Macbeth

"This is going to sound heretical, but I think that—particularly in the theatre—a lot of Shakespeare is too long. I think Act 4 in a lot of Shakespeare plays is a bit of a bum-number, and not much happens. I like to see Shakespeare intelligently cut, often to speed it up. Macbeth is a play that may have been cut. We don’t really understand the provenance of that text. It’s very short by Shakespearean standards and it’s very powerful because of that. There’s no subplot, there’s no parallel plot. Just this really intense journey through a psychological drama. It’s a really punchy play because everything is tightly headed in the same direction: the language, the imagery, the plot, the way the characters work. It’s a really superbly powerful, compact, condensed play. The textual history has changed a lot very recently. In the last ten or fifteen years we have come to think that the play as we have it probably represents a revision by Middleton of a Shakespearean original. We don’t know the extent of Middleton’s work on the play. We don’t know whether it’s merely that he slotted in some extra witchy material that he had from his own play, called The Witch . Did he bring in the Hecate scene? This is an interesting moment where witches become spectacular in a way that’s not primarily frightening, but visually compelling: they sing and they dance. What Middleton seems to do with Shakespeare’s play is to bring in some of that more fashionable material. So, we don’t know what the play that Shakespeare wrote in the first place was like and that may explain why it’s so short. It may be that Middleton streamlined it, or took certain bits out. In certain ways the psychological drama of Macbeth , which is a drama about temptation and ambition, doesn’t need the witches to set it off. It doesn’t need the supernatural backdrop. You could use an idle moment of someone in court saying, “you must be thinking you’d be a good king.” But the play, I think, is really ambivalent about whether the witches cause things. One of the things I like about it is that it’s about the question of agency. Who makes all these terrible crimes happen: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, or some supernatural elements? The play seems to present all those as possibilities but not endorse any of them."

"It’s been haunting me all my life. I did it at school, of course, everybody does Macbeth at school at some point or other. It’s extremely popular in Africa, and it’s extremely popular in the Far East and so on, because it’s short, and it seems to fulfil all the criteria of a Shakespearean tragedy: the man who is not altogether good nor altogether bad, who has a wife who is egging him on to do something for love of her. It is very powerful and it’s a play which involves magic, and Shakespeare loves all that stuff. It’s also a play which is very much of its day. This is a Jacobean tragedy and it deals with treason, and particularly the murder of a king, when the Gunpowder Plot was still very much a recent event. Shakespeare undoubtedly refers in the porter’s scene—a scene that almost certainly was not performed when the play was first written—to the execution of Father Henry Garnet [for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot]. Father Garnet’s cover name was ‘Farmer’, and Farmer is one of the equivocators mentioned by the porter. “I read Macbeth at school, of course. Everyone does Macbeth at school at some point ” It’s wonderful stuff. It comes immediately before Antony and Cleopatra and it has the same rhetorical brilliance. That speech: ‘If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well | It were done quickly’ in Act I Scene VII, when Macbeth contemplates murder, the murder of his king, seems to me Shakespeare’s greatest soliloquy. It’s metaphorically incomparable, and there are lines in it that just make you want to weep. The most wonderful line in my book, and there are so many wonderful lines, is when Lady Macbeth has realised that her husband has done something really dreadful, and she is mad, and she says ‘The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now?’ Again, the simplicity of the lines underpins their extraordinary power to move. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This is a play that’s incredibly intense and haunting, and curiously moral. Holinshed[‘s Chronicles], the main source of the play, has Macbeth looking for Macduff to kill him. Shakespeare stands this on its head: ‘of all men else,’ Macbeth says, ‘I have avoided thee | … My soul is too much covered with blood of thine already’. So at the end of the play, Shakespeare is quite prepared to give Macbeth, who has killed children, who has killed women, who has killed his king, a moment of moral recrudescence, I think because he has got to know Macbeth too well. I think lineage and childbirth are extremely important, after all Macduff is a man ripped untimely from his mother’s womb. Legitimacy comes into it undoubtedly. And of course, King James’s claim to the throne was probably quite dodgy. Did Elizabeth really say who better to succeed than the King of Scots or was it Robert Cecil who felt that for the sake of the kingdom it was best that someone who was a king, who was Mary Queen of Scots’ son, should succeed? Impossible to say, but the play undoubtedly carries a tremendous political charge. I know that James I fancied himself as a witchcraft detector, he persecuted poor old women all over Scotland and burnt them at the stake; he had a terrible past in that sense. Shakespeare is undoubtedly playing to the Scottish gallery to some extent, giving the new king a play he must be interested in, and of course he was. King Lear was performed on Boxing Day at court in 1606, his next play, after King Lear , is Macbeth , the next play is Antony and Cleopatra . There’s an extraordinary array of masterpieces coming one after the other, and they all deal with issues that are very close to the bone. I marvel and wonder at Shakespeare’s incredible guts. This was the son of a glover, and he was a brilliant son of a glover, undoubtedly, the most brilliant person who’s ever lived, perhaps, but for him to sail so close to the wind of politics is striking."