Macbeth

The RSC Shakespeare

Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editor: Héloïse Sénéchal
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,
Dee Anna Phares, Jan Sewell

Macbeth

Textual editing: Dee Anna Phares and Eric Rasmussen
Introduction and “Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater”: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Héloïse Sénéchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings) and Jan Sewell (overview)
The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):
Trevor Nunn, Gregory Doran, Rupert Goold

Editorial Advisory Board

Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,
Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,
Université de Genève, Switzerland
Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Fellow and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

Macbeth
is Shakespeare’s shortest, quickest tragedy. Its colors are black and red. It summons up dusk and midnight and at last a poor player who struts and frets with empty sound and fury, his life a snuffed out candle. But along the way we witness high passion, vaulting ambition, alliances made and broken. Macbeth himself is great in action but not in judgment. Give him a task on the battlefield and he will carry it through with aplomb. But give him words and he will be first easily led, then hesitant. His wife chides him for this but, ironically, as the two of them wade deeper into blood, he becomes more purposeful, she a nightmare-beset shadow of her former self.

Every day you will find some local “tragedy” described in the pages of your newspaper: a child drowns, a car crashes, a woman is murdered. The word is used so frequently, and sometimes with regard to misfortunes that in the overall scale of things are so commonplace, that it has been emptied of its primal force. If the word had been treated with the respect it deserves, kept ready for the truly awesome and the world-historical horrors, then a phrase such as “the tragic events of September 11” might have had genuine force instead of being a mere formula that rolls off every politician’s tongue.

“Is this the promised end?” asks the Duke of Albany at the end of Shakespeare’s
King Lear
. “Or image of that horror?” replies the Earl of Kent. Every human death is, for those who witness it, an image of our own promised end, but until relatively recently the word “tragedy” had not been applied to the mundane cycle of death, the expirations and silencings that occur every hour, every minute, every second. In Shakespeare’s world the term was reserved for two exceptional kinds of disaster. One was the catastrophe that seemed cosmic in its scale and horrific in its particulars, so genuinely seeming to be an image of the apocalypse, the promised end of all things.
When William Caxton, England’s first printer, wrote of “tragicall tidings,” the sort of thing he had in mind was the fall of ancient Troy—the end of a whole civilization, a turning point in history.

The second traditional sense of the word
tragedy
was shaped less by scale than by structure. “Tragedie,” wrote Geoffrey Chaucer, father of English verse, “is to seyn a certeyn storie, / As olde bookes maken us memorie, / Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, / And is yfallen out of heigh degree / Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly.” The higher they climb, the harder they fall: tragedy is traditionally about heroes and kings, larger-than-life figures who climb to the top of fortune’s wheel and are then toppled off. It is a structure saturated with irony: the very quality that is the source of a character’s greatness is also the cause of his downfall.

This is why talk of a “tragic flaw” is misleading. The theory of the flaw arises from a misunderstanding of Aristotle’s influential account of ancient Greek tragedy. For Aristotle,
hamartia
, the thing that precipitates tragedy, is not a psychological predisposition but an event—not a character trait but a fatal action. In several famous cases in Greek tragedy, the particular mistake is to kill a blood relative in ignorance of their identity. So too in Shakespeare, it is action (or, in Hamlet’s case, inaction) that determines character, and not vice versa.

In Shakespearean tragedy, the time is out of joint and the lead character is out of his accustomed role. Hamlet the scholar is happy to be presented with an intellectual puzzle, but unsure how to proceed when presented with a demand to kill. Macbeth the soldier, by contrast, relishes violent action but is restless when it comes to waiting for his reward. Hamlet meditates on the nature of providence, while Macbeth is prompted to take his fate into his own hands. Imagine Macbeth in Hamlet’s situation. He would have needed no second prompting. On hearing the Ghost’s story, he would have gone straight down from the battlements and “unseamed” King Claudius “from the nave to th’chops.” His courage and his capacity to act are without question.

King Lear cannot let go of the past, Macbeth cannot wait for the future, Hamlet cannot stop worrying about the future: none of them is content to live in the moment. This is not so much an individual
tragic flaw as a universal human failing. We are creatures bound by time but always longing for another time.

