Macbeth (25 page)

Nunn:
It was vital to the scheme of my production that full weight was given to the England scene, where an opposite set of beliefs, under the patrimony of a deeply religious king, is developed in necessary contradiction to the things that Macbeth in repeated soliloquy has been encouraging us to think. Nevertheless, I proposed cutting some elements of the scene, but much inspired by the arguments of Bob Peck as Macduff and Roger Rees as Malcolm, a number of my proposed cuts were restored. I had reduced the amount of testing of Macduff by Malcolm, but if there was any one individual who led the movement toward a less recited, more instant coinage of Shakespeare’s language at Stratford at this time, it was the late and deeply lamented Bob Peck; it was his example that led to the scene having a centrality that only the requirements of television editing were able to compromise.

Doran:
In the England scene I think Shakespeare allows you to debate what it is that we require our rulers to be. One of the difficult things about the early part of the play is that Scotland in Macbeth’s time is not a country where kings succeed through primogeniture,
so although Malcolm becomes the Prince of Cumberland, it isn’t an automatic choice that Duncan would choose him or his son as the next king. Indeed at that point, because Macbeth has performed in such an extraordinary fashion in routing the enemy, everybody expects that he will be rewarded and perhaps nominated as the next king. So there is a slight sense that in a way he was robbed of the crown, which of course he then seizes through devious means. But then we are asked to consider whether Malcolm himself is appropriate to be leader of the country. The trick that Malcolm plays on Macduff of pretending he is a deeply flawed character forces Macduff to decide whether a man of such low morals should indeed accept the throne. That shift of perspective is important for the audience to see a larger canvas; not just to involve themselves in how Macbeth has hacked his way to the throne, but to inquire what it is that we want our monarch, our rulers, to be. It’s about good government.

Goold:
A brilliant scene and one that in any other play with less bravura theatricality would be celebrated. I’ve always felt it suffers from undercasting—particularly if the actor playing Malcolm is inexperienced. Because Patrick was an older Macbeth we had an older company than usual, and so in Scott Handy had an actor of huge experience and talent in classical theater. This is a scene that focuses on what was for me the thematic heart of the play—what it is to be a man. Questions of masculinity haunt the play—Lady Macbeth wishes she were a man, she mocks her husband’s lack of manliness, he dares “do all that may become a man: / Who dares do more is none.” Here, in the longest scene in the play, Malcolm explores for himself and in role-play what his own masculinity is and how it might be exposed as a king but also how inexperienced and unmanly he truly is. Then at the most heartbreaking moment in Shakespeare, when Macduff hears of his family’s slaughter, Malcolm urges him to “Dispute it like a man” (what a martial and British sentiment! The fear of the unmanly tears of compassion!) and Macduff reminds us that true manliness lies at the margins of this brutal, sexualized, ferocious play when he declares “I shall do so / But I must also feel it as a man.” It’s a great scene. It will always struggle after the sensationalism
of the apparitions and the Lady Macduff murder in terms of sheer theatricality, but good actors and being brave with the pacing will make it a rich and profound experience. Two particular moments in our production stood out for me: one was Malcolm’s exploration of the princely virtues, which we played as an initial retort but that became a slow and terrified exploration of his own potential inadequacy. The other was a bold and almost two-minute pause we took after Macduff receives the news of his family’s slaughter and Malcolm says “Merciful heaven!” After this agonizing awkward hiatus, Malcolm whispered: “What, man, ne’er pull your hat upon your brows: / Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak / Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.” Beautiful transcendent lines in a transcendent scene at the heart of his greatest play.

How did you deal with the theatrical superstitions linked to this play—not mentioning its title, and all that? Why is this the one Shakespearean play to have such rituals surrounding it?

Nunn:
The
Macbeth
“bad luck” superstition remains potent among actors and directors and almost certainly derives initially from the discomfort that surrounds any dabbling with the black arts. The word “Macbeth” or any quote from the play must never be uttered in a theater, other than in the course of doing that play. I love the alternative story, that this derives from the days when stock companies toured the country led by actor-managers. If business was really bad, those actor-managers, in the desperate knowledge that everyone would soon be unemployed, would have to resort to presenting the biggest crowd-pleaser …
Macbeth
. So understandably, “Don’t say that word round here!” My experience in doing the production of the play with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench was completely the opposite. Rehearsals were a constant and exciting delight—often amidst bouts of laughter, we all remained close and caring friends through The Other Place in Stratford, then the main theater, then Newcastle, then the Warehouse, then the Young Vic, and then the television studio. That should have cured me of the superstition once and for all. But I still feel very distressed if somebody inadvertently says the “M” word in a theater.

