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If you’ve never seen a bad production of Macbeth, you’ve probably never seen a production of Macbeth. Famously cursed, the play has inspired perhaps the gravest superstition in the superstitious demimonde of Western theater: Every actor, director, stage manager, set designer, tech, and seamstress knows that one must never speak the name of Shakespeare’s Scottish play inside a theater. Partly this is derived from the story itself, brimful as it is with witchcraft, wickedness, and the violation of sacred bonds. Partly it is inspired by the misfortunes visited upon numerous historical productions. Those involved with various stagings across the centuries have suffered breaks, burns, falls, riots, and heart attacks. There have been a startling number of deaths, onstage and off, going back—as legend has it—to the boy playing Lady Macbeth in the very first production. And partly the superstition arises from the difficulties of the play’s script.
Among playwrights, certain scripts are considered “actor-proof”—dialogical contraptions so tightly paced, dramatically propulsive, and self-evidently motivated that even a lackluster performance, direction, or design cannot snuff out the narrative power of the writing. The truly actor-proof play, like the truly unsinkable ship, may not exist, but if there is such a thing as a script that can’t help but succeed in production, the Scottish play might be its opposite. Should every element of a production come together just right, Macbeth can be electrifying. But if even one bit goes awry, the whole thing falls to pieces.
What makes Macbeth so hard to stage well? Setting aside the challenges of producing any four-hundred-year-old play, there are several problems built into the script. First, it’s filled with magic. It opens on a coven of witches who speak in riddles and spells and in so doing set a semi-supernatural frame around all of the play’s events, which include Macbeth’s vision of a floating dagger, Lady Macbeth’s vision of blood that won’t wash out, the ghost of Banquo, and an elaborate sequence of prophetic symbols, spirits, and harbingers conjured for Macbeth’s edification in the witch’s lair. There is also the matter of the witches’ prophecies, delivered throughout the play, all of which come true, though often in ways that leave ambiguous their meanings.
Precisely how the audience is meant to receive all of this magic is unclear. Some instances, such as Lady Macbeth’s vision, seem to be mere hallucination, while others, such as the procession of Banquo’s line of future kings, are presented as objectively perceptible manifestations meant to be accepted by both characters and audience. That no one but Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost and the “air-drawn dagger” might suggest that these are psychological rather than spiritual phenomena. The characters themselves disagree, however, about what counts as magic and whether any of it should be believed, which complicates the problem of the intended audience response. Too much ambiguity regarding diegetic onionskins might try the audience’s patience, especially when the production is tasked with the additional work of preserving the suspension of disbelief with regard to onstage special effects. The delicate orchestration of these interlocking variables in a theatrical production is possible, but only barely.
The second major challenge for any production of Macbeth is the play’s tone. The script is among Shakespeare’s shortest, and the scope and complexity of the story give the audience little chance to digest all of the plot developments. The abruptness with which characters shiftfrom unshakeable loyalty to blackhearted villainy or from cynical realism to hallucinatory ecstasy can risk producing a comic effect in the midst of what might otherwise be a scene of terrible gravity. And when the characters display ambivalence about their choices, the wobbliness of their commitments can seem less tortured than incompetent. When Macbeth returns from Duncan’s murder to confess the crime to his wife, Lady Macbeth is appalled to find her absent-minded husband still in possession of the bloody daggers. The many references to drinking that appear between Duncan’s arrival at Inverness and the discovery of his body invite suspicion that the Macbeths might even have been drunk when they committed the murder. Much has been made of the Porter’s comic soliloquy, coming as it does in the midst of one of the play’s darkest moments, but that darkness has already been confused by a series of mishaps and half-measures on the part of the murderers. The script itself does not specify the proper tone with which to present such moments to the audience.
