1. art and entertainment
2. theatre

‘Something wicked this
way comes’
Macbeth and the performance of ‘evil’
Macbeth, dir. Rupert Goold, 2010
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Goold’s film ends with Macbeth and Lady
Macbeth descending into hell.
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Is a belief in the supernatural necessary in order
to appreciate the play?
‘Theatre of cruelty’
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French theatre practitioner Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)
advocated a ‘theatre of cruelty’ in which ‘metaphysics must be
made to enter the mind through the body’ (1993: 77).
Artaud proposed a theatre rich in physical, dream-like imagery: ‘a
theatre where violent physical images pulverise, mesmerise the
audience’s sensibilities’ (1993: 63).
For Artaud, theatre was a place for an audience to vent its inner
‘cruelty’: ‘its taste for crime, its erotic obsessions, its savageness,
its fantasies’ (1993: 70-1).
‘We are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads. And
above all else, theatre is made to teach us this.’ (1993: 60)
Macbeth and evil
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It is an idea about the transcendent nature of ‘evil’
which underpins most traditional readings of Macbeth.
In 1959, for example, Irving Ribner argued that:
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‘Macbeth is in many ways Shakespeare’s maturest and most
daring experiment in tragedy, for in this play he set himself to
describe the operation of evil in all its manifestations: to
define its very nature, to depict its seduction of man, and to
show its effect upon all of the planes of creation once it has
been unleashed by one man’s sinful moral choice.’ (1959:
147)
An evil play?
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The Macbeth myth:
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Charles Macklin’s production, 1772 – audience riots (due in part to rivalry
with Garrick).
New York, 1849: Englishman William Charles Macready and American
Edwin Forrest play in rival productions. Riots involved an estimated
20,000 people, and resulted in 30 fatalities and many more injuries.
When Constantin Stanislavski mounted a production at the Moscow Art
Theatre, his prompter was found dead during a performance.
Bad luck surrounded Laurence Olivier’s 1937 production at the Old Vic
(not least the death of actress Lilian Baylis, due to play Lady Macbeth).
Actor Harold Norman, playing Macbeth, was stabbed to death for real at
the Oldham Rep in 1947. (Dickson 2009: 217)
Of course, there are rational explanations for the ‘curse’.
Language and the uncanny
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When the witches claim to perform ‘a deed without a name’ (4.1.65), they
unsettle our faith in the possibility of explaining and articulating the
unknown.
This sense that the most terrifying aspects of existence transcend language (an
idea shared by Artaud) manifests itself throughout the play:
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‘Speak, if you can. What are you?’ (Macbeth, 1.3.45)
‘Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more. … Speak, I charge you.’ (Macbeth,
1.3.68,76)
‘O horror, horror, horror!
Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee.’ (Macduff, 2.3.62-3)
‘…I have words
That would be howled out in the desert air
Where hearing should not latch them.’ (Ross, 4.3.194-6)
‘…the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.’ (Malcolm, 4.3.210-11)
‘I think, but dare not speak.’ (Doctor, 5.1.76)
Inverted prayer
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To an audience with faith in the power of words to
solicit the supernatural (for good or for evil), the
language of the play is highly-charged:
LADY MACBETH. …Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. … Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief. (1.5.39-49)
Inverted prayer
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As he contemplates his future crimes, Macbeth’s couplets tend to
foreground the play’s cosmology of heaven and hell, as well as
taking on the form of inverted prayer:
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Stars, hide your fires,
Let not light see my black and deep desires. (1.4.50-1)
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I go, and it is done. The bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell. (2.1.62-4)
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It is concluded. Banquo, thy soul’s flight,
If it find heaven, must find it out to-night. (3.1.142-3)
Inverted prayer
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It is perhaps this perversion of religious speech
which renders Macbeth unable to recourse to
prayer:
MACBETH. …I could not say ‘Amen’
When they did say ‘God bless us.’
…I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’
Stuck in my throat. (2.2.26-31)
Inverted prayer
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Macbeth echoes his wife’s inverted prayer later
in the play:
MACBETH. …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. (3.2.47-51)
Witches
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Of course, the most famous uses of inverted prayer in
the play are in the witches’ incantations:
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Fair is foul, and foul is fair,
Hover through the fog and filthy air. (1.1.10-11)
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Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. (4.1.21-1)
Their power to command forces beyond human
comprehension is a key aspect of the play’s mythology.
