The Magic
of
Macbeth
It has put a spell on me, this play.
The assignment at the University of Stockholm was to read a few pages from Macbeth. Ever the dutiful student, I read them. And
read them again. Then went home, sat at the kitchen table, alone in the flat,
and read the whole play. Aloud. And my
life as a Shakespeare freak was firmly established.
I’m not the only one, obviously, to
regard Macbeth as one of the absolute giants of world literature. But
what is it that caught me in its spell that day at the kitchen table, and
continues to do so to this day? The answer is so obvious it’s almost trite, but
still true. Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and the three weird sisters. Far from the
stereotypes they have become, these three characters (if I may regard the
sisters as one) are so complex and mysterious that they continue to confound
and elude us, and to fascinate.
And so, a brief look at the witches,
the lady and the king hereafter.
The three witches open the play with
some of Shakespeare’s most memorable lines:
First
witch: When shall we three meet again?
In thunder,
lightning, or in rain?
Second
witch: When the hurly-burly’s done,
When the
battle’s lost and won.
Third
witch: That will be ere the set of sun.
First
witch: Where the place?
Second
witch: Upon the heath.
Third
witch: There to meet with Macbeth.
…
All: Fair is foul, and foul is fair,
Hover through
the fog and filthy air.
What an atmosphere these few lines
create! Storm, tumult, battle, paradox –
“fair is foul, and foul is fair”. It
doesn’t bode well for the poor fellow Macbeth, whoever he is. How much are the witches simply predicting,
and how much are they engineering? From
the very beginning, there is the magic of uncertainty in the play.
We meet the trio soon again in Act
1.3. Again it is stormy and they are
discussing a local sailor and his wife.
He’s on his way to Aleppo and they’re planning on sending a storm to
destroy him? Why? What do the witches have against these two? There is a hint
in the unkindness shown the witches by the wife who refused to share her
chestnuts and told them to go away but more than that, the three aren’t
telling. They are outcasts, they are
dangerous.
Enter Banquo and Macbeth. Banquo
describes them as “withered”, “wild”, “skinny”, “bearded” and possibly not of
this earth, but he seems more amused by them than frightened. They say little in the exchange. Simply the
fateful, “All hail, Macbeth…thane of Glamis…of Cawdor…the king hereafter.” And
to Banquo: “Lesser than Macbeth, and
greater…thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.”
And so the paths of Macbeth and Banquo
are set. Why are the witches doing this? “Are they responsible,” Stephen
Greenblatt asks in the Norton introduction, “by magical influence or by
planting the idea in his mind, for his decision to kill Duncan? Are they
somehow privy to a predestined fate…Or… are they uncanny emblems of Macbeth’s
psychological condition…?” (page 2573).
We don’t know. Like all magic, we
don’t know if it causes our fate to take place, or simply predicts it, or if it
comes from within ourselves.
The next time we see the witches is
in Act 3.5 but here they are being chastised by their boss Hecate for taking their
own initiative without letting her be part of the fun. She’s very keen to be part of Macbeth’s
downfall and willingly or not the three let her get involved.
Which leads us to the famous
“Double, double” scene.
Both hugely comical and horrible,
this scene has more or less brainwashed us in the past four hundred years into
believing this is how witches are. Who
in the western world, and possibly the rest, has not heard, “Eye of newt and
toe of frog” and recognized it as a magic spell? Who has not pictured all the
yucky things being tossed into the cauldron, forever identifying this once
everyday object – it’s just a big pot, after all – with magic? “Poisoned entrails…wool of bat…scale of
dragon…liver of blaspheming Jew [OMG!]…nose of Turk [these witches are terrible
racists if nothing else]…Finger of birth-strangled babe…” Talk about having to
laugh in order not to throw up!
If Shakespeare tells us what they
actually do with this ghastly potion, I’ve missed it. I can’t see that Macbeth drinks it or
anything. And in fact after the famous
line, “Something wicked this way comes”, announcing the arrival of Macbeth, the
three witches step back, allowing their masters to give Macbeth the three
prophesies: watch out for Macduff, don’t worry otherwise, you’ll be OK as long
as you stay away from men not born of women and moving forests. The role of the three witches now is to
admonish Macbeth to shut up and listen. And then they vanish.
They’ve certainly done their
bit. Macbeth is on his way to his violent
doom. But what exactly have they
done? The question remains
unanswered. “…the status of the witches
in Shakespeare’s play remains uncertain and seems to be so by design,” writes
Greenblatt (page 2574). Oh Shakespeare! You’re such a master of confounding and
enthralling your readers! How can I not love these witches?
Lady Macbeth, then. Everyone loves to hate her. She’s one of the
most hated women in literature. What’s magical about her? Only that she has bewitched the world into
seeing her as evilly ambitious when she, in fact, isn’t so different from the
rest of us.
Ambitious, yes, of course. Evil?