The third and perhaps greatest problem presented by Macbeth is that of motivation. Within the play’s first few scenes, we are introduced to Macbeth by other characters who speak enthusiastically about his incomparable virtue, but we’ve scarcely met the man himself before he starts to contemplate the murder of his king and benefactor. While Macbeth is still in the company of the messengers who bring him news of Duncan’s gratitude, he is already agonizing over the prospect of dispatching his royal cousin:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
He doesn’t bother considering any means by which he might become king other than killing Duncan. That the king might die some other way, that Malcolm might inherit the throne and die or be deposed himself, that another Scotsman might take up the former Thane of Cawdor’s treachery, or that the witches’ “shalt be king” might in fact mean anything other than snatching the crown from Duncan’s head: None of these possibilities cross Macbeth’s mind. The only future he imagines is a bloody one.
For her part, Lady Macbeth seems to have been thinking of regicide before she even steps onstage. The first lines she speaks are from a letter sent by her husband, in which he tells her what the witches said but not where his mind went afterward. It doesn’t matter. All on her own, she concludes that her husband must kill Duncan and seize the throne. The only obstacle she can anticipate is Macbeth’s bothersome good character:
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature.
It is too full o’th’ milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it . . .
As a question of playwriting, this perfect alignment between husband and wife could almost be seen as overdetermination—a kind of moral coincidence. Even if one of the Macbeths were to think immediately of murder upon hearing that Macbeth might be king, the logic of narrative causality would seem to dictate that the other one should have to be convinced before proceeding to the act. Of course, Lady Macbeth does have to do some persuading, and, unlike her husband, she never falters in her resolve—at least where Duncan is concerned. But their dialogue in later scenes is not so much the working out of a gradual persuasion as it is a chronicle of second-guessing in the face of a decision that both of them had already come to separately:
Macbeth
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
Lady Macbeth
What beast was’t then
That made you break this enterprise to
me?
Indeed, Macbeth displays more fealty to Duncan when speaking with his wife than he does when contemplating the matter on his own.
If one function of tragedy is to render the unspeakable understandable, then Macbeth leaves this work in the hands of the individual production. Having supplied a timeless subject, a gripping plot, a wealth of unforgettable figures and phrases, and hundreds of lines of breathtaking dialogue, Shakespeare chose not to furnish a motivation for his protagonist. Macbeth’s motive for killing Duncan is clearly to become king. But a motivation is a psychological force that makes the benefit seem worth the commission of the act. Without this, a character exposes himself to the audience’s disgust or—more fatally—disregard. If the tragedy is to remain a tragedy, Macbeth must retain the audience’s emotional investment, and for this, he needs—and yet he lacks—a credible motivation for the murder.
Playmaking is a collaborative process. In his soulful defense of Macbeth—in contrast to his cerebral disparagement of Hamlet—T. S. Eliot reveals that his reckoning of the play’s effect on the audience takes into account only the operation of the words as read: “You will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skillful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions.” While this may be true for a reader of the play, for someone taking in a live production, it’s more likely that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep will be communicated by a skilful accumulation of non-imagined sensory impressions. That is, regardless of the poetic images included in her speeches, the most striking impressions will be those of her actions and her appearance and the sound of her voice. And the fact that Shakespeare relied on productions of Macbeth to provide convincing choices for casting, blocking, set-dressing, atmosphere, tone, and even script adjustments is neither a sign of weakness nor evidence of authorial resignation. Macbeth might not be actor-proof, but one problem with an actor-proof script is that it doesn’t leave much room for the production to contribute to the final effect on the audience. Macbeth provides the recipe for a rich and brilliant night of theater, but unlike, say, Glengarry Glen Ross or The Importance of Being Earnest or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it requires the production to do more than break an egg and stir.
The first production of Macbeth took place in an especially tense political atmosphere. In 1603, James I became King of England. In 1605, a cabal of Catholic conspirators failed in their attempt to blow up the parliament and assassinate the king. And in 1606, the King’s Men premiered The Tragedie of Macbeth. The play, which concerns a Scottish subject, prominently features witches, and contains fewer lines than any of Shakespeare’s other tragedies, is often seen by scholars as a bundle of accommodating gestures intended to flatter the new king, who was Scottish, had an obsession with eradicating witchcraft, and preferred his entertainments on the shorter side. But Macbeth is also an audacious writerly challenge that the playwright posed for himself. Just one year after a highly public attempt on King James’s life, Shakespeare chose to put on a play depicting the successful killing of not one but three stand-ins for the king—two in the person of a Scottish monarch and one in the person of Banquo, whom James believed to be his ancestor—a lineage the Weird Sisters seem to confirm in Act IV.One can almost imagine Shakespeare assigning himself the herculean labor of persuading an audience still celebrating the executions of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators to applaud the onstage slaying of a Scottish king.
