You are not currently logged in. Please create an account or log in to view the full course.
Macbeth's Appeal: Then and Now
- About
- Transcript
- Cite
Shakespeare: Macbeth
This course focuses on Macbeth, looking in particular at several key aspects of the play. In the first module, we focus on the appeal of the play, both when it was first peformed in the early 17th century, and for contemporary audiences. In the second module, we explore the theme of the supernatural in Macbeth, looking at King James' fascination with witches, the character of the witches in the play, and the role of fate and free-will. After that, we look at the role of women in the play, focusing in particular on their position in the patriarchal societies of 11th-Century Scotland and Jacobean England, and thinking about the extent to which the major female characters of the play fit into the patriarchal mould. In the fourth module, we consider the theme of kingship, looking at how Shakespeare adapted his sources to make Macbeth look less legitimate as a ruler, before turning in the final module to thinking about the play in performance, thinking in particular about the various different ways that one might present the play in production.
Macbeth's Appeal: Then and Now
In this module, we consider why Macbeth was so popular in Shakespeare's time, and why it remains so popular today. Firstly, it is noted that a great many of the themes of the play are still relevant today: people are still ambitious like Macbeth, and people are still fearful like Macbeth. Other aspects of the play, such as the supernatural, remain captivating despite their unfamiliarity. As well as this, Macbeth is a morally interesting character; he is the hero of the tragedy, yet he is also a criminal - so what to make of him? Finally, we consider the play's engagement with questions of life and death - and a character who is doomed while he is still alive.
Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most popular
00:00:02plays.
00:00:05It was when it was written in the early 1600s,
00:00:06and it continues to be so now, both in the theater,
00:00:10and it's studied a great deal in schools and colleges.
00:00:14I've directed the play.
00:00:19I'm an independent scholar, and I've
00:00:21directed about 16 different Shakespeare plays,
00:00:24and Macbeth is one that interests me the most.
00:00:27And I want to talk to you first about the play's appeal
00:00:30then and now.
00:00:35What is the nature of that appeal?
00:00:36Now it seems to me that the first thing
00:00:41is that we, the audience experiences something
00:00:44that is quite familiar.
00:00:48It's the public world of politics, of surveillance,
00:00:50and murder.
00:00:57Now we certainly experience the first two nowadays,
00:00:59both politics and surveillance, perhaps less so of murder.
00:01:02But it's also about private individuals who
00:01:07hold public position, chiefly, Macbeth
00:01:09and his wife, who are a very ambitious couple, perhaps Lady
00:01:13Macbeth more than her husband.
00:01:17But we're used to that nowadays.
00:01:19Any student of American politics is interested in the Kennedy
00:01:21family, and nowadays, in the Clinton family, both of whom,
00:01:26both families achieved high office,
00:01:31and the readers and the audience to their fortunes
00:01:34are interested, I'm afraid to say, in their disasters,
00:01:39perhaps even more than their triumphs.
00:01:43The final aspect which I think is familiar
00:01:47is what the play fundamentally feels like,
00:01:51which is an exploration of the nature of fear.
00:01:53Everybody has been frightened, perhaps
00:01:57not to the degree in this play.
00:01:59But there is a degree of universality about fear,
00:02:03and we as an audience, then and now,
00:02:07are very interested in that.
00:02:10Now all of that is familiar, but the play is also very strange.
00:02:13First of all, we go into a strange world of Scottish
00:02:20history, way back in the 11th century,
00:02:24which is not only remote from us, but it was pretty remote from
00:02:27the Elizabethan's.
00:02:31Perhaps more strange than that is
00:02:34the fact that it includes the supernatural.
00:02:37Now Shakespeare was very interested
00:02:40in this, and much of The Tempest,
00:02:42right at the end of his career, and a Midsummer Night's
00:02:44Dream, an earlier comedy, they too
00:02:47are concerned with the nature of the supernatural.
00:02:50But in Macbeth, the supernatural is pretty much concerned
00:02:54with the nature of evil.
00:02:58Perhaps I should mention at this stage,
00:03:01reinforcing the notion that this is a play for the theater
00:03:03more than it is to be studied privately with you
00:03:07and the book, is that in the theater
00:03:11there is a superstition about Macbeth.
00:03:17It's known as the Scottish play, partly because
00:03:19of the supernatural, partly because of evil,
00:03:22and fundamentally because it's a play about a man who is
00:03:26damned while he's still alive.
00:03:30So there are various euphemistic ways of referring to it,
00:03:34and if you mentioned to an actor the word Macbeth,
00:03:39he will probably cross himself and leave the room.
00:03:44However, Macbeth is not just a criminal.
00:03:49He's also the hero of the play, which produces
00:03:52a degree of moral ambivalence.
00:03:55I think we're used to that nowadays,
00:03:58because when we watch television detective shows,
00:04:00the detective is often himself troubled or morally flawed.
00:04:04And yet, he's the hero of the play,
00:04:10and then is he who solves the crime at the end.
00:04:14Now moral ambivalence was developing
00:04:19during Shakespeare's time.
00:04:23In the 1590s, the great playwright Christopher Marlowe
00:04:26wrote his plays Faustus and Tamburlaine.
