Macbeth

Topic: Macbeth

1. Verified Sourced Facts

• The local wiki page covers Macbeth.
• The same page includes sections for References to Cannons and References to Hawking and Hunting.
• The page points to the 1.2 cannon simile and the 2.4 falcon/owl line.
• The direct Folger text witness confirms the cannon simile in 1.2.
• The same witness confirms the falcon / owl line in 2.4.
• The direct witness also contains additional military and metal-language clusters in 1.2, 1.6, 1.7, 5.3, and 5.6.

2. Ken Feinstein Twitter and Blog Information

• No Ken Feinstein Twitter/blog material is isolated in this packet at present.

3. Dating and Historical Context

• The current wiki page does not provide a separate dating section.

4. Cannon References

• In 1.2, the Captain says:

“As cannons overcharged with double cracks, so they / Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe”

5. Hunting and Hawking References

• In 2.4, the Old Man says:

“A falcon, towering in her pride of place, / Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed”

• In 1.3, the First Witch says:

“Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' th' Tiger”

• In 1.6, Banquo describes:

“The temple-haunting martlet”

6. Metallurgy, Iron, Furnace, or Forge References

• In 1.2, the Captain describes Macbeth’s:

“brandished steel, / Which smoked with bloody execution”

• In 1.6, Duncan says:

“We coursed him at the heels”

• In 1.7, Lady Macbeth says:

“Bring forth men-children only, / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males.”

• In 5.3, Macbeth asks:

“What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug / Would scour these English hence?”

• In 5.6, Macduff says:

“Make all our trumpets speak”

7. Other Relevant Historical or Local References

• The current wiki page identifies itself as:

“a work-in-progress analytical resource documenting specific textual references within the play”

• The direct play text is strongly saturated with war, siege, and martial language from the opening battle report onward, not only with the two lines preserved on the wiki page.

8. Neville Letter Alignments

• The evidence bank links 1.7 (“surcease”) to Neville’s letter_036 (13 Nov. 1599 to Robert Cecil), where he writes that “If the King commanded me to surcease, I knew what I had to do.”
• The close-reading material also links 3.4 (“Authorized by her grandam”) to Neville’s letter_001_1590, which says Warwick “had authorized them two to deal with us.”
• The same evidence bank links 4.1 (“swallow navigation up”) to the 1590 ordnance letter’s phrase about “the necessary provision of our own navigation.”

9. Quoted Source Text

Direct play text (Folger)

• 1.2: “As cannons overcharged with double cracks, so they / Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe”
• 1.2: “brandished steel, / Which smoked with bloody execution”
• 1.6: “The temple-haunting martlet”
• 1.6: “We coursed him at the heels”
• 1.7: “undaunted mettle”
• 2.4: “A falcon, towering in her pride of place, / Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed”
• 5.3: “What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug / Would scour these English hence?”
• 5.6: “Make all our trumpets speak”

10. N-gram Research

• In the codex-neville-ngram-report rare-bigram ranking, Macbeth ranks 152 with 81 shared rare bigrams.
• In the same folder’s rare-trigram ranking, the play ranks 120 with 155 shared rare trigrams; in the Jaccard-normalized trigram table it ranks 110 with a Jaccard score of 0.00494796654536168.
• No separate exact 4–7 gram phrase dossier for Macbeth has yet been located in the current Pervez n-gram folders. The current n-gram evidence for this play is ranking-based rather than an extracted exact-phrase report.

11. Citations

• “Macbeth.” Henry Neville Research Wiki, 10 Oct. 2019, http://nevilleresearch.com/index.php?title=Macbeth.
• wiki_macbeth.md, local preservation of the wiki page.
• Evidence_Bank_AllPlays_PASS.md, Pervez Database manual-PASS evidence compilation.
• Top10_Letter_Affinity_CloseReading_Draft.md, Pervez Database close-reading synthesis.
• neville_rare_bigrams_vs_plays_1590_1615.csv, Pervez Database rare-bigram play ranking.
• neville_rare_trigrams_vs_plays_1590_1615.csv, Pervez Database rare-trigram play ranking.
• neville_rare_trigrams_jaccard_vs_plays_1590_1615.csv, Pervez Database Jaccard-normalized trigram ranking.
• Neville_Letters_Corpus_v8.xml, direct local letter corpus witness for letter_001_1590 and letter_036.
• Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Folger Shakespeare Library text witness:
• front_matter.txt
• act-01_scene-02.txt
• act-01_scene-03.txt
• act-01_scene-06.txt
• act-01_scene-07.txt
• act-02_scene-04.txt
• act-05_scene-03.txt
• act-05_scene-06.txt

12. Notes on Access

• This packet has now been upgraded from direct scene-by-scene reading of the Folger text witness.