Yet, as time has passed and our collective memories of the Gunpowder Plot have been reduced to a children’s rhyme and a Halloween mask, the script’s accommodations to its historical context have brought about new difficulties for modern stagings of Macbeth. Much of the dialogue dwells on the question of regicide, the crime most appalling to the play’s original Jacobean audience. Shakespeare gives the matter lengthy discussion by perpetrators, bystanders, mourners, and revengers. But to a modern audience, less invested in the divine right of kings, Macbeth’s Act II murder of King Duncan is unlikely to be the most salient of his crimes. Far harder to comprehend is the Act IV massacre of Lady Macduff and her children. If there is in our culture today any group to whom an aura of sacred untouchability belongs, it is not monarchs but children. Now as then, however, these crimes provoke the same question from the audience: What would possess Macbeth to do such a thing?
Justin Kurzel’s 2015 film adaptation of Macbeth offers a stunning solution to the problem of Macbeth’s motivation. The movie’s opening shot is of a dead toddler, his body laid on a funeral platform, his tiny face marked with splotches presumably caused by disease. His parents—Macbeth and Lady Macbeth—stand nearby, cowled in dark cloth, first among the mourners. The mother sets flowers on the child’s chest. The father lays on the boy’s closed eyes objects that could be coins or oyster shells, then sprinkles black soil over his body. Someone brings a torch to the platform, which is soon consumed in flames.
The lost child—in the first instance, Macbeth’s own—is a figure that will recur throughout the movie. Cleanth Brooks observes of Shakespeare’s script that “the babe turns out to be, as a matter of fact, perhaps the most powerful symbol in the tragedy.” Kurzel’s film does not contribute the child motif to Shakespeare’s play but rather emphasizes it, elaborates on it, and invests it with personal meaning for Macbeth. The film’s first battle—in which Macbeth and Banquo lead the fight to defend Duncan’s throne—begins with the two Scottish captains preparing the king’s “last reserves,” who turn out to be a passel of scrawny boys recruited from the remaining loyalist families. Macbeth gives particular attention to one boy, who seems a kind of stand-in for the son he lost. He paints the boy’s face and binds a dagger to his hand. In the chaotic violence that follows, Macbeth distinguishes himself but is unable to stop an enemy soldier from cutting the boy soldier’s throat. Afterward, “when the battle’s lost and won,” the captains drag their dead soldiers into a common grave, but Macbeth takes special care with the body of this same boy—setting the dagger on his chest and laying tokens on his eyes of the same kind that he had laid on his dead son’s.
The screenwriters make many cuts to Shakespeare’s script, accommodating the cinematic mode of storytelling, which relies far more on visual than on verbal action, and many interstitial scenes not crucial to the plot are done away with. But they preserve a few lines from Act I, Scene IV and relocate them to Macbeth’s home at Inverness, where we see Duncan joyfully announce the elevation of his own son and heir, Malcolm, in the presence of his stone-faced host and hostess:
Sons, kinsmen, thanes—
And you whose places are the nearest—know that
We will establish our estate upon
Our eldest, Malcolm; whom we name hereafter
The Prince of Cumberland.
The contrast here could not be more pronounced: between the happy legacy of Duncan—drunk, well-dressed, unmarked by battle—and the childlessness of the scarred and scowling Macbeth. Macbeth’s desolation has been compounded by a second loss—of the boy soldier—which served no purpose beyond the safeguarding of Duncan’s royal bloodline. The atmosphere of hovering resentment carries over into an exchange that comes soon after. Macbeth attempts to halt the treasonous plan he and his wife have made, and she urges him onward. In light of the movie’s opening scene, Lady Macbeth’s reference to her own experience as a mother possesses biographical clarity and emotional force that it might otherwise lack:
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.
