“Double bubble, toil and trouble. Fire burn and caldron bubble”

In honor of summer solstice and in recognition of the witches and pagans who gathered at places like Stonehenge and on Santa Barbara’s State Street for the annual solstice celebration Saturday here’s a modern renewal of a famous curse.

A production of “Macbeth” now in rehearsal at Cal Lutheran University - north of Los Angles –has suffered the “curse.” First, the actor with the title role suffered a detached retina; another fell off a roof and broke a foot, another quit. According to the “Los Angeles Times,” all have been recast and the play is set to open this Friday as scheduled.

The belief in the curse on the play endures and is widely held among thesbians who typically refrain from even uttering the play’s title in a theatre, instead referring to it as “the Scottish play.”

Macbeth was likely written between 1604 and 1606 by William Shakespeare. According to legend, it was performed at Hampton Court in 1606 for King James I and his brother-in-law, King Christian of Denmark, and was clearly designed to appeal to King James. Not only was Banquo, who just happens to be a part of the Stuart family tree (as was James), portrayed favorably, but the play itself was fairly short, probably because King James preferred short plays. Most importantly, James himself had previously published a book on witches and how to detect them. Because of this, Shakespeare decided to give his play a supernatural twist in another effort to please the King. For the opening scene of Act IV, he reproduced a sacred black-magic ritual in which a group of witches danced about a black cauldron, shouting out strange phrases and ingredients to be thrown into it. The practitioners of rituals such as this one were not very amused by Shakespeare’s public exposure of their witchcraft, and as punishment they decided to cast their own spell on the play Macbeth that still haunts it to this day.

Supposedly, just saying the name “Macbeth” inside a theater will bring bad luck to the play and anyone acting in it. The only exception is when the word is spoken as a line in the play.

Legend is to reverse the bad luck, the person who uttered the word must exit the theater, spin around three times saying a profanity, and then ask for permission to return inside. Other variations of this ritual involve spitting over your shoulders or simply letting out a stream of cuss words. Some say that you must repeat the words “Thrice around the circle bound, Evil sink into the ground,” or you can turn to Will himself for assistance and cleanse the air with a quotation from Hamlet. Whatever steps that you choose to take, failing to do anything to prevent the curse from taking effect will ensure that you will in for some trouble. To avoid bringing up the curse in the first place, most people refer to Macbeth as one of it’s several nicknames, with “the Scottish Play” seeming to be the most popular of them. Go up to any experienced actor and ask him about the Scottish Play, and he or she will almost certainly know exactly what you are talking about.

There is a further thread in that it was also at Hampton Court where in January 1604 that King James I convened the Hampton Court Conference where a new English version of the Holy Bible was conceived in response to the perceived problems of the earlier translations as detected by the Puritans, a faction within the Church of England.