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Shakespeare: Macbeth: Recent Scholarship
In this course Professor Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University) provides of overview of some of the recent scholarship on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, with a focus on six key themes. In the first lecture we think about the representation of time in Macbeth. After that, we think about the play’s topicality, i.e. its particular resonance for its original, early 17th-century audience, before turning in the third lecture to consider the presentation of fate and free will in the play. In the fourth lecture we explore the presentation of women in the play, particularly the character of Lady Macbeth and the witches, before turning in the fifth lecture to think about the presentation of sleep and dreams in the play, as well as about consciousness and reality. Finally, in the sixth lecture, we think the use of language and imagery in the play, including the kind of vocabulary used in the play, recurrent imagery, and the play’s insistence of being seen as a play.
Time
In this lecture we think about the representation of time in Macbeth, focusing in particular on: (i) the very first words in the play, in which the witches discuss when they are going to meet again (“When shall we three meet again?, 1.1.1); (ii) the preponderance of future tense verbs in the play; (iii) Donald W. Foster’s article, Macbeth’s War on Time (1986), in particular the contrast between the character of Donalbain and the real, historical figure; (iv) Rhodri Lewis’ article, Polychronic Macbeth (2020), in particular the tension between ‘secular and historical’ time and ‘sacred and transcendent’ time; (v) Daniel Johnson’s article, ‘Shakespeare’s Phenomenology of Time in Macbeth, in particular the essential ‘doubleness’ of time in Macbeth; (vi) Sarah Lewis and Emma Whipday’s article, ‘Sounding Offstage Worlds: Experiencing Liminal Space and Time in Macbeth and Othello’, in particular the importance of offstage sounds structure the audience’s experience of theatrical time; (vii) the concepts of kairos (a particular moment in time) and telos (the end of time); (viii) the extent to which Macbeth (both the character and the play) subscribes to a particular understanding of time; and (ix) the extent to which time is ‘broken’ by Macbeth, and the extent to which it can be repaired or recovered when he has been killed.
Reading list:
– Donald W. Foster, ‘Macbeth’s War on Time’, English Literary Renaissance 16.2 (1986), pp. 319-42
– Rhodri Lewis, ‘Polychronic Macbeth’, Modern Philology 117.3 (2020), pp. 323-46
– Daniel Johnson, ‘Shakespeare’s Phenomenology of Time in Macbeth’, Shakespeare 17 (2021), pp. 379-99
– Sarah Lewis and Emma Whipday, ‘Sounding Offstage Worlds: Experiencing Liminal Space and Time in Macbeth and Othello’, Shakespeare 15 (2019), pp. 272-82
Hello, I'm Lisa Hopkins and professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University.
00:00:05I'm going to be talking today about criticism of Macbeth.
00:00:10I'm going to be starting with the concept of time,
00:00:14which is something extremely important in the play.
00:00:16It actually begins with a question about time. When shall we three meet again?
00:00:20And that's become so famous that we perhaps don't pay very much
00:00:25attention to the fact that it is a question about time.
00:00:28It's almost become a cliche. When shall we three meet again when,
00:00:32uh, it's looking to the future?
00:00:36And it's over 200 years ago?
00:00:38Now that somebody first pointed out that so many
00:00:39of the tenses in Macbeth are the future tense,
00:00:42so many of the images of time are looking forward,
00:00:46although some of them obviously are also looking back, We've got yesterday days,
00:00:50all our yesterdays
00:00:55and we've got She should have died hereafter,
00:00:57which is a kind of strange remark about time, which is neither the future
00:01:00nor the present nor the past, but about some kind of conceptual other time,
00:01:04which is apparently the time at which Lady Macbeth should have died.
00:01:10Uh,
00:01:13we've got Macduff saying the time is free,
00:01:15and we've got Macbeth saying Tomorrow and tomorrow and Tomorrow.
00:01:18So time is clearly something of great interest and significance in the play,
00:01:21and, not surprisingly, a lot has been written about that.
00:01:27I'm going to talk about some of the more recent pieces
00:01:30that haven't been anthology sized.
00:01:32If you look at collections of essays on Macbeth,
00:01:34it's very easy to find things about times.
00:01:37But I've been looking at things from journals published more recently
00:01:39and therefore not so likely to be anthologised.
00:01:44And the first thing that I thought might be of interest
00:01:46was an article by Donald Foster called Macbeth's Warren Time,
00:01:49which came out in English literary Renaissance at L.
