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to Dr. Regan's Home PageIntroduction.
1. The most famous legend about a Shakespeare play involves Macbeth. Just to say the word inside the theater curses the production. I think the origin of the superstition comes from the fact that Macbeth is surprisingly difficult to play successfully. It looks like a short, straightfoward tragedy, surely easier to act than Hamlet, Othello, or King Lear. But in fact it demands powerful suspense, breakneck speed, and wrenching emotional portraits, enough to strain director and actors to the utmost. No wonder failed productions summon a curse as explanation.
2. Another unique feature of Macbeth is the probable association of the play's story with the reigning monarch, James I. He was King James VI of Scotland when invited to take the English throne after the death of Queen Elizabeth. Not only was the new king a Scot, but he was fascinated by witchcraft. If we consider also the Catholic Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament in 1605 and the Elizabethan fascination with Jesuit spies in England, we discover a complex layer of history underlying the play. The word "equivocation" is an important historical clue in the text of the play.
3. In the end, only actors of compelling skill can make this play work, in performances shaped by inspired directors. We will draw from Trevor Nunn's production starring Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart's Broadway role converted to film by Rupert Goold, and the Royal Shakespeare Company production starring Antony Sher, directed by Gregory Doran. I was fortunate enough to see the latter two on stage, and the duo of Ian McKellan and Trevor Nunn is unsurpassed. In fact, Nunn directed McKellan in King Lear on a world tour and published a DVD in 2009. You will also see three brilliant interpretations of Lady Macbeth: Judy Dench (McKellan), Suzanne Burden (Stewart), and Harriet Walter (Sher).
Interpretation: performance and the text.
4. Macbeth is a violent play (like other tragedies) and directors often ritualize violence, either to soften it for audiences or to intensify it. Three witches are an unholy trinity that suggests a demonic side to human life. Trevor Nunn uses ritual from the first scene, cross-cutting to the praying King Duncan:
Duncan's political ritual, naming Malcolm his successor, cuts off Macbeth's ambition to be king. Macbeth and his wife will have to make their own violent ritual assassination to seize power:
Lady Macbeth's speech makes her the center of the bloodletting as she denies her womanly nature. Here are two other brilliant portrayals of a woman who denies the natural order of motherhood, by Harriet Walker (the Sher RSC production) an Suzanne Burden (the Stewart film):
MacbethSher1.5
MacbethStewart1.5
5. Lady Macbeth describes her husband as having too much of "the milk of human kindness" (1.5.361). As the couple plunge forward to their violent ends, there is a remarkable crossing pattern where she drives him to murder with her strength of will before she later collapses in Act 5 under the weight of their own vicious acts. Many scenes in the Stewart film take plays in a kitchen, surrounded by butchers knives.
These two performances begin with Macbeth's hesitancy, but his wife drives him on to act:
Here are three interpretations of the first committment to murder by Macbeth. They have different levels of intensity and raise the question of the ability of the audience to understand Macbeth as a struggling human being, not just a "butcher" (5.8.80).
MacbethSher2.1
MacbethStewart2.1
MacbethNunn2.1
After Macbeth is pushed to do the murder, he is shaken as he returns to his wife. Ironically he is the one to stab the King because Lady Macbeth has a qualm ("Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done't" [3.2.15-16]). Yet when he refuses to return to the scene, she steps forward to frame the servants. The third clip below continues to the infamous Porter scene, a grotesquely comic vision of Hell.
MacbethNunn2.2
MacbethSher2.2
MacbethSher2.2Porter
6. Macbeth is bedeviled by the witches' prophecy that Banquo's lineage will succeed him in Scotland. These are historical figures in the play, adapted from Raphael Holinshead's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and there was a popular belief that Shakespeare's King James was descended from Banquo. Macbeth has no children, although his wife is apparently a widow and has given birth in the past. In the play Macbeth orders the slaughter of Banquo's son and MacDuff's children, driven on by the prophecy that his kingship would end with him:
And now both Macbeth and his wife are in great distress, beginning to feel the weight of guilt that will overwhelm them in different ways. In 3.2 we hear Macbeth:
O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! (36)
But as she tries to hold him together, we begin to see the way their emotions are counterpointed. She will continue to be the stronger one through the banquet scene, but her terrible stress will soon break her. She had denied her womanly nature in 1.7:
Macbeth. Prithee, peace:
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
Lady Macbeth. What beast was't, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
Macbeth. If we should fail?
Lady Macbeth. We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail. (1.7.46-61)
Ironically, Macbeth will become the stronger now, as he denies the bond of Nature
Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale! Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood:
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;
While night's black agents to their preys do rouse.
Thou marvell'st at my words: but hold thee still;
Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.
So, prithee, go with me. (3.2.45-56)
7. The last moment of Lady Macbeth's strength comes in the banquet scene. We have two brilliant productions to view. Trevor Nunn's is stark black and white, which helps focus Macbeth's psychic isolation and Lady Macbeth's last burst of emotional energy as she desperately tries to save her husband from madness. Judy Dench finds the key to her character's coming disintegration. By contrast, the color film starring Patrick Stewart has an expressionist style as it portrays the servers as witches/nurses and Banquo as a threatening, bloddy spirit.
MacbethNunn3.4
MacbethStewart3.4
The Stewart film also features a nightmarish 4.1 when Macbeth revisits the witches, who originally appeared an nurses in a field hospital.
Macbeth fixates on Macduff and orders the murder of his family in a wrenching scene that reminds us how love and family are distorted in this savage play.
The next scene is one of the most challenging in the play, as MacDuff is tested by a fearful Malcolm, the heir apparent who is hiding in England. Then Macduff assumes the role of moral hero when he hears that Macbeth has killed his family, and Malcolm will lead their army to Scotland for the final assault.
8. Act 5 gives us the madness and suicide of Lady Macbeth, and the desperately violent death of Macbeth. This scene completes the crossing pattern of the couple as strength drains from Lady Macbeth and becomes magnified in Macbeth in both defiance and stoic resignation:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (5.5.19–28)
MacbethNunn5.1
MacbethNunn5.3
MacbethNunn5.5
We'll follow Patrick Stewart's portrait of Macbeth's final moments in a film version of the military setting. Macbeth's resolution includes an awareness of his moral decay:
I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not. (5.3.24-30)
MacbethStewart5.3
MacbethStewart5.5
Macduff, not a "man of woman born," is the final ironic twist in the temptations of the witches and the agent of Macbeth's death.
Macbeth is finally described as a villain, not a hero:
This dead butcher and his fiend-like queen. (5.8.70)
And Scotland, like the England of Richard III, is left to heal itself under a new ruler, a savior.
Journal Notes.
Please use the following prompts for your journal. Add your own if you like, and send them to me before class. They may suggest ideas for your students.
Shakespeare has couples with different personalities in other plays, but none more complex than Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. It is fascinating to trace the ebb and flow of their resolution to murder the king, and the conversion of their resolve to anguish, fear, and madness.
Consider also that Macbeth is finally more villain than hero, putting him in the camp of Richard III rather than the sympathetic central characters of Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Anthony, even Coriolanus.