By the time Macbeth resolves to murder Duncan, he seems to be driven far less by “thriftless ambition” than by “great revenge.”
Soon after the conference with his wife, Macbeth delivers the famous dagger soliloquy—but in Kurzel’s adaptation, it is no longer a soliloquy. Instead, Macbeth is confronted by the figure of the dead boy soldier whom he buried. The boy holds out to him the dagger that Macbeth once bound to the boy’s hand and later laid upon his chest in the grave. This is the weapon that beckons Macbeth to kill the king. But after the opening question—“Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?”—Macbeth’s speech appears to be directed not to the dagger but to the boy himself, to the specter of the thane’s own snuffed-out lineage:
Come, let me clutch thee—
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling, as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
This “dagger of the mind,” which in many productions risks a hokey literalness, here acquires new poignancy. The memory of the lost child is for Macbeth a constant source of pain, less a florid hallucination than a subject of psychic torment, echoed later in the play—and film—by his lament to Lady Macbeth: “Full of scorpions is my mind!”
The ghost of the boy soldier returns to great effect at other moments in the film. Three instances in particular stand out. First, Kurzel and the screenwriters take a cue from Adrian Noble’s celebrated 1984 production of Henry V for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in which the hanging of Bardolph was brought onstage, so that the doomed thief’s old friend Henry must witness the consequence of his decree. In Kurzel’s film, Macbeth’s chilling order to “Seize upon Fife, give to the edge o’ the sword / His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls / That trace him in his line” is carried out by the protagonist himself, onscreen, in a fiery spectacle of cruelty and horror. Lady Macduff and her children are tied to stakes before a somber audience of Scots, and Macbeth sets fire to the wood heaped at their feet. The roaring of the flames that consume their bodies calls to mind the two other bodies Macbeth has set aflame—the body of his dead son and the body of the dead boy soldier. A few scenes later, Lady Macbeth delivers her own most celebrated speech, not to herself but to the ghost of her dead son—who is shown sitting quietly before her, heedless of the sores on his face: “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand,” she tells him, “What’s done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed.” Finally, in a horrifying reinterpretation of the witches’ prophecy, the Birnam Wood approaches high Dunsinane Castle, not creeping in the form of cut branches borne by enemy soldiers, but billowing in furious clouds of ash. We see Macduff, painted for battle, swinging a torch from tree to tree until the entire wood is a swirling inferno, and the smoke and embers come sweeping up the hill to meet Macbeth outside his castle. The torch Macduff wields is a double of the one with which his family was put to death. Seen this way, his vengeance is the mirror of its occasion.
Every Shakespeare play has its own lacunae, and every production must decide how to fill those gaps to the satisfaction of the audience. Some characters aren’t very likable on the page. Some scenes feel flat without ingenious blocking. Some speeches seem tangential to the story unless a good production finds a way to give them convincing context. And in the case of Macbeth, the title character’s motivations aren’t apparent from the script alone.
It’s not coincidental that in Shakespeare’s time, a performance text was typically preserved in one closely guarded master script, which was then parceled out into individually copied sides so that the actors could study their cues and lines without possessing the whole of the book. After all, the script was never meant to be a standalone work of art. It was meant to be one share—the lion’s share, but even so—of a greater, live, collaborative experience. Shakespeare wrote for the stage—and, with a little transposition, for the screen. A script that insists too much on its own completeness risks alienating actors and directors, and while a competent staging of an actor-proof play might guarantee a satisfied audience, it offers little artistic purpose to those on the production end.
Besides, we already have a name for a play that is self-sufficient, that contains within its pages all an audience could want without the bother of an actual production, that can trammel up the consequence and catch with its surcease success, that is the be-all and the end-all on the page. It’s called a closet drama, and a play that’s better read than staged is for the most part neither. Macbeth may have its problems, but that’s not one.
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