00:01:53R, as it's often known
00:01:56in 1986.
00:01:57And he says that the it is about
00:01:59a play that constantly looks to the future, and he draws attention to,
00:02:03particularly the figure of Donald Bain, as represented in Holland said.
00:02:08Now, Rafael Hollande said, chronicles well known to be Shakespeare's source.
00:02:14They give prominence to Donald Bain,
00:02:18and they take the character of Donald Baines story
00:02:22further forward from the end of the play,
00:02:25and point out that whereas in Macbeth the play.
00:02:27Donald Bain is just a kind of sidekick to Malcolm
00:02:31in history.
00:02:36Donald Bain has a life of his own in that he will eventually kill Malcolm,
00:02:37succeed him, and he will try to take Scotland back to Celtic nous.
00:02:42The The thing that we hear Malcolm promise at the end
00:02:48of the play is that he's going to add ANGLICISED Scotland.
00:02:50It's not going to have veins anymore. It's going to have girls.
00:02:54It's going to be like the court of his uncle, Edward the Confessor,
00:02:57where he has been spending time.
00:03:00Donald Bain is going to undo all that.
00:03:02And historically, Donald Bain is going to be a regressive figure,
00:03:04a figure who harks back to the past
00:03:09in some film versions of the play.
00:03:14That idea has been taken up most famously in Polanski's film,
00:03:16where Donald Bain comes along at the end and you can
00:03:20see that although this is the end of the film,
00:03:23it's not the end of the story.
00:03:26There's going to be a sequel in place, and so Donald Foster draws attention to that
00:03:27and talks about the play, showing us a harvest being sown
00:03:33and inviting us to imagine what's going to come of that?
00:03:38What are the consequences going to be of the events that we see happening in it?
00:03:41For an alternative perspective?
00:03:47Uh, there's an article by Rhodri Lewis called Polly Chronic Macbeth,
00:03:49which came out and fill a logical quarterly in February 2020.
00:03:54So just before lockdown.
00:03:57So, uh, kind of interesting time for an article about time to come out.
00:03:59And he argues that Macbeth can be read as dramatisations of the
00:04:04tensions between two different temporal it ease one secular and historical,
00:04:08the other sacred and transcendent.
00:04:15So there are various ways of looking at time
00:04:18is time something that just happens that unrolls,
00:04:20uh, in a kind of accidental and chaotic way.
00:04:24Or is there a plan to time? Is time organised? Is it marching towards something
00:04:27in the Christian perspective on time?
00:04:34Time has been planned, and the way that it unfolds is controlled and predictable,
00:04:36perhaps by some people with access to prophecy.
00:04:43In a secular perspective, time just happens.
00:04:47It merely occurs, and there's no knowing what might happen next,
00:04:50what the next event might be.
00:04:55And Lewis argues that Macbeth shows a difference between those two types of time
00:04:57and puts them in dialogue with each other and invites us to consider.
00:05:04Are we seeing a sacred time,
00:05:08a journey towards a specific and or are we seeing a kind of chaotic,
00:05:11unpredictable time in which things are not pre controlled?
00:05:17And I'm going to come back to that idea of pre control and destiny?
00:05:23In another of these sections?
00:05:28A Still a third perspective is offered by an
00:05:31article that came out in the journal Shakespeare,
00:05:33the Journal of the British Shakespeare Association.
00:05:36Uh, that's in Volume 17. It's by Daniel Johnston.
00:05:38It's called Shakespeare's phenomenal phenomenology of time in Macbeth,
00:05:43the word I never can say,
00:05:46and he argues that there is an essential double nous of time in the play,
00:05:48and that's a concept that's very often found in discussions of Shakespeare.
00:05:52It's most famously occurs in Othello,
00:05:56whereas if you watch your fellow in the theatre,
00:05:59you think it's only taking a couple of days to happen in front of you,
00:06:02and then our fellow surprises everyone by saying
00:06:07that Desdemona hath the act of shame with cassio
00:06:091000 times committed.
00:06:12Well, that's pretty good going in two days, actually,
00:06:14So the concept of double time is well known in Othello,
00:06:16but there could be a kind of double time in Macbeth as well.
00:06:20Historically, the real Macbeth reined in Scotland for years and years,
00:06:24but one gets no sense at all of that in the play.
00:06:30One just gets a sense of he comes. He's bad, he's got rid of it's all over.