Well, define evil. Her role is so often
played as a vicious sexpot and that is so wrong. She is, when she gets her husband’s letter,
happy for his success and aware of the aspects of his character that will make
it difficult for him to step into the unexpected role of king. She is a keen observer of character and an
astute politician in an era when most kings are murdered so that their
successor may take over the throne. Her
lines, as she reads and ponders the letter, should not be read viciously or
insanely or lustfully but thoughtfully and with just a suggestion of enjoyment
over their royal prospects.
She does not then say, “OK, we’ll
just have to kill Duncan because he’s in our way.” She says instead a whole lot
of other things that show that the murder is fated and necessary and that to
carry it out she will have to summon the power of the spirits to unsex her, to
fill her with cruelty, to stop remorse, to bring darkness so that her “keen knife not see the wound it makes…” (Act
1.5). Lady Macbeth does not want
to commit murder. She finds no vicious
joy in it. She cannot, in fact, do it
without the help of spirits to make her go against her nature. She cannot do it
without the help of a kind of magic.
Lady Macbeth’s following lines, in
which she urges her husband to fulfill the masculine role demanded of him (not
just by her, it must be emphasized, but by society), should be read not with
vicious lust but earnestly, analytically, pleadingly. Even the baby image, disturbing as it is,
should perhaps be seen more as a symbol of how necessary the murder is (within
the framework of the story) than as a literal crime Lady Macbeth would be
willing to commit. Or, it could be the
sign that in calling on the spirits to give her the strength to kill the king,
Lady Macbeth has already stumbled over the edge. She has asked to be made cruel and
remorseless, and for the moment, before the deed is actually done, she is. And her husband admires her for it, for her
“undaunted mettle” (Act 1.7).
It doesn’t last long. As she waits to hear from Macbeth that the
murder has been committed she tells us, “Had he not resembled/ My father as he
slept, I had done’t” (Act 2.2). Already
her cruelty and remorselessness is cracking and from this point onward, through
the discovery of the body, through the banquet and through to her death, Lady
Macbeth falls apart. She knows from the moment Macbeth tells her the king is
dead that madness and fear are going to consume her. “These deeds must not be thought/ After these
ways. So it will make us mad” (Act 2.2). And, “You do unbend your noble
strength to think/ So brain-sickly of things” (Act 2.2). And, “Help me hence, ho!” (Act 2.3). And
Naught’s had,
all’s spent,
Where our desire
is got without content.
‘Tis safer to be
that which we destroy
That by
destruction dwell in doubtful joy (Act 3.2).
Remorselessness didn’t last long,
did it? Be careful what you wish for…
In the banquet scene Lady Macbeth
becomes more and more frantic and confused as she watches her husband go
mad. Her own madness is not far
off. The next we hear of her is the
gentlewoman telling the doctor of her agitated insomnia and frantic hand
washing. Then we see the tragic figure
herself in one of the most heartbreaking scenes in literature:
Out, damned
spot; out I say. One, two, - why, then ‘tis time to do’t. Hell is murky…who would have thought the old
man to have had so much blood in him?...What, will these hands ne’er be
clean?...Here’s the smell of blood still….look not so pale…To bed, to bed.
There’s knocking at the gate. Come,
come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed” (Act 5-1).
And then, not much later, Seyton
tells Macbeth, “The Queen, my lord, is dead” (Act 5.5).
Killed by her own remorse, Lady
Macbeth is not a brutal lustful vamp. She
is a true victim of tragedy, a woman who does what is demanded of her but who
is able to do so only by conjuring spirits – dark magic, if you will – which
then leave her once again to herself once the crime is committed. A self that
is as frailly human as we all are.
I love the witches and their magic.
I grieve for Lady Macbeth and what magic does to her. What then of Macbeth himself?
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and
tomorrow.”
The magic Macbeth works on me
culminates and stuns me in these five words, the two preceding lines and in the
following nine lines. This monolog is
the essence of the play and its magic. It’s the essence of…everything. For
everybody.
So much can be written about the
character of Macbeth. Like Hamlet, every word he says can be pondered. Like
Hamlet he is what we might be. Unlike
Hamlet we don’t want to be like Macbeth but we want to know him. We want things to somehow turn out well for
Macbeth, even though we know all along that they will not. In the “Tomorrow” monolog we magically
encounter the very depth of Macbeth, and ourselves.
And there, in this monolog, to complete
this discussion of the play, I will stay.
Macbeth has just been told, “The
Queen, my lord, is dead.” And he says:
She should have
died hereafter.
There would have
been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and
tomorrow, and tomorrow
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’s a tale
Told by an
idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying
nothing.
Hereafter. King hereafter. Died
hereafter. King and Queen forever. So
they had been told. So had it been
prophesied. “…she, like he, ought to
have received what they were virtually promised: never to have died” (Mallin,
page 99).
But the Queen had gone mad and is
now dead. In front of him Macbeth has a
bleak future of creeping days without her and now the days behind him, he sees
clearly, have led to this moment. The yesterdays of his glorious victories in
war, his meetings with the weird sisters who ignited his lust for power through
their taunts and titles, have lit the way for him. A fool.
