaps Shakespeare took over the role for him and was really terrible in it and therefore didn't want to hear the play's name again. I mean, if you're awful you walk on stage, is like, don't say the name to me. Embarrassing performance. Um. There's another theory, though, and that's that the witches incantations were real, and they were real chance that Shakespeare lifted, and so they cursed the play forever more. But why would Shakespeare have done something like that? King James had authored a book on demonology, which is one of his chief interests, and as we mentioned, of course William Shakespeare wanted his favor. But the story goes that James hated the play and possibly banned it from being performed. So that brings us to the stories of the curse. And we have to preface this by saying we're not saying that any of these stories are true, because only a few of them can be corroborated. We'll try to point out some of the ones that can be that we think are true. Yes, Um, but these are the stories that so many of you sent us, and the ones that you'll see most frequently mentioned about the curse. So remember these are not all real. We're just telling you what people say. This is a podcast about the curse exactly. So here goes the hearsay. All right, we're going to start in the seventeenth century. In one performance, the actor playing Macbeth supposedly used a real knife instead of a stage prop and killed the actor playing Duncan in front of a live audience. During the eighteenth century, at the opening day of a performance in London. It also marked the day of one of the worst storms ever to hit the city. All right, This next one is one of my favorites. In another performance, we have an aristocrat walking across the stage. We should mention that sometimes the very best people would get to sit on the side of the stage, So he just walks across the stage in the middle of the play to be answering your cell phones. It's probably worse than that, but going to talk to his friend. The actors got very angry and ran him out, so he came back with a posse of friends and burned the whole place down. In seventeen seventy five, famed British actress Sarah Siddons, who was most famous for her portrayal of the Lady Macbeth was almost attacked by an audience member, So such as the power of theater. Moving on to the nineteenth century, this is a pretty good one too. This one's my very favorite. Can I steal this home from? Okay, So we're in the mid eighteen hundreds and there are two actors who hate each other. One is English William McCready and one is American Edwin Forrest. And Forest is said to have started this whole feud by being a very rude audience member at a McCready performance in London. So they both stage different productions of Macbeth at the same time in New York City, and supporters of Forest through stuff at McCready while he was on stage in his performance, which I mean it sounds like a cartoon, like throwing tomatoes at someone. So then there was a riot known as the astor placed right it, and the militia came and shot just at the crowd. More than twenty people died and anywhere between thirty and a hundred people were injured. It depends on what you're reading, which is absolutely insane. Well, maybe double the productions, double the curse too. So moving on to a very famous incident involving the curse. One week in eighteen sixty five, President Abraham Lincoln was reading from his favorite play, reading his favorite passage about Duncan's assassination. The next week he was assassinated. Guess what play he was at Macbeth. And in another incident in the nineteenth century, an actor accidentally seriously injured another one with a sword. And in the nineteen twenties, Lionel Barrymore's performance as Macbeth was reviewed so scathingly that he never got on a Broadway stage again. So we're ruining careers now as well as accidentally or purposely adding people. Yeah, we have a few more of those stage accidents though. The British actress Sybil Thorndyke was almost strangled by an actor, which it seems like it would be hard to do, accidentally almost strangle someone. Maybe not accident, it's just a really good actress. And then at a London staging a set collapsed and hit the cast, and there was also a fire. In the nineteen thirties, one actress playing Lady Macbeth died right before the last dress rehearsal, and supposedly during a nineteen thirty four production, an actor went mute on stage and the guy who took over for him got a fever and went to the hospital. Or depending on which story you read, the one actor went mute from a fever and had to be hospitalized. Again, there's you know, depending on what you're in the purse rumors all right. In nineteen thirty six, or Sinwells put on an all black production in Harlem, and there was a Haitian witch who had a role in the play, and when one of the critics panned the production, he and the drummers, he being the witch, the witch doctor