Macbeth

I have proclaimed this the summer of Macbeth, for no particular reason. Oh, there is a reason--I was setting up my Netflix queue for a Jessica Chastain film festival, and I realized she'd make a great Lady Macbeth--she has already played a Lady Macbeth manque in The Most Violent Year. So not only am I going to watch a lot of Jessica Chastain movies, I'm going to delve into Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy. If you're reading this, Jessica, I'd love to direct you in the play, on stage or on film. I'll do it for scale.

Anyway, Macbeth is certainly one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, I'd put it in the top five (and what would that be? Hmm-Hamlet, of course, Twelfth Night as best comedy, Romeo and Juliet for sentimental reasons, and maybe A Midsummer Night's Dream. Your mileage may vary). It is Shakespeare's most supernatural play, with witches and ghosts (trivia time--what are they other two plays that feature ghosts? Answer below). It is also his shortest tragedy (some think the First Folio version was missing large chunks, but the brevity suits it, as the action is pretty much uninterrupted). Macbeth has also become a superstition, as actors are not supposed to say the title aloud--it is to them "The Scottish Play."

I read it again the other day, sitting in the break room where I work, and was struck by how readable it is to modern audiences. Sure there is stuff that you need annotation for--you might want to look up who Hecate is before reading--but it's pretty straightforward for modern ears. I've detailed the plot in my review of the 2015 film version, so no reason to go over that again. Macbeth is most often described as a look at how ambition corrupts--Macbeth, who begins the play humbly serving his king, is goaded to ambition by both the Weird Sisters and his wife, and ends up a slaughterer of children. Jan Kott, a professor at Stony Brook (I took a course with him, but not on Macbeth, it was on comedy) wrote a book called Shakespeare Our Contemporary, in which he analyzes Shakespeare through the prism of the upheaval of the twentieth century. In some ways, Macbeth prefigures the dictator, who is a different animal than a king. A dictator is someone who usually rises from nothing to complete, ruthless power, like Macbeth.

Reading the play again I was struck by certain words that repeat often. The most prominent is sleep: Macbeth imagines he hears someone crying that "Macbeth does murder sleep," As with Hamlet's reticence at committing suicide, should there be dreams thereafter, sleep seems to be in Macbeth a place both of innocence and horror. Macbeth has murdered it--he kills King Duncan in his sleep--and later Lady Macbeth will walk in her sleep, reliving the deaths with her "Out damn spot" speech. We can speculate that she may have killed herself while sleepwalking, thus dying in sleep.

The other frequent mention is milk. Lady Macbeth sneers at Macbeth, who is nervous about killing Duncan, that he is too full of the "milk of human kindness," and adds, "I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this." Surely this is the most horrifying reference to breast-feeding that has ever been penned. This is an indication, that is nowhere else in the script, that she has given birth, obviously to a child now dead. The 2015 film begins with the couple burying that child. It's a tiny but unavoidable look at the root of Lady Macbeth's evil.

The plot is driven by the Weird Sisters, who gave us the terms "Double double toil and trouble" and "eye of newt." Their prophecies push Macbeth into doing what he does, despite himself, and also their wordplay about those who he need not fear spur him on to think that he is invincible. Are they playing a practical joke, or are they some early form of a Twilight Zone twist--I think of the episode of when a couple of grifters come across a camera that takes pictures of the future, and thus compels the pair to complete the prediction. Are the sisters merely "just sayin'," or is their malevolence intended?

There's lots of excellent use of language in the play. Note that the murderer of Macduff's son calls the boy an egg, and later Macduff will use chickens as a metaphor for them. Lady Macbeth is very vivid with her language, saying "Screw your courage to the sticking place," and "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." The play's best known soliloquy, which Macbeth gives after his wife's death, is a litany of Bartlett's quotes: "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," "The way to dusty death," "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." This bit of existentialism is about 350 years before Sartre.

As for when it was written, which is problematic with most of his plays, it is generally thought to be 1606, for there are many allusions to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and the belief that it was written as a tribute to King James I, who was Scottish, and was thought to be a descendant of Banquo, Macbeth's murdered former friend (Banquo has since been determined to be unhistorical). It was a pretty good year, as it is thought Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra all in that twelve-month period.

Over the next few weeks and months I'll be looking at film versions of the play, as well as modernizations, and doing some reading on the topic.

Answer: Julius Caesar and Richard III.