Some years ago, when I had the honor of being the theater critic for this journal, it happened that there were two productions of Macbeth in the same week, both of which interested me. So I went to see them both. There was another the next week, and then one in Connecticut, and an interesting semi-professional performance in Queens, and I went to those, too. But I hadn’t lost my appetite for Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, and so I thought it would be amusing to go see every Macbeth I could get to for the next couple of months. As it turns out, there are a lot of Macbeths going on at any given time—and, eventually, more Macbeths than your typical obsessive-compulsive theater critic has friends to go see Macbeth with him. (My advice: go alone.) Over the next couple of years, I saw more productions of the play than I can count or remember, from scrappy little productions in church lofts to Alan Cumming’s one-man (almost) version on Broadway.

Alan Cumming as Macbeth/Photo: Eoin Carey

It is a play for our times.

The cardinal value in Shakespeare’s political tragedies is order: a place for every man, and every man in his place.

Shakespeare’s political tragedies understand the world and its polities as a kind of vast algebraic equation rendered in iambic pentameter, equations that have to be balanced when one of the variables changes. It is a clockwork universe, a universe-as-machine, an idea that would capture the imaginations of those Enlightenment scientific thinkers who followed shortly behind Shakespeare (the Principia was published about eighty years after Macbeth), challenging the moral assumptions underpinning Western societies. Samuel Clarke criticized the idea in a letter to Gottfried Leibniz: “The Notion of the World’s being a great Machine, going on without the Interposition of God, as a Clock continues to go without the Assistance of a Clockmaker, is the Notion of Materialism and Fate, and tends, (under pretence of making God a Supra-mundane Intelligence,) to exclude Providence and God’s Government in reality out of the World.” There is a great deal of the supernatural in Macbeth, but nothing of the God Whose absence, if only rhetorical here, so worries Clarke. There is no God the Father, nor God the Judge, in Macbeth, only pitiless mechanics and the God of Passing Time.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
                   Signifying nothing.

The cardinal value in Shakespeare’s political tragedies is order: a place for every man, and every man in his place. When the great order is upset or inverted, then the machine begins to break down, and the out-of-place cogs and wheels are by remorseless necessity broken and removed. Out of place, the flower of a man’s virtue is indistinguishable from the serpent lurking under it: Macbeth’s great virtue is his physical courage, which is expounded upon at some length (some slightly tedious length, in truth) in the play’s opening. The will to do what other men will not do, or cannot bring themselves to do, makes heroes: anyone reading an account of the valor of Edward Byers, the Navy seal awarded the Medal of Honor in February for deeds in Afghanistan that would be rejected as implausible if they’d been included in a Michael Bay movie script, must be at least as much struck by the fact that he could do what he did as that he would. But that superhuman courage is deeply and intricately related to the inhuman extremities to which the men against whom Byers et al. fought are willing to go: burning children to death in cages, raping women to death, etc. In both cases it bears meditating upon the literal meaning of an often asked rhetorical question: how could they bring themselves to do it? At a moment in time in which a likely major-party presidential nominee cheerfully contemplates murdering the families of suspected terrorists as a national-security prophylactic, the Keyzer Soze theory of political power comes into play: “They realized that to be in power, you didn’t need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t.”

Macbeth has half a will to do what the other guy wouldn’t:

I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more, is none.

The other half he borrows from his wife.

Lady Macbeth appeals to the supernatural (“Come, you spirits . . . you murdering ministers . . . sightless substance”), but in reality her concerns are strictly biological: “Unsex me here.” There is a certain irony there: Treason and assassination are a man’s work. She may be eager to cajole her husband into stepping out of his own place into the king’s, but it is assumed from the beginning that she cannot do that herself, stepping out of the feminine world of manipulation into the masculine world of murder. Poor Shakespeare, creature of the dark ages that he was, had never heard of “gender affirmation surgery.”

