the scottish play.

I've been reading Macbeth since yesterday, and I'm afraid I just haven't finished it yet, but something in the Bevington got me thinking:

Macbeth is a difficult play to present on stage, at least according to stage tradition: ever since the early twentieth century, actors have referred to [Macbeth] superstitiously as "he Scottish play" as a way of avoiding bad luck that otherwise can hover menacingly over the action company (714).

Now, although this quote says that the plague of the play only began since the first bit of the twentieth century, I did some internet research and found that from the very first production of Macbeth there were incidents: the lead actor dying off before the production of the play, an actor killed when stabbed with a real dagger instead of a prop, real witches who were offended about how they were portrayed cursed the play, etc. So, knowing that the Victorians were also very superstitious and were very interested in incantations and seances from earlier periods of history,there has to be something about all the magic and mayhem in Macbeth that they felt akin to. So I plan to dig a little deeper to find out exactly what the Victorians did with the magic within Macbeth, and also if they had their own scary superstitions they adhered to when performing "the Scottish play."