and some of the drummers in the play cursed the critic, like really cursed him, and he died of pneumonia. So oh. Also in the nineteen thirties, Lawrence Olivier was almost crushed by a stage weight and in a car accident on separate occasions, and the proprietor of the theater had a fatal heart attack on opening night and her dog died on the same day, Or again depending on what you read, the proprietor died during a dress rehearsal, and it was an actress who was in the car accident. Then in the nineteen forties, there was a very unlucky staging in nineteen forty two when two of the witches and Duncan died and the set designer killed himself, and this is a this is a likely one. In nineteen forty seven in England, one Mcabeth Harold Norman was accidentally stabbed with the sword during the end fight scene and died. And the kicker is that right before he said he didn't believe in the curse and his ghost haunts the theater. And then this is a pretty good one. To one. Actress Diana Wynyard walked off the stage while sleepwalking as Lady Macbeth in n I mean she wasn't just squinting her eyes kind of fake closing them. She had them shut and walked off the stage right into the orchestra pit, which was like a fifteen foot drop or something. She must have not been too cursed though, because she got right up from the fall. The show must go on. Sarah. In the nineteen fifties, during a Bermuda staging, supposedly during an attack scene, these flames were blown into the audience near the castle attack and Charlton Heston who's playing Macbeth, was severely burned, and Olivier in another production almost blinded another actress. So we're thinking, I'm thinking like maybe that was his last taking new role. Um the sixties skipped the curse skips the sixties, so they were busy. And then in the nineteen seventies there's an actor's strike and fires and multiple robberies. In Planski's ninety one film, a camera operator was almost killed. And then finally we get to the nineteen eighties where in nine and one production there were twenty six cases of flu, lots of injuries, lots of directors, lots of actors, and lots of stage managers. That doesn't sound like occurs so much to me. It's just a bad, prescarably run production. Yes, but we've got some possible explanations of course for this. Yeah, for this high rate of accidents and trouble with Macbeth. One thing, there are a lot of fight scenes and that equals a lot of chances for injury. You noticed most of what we read here is uh, people getting stabbed accidentally or walking off the stage accidentally being injured in something action path act and dramatic. And there are lots of dark scenes, of course, and this is also a popular play, and it's a short play, so it's been considered a good choice for failing companies to put on. And then, of course it's not the place fault that a company fails. It already was. The play just perhaps sounded the death knell. But still that ties into the whole curse thing, and all plays have things go wrong. We just concentrate on Macbeth because supposedly there is a curse, and since it is such an old play, we've got centuries and centuries of time for all of these things to happen. I mean, perhaps we'll have a new one for Ibsen, say in in a few centuries. But it's confirmation bias because you start looking for all the things that back up your belief instead of paying any attention to all the things that don't. And you know, surely there's another terrible storm that's taken place at the at the beginning of a production, or an actor dies during a play. Those things aren't entirely unusual. Yeah, in college, I actually did a project on theaters in nineteenth century London, and I mean the accidents were insane. If if you go back and look at the London Times archives. There's just every terrible thing that could possibly happen to you would happen during these stage productions like fancy ones too, terrible falls and knife fights and swords and falling through the trapdoor. Yeah. So I'm going to go ahead and say that I don't think that there's a Ma Bath curse, Sarah, But I'm not going to say that because you don't want to harold Normana. Yeah, the guy who says he doesn't believe in the curse. I mean, I don't know if this curse extends to podcasts, but I don't I don't want to be too bold about it. We're more in a studio than a theater, so I'm I mean, notice our list of curses stops in nine. We don't know what's been going on for the past twenty years, and if maybe the curse has jumped to new media, is it a time for revival hubs? Certainly mont. We do have some tips though, if you happen to say the play's name in a theater, and we might do it now that we're done in this podcast in case, the tradition is that if you say Macbeth, in a theater, you leave the room, you spend three times over your right shoulder, you spit, and then you knock on the door and ask to come back in. So if there are any theater people listening who