On that subject, Macbeth contains with it what surely is the darkest and the strangest example of sexual ambiguity in all of Shakespeare’s work, a situation with which the playwright had an obvious fascination not entirely explained by his weakness for shaggy-dog plot devices: the Weird Sisters. One would think that, given the current state of cultural politics in theater, a genuine episode of sexual ambiguity would be capitalized on to the maximum by our contemporary producers. Oddly enough, that has seldom been the case. Instead, the witches more often have been portrayed as scantily clad sexpots, with one performance I attended verging on something like softcore lesbian pornography. While I do not have any objection in principle to attractive, young, largely naked women writhing on stage (let him among us with a free hand with no Crazy Horse stamp on it cast the first stone and all that), that makes no sense at all, visually or dramatically, when Banquo observes: “You should be women/ And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/ That you are so.” This is another unhappy example of Shakespeare modernizers attempting to inject a little hipness into the play or—angels and ministers of grace defend us!—to make it “relevant.” (As though it were anything but that in its unadorned form.) In truth, the most disturbing stagings of the play I have seen are those in which the witches are as suggested in the text itself: ghostly, ghastly, bearded, sexually ambiguous (I’ve seen them played both by men and by women), and impossibly alien. My cynical assumption is that Macbeth producers sex up the Weird Sisters for the same reason that Tony Soprano conducted business in a strip club rather than in a wrecker’s shop, why the people who write Game of Thrones sometimes find themselves obliged to say: “Thanks for sitting through eleven minutes of expositional dialogue—check out the hooters on Emilia Clarke!”

 The small-budget performances generally come closer to getting it right.

In general, getting the visuals right on Macbeth does not seem to me something that should be very difficult to do, but it seldom is done. Alan Cumming’s adaptation was set in what appears to be an early twentieth-century mental hospital; it wasn’t quite Macbeth, but it was Macbeth-ish. For that creepy, blood-on-dirty-tiles institutional vibe, the real deal is New York’s long-running Sleep No More, an immersive take on the play in which members of the audience are obliged to strap on commedia dell’arte masks and wander through a warren of rooms in which scenes from Macbeth are being acted out with varying degrees of extravagance and innovation, from a spectacular witches’ Sabbath set to rave music to a dramatic hanging of the play’s principal malefactor. (For a Valentine’s Day performance a few years back, the strung-up Macbeth was hoisted to the ceiling and then replaced by a disco ball as the performance dissolved into a dance party.)

Sleep No More, at the Punchdrunk Theater in Chelsea/Photo: Alick Crossley

Conversely, the small-budget performances generally come closer to getting it right: Seth Duerr of the York Shakespeare Company, in an act of theatrical endurance, directed and played the lead in back-to-back performances of Macbeth and Richard II. (He was also excellent in the Folding Chair Classical Theatre’s Titus.) His Weird Sisters were properly weird, and properly bearded. He himself brought an appropriately large physicality to the role of Macbeth. (That presence was quite diminished the last time I saw him, presumably as the result of a successful fitness program and not of his being a literally starving artist.) Marc LeVasseur wasn’t quite so martial in the Secret Theater performance of the play by the Queens Players (their name refers not to Her Royal Highness but to the New York borough) though he played the right kind of weakness when overwhelmed by his Lady Macbeth (Rachel Cornish was terrifying in the role). But Alan Cumming is fearsome mainly in a Norman Bates kind of way—it is impossible to imagine him as the claymore-swinging badass described in the play’s opening. (“Unsex me,” indeed.) Likewise, Ethan Hawke’s version, which was rather too close to Cumming’s, asked us to imagine Macbeth as a drug-addled rock star in the midst of a Kurt Cobain–style mental breakdown. The Macbeth of Macbeth is nothing of the sort, and playing him that way puts the performers at odds with the material. I have remarked that the man who looks the most like Macbeth as I imagine him is the B-movie and A-television actor Danny Trejo. If Robert Rodriguez ever gets around to the Scottish play . . . one shudders to consider it. It’s been said that Mel Gibson was far from the best actor to portray Hamlet, but he was definitely the best fencer; we might say something similar of Michael Fassbender’s 2015 cinematic Macbeth: at the very least, the man looks the part. That cannot be said of the Manhattan Shakespeare Project’s all-female version.