He has been a fool not to listen to his own fears. He knew from the beginning
that “this supernatural soliciting/ cannot be ill, cannot be good…If good…” he
would not have immediately imagined the murder of Duncan. He should have rejected the “horrid image”,
the “present fears”, “the horrible imaginings” (Act 1.3).
But his life became a shadow to his
obsession for the throne, to his poor acting as a king who strutted and fretted
and murdered and now here he stands, his beloved wife is dead, he has suffered
the same madness of guilt that destroyed her, his kingdom has become his
enemy. He knows, even though he still
tries to believe in what he has thought are prophesies of his invincibility,
that soon he will be “heard no more.” He
knows that his life, his tale, which seems to have been so certain and
successful, has in the last short time become the tale of an idiot who believed
in his own delusions of grandeur. He
knows that the sound and the fury, his “dread exploits” (Act 4.1) have turned
“th’ingredience of our poisoned chalice/ To our own lips” (Act 1.7) and that
“these terrible dreams/ that shake us nightly” turn the fury onto himself and
that he would “Better be with the dead...Than on the torture of the mind to
lie/ In restless ecstasy” (Act 3.2).
Macbeth has known all along that his
tale, in spite of the sound and fury of his crazed ambition, his crimes of
murder that tortured him before and after they were committed, is the tale of
an idiot. He has been so stupid! And now his wife is dead and he soon will
be. It all signified…nothing.
And so it is.
The magnificence of this ultimately
devastating monolog is the culmination of the magic of Macbeth. The unbreakable spell of this funny,
horrifying and tragic play. This magic
is not the magic of clever tricks. It is the magic of life itself and though
it’s true that it signifies nothing, the magic is that at the end of the play,
after the witches, after Lady Macbeth, after Macbeth himself leave the stage,
we remain caught in the tragic web and we know that the sound and the fury
signify…everything.
Works cited:
- The Norton
Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition. Ed.
Greenblatt, Stephen et al. Second edition. 2008.
- Godless
Shakespeare. Mallin, Erik S. 2007.
- “Intoduction”
by Stephen Greenblatt in The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition.
Spinoffs and Macbeth related films seen:
- Throne of Blood 1957. Director: Akira Kurosawa. Cast:
Macbeth - Toshiro Mifune; Lady
Macbeth - Isuzu Yamada. Oh what a disappointment! I had high hopes
for a Kurosawa masterpiece and many people regard it as such. Not me. Boring!
- Macbeth Retold, 2005. Director: Mark Brozel. Cast: Joe Macbeth – James McAvoy ; Ella Macbeth –
Keeley Hawes; Billy Banquo – Joseph Millson; Trash in collectors (Witches) –
Ralph Ineson, Richard Ridings, Charles Abomeli. Not a totally successful transformation into
modern times but a powerful performance by the entire cast, especially James
McAvoy.
Films seen:
- Macbeth, BBC, 1982. Director: Jack Gold. Cast: Macbeth – Nicol Williamson; Lady Macbeth – Jane
Lapotaire; Banquo – Ian Hogg; Witches – Brenda
Bruce, Eileen Way and Anne Dyson.
It’s very difficult to live up to my expectations of this play and the
BBC version doesn’t. Williamson is just
not right for the part. Lapotiare, though she starts out sleazily, does well
after the murder of the king but generally the production is hammy and
overacted and the music is more irritating than atmospheric. Visually it’s
beautiful though. Mostly done in a somber monochrome with effective flashes of
brightness and colour.
- Macbeth, 2006. Director: Geoffrey Wright. Cast: Macbeth – Sam Worthington; Lady Macbeth – Victoria
Hill; Banquo – Steve Bastoni; Witches – Chloe Armstrong, Kate Bell, Miranda
Nation. Set in today’s Australia in the
midst of a drug lord war, this updated version works quite well. It has its problems but I quite liked it.
- Macbeth, 2010. Director: Rupert Goold. Cast: Macbeth – Patrick Stewart; Lady Macbeth – Kate
Fleetwood; Banquo – Martin Turner; Witches – Niamh McGrady, Polly Frame, Sophie
Hunter. I expected so much more of this
version. It had its moments but as a whole, a big disappointment.
- Macbeth, 1971. Director: Roman Polanski. Cast:
Macbeth – Jon Finch; Lady Macbeth – Fransesca Annis ; Banquo – Martin
Shaw; Witches – Maisie MacFarquhar, Elsie
Taylor, Noelle Rimmington. This one is better than I remembered and the best of
the actual films (as opposed to filmed stage productions) so far.
- Macbeth, 1948. Director: Orson Welles. Cast: Macbeth – Orson Welles; Lady Macbeth – Jeanette
Nolan; Banquo – Edgar Barrier; Witches – Peggy Webber, Lurene Tuttle, Brainerd
Duffield. Another bitter disappointment,
this one. Beautiful black and white, but boring, pretentious and silly.
- A Performance of Macbeth, 1979, Director: Philip
Casson. Cast: Macbeth – Ian McKellen;
Lady Macbeth – Judi Dench ; Banquo – John Woodvine; Witches – Marie Kean, Judith Harte, Susan Dury. Oh see it, see
it! It’s very good!
Seen on stage:
