37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 29: Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth, first broadcast November 5th, 1983

• When was it written? Nobody knows. Probably after 1603, because the new King James saw himself as a direct descendent of Banquo and the play seems to have been written to flatter his bloodline. Possibly written in 1606 during the Gunpowder Plot trials, from which some language may have been drawn.
• What’s it about? Scottish thane Macbeth is told by witches he’ll be king. He tells his wife, who convinces him to go ahead and kill the king to speed the process along.
• Most famous dialogue: Probably the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech
• Sources: Holinshed’s Chronicles, of course, and Hector Boece’s History of the Scottish People, but also The Daemonologie, a pamphlet written by King James himself.
• Best insult: “Not in the legions Of horrid hell can come a devil more damned In evils to top Macbeth.” “I grant him bloody Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin That has a name.”
• Best word: “Aroint thee, witch, the rump-fed ronyon cries!”
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I just saw one unmemorable production, and I’ll be missing it in Stratford this year. (I’ve also seen the Welles, Polanski and Coen films, all of which are very good.)
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Nicol Williamson from Excalibur is Macbeth

How’s the cast?

• Williamson and Jane Lapotaire as Lord and Lady Macbeth are both captivating but a little broad for TV. I’ve been sticking to this one series of plays, but on YouTube you can apparently watch Ian McKellen and Judi Dench in the parts, and it was tempting to watch that one instead.

How’s the direction by Jack Gold?

• Everything feels a little cheesy and tacky, from the sets to the lighting to the camera movement. It feels a bit like an old Doctor Who episode. I enjoyed watching it, but there are better options for viewing this play.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Not All Killers Are Psychopaths

On the surface, Macbeth has a lot of similarities to Richard III. They both kill to gain a kingship, then keep killing women and children to hold it, finally dying on the battlefield as the proper order is restored. (In fact, Richard’s rise was also prophesized by a witch way back in Henry VI Part 2, wasn’t it?)

But it is a sign of Shakespeare’s greatness that the characters are so different. The easy reading of it is that Richard is a psychopath whereas Macbeth is not. Killing is easy and fun for Richard, whereas it’s torturous for both Macbeth and his wife. They’re riven by indecision, horrified by the act, and wracked by guilt afterwards. Each blames the other for getting them into this mess, and can’t forgive them or themselves. She is driven mad and kills herself, and he comes to feel that his life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

To paraphrase Twelfth Night, some are born murderous, some become murderous and some have murderousness thrust upon them. The Macbeths are clearly not in the first category, but it’s probably too generous to put them in the third. The witches don’t even tell them to kill the king, the Macbeths just pretend they did.

Ultimately, this is a greater play than Richard III because Macbeth is so torn up inside. Richard III is an excellent portrayal of how unreserved evil works, but this is an even better portrait of how evil is waiting to swallow any of us up at any time.

 
Storyteller’s Rulebook: Unsex It, Please

 
There is much debate about how bawdy Shakespeare really was. We have many dirty interpretations of his work today that may or may not have been what he intended. Was he really making a c-word joke in Hamlet? We’ll never know.

But undoubtedly many directors take moments in Shakespeare that were not intended to be sexual and make them sexual. Lawrence Olivier turned Hamlet’s bedroom scene with his mother into a real bedroom scene with his mother. (This would have been daring if he had cast someone old enough to be his mother in the role, but instead he cast an actress who was 11 years younger than him!)

In this series, I haven’t been focusing on these moments but they’re here and they’ve been annoying me. In the BBC All’s Well That Ends Well, the scene with the king is made very sexual even though there seems to be no justification for that in the actual text.

In this play, Lady Macbeth calls on spirits to “unsex her”, by which she means just make her more like a man and less like a woman, but they could stand to unsex her in other ways too, because she’s quite hot and bothered at times. When she says “Come to my woman’s breasts And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,” she starts to build to a fit of emotion that can only be described as orgasmic.  When she concludes the speech with “Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry ‘Hold! Hold!’” then falls back on the bed, she leaves little to the imagination. 

Lapotaire has fun with it, and it almost works, but ultimately it tips over into the unintentionally comic. Not everything is a sex scene, people, and injecting them into Shakespeare where he didn’t intend them is not doing him or yourselves any favors.