One never becomes quite familiar with Macbeth—it is far too strange for that . . . .

But Macbeth can bear a great deal of bastardization before it falls apart entirely. Cumming’s version was compelling in its way, and Sleep No More, which doesn’t even quite claim to be a performance of Macbeth, has been both provocative and delightful in its many evolving versions—it is Macbeth in spirit, if not in fact. It is a play that seems to me to have more to say each time I see it, rather than less. One never becomes quite familiar with Macbeth—it is far too strange for that—but after however many viewings, I feel a little like I take the play into the world with me when I exit the theater.

Macbeth is, of course, a succession drama. The king is dead, long live the king. One would think that living in a 240-year-old republic would put some emotional distance between American viewers and a tragedy of royal missuccession. Indeed, the entire idea of kings must seem faintly ridiculous even to those living in modern monarchies. (Some time ago I was visiting Norway and enduring a lecture from one of my hosts on the wonders of Norway’s deeply egalitarian culture: “Students call their professors by their first names as a matter of course,” he said with some pride. When I asked whether egalitarian Norwegian informality extended to the country’s king—and I had to suppress a snicker at the word “king”—I saw my first angry Norwegian, perhaps the first since the age of the Vikings, or at least since the Nasjonal Samling.) What could kings mean to people like us?

We should resist the voguish habit of reading literature through the lens of current affairs, and particularly through the lens of current politics, but I cannot help but feel that Macbeth hits so hard just now because we have spent the past decade and a half going through something like a succession drama of our own. The closely contested election of 2000 left Democrats—and some Americans who were not partisans or ideologues—convinced, or at least suspicious, that there was something not entirely legitimate about the presidency of George W. Bush. The emotional convulsions of September 11, 2001, the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the intrusions of terror-consciousness into American domestic life raised the emotional temperature of the nation’s politics. For the Right, there was a backlash: loose talk of “treason” became all too common on both sides of the aisle, but there was something monarchical in Republicans’ reaction, as though their rivals had falsely cast aspersions of bastardy upon the rightful heir. (“Nor should thy prowess want praise and esteem/ But that ’tis shown ignobly and in treason.”) The prevalence of daft conspiracy theories—that Bush was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, that Obama is a Manchurian candidate from Kenya or Indonesia or wherever—and the extraordinary emotional volatility of the current political moment suggests a mood that is indeed Shakespearean: a belief that the machinery of our society is somehow broken, that something or someone is out of joint, that somewhere a rightful heir has been dispossessed of his patrimony and scepter.

“Truth will out,” Launcelot assures us in The Merchant of Venice. Three hundred years later, Robert Frost answered him: “Blood will out.” Frost had read his Macbeth.

It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood:
Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;
Augurs and understood relations have
By magot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth
The secret’st man of blood.

Macbeth hits so hard just now because we have spent the past decade and a half going through something like a succession drama of our own.

Shakespeare is the great poet of secrets. No secrets, no Shakespeare: No Macbeth, no Romeo and Juliet, no Midsummer Night’s Dream, no Much Ado about Nothing. Ours is a time in which there really are no secrets: it’s all right there in The Wall Street Journal. No great secrets, nor much in the way of great poetry, either. There is nothing occult in the sources of our dissatisfaction, and the broken clockwork is plainly visible, as with an open-backed wristwatch. We can watch the gears move on c-span and Fox News. There are witches in Macbeth, but there isn’t really any witchcraft: they are only the bearers of news—not makers of fate, but revealers of it. Macbeth’s world is a world of Macbeth’s making—his, and Lady Macbeth’s, and Duncan’s, too: no one is quite innocent.

In the end, balance sheets must balance.

               Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what’s done is done.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 34 Number 8, on page 9
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https://newcriterion.com/issues/2016/4/give-sorrow-words

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