have a Macbeth tale to tell, please email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. And that brings us to our listener mail for today. Brian from Brooklyn sent us what's supposed to be a concert poster with copies for both of us to hang in our cubes. But it says s Y MHC Presents and these are all bands and they're all things that were brought from our podcast, so it's it's not obscene. For the first one, um the penis Thieves, Moda Harri and the Sinister salam As the murdered Meta Cheese with a special appearance by King Ludvig. The second at the lamber Dowdy Amphitheater. It's ten dollars and no Darnley's will be allowed to enter, strictly enforced, and it would be strictly enforced if I had my way. So again, you can email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We've also got a Twitter page at mist in History, and we have a Facebook fan page, which is a really good way for us to keep up with you on a on a day to day basis and respond to stuff because it takes us a little bit when it comes to email. And if you're looking for more on Shakespeare and Shakespearean manuscripts and theater history, you can try searching our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the stuff you missed in the History Glass blog on the how stuff Works dot com home page. Wh

Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Dowdy, and today we're revealing a few personal stories because we're talking about plays and we have both been in plays. Um Mostly I just liked reading aloud in class, but occasionally I would get brave enough to be in one, and my shining moment was as Katie the Cook and Meet Me in St. Louis in middle school, in which I danced I Think Maybe and sang in an apron Katie the Cook that named after you. I'm hoping they didn't pick me just because of my name and more because they thought I was incredibly talented. But I was also in some sort of chorus in Oklahoma, and as a kindergartener in Mary Poppins, where I got to wear pink Jammy's and my mom put lipstick on me, which was a huge deal, definitely. But I am most well known in my family for a preschool performance in which I got on stage with the rest of my class and then went and sat down on the edge of it with my head in my hands and refused to saying we have photo evidence of my grumpy, little little three year old things. Do you have a history on the stage, Um, yeah, I guess I've been in a few plays. I probably my biggest one came in elementary school. My class wrote a play called The Power Plan about power struggles on the playground, and uh, I was the class president in the play, I had a solo. I had to stand on the stage all by myself and saying in front of the audience. It was all pretty scary, but kind of awesome too. Not gonna lie, Um, I guess. Let's see. In high school I was in Fumed Oak. That was a very violent play. So that was exciting. How are struggles and violence the Inner world of Sarah Dowdy? Yeah, Probably the best part in that was there was supposed to be a violent conference tation about more ham for dinner. We were a little lax on our props, and so we didn't bring a ham in. We brought a bag of potato chips and I was playing the wife, and so at one point the guy who's playing my husband said more potato chips for dinner and throws some on the floor. I prefer the hands. That's a legitimate complaint. I would say your star, you're on top. Somebody bring you some hams. You might say in dirty rock. But this is actually leading up to a point. Believe us or not. Um. You know how you're never supposed to say good luck in a theater, you say break a leg or something, and definitely in belly dance we do the same thing. We say break a hip or Sarah says break a snake. But there are more theatrical superstitions than that, and one is that you never say Macbeth in the theater unless you're performing. Yeah, call it the Scottish play. And that is because there's some scary stuff attached to it. This is a Halloween episode, so you can guess where it's headed. Suppose said Lee, there is a Macbeth curse. So to start it off, let's give you a little recap of the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth. It is a bloody tragedy. It starts off with three weird sisters who tell Macbeth, a relative of the King Duncan, that he himself will be king. They also tell another general, Banqueo, that his sons and descendants will be kings, but he himself never will be so Macbeth's wife, Lady Macbeth, vows to help him achieve this goal of ruling the kingdom by convincing him to kill King Duncan, his relative. And this is only the first of many murders in the play. Um Macbeth is behind the murder of guards, the Thane of Fife's mcduff's family and everyone in his castle. Lady Macbeth commits suicide. She's unable to wash the blood from her hands, and Macbeth is haunted by the ghost of Banquo, and the play ends with a battle in which McDuff kills Macbeth and Duncan's son Malcolm has the throne. This is