The real Macbeth lived hundreds of years before Shakespeare. It was intended to be fiction loosely based on real events, not a documentary. Shakespeare probably had relatively little real material to work with.
"They" sometimes say it's Arabic too.
I don't think he ever let facts get in the way of a good story.
I've always heard it as a Chinese proverb, not necessarily ancient.
More importantly, he was writing Macbeth to flatter the real Scottish king, James VI (and I of England) who was his patron, so echoing the king's views on witchcraft and regicide was his priority, along with telling a good yarn.
It was a joke.
That’s what I’d always thought, too. I may have exaggerated the perceived age of the proverb. But from what I can tell it was first recorded by an Englishman, and may come from a very similar Irish proverb.
Whatever the source, I blame the current state of the world on all those millions of people who thought it was funny and repeated the curse every chance they got.
The thing that those seven men had in common (balls) was something that the equally citable Dorothy Parker never shared, and she should probably make this list too. She famously opined:
All times in the last 12,000 years have been "interesting." At least now there are no Huns or Mongols to contend with.
It seems to be from England, but probably the Irish used it too. There is a complicated story of how it got misquoted, but one can look that up if interested.
Yet it creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time...
Weezer has at least one decent song.
And there was an actual Scottish assassination tied with the succession, but it wasn't Macbeth and it happened at a far different time. Shakespeare conflated the two stories to make that good yarn.
It's not a statistic; it's a census. A statistic is the count from a sample, used to infer something about a population. A census is an actual count. The death of any number is a reality, not an inference
