In January 2013, I held my breath and sent Ken Branagh the draft of my Springboard Shakespeare: Macbeth. With his production planned for the Manchester International Festival in July that year, I hoped he might flip through it.
I was called a week later. He had been reading everything he could lay his hands on about this dark play, and apparently so much of what I'd said in my book matched his ideas. Would I consider writing something for the production's programme?
The
be-all and end-all
Actor and
writer Ben Crystal sheds a 21st-century light on the darkness of the Scottish
Play
Macbeth: image-famous
for witches, a floating dagger, and the midnight murder of a Scottish king.
Beyond these, it’s a blood-soaked play with
unspeakable brutality – throat-slitting, decapitation, the killing of an
innocent mother and child (nothing less than horrific), the murder of people
while they sleep, the splitting of someone from stomach to jawbone with a
sword, and a few other deaths that make the on- and off-stage body count at
least a dozen.
There are bloody ghosts, witches, and figures from
the Greek underworld, all ideas that would have brought terror to the minds of
Shakespeare’s audience. Characters hallucinate, are drugged, and are so terrified
of their leader that they flee from their home and country. Some are so opposed
to the dictator-like, tyrannical killing of innocents that they raise an army
and go to war.
Pixies, faeries
& ghosts
For Shakespeare’s audience at the Globe in 1606,
the presence of witches and the main plotline of killing a king were topical as
well as terrifying. Macbeth was first
performed in a period of persecution now known as the European Witch Craze, during
which many women (and men) were put under trial and executed under suspicion of
witchcraft.
In 1603, the Scottish King James VI acceded the
English throne as King James I. A few years earlier, he had written a book
about witches. And in 1605, a few months before Macbeth was first performed, he survived an assassination attempt
by Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators. (Indeed, the word ‘assassination’ was
coined by Shakespeare for this play. As I say, topical.)
The King or Queen was officially considered to be
God’s voice on Earth and the removal of the rightful monarch meant anarchy,
that the skies would darken and fall. Superstition was so powerful that the
existence of pixies, faeries and ghosts were a commonly held belief, while an
equally religious world thought earthquakes were the punishing Hand of God. Written
in that fearful time, this is a play that asked questions about political and
social instability: about how far someone will go for power, and what that can
cost...
Macbeth
and the canon
As he did for many of his plays, Shakespeare took
the basic plot for Macbeth from
Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, a
history of Britain. The second edition of Chronicles
appeared in 1587, around the time Shakespeare came to London to begin his
theatrical career.
In some respects, the play is a re-run of his earlier
Richard III (written c.1592) and Julius
Caesar (c.1599): the first half features a slow build-up towards the murder
of the rightful leader, with the second half concentrating on the emotional and
psychological fallout of such actions. It’s a structure that has inspired many
imitations on stage and screen; Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, for instance, follows a similar
path.
Othello,
King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, Coriolanus and The Winter’s
Tale followed – titanic works, each exploring the fall of a good man, but
from a slightly different angle each time. Othello suffers at the hands of another,
Lear is foolish, and Leontes (in The
Winter’s Tale) is susceptible to jealousy, as we all are. However, like
Richard III before him, Macbeth becomes a tyrant, a killer of innocents.
Macbeth is an incredible character. He experiences
a rocket-rise to absolute power via murder, then plummets into absolute
disaster, a roller-coaster ride turned runaway train. He’s the loyal soldier
who embraces his inner darkness, reaching a point of near-insanity through
megalomania, paranoia and greed, and who swings from uncertain weakness to a
Superman-like conviction of invincibility.
The
Macbeths
If Aragorn in The
Lord of the Rings had taken the Ring and Arwen had turned to Mordor, he
would have become Macbeth, and she, Lady. Macbeth, essentially, takes the Ring.
Whatever his actual years, he doesn’t seem to have acquired the wisdom that
usually comes with age to see past the Witches’ equivocation; instead, he
believes the Witches and is terrified by Banquo’s Ghost. He becomes paranoid to
the point of excluding everyone from his side, apart from a character called
Seyton (pronounced, like the devil, ‘Satan’).
In the second half of the play, Macbeth feels like
a man with nothing left to lose. However, pity for him is often reignited
during his final encounter with Macduff, as all the pieces of the puzzle fall
into place. He makes for a great and dramatic figure: someone who’s profoundly
aware he’s trapped in a downward spiral and decides to plunge headlong down
anyway.
Lady Macbeth is different. We watch as she embraces
her own darkness and see her being left far behind her husband, having
encouraged him to engage with his own inner demons, before losing her mind in a
living waking-dream.
Macbeth
is a tragedy driven forward not by a solitary figure but a married couple. Some
productions have made the Macbeths an overtly sexual couple, while others have
tried to suggest that their strength – or ensuing disintegration – comes from
having lost a baby. They only have a few scenes together, but in that time, we
need to believe they’re a couple in a strong relationship, that they could plot
and carry out a murder together.
MACBetH
Does MURDeR sLeeP
I like Macbeth. He’s a weird animal, the character
of a warrior with a very poetic heart. The verse Shakespeare wrote for him is
muscular and erratic, and its imagery is incredibly powerful. From the
terrifying:
O full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.
To the child-like rhyming:
I will not be afraid of Death and Bane
Till Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane.
To the near-suicidal:
I ’gin to be a-weary of the Sun
And wish th’estate o’th world were now undone.
To elegiac reflection:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
There’s a hauntingly tragic moment when, having
murdered Duncan, Macbeth tells his wife:
Methought, I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder Sleep’...