Macbeth is more like Hamlet than he appears to be at first glance. He has a conscience. When his ambition is stirred by the weyard sisters’ prophecies, he tries to slap it down: “Stars, hide your fires: / Let not light see my black and deep desires.” And when he returns to his castle: he soliloquizes on the afterlife every bit in the manner of the Danish prince. But where Hamlet is profoundly alone, unable to bring himself to confide in Ophelia because Gertrude has destroyed his faith in womankind, Macbeth has a wife to take charge of him. She enters as he is concluding his conscience-ridden soliloquy and with a few brisk exchanges and put-downs (“When you durst do it, then you were a man”) she changes his mind and settles him to the terrible feat.

His conscience is still working after the regicide, as he is haunted by the sound of the voice crying “Sleep no more.” His wife, on the other hand, is cool and practical (“A little water clears us of this deed”). But as the play progresses, in one of Shakespeare’s finest structural movements, a reversal takes place. It is Lady Macbeth who sleeps no more, whose mind is emptied of everything save the night of the murder, who cannot wash away the blood (“All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand”). Macbeth, by contrast, steeps himself so far in blood that it becomes easier to carry on than to turn back. He does not tell his wife about the plan to murder Banquo and Fleance, and by the fourth act, when he massacres the innocent Macduffs, she has temporarily disappeared from the action. By the fifth, he is willing on the final encounter: “Blow wind, come wrack, / At least we’ll die with harness on our back.” The final thoughts inspired by his wife are fatalistic: she began by spurring him to take his destiny into his own hands, she ends as the provocation to his meditation on the meaninglessness of life.

Bound by time but always longing for another time: in the face of this dilemma, Shakespearean tragedy pulls in two different directions. There is a movement toward acceptance of the moment, which means acceptance of death. Thus Macbeth: “She should have died hereafter. / There would have been a time for such a word.” And Hamlet: “If it be now, ’tis not to come: if it be not to come, it will be
now: if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.” And Edgar in
King Lear
: “Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all.” This is a kind of tragic knowledge that derives from the classical philosophy of Stoicism. Stoicism meant resignation, fortitude, suppression of emotion.

But Shakespeare was also skeptical about Stoicism. It is the Stoic philosophy that he mocks when a grieving father refuses comfort in
Much Ado About Nothing
: “I will be flesh and blood,” says Leonato, “For there was never yet philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently, / However they have writ the style of gods / And made a pish at chance and sufferance.” The trouble with Stoicism is that it neglects the capacity to feel, something which makes us human just as much as the capacity to reason. The counter-movement in Shakespearean tragedy is toward an acknowledgment of the emotions, as they express themselves in the body. Gloucester in
King Lear
has no eyes and yet he sees how the world goes: he sees it feelingly. Before Macduff can act like a man in taking revenge against Macbeth for the murder of his family he must first
feel
his grief as a man—he must let himself be a weeping human before turning himself into an alpha male.

“A play read,” mused Dr. Samuel Johnson in his preface to Shakespeare, “affects the mind like a play acted.” It doesn’t: what you have with a play acted is the actor’s body. Shakespeare was not a Stoic because he was a player. A player works with his body as much as with his words. In the theater, the body is a supremely expressive instrument of feeling.

“Words, words, mere words,” says Hamlet-like Troilus in Shakespeare’s acrid Trojan tragedy
Troilus and Cressida
, “No matter from the heart.” In the end, what matters about Shakespearean tragedy are not the fine words of resignation and Stoic comfort, but the raw matter of the heart and the solid presence of the body. The body in pain. The body emptied of life but still available for a farewell kiss or blessing. The bodies of Romeo and Juliet, of Othello and Desdemona, come to rest in an embrace. Horatio, best of friends, is there to bid Hamlet’s body goodnight. Lear is allowed to mourn over Cordelia; when he has said goodbye to his daughter he is ready for his own heart to break.
Macbeth
is the loneliest of the tragedies because the
Macbeths, having begun the play as one of the few happily married couples anywhere in Shakespeare, drift apart and each dies profoundly alone. There is no Horatio or Earl of Kent to “Give sorrow words” on behalf of the audience. Only in this play could Shakespeare have described life as a walking shadow, a poor player, a tale “Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”

Macbeth
is a play about how dreams may become nightmares, how a castle that by day seems the pleasant seat of nesting birds is transformed by night into hell itself—with a grimly witty Porter at the gate. And how the world may be turned upside down: the sun refuses to rise the morning after Duncan has been killed and other strange phenomena are interpreted as disruptions of the natural order.

