The Tragedie of Macbeth
By William Shakespeare
Background
For Spring Break 2024, I took a nostalgic turn and returned to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. It was another stop on my yearlong trip down memory lane, revisiting my childhood destinations. As I recall, this was an overnight field trip with a junior high drama class to attend performances in preparation for our school production of "Macbeth."
The Curse
Behind the scenes, many in the theatre tribe superstitiously refer to "Macbeth" as "The Scottish Play," sidestepping a belief that the play is cursed and, as such, do not mention the play by name. Evidently, an utterance of the name while in the theatre will evoke the ghosts of past performances, and hijinx ensues.
At the time of my school's production, I have the faintest memory of the performance being interrupted by a fire alarm. Perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy that we students were educated on many aspects of the play, including the curse, and then coincidentally, before intermission, the gymnasium required evacuation. I was backstage with a clipboard, which will surprise no one. I remember laughing as I walked toward the footlights where my Dad stood. I remarked, "Can you believe they hated it that much that they didn't even wait until intermission to walk out?"
In the blink of an eye, 25 years have passed. And yet, I still recall standing at the bricks outside the Allen Elizabethan and Angus Bowmer theatres, staring up at the sky. At the same time, my school group yammered away about the performance and when the next meal would occur. Out of the corner of my eye, I observed a shooting star. I optimistically scanned the group to see who else might have caught a glimpse, but everyone was focused on the material world.
In Production
I had the great fortune to see a preview of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2024 production of "Macbeth" before it ends its season run in early October of 2024 (see link below for schedule and tickets).
Wiley Basho Gorn served as the production’s dramaturg. In other words, the behind-the-scenes point person for the director and performers. A dramaturg is an added resource that provides context, research, and feedback for quality assurance and the accuracy of a production.
From the mouth of the Director, Evren Odcikin, "Shakespeare's amalgamation of Scottish and English history with Greek myth is filled with big magic and war sequences, but despite the grandiosity of its setting, it manages to capture humanity at its simplest. It answers the question of what it means for your soul if you negotiate your humanity to win."
In Print
I wish I had a better excuse for the 25 years between my visits to this gorgeous setting of emerald rolling hills and small-town hospitality. Alas, I do not. To compensate for lost time, I've been studying the 2015 Hitz Foundation commission program "Play on!" Which enlisted 36 playwrights and 38 dramaturges to translate 39 of Shakespeare's plays. Perhaps translation is a poor choice of words. The task was to carry the language forward for a contemporary audience.
Inspired by linguist John McWhorter's 1998 book "Word on the Street" where he remarked, "[...] irony today is that the Russians, the French, and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak."
It's no easy undertaking. To conduct this linguistic operation, the different kinds of speech, i.e., rhetorical to poetic, soliloquies to crowd scenes and comedic puns, all required close examination.
The instructions for the project were simple:
Do no harm. Plenty of the language didn't need to be carried forward.
Write line-by-line without cutting or fixing the play.
Context is constant, e.g., the period, story, characters, motive, and inner dialogue.
Follow the original.
Above all, honor the meter, rhyme, rhetoric, image, metaphor, character, action, and theme. Stay within the structure of iambic pentameter.
I haven't finished the canon yet. However, my initial impression is that these scripts are understandable and relevant to modern life. I can't think of a better project to continue this literary legacy forward for future generations (see the link below for more information).
In Film
Considering the 2021 film adaptation "The Tragedy of Macbeth" starring Denzel Washington and Francis McDormand. It's a tale of regicide that we know all too well. Still, a contemporary retelling invites the audience to consider the notion of the supernatural, inducement by the influence of others, and what it means to be a man.
The popular opinion of its characters isn't that they are complicated individuals in complex and competing situations. Instead, the Macbeths are reduced simply as evil individuals who have been corrupt and blinded by their ambition.
Joel Coen's film adaptation is stage-bound in its performances and depicted in a manner authentic to early filmmaking. Viewing this film, we are invited into a black-and-white world, stumbling along while we approach those we've cast into the role of villains. However, instead of allowing us to distance ourselves from the Macbeths, the author crafted characters we could fall in love with to ask ourselves: is it possible to find humanity in a murder?
Theme of Ambition
One could argue that Macbeth was not born a villain by nature. Instead, he is influenced into action by faulty rationalization and deductions from false premises. Macbeth dramatizes the physical and psychological effects to which those seeking power often succumb. His partner, Lady Macbeth, takes an active role in his ascension. There is no alternative scenario in which Macbeth does nothing and becomes king. Instead, an innate and hidden desire to win is seen by his partner, who reveals it only to her family's detriment.
The dagger hallucination scene serves as a demonstration of a type of fetish object where Macbeth is speaking to the object in a way that is believable to the audience that the object speaks back (see link below for a clip).
Supernatural, Witchcraft, and Religious Tropes
In Shakespeare's day, weird meant fate. Centuries later, the word took on today's meaning of being strange. I suppose one could interpret Shakespeare's view of the "weird sisters" as divine beings who reveal to Macbeth who he truly is via his repressed desire—reflecting his inner ambition instead of maneuvering or seducing him into action.
When this play was written, King James had an obsession with witchcraft. His fascination with the supernatural gave him the moral context to process his life’s catastrophic and traumatic events as solvable crimes he could meaningfully pursue rather than reconciling them as random acts of chaos. Shakespeare was opportunistic in ingratiating himself with his patron, King James, and his religious zealotry.
Don't get me started on the absurdity of the term "supernatural." Everything happens and is observed within nature. Whether we believe it or not is irrelevant. An association frequently made to "Macbeth" is the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, where treason and conspiracy against the state were evident. For further reading, consider another production from the 2009 Oregon Shakespeare Festival called "Equivocation" by playwright Bill Cain (see link to script below).
The three witches represent ideas of darkness, chaos, and conflict. Their role is as agents and witnesses to the events that unfold. At that time, witches were seen as worse than rebels; they were political and spiritual traitors. Much of the confusion in the play is that it is unclear whether they control fate or are merely agents in many ways, defying logic and the rules of reality. In this play, I am most enamored by the situations where evil is depicted as good while good is rendered evil.
While the witches never directly command Macbeth to kill King Duncan, they reveal to Macbeth a desire he is too afraid to confront, which entices him to consider whether he is destined to be king. Did they ignite the thought in his mind that drives him toward a path of destruction? This play has plenty of Shakespearean tropes, such as regicide, apparitions, and a pattern of guilt and paranoia. Perhaps once the seed is planted, one could reject the wild speculation rather than indulge in the fantasy—as did Banquo, laughing off the witch's claims. It should be noted that both meet untimely deaths as this is, after all, the "The Tragedie of Macbeth."
To round out this detailed (some might say eye-wateringly so) review, I'll conclude that "Macbeth" is a distinctively Christian tale. The sacrifice of King Duncan serves as a biblical allusion. I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts, opinions, interpretations, and favorite quotes in the comments below. I'll get us started with:
"Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air."
"False face must hide what the false heart doth know."
"Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble."
“Who could refrain,
That had a heart to love, and in that heart
Courage to make love known?”
My favorite line after watching Coen's Macbeth...
LADY MACDUFF: Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defense
To say I have done no harm?