The next clip is from Orson Welles’ Macbeth (1948).
Witches
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Are the witches human or inhuman?
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On the one hand, there is something of the ‘village witch’ about their
petty concerns in 1.3 (the first witch’s vendetta against a mean-spirited
sailor’s wife, for example).
On the other, Banquo suggests that they ‘look not like th’ inhabitants o’
th’ earth’ (1.3.39) and that ‘The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, /
And these are of them’ (1.3.77-8).
Do the witches control, or merely foresee, the future?
Shakespeare’s source, Holinshed’s Chronicles, is also ambiguous:
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‘…the common opinion was, that these women were either the weird
sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destiny, or else some
nymphs or fairies, endued with knowledge of prophecy by their
necromantical science, because everything came to pass as they had
spoken.’
A feminist reading
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Peter Stallybrass discusses the ‘social utility’ of
witchcraft beliefs, arguing that beliefs in the ‘unnatural’
‘imply and legitimate their opposite, the “natural”’
(2005: 190):
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‘Witchcraft accusations are a way of reaffirming a particular
order against outsiders, or of attacking an internal rival, or of
attacking “deviance”. Witchcraft in Macbeth… is not simply a
reflection of a pre-given order of things: rather, it is a
particular working upon, and legitimation of, the hegemony
of patriarchy.’ (2005: 190)
King James and the North Berwick witchcraft trials,
1590 (and others)
Lady Macbeth and the witches
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Shakespeare sets up several parallels between the
witches and the character of Lady Macbeth:
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They mirror each other structurally in Act 1: 1.1, 1.3, 1.5 and
1.7 are private, female-dominated scenes, alternating with
public, male-dominated ones.
Both are figured as dangerous androgynes: the ‘unsexed’ Lady
Macbeth and the ‘bearded’ witches;
Both are associated with infanticide: Lady Macbeth imagines
dashing out the brains of her child (1.7.54-9), while the
witches’ potion includes a ‘Finger of birth-strangled babe’
(4.1.30).
Against this, one might contrast the passive, motherly
Lady Macduff (4.2).
Lady Macbeth
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Lady Macbeth assumes a male role in policing
her husband’s masculinity:
‘When you durst do it, then you were a man’ (1.7.49)
 ‘Are you a man?’ (3.4.57)
 ‘What, quite unmanned in folly?’ (3.4.72)
 Macbeth recognises her masculinity when he tells
her, ‘thy undaunted mettle should compose /
Nothing but males’ (1.7.73-4).
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Lady Macbeth
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Lisa Jardine analyses Lady Macbeth in light of
Hic Mulier: or the Man-Woman (1620), a Jacobean
condemnation of ‘masculine’ women.
Arguing that the drama of the early modern
period was ‘full of set-piece denunciations of the
“not-woman” in her many forms’, Jardine
identifies Lady Macbeth as the archetype of
Jacobean drama’s ‘not-woman’ (1983: 93, 97-8).
The politics of Macbeth
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One can read Macbeth as an intensely conservative political
drama:
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Performed only months after the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, it demonstrates
the terrible consequences of regicide;
It serves to legitimate James’s authority by presenting his rule as
supernaturally-foretold: Banquo was his ancestor, and the procession of
‘eight Kings’ in 4.1 illustrates his royal lineage (conveniently omitting his
politically-awkward mother, Mary Queen of Scots).
The divinely-appointed King’s ability to heal scrofula with ‘holy prayers’ is
narrated in a (completely unnecessary) passage in Act 4 (4.3.141-60).
James is known to have participated in such ceremonies himself.
See the opening sequence of Trevor Nunn’s Macbeth (1978)…
Mythologising ‘evil’
MACBETH. …Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against
The deep damnation of his taking-off. (1.7.16-20)
OLD MAN. ’Tis unnatural,
Even like the deed that’s done. On Tuesday last
A falcon, tow’ring in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed. (2.4.10-13)
DOCTOR. Foul whisp’rings are abroad. Unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles. (5.1.68-9)
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Association of witches with natural disorder: thunder, lightning,
fog, filthy air.
Mythologising ‘evil’
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Clergyman Robert Bolton, preaching in 1621:
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‘Take sovereignty from the face of the earth, and you turn it into a
cockpit. Men would become cut-throats and cannibals one unto another.
