Macbeth is overwhelmingly a play of night-time and the hours just before and after dark. It drew on all the resources of Shakespeare's indoor theatre when it opened its doors in 1609.
We don’t know if the King’s Men ‘clapped down’ the windows and extinguished the candles for the dark scenes in Macbeth, but the play’s likely emendation by dramatist Thomas Middleton in the years after 1616 suggest that the company were minded to keep it up to date with theatrical fashion beyond the playwright’s death, and they may well have experimented with the sort of lighting effects for which the indoor playhouses were well known. Perhaps the King’s Men discovered that Macbeth thrived in the dimly glittering, intimate space of the Blackfriars, where the ‘good things of day’ could be shut outside, for ‘night’s black agents’ to begin their devilish work.