The English court, in contrast, is represented as a haven, a place of grace and “healing benediction.” Malcolm’s stay in England serves as an education into virtue. His conquest of Scotland, with the worthy English Siward in support, is made to seem like a restoration of nature, the moving trees of Birnam symbolic of spring and rebirth. The play was written in the first few years after King James united the thrones of Scotland and England: Macduff’s final entrance with the tyrant’s head and his announcement that the time is free express hope for an end to the uncertainty about the nation’s future which had attended the final years of the Virgin Queen’s reign.

Within weeks of James VI of Scotland becoming James I of England in 1603, Shakespeare’s acting company were given the title “The King’s Men.” In return for this honor, they were expected to play at court whenever required. They duly gave more command performances at royal events than any of their rivals: between ten and twenty shows per year for the rest of Shakespeare’s career.

Two years after his accession, in the summer of 1605, King James visited Oxford University. At the gates of St. John’s College, there emerged from an arbor of ivy three undergraduates cross-dressed in the female garb of prophetesses or “sibyls” from classical antiquity. The first hailed him as King of Scotland, the second as King of England, and the third as King of Ireland. They reminded him that
three prophesying sisters had told the ancient Scottish thane Banquo that, though he would not be king himself, his descendants would one day rule an immortal empire. Some time before, James himself had commissioned a family tree that traced the Stuart line back to Banquo and Fleance: the sisters were now reconfirming their prophecy.

Macbeth
was almost certainly performed in the king’s presence, possibly in the summer of 1606 during a visit from the Danish king. This may explain why Norway is made Scotland’s enemy in the opening battle, where it was Denmark in the
Chronicles
that were Shakespeare’s source.
Macbeth
is steeped in the preoccupations of the new king: the rights of royal succession, the relationship between England and Scotland, the reality of witchcraft, the sacred powers of the monarch (James revived the ancient custom of “touching” his subjects in order to cure them of scrofula, “the king’s evil”). And there was one enduring concern inherited from his predecessor’s reign: anxiety about high treason and Roman Catholic plots. The Porter’s reference to “equivocation” has often been seen as an allusion to the verbal cunning shown by Father Garnet, leader of the British Jesuit community and confessor to the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, during his trial in the early months of 1606.

“Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none,” says the Third Witch to Banquo. When Macbeth returns to the weyard sisters in the second half of the play he sees a vision of the generations begotten by Banquo: “A show of eight kings and
Banquo
last: with a glass in his hand.” Some critics have supposed that the glass was a mirror pointed at King James sitting in the audience, creating a reflection of his image onstage as Banquo’s ghost walks behind. It is more likely to have been a representation of a magic crystal of the sort that was supposed to contain visions of the future. In dramatic terms, there is perhaps also an echo of the diamond given by Banquo to Macbeth on the night of the murder just before he sees another vision, that of a dagger with its handle toward his hand. Whatever the precise nature of the glass, there can be little doubt that the king imagined within it is James, the “two-fold balls” representing the orbs of Scotland and England, the “treble sceptres” denoting his claim to be King of Great Britain, Ireland, and France.

A more difficult question is the precise nature of those prophetic females who open the play. Whether or not there were such things as witches was a fiercely debated subject in the period. In his treatise
Of Demonology
, King James affirmed that there were. He believed that, nine times out of ten, witches were women, but women with unnaturally masculine features such as facial hair, that they were in league with the devil, that they had familiar spirits in the shapes of cats and toads, that their most dangerous work consisted of conjuring up images of people and cursing them, that they sent succubi to remove the sexual lifeblood from men, that they caused disease in animals. One could establish whether or not a woman was devilishly possessed by a “witch mark” on her body that would not bleed if it were pricked. When Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice
says “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” he means that Jews are not devilish in the way that witches are. The
Macbeth
witches answer to most of these characteristics: they are women with beards, summoning Grey Malkin the cat and Paddock the toad, while lines such as “I’ll drain him dry as hay” and “Killing swine” suggest succubi and diseased livestock.