worse than Lizzie Borden, classic Shakespeare tragedy, everybody dead on the stage at the end of the play. But there was in fact a real Macbeth. Yeah. So Macbeth was an aristocrat in eleventh century Scotland, and during this time there wasn't primagenitor like we think of most rulers today. You know, your your son becomes king or some relative descendant becomes king after you die. There wasn't any firstborn inheriting. Instead, kings would pick their successors, and so you can imagine that would lead to a lot of strife because it's not just the kid you ended up with, it's the rest of the nobleman too. Yeah. So Macbeth's father was killed by Macbeth's cousins who wanted his throne. Later in life, Macbeth revenged his father by killing them and married one of their widows. Grew up the real life Lady Macbeth. And we're not sure that name is is going to make a comeback as a baby name. So we're reques saying that a listener could perhaps name a pet after grew up, you know, like grew k Lambert. You know, I don't really think that's gonna work. Perhaps if I take my imaginary future husband's last name, we can reconsider it. But Macbeth had a title, though it wasn't the thing of Glamis, and the King, Malcolm the Second, who is king at the time of Macbeth, decided to institute this rule of primogeniture and ended up choosing his nephew Duncan, and the nobles were angered, as Scottish nobles always are in every single podcast we have ever done well and and part of this is you know, maybe personal, why didn't you pick me? But also Duncan just isn't much of a ruler. He's not very good in battle. He doesn't seem like he should be king. And so Macbeth killed Duncan in battle, and we should note that this is not a battle against each other, perhaps a friendly fire sort of situation. Yeah, and then Macbeth in turn is eventually killed by Duncan's son, who is also named Malcolm Um. But Macbeth didn't have a bad reputation. I mean, this seems like your average average stuff back then, just killing the king kind of semi honorably, maybe not so much, nothing terrible. So where did the bad rep come from? Well, Shakespeare's Macbeth was written sometime in the early sixteen hundreds, which is a good five hundred years after Macbeth's life, And of course history loves embellishment over the ages, and Shakespeare used Raphael Holland Sheds Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, which was published in fifteen seventies seven, as background information. But you know, he never planned for it to be historically accurate. The play. He wanted to build on that. Yeah, it's a historical drama, not an actual account. So Holland shed had, of course built on some earlier versions of the story, and through the centuries we had all these little bits added in, like the imaginary banquet and this evil, scary Lady Macbeth, and those were added in the fourteen hundreds and the early hundreds, So getting a little closer to the story we know today, poor grew up And yeah, there was no real life counterpart for Banquo, And that's a little bit of a big deal because if you remember how the witches in the play promise him this line of kings, he was supposedly um the start of the Steward line, and I think of who's king when Shakespeare's putting on this play, well exactly, and that may be part of the reason that he's turned into such an innocent character in Shakespeare's play, which he wasn't in earlier versions, trying to impress the James Laster King good. So, according to the legend, the very first performance of the play Macbeth in sixteen o six had the actor playing Lady Macbeth, who was a boy falling ill and dying right before the start of a mysterious fever, and perhaps Shakespeare took over the role for him and was really terrible in it and therefore didn't want to hear the play's name again. I mean, if you're awful you walk on stage, is like, don't say the name to me. Embarrassing performance. Um. There's another theory, though, and that's that the witches incantations were real, and they were real chance that Shakespeare lifted, and so they cursed the play forever more. But why would Shakespeare have done something like that? King James had authored a book on demonology, which is one of his chief interests, and as we mentioned, of course William Shakespeare wanted his favor. But the story goes that James hated the play and possibly banned it from being performed. So that brings us to the stories of the curse. And we have to preface this by saying we're not saying that any of these stories are true, because only a few of them can be corroborated. We'll try to point out some of the ones that can be that we think are true. Yes, Um, but these are the stories that so many of you sent us, and the ones that you'll see most frequently mentioned about the curse. So remember these are not all real. We're just telling you what people say. This is a podcast about the curse exactly. So here goes the hearsay. All right, we're going to start in the seventeenth century. In one performance, the actor playing Macbeth supposedly used a real knife instead of a stage prop and killed the actor playing Duncan in front of a live audience. During the eighteenth century, at the opening day of a performance in London. It also marked the day of one of the worst storms ever to hit the city. All right, This next one is one of my favorites. In another performance, we have an aristocrat walking across the stage. We should mention that sometimes the very best people would get to sit on the side of the stage, So he just walks across the stage in the middle of the play to be answering your cell phones. It's probably worse than that, but going to talk to his friend. The actors got very angry and ran him out, so he came back with a posse of friends and burned the whole place down. In seventeen seventy five, famed British actress Sarah Siddons, who was most famous for her portrayal of the Lady Macbeth was almost attacked by an audience member, So such as the power of theater. Moving on to the nineteenth century, this is a pretty good one too. This one's my very favorite. Can I steal this home from? Okay, So we're in the mid eighteen hundreds and there are two actors who hate each other. One is English William McCready and one is American Edwin Forrest. And Forest is said to have started this whole feud by being a very rude audience member at a McCready performance in London. So they both stage different productions of Macbeth at the same time in New York City, and supporters of Forest through stuff at McCready while he was on stage in his performance, which I mean it sounds like a cartoon, like throwing tomatoes at someone. So then there was a riot known as the astor placed right it, and the militia came and shot just at the crowd. More than twenty people died and anywhere between thirty and a hundred people were injured. It depends on what you're reading, which is absolutely insane. Well, maybe double the productions, double the curse too. So moving on to a very famous incident involving the curse. One week in eighteen sixty five, President Abraham Lincoln was reading from his favorite play, reading his favorite passage about Duncan's assassination. The next week he was assassinated. Guess what play he was at Macbeth. And in another incident in the nineteenth century, an actor accidentally seriously injured another one with a sword. And in the nineteen twenties, Lionel Barrymore's performance as Macbeth was reviewed so scathingly that he never got on a Broadway stage again. So we're ruining careers now as well as accidentally or purposely adding people. Yeah, we have a few more of those stage accidents though. The British actress Sybil Thorndyke was almost strangled by an actor, which it seems like it would be hard to do, accidentally almost strangle someone. Maybe not accident, it's just a really good actress. And then at a London staging a set collapsed and hit the cast, and there was also a fire. In the nineteen thirties, one actress playing Lady Macbeth died right before the last dress rehearsal, and supposedly during a nineteen thirty four production, an actor went mute on stage and the guy who took over for him got a fever and went to the hospital. Or depending on which story you read, the one actor went mute from a fever and had to be hospitalized. Again, there's you know, depending on what you're in the purse rumors all right. In nineteen thirty six, or Sinwells put on an all black production in Harlem, and there was a Haitian witch who had a role in the play, and when one of the critics panned the production, he and the drummers, he being the witch, the witch doctor and some of the drummers in the play cursed the critic, like really cursed him, and he died of pneumonia. So oh. Also in the nineteen thirties, Lawrence Olivier was almost crushed by a stage weight and in a car accident on separate occasions, and the proprietor of the theater had a fatal heart attack on opening night and her dog died on the same day, Or again depending on what you read, the proprietor died during a dress rehearsal, and it was an actress who was in the car accident. Then in the nineteen forties, there was a very unlucky staging in nineteen forty two when two of the witches and Duncan died and the set designer killed himself, and this is a this is a likely one. In nineteen forty seven in England, one Mcabeth Harold Norman was accidentally stabbed with the sword during the end fight scene and died. And the kicker is that right before he said he didn't believe in the curse and his ghost haunts the theater. And then this is a pretty good one. To one. Actress Diana Wynyard walked off the stage while sleepwalking as Lady Macbeth in n I mean she wasn't just squinting her eyes kind of fake closing them. She had them shut and walked off the stage right into the orchestra pit, which was like a fifteen foot drop or something. She must have not been too cursed though, because she got right up from the fall. The show must go on. Sarah. In the nineteen fifties, during a Bermuda staging, supposedly during an attack scene, these flames were blown into the audience near the castle attack and Charlton Heston who's playing Macbeth, was severely burned, and Olivier in another production almost blinded another actress. So we're thinking, I'm thinking like maybe that was his last taking new role. Um the sixties skipped the curse skips the sixties, so they were busy. And then in the nineteen seventies there's an actor's strike and fires and multiple robberies. In Planski's ninety one film, a camera operator was almost killed. And then finally we get to the nineteen eighties where in nine and one production there were twenty six cases of flu, lots of injuries, lots of directors, lots of actors, and lots of stage managers. That doesn't sound like occurs so much to me. It's just a bad, prescarably run production. Yes, but we've got some possible explanations of course for this. Yeah, for this high rate of accidents and trouble with Macbeth. One thing, there are a lot of fight scenes and that equals a lot of chances for injury. You noticed most of what we read here is uh, people getting stabbed accidentally or walking off the stage accidentally being injured in something action path act and dramatic. And there are lots of dark scenes, of course, and this is also a popular play, and it's a short play, so it's been considered a good choice for failing companies to put on. And then, of course it's not the place fault that a company fails. It already was. The play just perhaps sounded the death knell. But still that ties into the whole curse thing, and all plays have things go wrong. We just concentrate on Macbeth because supposedly there is a curse, and since it is such an old play, we've got centuries and centuries of time for all of these things to happen. I mean, perhaps we'll have a new one for Ibsen, say in in a few centuries. But it's confirmation bias because you start looking for all the things that back up your belief instead of paying any attention to all the things that don't. And you know, surely there's another terrible storm that's taken place at the at the beginning of a production, or an actor dies during a play. Those things aren't entirely unusual. Yeah, in college, I actually did a project on theaters in nineteenth century London, and I mean the accidents were insane. If if you go back and look at the London Times archives. There's just every terrible thing that could possibly happen to you would happen during these stage productions like fancy ones too, terrible falls and knife fights and swords and falling through the trapdoor. Yeah. So I'm going to go ahead and say that I don't think that there's a Ma Bath curse, Sarah, But I'm not going to say that because you don't want to harold Normana. Yeah, the guy who says he doesn't believe in the curse. I mean, I don't know if this curse extends to podcasts, but I don't I don't want to be too bold about it. We're more in a studio than a theater, so I'm I mean, notice our list of curses stops in nine. We don't know what's been going on for the past twenty years, and if maybe the curse has jumped to new media, is it a time for revival hubs? Certainly mont. We do have some tips though, if you happen to say the play's name in a theater, and we might do it now that we're done in this podcast in case, the tradition is that if you say Macbeth, in a theater, you leave the room, you spend three times over your right shoulder, you spit, and then you knock on the door and ask to come back in. So if there are any theater people listening who have a Macbeth tale to tell, please email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. And that brings us to our listener mail for today. Brian from Brooklyn sent us what's supposed to be a concert poster with copies for both of us to hang in our cubes. But it says s Y MHC Presents and these are all bands and they're all things that were brought from our podcast, so it's it's not obscene. For the first one, um the penis Thieves, Moda Harri and the Sinister salam As the murdered Meta Cheese with a special appearance by King Ludvig. The second at the lamber Dowdy Amphitheater. It's ten dollars and no Darnley's will be allowed to enter, strictly enforced, and it would be strictly enforced if I had my way. So again, you can email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We've also got a Twitter page at mist in History, and we have a Facebook fan page, which is a really good way for us to keep up with you on a on a day to day basis and respond to stuff because it takes us a little bit when it comes to email. And if you're looking for more on Shakespeare and Shakespearean manuscripts and theater history, you can try searching our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. 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