Doran:
Very straightforwardly. On the first day of rehearsals I said, “We are doing a play called
Macbeth
.
Macbeth
,
Macbeth
,
Macbeth
!” I think that the whole superstition thing is a total nonsense. There are delightful stories about the terrible things that have happened doing
Macbeth
, but if you have a group of actors together for as long as a year doing
Twelfth Night
then terrible things no doubt happen, but we never call it “The Illyrian Play”! Obviously it’s a play with swordfights, actors sometimes get tired and swordfights can go wrong, so that could be dangerous. I’m fascinated by the history of it but I think it’s nonsense in terms of the actual production. I felt it was reductive. So we resolutely on the first day decided to banish those superstitions and just refer to it as
Macbeth
. It must have worked because we were very lucky in having a very successful production!

Goold:
They say more about the theatrical community than the play, I fear. It is a difficult play, though; perhaps only
Romeo and Juliet
is harder, because, just as with
Romeo and Juliet
the play will not happen if you do not believe in the love of the lovers,
Macbeth
has to be scary, and if it doesn’t chill you then it will never take flight. Perhaps the difficulty of getting terror right onstage has made it so cursed. All I can say is that we stared it hard in the eyes and it was the most fortunate career-changing moment of my and my family’s life. We certainly got lucky with it, but even then I remember landing on the plane back from the Tony Awards a year after our journey had begun and feeling the most intense relief that we had touched ground safely—I kept thinking the play might bite back one day!

William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into
tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy
Titus Andronicus
but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.

He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself—he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson’s plays as well as the list of actors’ names at the beginning of his own collected works—but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.

The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare’s
career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet, aged eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:

For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the “honey-flowing vein” of
Venus and Adonis
and
Lucrece
, narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593–94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.

Elizabethan playhouses were “thrust” or “one-room” theaters. To understand Shakespeare’s original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary “fourth wall” framed by the proscenium. The picture-frame stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world—especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted
stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience were always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, and they shared the same “room” as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.

Shakespeare’s theatrical career began at the Rose Theatre in Southwark. The stage was wide and shallow, trapezoid in shape, like a lozenge. This design had a great deal of potential for the theatrical equivalent of cinematic split-screen effects, whereby one group of characters would enter at the door at one end of the tiring-house wall at the back of the stage and another group through the door at the other end, thus creating two rival tableaux. Many of the battle-heavy and faction-filled plays that premiered at the Rose have scenes of just this sort.

At the rear of the Rose stage, there were three capacious exits, each over ten feet wide. Unfortunately, the very limited excavation of a fragmentary portion of the original Globe site, also in 1989, revealed nothing about the stage. The first Globe was built in 1599 with similar proportions to those of another theater, the Fortune, albeit that the former was polygonal and looked circular, whereas the latter was rectangular. The building contract for the Fortune survives and allows us to infer that the stage of the Globe was probably substantially wider than it was deep (perhaps forty-three feet wide and twenty-seven feet deep). It may well have been tapered at the front, like that of the Rose.

The capacity of the Globe was said to have been enormous, perhaps in excess of three thousand. It has been conjectured that about eight hundred people may have stood in the yard, with two thousand or more in the three layers of covered galleries. The other “public” playhouses were also of large capacity, whereas the indoor Blackfriars theater that Shakespeare’s company began using in 1608—the former refectory of a monastery—had overall internal dimensions of a mere forty-six by sixty feet. It would have made for a much more intimate theatrical experience and had a much smaller capacity,
probably of about six hundred people. Since they paid at least sixpence a head, the Blackfriars attracted a more select or “private” audience. The atmosphere would have been closer to that of an indoor performance before the court in the Whitehall Palace or at Richmond. That Shakespeare always wrote for indoor production at court as well as outdoor performance in the public theater should make us cautious about inferring, as some scholars have, that the opportunity provided by the intimacy of the Blackfriars led to a significant change toward a “chamber” style in his last plays—which, besides, were performed at both the Globe and the Blackfriars. After the occupation of the Blackfriars, a five-act structure seems to have become more important to Shakespeare. That was because of artificial lighting: there were musical interludes between the acts, while the candles were trimmed and replaced. Again, though, something similar must have been necessary for indoor court performances throughout his career.