00:04:30Both characters are extremely flawed, violent, deceitful,
00:04:34wicked, and yet we enter into their states of mind.
00:04:40Some of Shakespeare's most charismatic heroes
00:04:45Edmund, Yago, Richard, the Third, perhaps not
00:04:48all heroes, but certainly dominating their plays,
00:04:52certainly attracting the audience interest
00:04:55and often admiration.
00:04:58Morally, extremely suspect.
00:05:00So we have to observe these characters in two ways
00:05:04simultaneously.
00:05:10On the one hand, we admire them, and in another way,
00:05:11we judge them morally to be wrong,
00:05:16and we look at their careers in the play,
00:05:19and take their careers as a sort of warning to ourselves.
00:05:22Which leads on I think to an aspect of drama which
00:05:28was very popular in Shakespeare's time of history
00:05:31plays.
00:05:34They were popular because they dramatized
00:05:37English history, most of them.
00:05:41And also, because the stories of the great produce
00:05:43warnings about how you should conduct yourself, and not
00:05:48to become overweening or too full of yourself,
00:05:53and all of these characters fall from grace.
00:05:58And this is why tragedies are very interesting and important
00:06:01as well.
00:06:05There was a book published in 1597
00:06:06by Gascoigne called A Mirror For Magistrates,
00:06:08which was a collection of stories about those people
00:06:12who were high in fortune, and then for one reason or another,
00:06:16largely their own flaws fell into misery and poverty
00:06:20and distress.
00:06:25Tragedies, in those days, were meant
00:06:28to instruct and to entertain.
00:06:32You'd expect to find in them much conspiracy, bloodshed,
00:06:38revenge, high rhetoric in the language of them.
00:06:43Now Macbeth has all this, plus it has great pace.
00:06:48Once the sequence of events has started,
00:06:56it's a roller coaster of a play, which
00:07:00rushes through to disaster to such an extent
00:07:02that when you go and see a production of Macbeth nowadays,
00:07:05you may often see it played without an interval,
00:07:08as though to break the flow of the pace of the play
00:07:12would be somehow to damage its force and impact.
00:07:17One other type of play which was popular in Shakespeare's day
00:07:24was the morality play, in which you
00:07:28could say that the human soul is the battleground
00:07:32for the conflict between good and evil.
00:07:38And for the purposes of the theater,
00:07:42the human soul becomes the stage itself.
00:07:45Most famous of these is Every Man, written
00:07:49in the late 15th century.
00:07:53The title, Every Man indicates that the story
00:07:55has universal significance.
00:07:58To an extent, Macbeth, and perhaps to a lesser extent,
00:08:03Marlowe's Dr. Faustus is a sophistication
00:08:08of this battle between good and evil.
00:08:12It's a sophistication because it takes us
00:08:15into the mind and the emotions of the hero, who
00:08:18is also the transgressor.
00:08:22For me, if I want to sum up what Macbeth conveys to me
00:08:27and why I think it's important, is
00:08:34that it is the story of what it feels like to be
00:08:37damned before you die.
00:08:41And to indicate this, I want to choose
00:08:45a piece that is rather surprising to read out
00:08:48to you from act five.
00:08:52She should have died hereafter.
00:08:54That would have been a time for such a word.
00:08:57Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
00:09:01creeps in this petty pace from day to day
00:09:07to the last syllable of recorded time.
00:09:12And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
00:09:17the way to dusty death.
00:09:21Out, out, brief candle.
00:09:25Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
00:09:30that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
00:09:34and then is heard no more.
00:09:38It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
00:09:42signifying nothing.
00:09:49Now I feel that's a surprising passage in some ways.
00:09:54And because it is about being damned,
00:09:58but it is not filled with violence.
00:10:02What seems to dominate it for me is a sense of utter exhaustion
00:10:05and weariness, an obsession with time and it's
00:10:10meaninglessness, in fact, the absurdity
00:10:14of being alive at all.
00:10:18Which brings me onto one aspect of Macbeth
00:10:21which is often overlooked, the fact that it
00:10:23has a strong comic element.
00:10:26It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
00:10:30signifying nothing.
00:10:36The point about this as about so much in the play
00:10:40that Macbeth is supposed to be in charge,
00:10:44and yet he's very well aware of being mocked by fate,
00:10:48and therefore, he's an idiot.
00:10:54And there's something insubstantial about what
00:10:57he's achieved.
00:10:59He's a walking shadow.
00:11:02He's a poor player.
00:11:05So the business of being damned is being in a state
00:11:08of utter nonsense.
00:11:12Nothing heroic, nothing grand, but in terms of the drama,
00:11:16there is something powerful and compelling
00:11:23about seeing a man who wanted to be a great hero,
00:11:26facing the nothingness of his life
00:11:30and seeing it unblinkingly.
00:11:32
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Siddall, S. (2018, August 15). Shakespeare: Macbeth - Macbeth's Appeal: Then and Now [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-macbeth/women-af12bbef-5b99-4020-90e5-38034a6f0649
MLA style
Siddall, S. "Shakespeare: Macbeth – Macbeth's Appeal: Then and Now." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-macbeth/women-af12bbef-5b99-4020-90e5-38034a6f0649