Having seen the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival's production of Macbeth the other night, I have a few points to hash out, or perhaps rehash, as the case may be.
*For a production of Macbeth to work, the audience must have sufficient points of access to Macbeth's character -- and to Lady Macbeth's. That is, first of all, we must develop an understanding of Macbeth's prowess as a warrior, his courage, and his seeming-steadfast loyalty (which quickly dissipates in the wake of the witches' prophecies). All of this is established in Act I, through the Captain's report ("doubtful it stood ...") and then through the explicit contrast (primarily in Duncan's speech) between Macbeth and the traitor Macdonwald. Macbeth, like Othello, is the story of a fall from grace, of a good man gone bad because of the weaknesses in his character, whereby his strengths become perverted. The tragic arc of the story is rendered insensible if we do not at the start see Macbeth as the valiant, noble, and, indeed, loyal thane.
For the rest of the play, beyond Act I, to work, we need to see a suffering Macbeth, not merely a merciless tyrant (though he is, certainly, that, too--or he becomes it by the middle of Act IV). We need to see a Macbeth who is devoted to his wife, who does what he does in no small measure out of love for her. We need to see a falling hero who is tormented by phantasmagorical images, who recoils with horror at his own deeds, who feels powerless to stop the procession of bloody deeds that he himself enacts, until he becomes largely numb to them, or even embraces them, until Macbeth concludes that he has supped so much on horror that it frights him no longer. (Of course, he realizes that he is wrong, and therein we find the most complete, the most powerful expression of humanity in the play -- that no matter how bloody, how awful the tyrant, he is still capable of grief, depths of sadness.) When Macbeth envisions the bloody dagger, we have to understand the horrific charge of this hallucination: the dagger is covered in blood--not the blood of his own impending fate (could he meet any other fate, given the processional of bloody deeds that begins the play?), but the blood of the innocents he will murder. As penalty, Macbeth will "sleep no more," and his wife will achieve only a sleep without rest, one tormented by somnambulatory recreations of her guilt. Once Macbeth's sense of humanity has been utterly drained, as it is after he expends his last heartfelt sentiments at the news of his wife's demise, it is time for him to enter fully the identity of the heartless villain, and thus it is time for him to pay for his crimes with his very life.
In the meantime, the Macbeths suffer greatly, are racked (in the Early Modern sense of "rack") by guilt, and the effect on us as audience is that we feel their guilt, their suffering, their horror, the fruitlessness of their ambitions, their powerlessness to stop the procession of bloody deeds once they begin. The guilt that they feel is the stuff of our own nightmares, our worst twinges of conscience, only amplified. You walk away thinking that there is something, just a hint, perhaps, of yourself in Macbeth or in Lady Macbeth, and thus the play offers one of the most powerful experiences of catharsis of any Shakespearean play.
*Regarding the theme of sleep, Macbeth provides a nightmarish Jacobean counterpoint to the far gentler Elizabethan sleep-comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sleep and dreams -- "to sleep, perchance to dream" -- are clearly significant thematic elements in Shakespeare.
*The issue of agency is perhaps the most perplexing issue in Macbeth, presenting a problem without an answer: to what extent is Macbeth himself responsible for his own deeds? Is he a victim of "supernatural soliciting" via the witches and the shadowy master with whom they communicate via their cauldron? Or do the witches' words merely unloose the "vaulting ambition" that is latent in Macbeth? Beyond these questions, is the outcome of the play merely a function of the innate character Macbeth possesses, or does he create this character through words and deeds that are deliberative?
This is the great ambiguity of the play that makes it another poignant iteration of what is perhaps he greatest theme of the Shakespearean canon: the nature of character and identity. Character is destiny in Shakespeare, but how much of character is our own?
Faced with a set of conditions -- an opportunity for advancement, a murder to be avenged, slings and arrows, etc. -- what do you do? Shakespeare's characters are at once classical and modern, with one foot in the past, the other in a present that is hurtling toward the future. Macbeth himself is either a testament to the enduring mystery of fate or he is one who forges his own fate in the existential void of the untethered self. Hamlet is, of course, the greatest monument to self in Shakespeare, but others -- Othello, Prospero, Brutus, and, Harold Bloom would say, Falstaff -- bear the same burden of character.
*I was impressed the other night with a sense of the great importance of Macduff in the play, partly as a contrast to Macbeth but also as a warrior with great similarity to Macbeth. Both are formidable practitioners of the art of war, but -- partly through chance and circumstance -- Macduff is the vehicle of good and the achiever of a Pyrrhic victory, and Macbeth ultimately the defeated villain.
The emotional anchor of Act IV is Macduff's response to the news that Macbeth has slain his family. The situation prompts all manner of questions. Why did Macduff leave his family unprotected? Was it a matter of loyalty to the state versus loyalty to family -- protecting the common interest versus protecting one's own? Or was it simply a failure on Macduff's part to thoughtfully anticipate the outcome of his actions, which his wife subsequently interprets as an act of desertion? Macduff is none too great a thinker, it seems, and he operates at his best when fueled by raw emotion. And the emotion of Macduff's response is precisely the issue: he must "dispute it like a man." I have a lot more to say about this scene, which does a lot with gender themes and the nature of true manhood, but that is perhaps a matter for another time.
Macduff's wife brands him a traitor, and though Macbeth is certainly the greater traitor of the two by far, it invites comparison and contrast between the two warriors. When Macbeth battles Macduff, he is, essentially, battling his own best self of his former life. The two are in many ways more alike than they are different.
*Macbeth is, in all, I think, the most efficient play Shakespeare wrote, word for word. It's an impressive achievement, prompted by a desire to please a patron, no doubt -- King James, whose reputed short attention span explains in part the efficiency of the play -- but there's hardly a wasted line in the entirety of its five acts. This is not to say that Macbeth is necessarily Shakespeare's "best" play, but it is one that never fails to yield rich new meanings with each experience of it, and that, I believe, is what keeps us coming back to Shakespeare again and again.
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