He’s describing the medical condition of insomnia – a term that isn’t recorded in English
until 1623, when ‘insomnie’ was defined as ‘watching; want of power to sleepe’.
Oddly enough, bearing in mind what happens to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the
four stages of the rare condition called fatal familial insomnia are now known
to be as follows:
1 – Up to four months of
sleeplessness; panic attacks, phobias and paranoia.
2 – Around five months of
severe panic attacks and hallucinations.
3 – For up to three months,
a complete inability to sleep followed by rapid weight loss.
4 – Over the next six
months: dementia, a lack of physical or verbal response to others, and
eventually death.
Other symptoms of long-term sleep loss include menopause
in women and impotence in men. Both are fascinating possible character choices,
especially considering Lady Macbeth’s reference to losing a child. She lambasts
Macbeth’s manliness, prompting him to respond, ‘I dare do all that may become a man’, and, after seeing Banquo’s
Ghost, his proclamation that ‘I am a man
again’.
Shakespeare’s lines
Shakespeare
writes prose, a
theatrical reflection of everyday speech, and he writes poetry, organising a
character’s speech into rhythmical lines of verse. He uses this verse to direct his actors, bringing out the
traits of their characters through the type of lines they speak.
In Macbeth,
the distinction between prose and verse, and between different kinds of verse,
has a hugely dramatic role. Most of the characters in Macbeth speak in verse – only 6.5 per cent of the lines in the play
are prose. The play has this rhythm pounding through it like a heartbeat,
albeit an irregular one that changes its pace. Drops of earthy base prose are scattered
throughout, stopping and starting the rhythms like a jazz trumpeter
improvising.
We hear the Porter, the Scottish Doctor and Lady
Macbeth’s Waiting-gentlewoman speak in prose, as well as Lady Macduff and her
Son; the Witches, too, from time to time. Prose, closest to everyday speech, is
the medium that Shakespeare’s lower-class characters normally use.
The Scottish noblemen and the Witches both speak in
verse, but they do so in very different ways. The noblemen use the form of
verse that was most popular in Shakespeare’s lifetime: iambic pentameter. This is
a rhythmical line with ten syllables, made up of five (‘penta-’) stronger beats
and five weaker ones, with the stronger beat every second syllable: de-DUM (known as an ‘iambic’ rhythm).
Iambic pentameter is the type of verse closest in
rhythm to spoken English, and its weak-strong beat pushes the speaker towards
the more important syllables in a line. We hear it when we first see Macbeth,
who says to Banquo:
So foul and fair a day I have not seen
This length of line of can be easily said with one
intake of breath, and the regular heartbeat-like rhythm makes it easy to commit
to memory.
The less-than-human characters are different. When
Shakespeare breaks from that iambic rhythm, he’s telling us, aurally, that
there’s something different about the characters, or that what they’re saying
is especially important. The Witches speak in short lines of four DUM-de beats, a type of verse called trochaic
tetrameter. We hear it in the opening lines of the play:
When shall we three meet again
In thunder lightning or in rain
This rhythm, so different from the rhythm of
everyday speech, is a very subtle but effective way of making the characters
seem even more other-worldly than they would if Shakespeare had written their
speeches in prose or regular iambic pentameter. The repeated four-beat lines
convey a hypnotic sound that drums into our ears. The effect is especially
noticeable later in the play, as the Witches concoct their spells...
Comedy
and tragedy
As well as being one of Shakespeare’s shortest
plays, Macbeth is also one of the
darkest. It’s often played as a tragedy with little to no comedy; even the main
‘comic’ part, the Porter, can be played as a dark, tragic demon-figure. But as
with all of Shakespeare’s plays, there’s an inherent balance of comedy and
tragedy written in.
He knew, as the classic image of theatre (the ‘persona’ mask) implies, that comedy and tragedy
work best next to each other. Balance is key: if you make an audience laugh, it’ll
be easier to make them cry, and vice versa. So don’t be surprised if this
production delivers unexpected laughs, or if it has a black comedy focus,
instead of feeling like a ‘pure’ tragedy.
Themes…
and variations
When the drunken Porter shows up to open the castle
gate, he speaks of an ‘equivocator’, someone who intentionally misuses one
word for another to deceive the listener. At the time of Macbeth’s first performances, equivocation was on the minds of
Shakespeare and his audience. Father Garnet, a Jesuit priest, was hanged in May
1606 for his part in Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605. At his trial,
he was famously discovered to have sworn evidence to be true that he knew in
his mind was false – so trying to equivocate his way out of guilt. The idea of
equivocation underpins the play. The prophecies the witches give to Macbeth
seem to be straightforward but turn out to have a double meaning – lies
masquerading as truths – and eventually doom him.
Shakespeare’s works are often discussed
thematically, but such discussions don’t tell the whole story. It’s characters
that make themes, not themes that make characters. Underneath the speeches are
characters that think and feel like any living person. And that’s the starting
point.
Shakespeare didn’t set out to write a play about a
particular theme. Macbeth doesn’t reach for the crown to explore the theme of
ambition. He simply is ambitious, and therefore we read that theme into the
play. Similarly, Lady Macbeth is a strong woman, so it’s also a play about
feminism. It can equally be read as a play about the current conflicts around
the world, democracy or any number of other subjects. The marvellous thing
about Shakespeare’s plays is that we can use them to reflect or refract
virtually any modern political or sociological theme: freely channelling
ideologies through his writing as if he wrote his plays to be sponges, sucking
up whatever part of life we bring to them.