00:06:33It's one of the short
00:06:38and one of the quickest of Shakespeare's plays, a feeling of urgency, of everybody,
00:06:39constantly in a rush,
00:06:44the idea of a real historical Macbeth raining for long enough to go on
00:06:45pilgrimage to Rome and actually doing quite a decent job in the historical record.
00:06:50That's just not there at all.
00:06:55And what Johnston says in particular is that Macbeth rejects the idea of shared time
00:06:58of a time
00:07:06which is structured in such a way that has ritual
00:07:08events because that's another important way of thinking about time.
00:07:11Time obviously unfolds before us as a future,
00:07:15but it also has a psychological element to it.
00:07:19We mark the year we are aware of specific calendrical points, were aware,
00:07:23for instance,
00:07:28of May Day and Christmas and Eastern of
00:07:29other things that come around again and again.
00:07:32So the future is
00:07:34in one sense, linear, but in another sense,
00:07:38cyclical.
00:07:40And I think it's interesting to see to think of Macbeth
00:07:42as a play that does reject that idea of shared time.
00:07:45When you start thinking about that,
00:07:48you can perhaps see that moments like Birnam Wood that could be seen as a kind of
00:07:50calendrical event that could be seen as a kind of a sort of not quite may saying,
00:07:55but it does.
00:08:01It could look a little like a pastoral and agricultural festival,
00:08:02but in the context of the play, it doesn't look like that.
00:08:06It looks like a one off, a strange and unnatural event,
00:08:11an event that's almost out of time rather
00:08:15than an event that occurs regularly within time.
00:08:18And the final piece that I wanted to talk about is also in Shakespeare,
00:08:22the Journal of the British Shakespeare Association,
00:08:26and that appeared a couple of years before Daniel Johnston's piece.
00:08:28It's by Sarah Lewis and Emma Whipped Day,
00:08:32and it's called sounding Off Stage World's Experiencing Live
00:08:34Final Space and Time in Macbeth and Othello.
00:08:38And it looks very interestingly at the preponderance
00:08:41of offstage sound in Macbeth grew out of a
00:08:45workshop that looked at staging actually mounting tiny little
00:08:49mini productions of various moments in the play.
00:08:56And it argues that the use of the
00:08:59offstage sounds reminds the audience of the fact that
00:09:02time is unfolding differently in their own real world and in the world of the play.
00:09:06So amongst them,
00:09:12those articles consider various ways that we might think about time,
00:09:13which on the face of it, is such a simple and uh, concept.
00:09:18And yet it's got very many different ways of imagining it.
00:09:23There is an idea in Greek mythology and culture of Cairo's
00:09:27a specific moment in time.
00:09:32There's an idea in Christian thought of t lost
00:09:36the end of time towards which you are moving.
00:09:39Macbeth doesn't subscribe to any one way of thinking about time,
00:09:42but I think it juggles lots of different ways of thinking about time.
00:09:46It invites us to consider whether time is simply
00:09:50a space of Futurity that lies in front of us, whether time is to be considered,
00:09:55as marked by ritual and calendrical functions,
00:10:00where the time is something that's preordained or whether we have control over it
00:10:04and whether time is our enemy or our friend.
00:10:10Macbeth presents himself as very much a victim of time,
00:10:14but he also presents himself as a man who is not
00:10:18experiencing time in the way that he had hoped to.
00:10:20He talks about the things that should accompany old age as reverence.
00:10:23Love, obedience, troops of friends. And he's not having those things.
00:10:28So he's a man who feels himself out of joint with time.
00:10:33And there is a think a sense that time is
00:10:36going wrong for Macbeth.
00:10:40And I think the question of the play,
00:10:44perhaps asks us to consider is can it be redeemed?
00:10:45Is there a way of bringing that back?
00:10:49And at the end of it, when McDuff says the time is free, is he right?
00:10:51Has the problem been solved now, or is time a continual problem?
00:10:56Do we have to keep doing battle with it?
00:11:01So that is, I think,
00:11:03a survey of some of the ways that we might think about time in the play
00:11:06
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Hopkins, L. (2022, October 10). Shakespeare: Macbeth: Recent Scholarship - Time [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-macbeth-hopkins/topicality
MLA style
Hopkins, L. "Shakespeare: Macbeth: Recent Scholarship – Time." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 10 Oct 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-macbeth-hopkins/topicality