Murder, adulteries, incests, rapes, robberies, perjuries, witchcrafts,
blasphemies, all kinds of villainies, outrages, and savage cruelty, would
overflow all countries. We should have a very hell upon earth, and the
face of it covered with blood, as it was once with water.’
James I’s ideology of Absolutism, says Alan Sinfield,
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‘…represented the English state as a pyramid, any disturbance of which
would produce general disaster. … This system was said to be “natural”
and ordained by “God”; it was “good,” and disruptions of it were “evil.”’
(1992: 96)
Legitimate violence
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‘It is often said that Macbeth is about “evil”, but
we might draw a more careful distinction:
between the violence which the State considers
legitimate and that which it does not.’ (Sinfield
1992: 95)
Think about the following clip from the TV
series 24, as framed by Fox News…
Legitimate violence
CAPTAIN. …brave Macbeth – well he deserves that name! –
Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valour’s minion
Carved out his passage till he faced the slave,
Which ne’er shook hands nor bade farewell to him
Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops,
And fixed his head upon our battlements.
DUNCAN. O valiant cousin, worthy gentleman! (1.2.16-24)
LADY MACDUFF. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. (4.2.75-8)
Legitimate violence
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Macbeth’s illegitimate violence is punished, finally, by
another embodiment of the legitimate order of violence
from which he transgressed – the severing of his own
head by Macduff.
Final parallel between Duncan/Macbeth and
Malcolm/Macduff…
Note Macduff’s willingness to legitimate Malcolm’s
(feigned) ‘black and deep desires’ in Act 4 (‘take upon
you what is yours’; 4.3.71).
Modern productions which set Macbeth in the world of
gang warfare tend to emphasise this aspect of the play.
See Penny Woolcock’s Macbeth on the Estate (1997)…
Duncan in Holinshed
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The Prologue to Macbeth on the Estate echoes Holinshed:
MACDUFF. But in time, Duncan grew fat, slack – and many misruled men
took occasion thereof to trouble peace with seditious commotion. (film)
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Holinshed: ‘The beginning of Duncane’s reign was very quiet
and peaceable, without any notable trouble; but after it was
perceived how negligent he was in punishing offenders, many
misruled persons took occasion thereof to trouble the peace and
quiet state of the common-wealth, by seditious commotions
which had their beginnings in this wise.’
Duncan in Holinshed
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In Shakespeare’s source, in fact, Duncan and Macbeth
are not so very different from one another:
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‘Makbeth, after the departure thus of Duncane’s sons, used
great liberality towards the nobles of the realm, thereby to
win their favour; and when he saw that no man went about to
trouble him, he set his whole intention to maintain justice,
and to punish all enormities and abuses which had chanced
through the feeble and slothful administration of Duncane.’
Holinshed goes on to report that Macbeth ruled with
justice for 10 years before becoming tyrannical.
The witches: heroines of the piece?
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‘The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself
recognises the fact, and however much the critics may have set out to
defame them. It is they who, by releasing ambitious thoughts in
Macbeth, expose a reverence for hierarchical social order for what it is,
as the pious self-deception of a society based on routine oppression
and incessant warfare. … The witches are exiles from that violent
order, inhabiting their own sisterly community on its shadowy
borderlands, refusing all truck with its tribal bickerings and military
honours. … their words to Macbeth catalyse this region of otherness
and desire within himself, so that by the end of the play it has flooded
up within him to shatter and engulf his previously assured identity.’
(Eagleton 1986: 2)
See the ending of Roman Polanski’s film version of Macbeth (1971)…
References
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Artaud, Antonin (1993) The Theatre and its Double, translated by
Victor Corti, London: Calder.
Dickson, Andrew (2009) The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, London:
Penguin.
Eagleton, Terry (1986) William Shakespeare, Oxford: Blackwell.
Jardine, Lisa (1983) Still Harping on Daughters, Women and Drama in
the Age of Shakespeare, Brighton: Harvester Press.
Ribner, Irving (1959) ‘Macbeth: The Pattern of Idea and Action’,
Shakespeare Quarterly, 10:2, 147-59.
Sinfield, Alan (1992) Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics
of Dissident Reading, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Stallybrass, Peter (2005) ‘Macbeth and witchcraft’ in John Russell
Brown [ed.] Focus on Macbeth, London: Routledge, 189-209.