Day 26: Macbeth

[a_t_rain]

What I love about this play: It’s so tight and dark and tense, with so many lines that give me the shivers. From Act 1 alone: “Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky / And fan our people cold.” “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” “Or have we eaten on the insane root / That takes the reason prisoner?” “What thou wouldst highly / That wouldst thou holily.” “The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements.” “Come, thick night / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell.”

The verse in this play feels intensely imagistic to me – there’s a lot of emphasis on the visual, things seen and partly-seen and unseen, and a lot of recurring visual imagery: blood, birds, fog and smoke and darkness. It’s also just stunning poetry, in general: the long leaden vowels of “Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak”; the slow drag of “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.” It cries out to be read aloud.

Some nice character touches: Banquo’s “A heavy summons likes like lead upon me / And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers / Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose.” (I like the hint here that he’s an almost-Macbeth, sleepless while the innocent are sleeping and grappling with the same temptations that Macbeth is, but he manages to rein them in.) I’m also fond of Lady Macbeth’s “What, in our house?”, which is just the sort of awkward and inappropriate thing people do blurt out when they’re in a state of shock, and I can’t for the life of me work out whether it’s the first sign that she’s losing control of the situation, or quite deliberate, and a stroke of brilliance.

(Random question: Has anyone ever seen or heard of a production in which Lady Macbeth’s child actually appears on stage? I’m staring right now at the “Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown, / And put a barren sceptre in my grip,” speech, which I’d always taken to mean that Macbeth didn’t have a living heir, but in context, it actually doesn’t; rather, he’s saying that the witches have done this to him by predicting that Banquo’s children will succeed to the throne. And he doesn’t brood or obsess about his own childlessness at all, as you might expect, just about Fleance’s continued existence. I think the kid could easily be alive at the beginning of the play; really, the only thing pointing against it is Macduff’s “He has no children,” and this could just as easily refer to Malcolm as Macbeth. I also think this could be really interesting in performance, especially if the child eventually meets an awful fate as a result of Macbeth’s choices. Yeah, I’m cruel, but there are dead mothers and dead babies all over this play, and it would fit so well, thematically.)

Favorite memory: Re-reading this for my Shakespeare class last fall. For some reason, I’d never had occasion to read it since I was in college, and I’d only seen one very, very bad stage production during the twelve years in between, so it was this huge rush of re-discovery: how did I forget this play was so good?

Comments

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

I looked up Lady Macbeth--the real life one--because I'm writing about the play version for FemGen and that means blending play and history like mad.

Lady Macbeth DID have a child--by her first marriage to Gille Coemgáin. Her husband, who was the King of Moray, and fifty of his men were burned alive in his great hall, almost certainly on the orders of the king of Alba. Indeed, it's possible that the assassin was Macbeth himself. The boy was named Lulach, and was referred to when he grew up as "Lulach the Unfortunate" and "Lulach the Simple-Minded." When Macbeth married the future Lady Macbeth, he adopted Lulach as his own child. And simple or not, Lulach did marry and produced a son (Máel Snechtai) and an unnamed daughter who became the mother of the last King of Moray (Óengus of Moray). So far as I can tell, RL Macbeth never had any biological kids.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thanks! I had no idea about the real Lady M.

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

I thought Lady MacBeth herself refers to the fact that she has had (or still does have) children with her "I have given suck and know how sweet it is to love the babe that milks me" speech (you know, that speech where she says basically even as a mother who loves her kid, she would kill her kid if she'd sworn an oath too, so Lord McB shouldn't be an oathbreaker either). Though I can't remember if she later refers to the kid dying, or if that was part of the production's backstory/fanon.

I've never seen the kid on stage though.

I did this show in college, as the assistant SM. It really is such a visual show.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Yes, she does. There's no indication whether the child is dead or alive.

[alba-merula.livejournal.com]

"It is really such a visual show" - I saw it once staged by a contemporary ballet group (a VERY good one). Without the flesh of the words, the skeleton of the story was chilling. Remembering the rawness of that AND reading / hearing the words again sometimes seems almost too strong of an experience... (I'm approximately the 923 517 865 443 907 612th person on Earth repeating that Shakespeare's a genius.

On a lighter note, have you read Wyrd Sisters from Terry Pratchett? A lovely variation for the story, with the Discworld version of Macbeth and the witches, Plot-Device Actors and someone dreaming of building a theater one day, a theater that is to be called the Dysk.

I’d be willing to bet... to bet the sunshine on my next birthday that you would like it, Rain, and most of the fellow-visitors here, too.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

I've got to read Pratchett some day -- people keep recommending him to me, but I've never gotten around to it.

[megaton-souffle.livejournal.com]

I'm so excited! I'm going to watch a production of Macbeth today, and I think you're right -- done well, the play can be really chilling. I went to a production of Hamlet by the same theatre company in 2008, and that was extremely spooky, so I have high hopes. :)