Front of house there were the “gatherers” who collected the money from audience members: a penny to stand in the open-air yard, another penny for a place in the covered galleries, sixpence for the prominent “lord’s rooms” to the side of the stage. In the indoor “private” theaters, gallants from the audience who fancied making themselves part of the spectacle sat on stools on the edge of the stage itself. Scholars debate as to how widespread this practice was in the public theaters such as the Globe. Once the audience were in place and the money counted, the gatherers were available to be extras onstage. That is one reason why battles and crowd scenes often come later rather than early in Shakespeare’s plays. There was no formal prohibition upon performance by women, and there certainly were women among the gatherers, so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that female crowd members were played by females.

The play began at two o’clock in the afternoon and the theater had to be cleared by five. After the main show, there would be a jig—which consisted not only of dancing, but also of knockabout comedy (it is the origin of the farcical “afterpiece” in the eighteenth-century theater). So the time available for a Shakespeare play was about two and a half hours, somewhere between the “two hours’ traffic” mentioned in the prologue to
Romeo and Juliet
and the “three hours’ spectacle”
referred to in the preface to the 1647 Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays. The prologue to a play by Thomas Middleton refers to a thousand lines as “one hour’s words,” so the likelihood is that about two and a half thousand, or a maximum of three thousand lines made up the performed text. This is indeed the length of most of Shakespeare’s comedies, whereas many of his tragedies and histories are much longer, raising the possibility that he wrote full scripts, possibly with eventual publication in mind, in the full knowledge that the stage version would be heavily cut. The short Quarto texts published in his lifetime—they used to be called “Bad” Quartos—provide fascinating evidence as to the kind of cutting that probably took place. So, for instance, the First Quarto of
Hamlet
neatly merges two occasions when Hamlet is overheard, the “Fishmonger” and the “nunnery” scenes.

The social composition of the audience was mixed. The poet Sir John Davies wrote of “A thousand townsmen, gentlemen and whores, / Porters and servingmen” who would “together throng” at the public playhouses. Though moralists associated female play-going with adultery and the sex trade, many perfectly respectable citizens’ wives were regular attendees. Some, no doubt, resembled the modern groupie: a story attested in two different sources has one citizen’s wife making a post-show assignation with Richard Burbage and ending up in bed with Shakespeare—supposedly eliciting from the latter the quip that William the Conqueror was before Richard III. Defenders of theater liked to say that by witnessing the comeuppance of villains on the stage, audience members would repent of their own wrongdoings, but the reality is that most people went to the theater then, as they do now, for entertainment more than moral edification. Besides, it would be foolish to suppose that audiences behaved in a homogeneous way: a pamphlet of the 1630s tells of how two men went to see
Pericles
and one of them laughed while the other wept. Bishop John Hall complained that people went to church for the same reasons that they went to the theater: “for company, for custom, for recreation…to feed his eyes or his ears…or perhaps for sleep.”

Men-about-town and clever young lawyers went to be seen as much as to see. In the modern popular imagination, shaped not least
by
Shakespeare in Love
and the opening sequence of Laurence Olivier’s
Henry V
film, the penny-paying groundlings stand in the yard hurling abuse or encouragement and hazelnuts or orange peel at the actors, while the sophisticates in the covered galleries appreciate Shakespeare’s soaring poetry. The reality was probably the other way around. A “groundling” was a kind of fish, so the nickname suggests the penny audience standing below the level of the stage and gazing in silent open-mouthed wonder at the spectacle unfolding above them. The more difficult audience members, who kept up a running commentary of clever remarks on the performance and who occasionally got into quarrels with players, were the gallants. Like Hollywood movies in modern times, Elizabethan and Jacobean plays exercised a powerful influence on the fashion and behavior of the young. John Marston mocks the lawyers who would open their lips, perhaps to court a girl, and out would “flow / Naught but pure Juliet and Romeo.”

In the absence of typewriters and photocopying machines, reading aloud would have been the means by which the company got to know a new play. The tradition of the playwright reading his complete script to the assembled company endured for generations. A copy would then have been taken to the Master of the Revels for licensing. The theater book-holder or prompter would then have copied the parts for distribution to the actors. A partbook consisted of the character’s lines, with each speech preceded by the last three or four words of the speech before, the so-called “cue.” These would have been taken away and studied or “conned.” During this period of learning the parts, an actor might have had some one-to-one instruction, perhaps from the dramatist, perhaps from a senior actor who had played the same part before, and, in the case of an apprentice, from his master. A high percentage of Desdemona’s lines occur in dialogue with Othello, of Lady Macbeth’s with Macbeth, Cleopatra’s with Antony, and Volumnia’s with Coriolanus. The roles would almost certainly have been taken by the apprentice of the lead actor, usually Burbage, who delivers the majority of the cues. Given that
apprentices lodged with their masters, there would have been ample opportunity for personal instruction, which may be what made it possible for young men to play such demanding parts.