Right, well, let's get started. My mom was listening to one of the lectures and she said, well, somebody had a really bad cough and I should have said, I'm sorry, you've got such a bad cough. So I just got some water. And it really does have a really bad cough this week and wants to share the billing with me for the lecture. Just just keep coughing more time. I'll give you that sip of water. OK, so this is the penultimate lecture approaching Shakespeare for this term.
And today I'm going to talk about Macbeth. The question I want to suggest that Macbeth asks us or demands that we address is the question philosophers call the question of agency. Question of agency. Why do the things that happen happen? So whether we're talking about is how we can answer or at least interrogate questions of agency in Macbeth.
Why do the events of Macbeth happen to approach this question and come to draw on some theories of tragedy and some theories of historical philosophy and on performance as in the previous lectures? What I want to try and say is that the play prompts this question. It doesn't answer. It prompts the question rather than answering it. And I'm going to, as so many coughs now, don't know what to do with my with my water. I am sorry. It's a bad point in the terms, isn't it?
Okay. But I want to start not with Macbeth, but with another early modern document. And that's Robert Burton's huge book on the causes and the effects of melancholy. The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 16 21. Burton's self-appointed task is to compile information about melancholy, not to present a particular argument or an empirical case. It's a policy of accretion which adds more stuff rather than sort of trying to assess the merits of different different kinds of approach,
different kinds of material. And if we look at the contents page to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, we can see something about what this policy of accretion where this policy of accretion leads. Burton tries to make sense of all his material by setting it under numerous headings and subheadings and the bits of it that I'm most interested in relation to.
Our question of agency is the catalogue or synopsis. In discussing the question of the causes of melancholy, Burton offers a range of possibilities. And I hope if I go through these, the relevance, their relevance to Macbeth might start to emerge. First, he wonders whether the causes of melancholy might be supernatural or natural supernatural causes. He subdivides as from God immediately or by second causes or from the devil.
Immediately, with the digression of the nature of spirits and devils or supernatural, but immediately by magicians and witches. Okay, so these are his supernatural causes from God, from the devil, or via magicians, which is the natural causes are also subjective. Subdivided primary as stars provided by aphorisms, signs from physiognomy and secondary. That breaks down into congenital temperament or heredity and secondary. Secondary causes have all kinds of agents, nurses, education, terrors.
Scoffs Bitter gests, loss of liberty, poverty, loss of friends. This causes a broken down still further. If melancholy is in the mind, it may be caused from within the body, fumes from the stomach, hot brain with corrupted blood or from outside the body. Too much sun. Too much study. Too much garlic if it's in the body. Well, there are lots of potential physiological causes. If diet is the cause, it may be quantity or quality that's at fault.
If passions are a cause, these can be anything from anger, envy, ambition, lust, shame, fear. For our benefit. There's a special section on the love of learning as a cause of melancholy, with a digression on the misery of scholars and why the muses are melancholy. And another curly bracket may get us to the Brown report.
So I've begun with Burton because he's a near contemporary of Shakespeare who, like Shakespeare, can see a range of different causes, some of which look to us incompatible or deriving from widely differing understandings of the world. But he presents them as potential causes for a single phenomenon. Broadly speaking. And here, I think Burton's analysis of causes of melancholy is actually an analysis of what happens in the early modern world.
These are the kinds of causes that people give, and they are the kinds of causes which are competing are competing claims for the question of agency in the world why these things happen. Berton's causes of melancholy result from three potential grand causes. The first is the melancholic individual, him or herself, who may or may not be able to help themselves.
That may be because they are melancholy, because of their temperament, but they may be marriage may they may be melancholy because they studied lust, eat garlic too much, whatever, so they could do something about that, in effect, to kill. So sometimes the cause causes internal and sometimes it's within the control of the individual and sometimes not. The second cause of melancholy is other people. Other people's actions have a negative impact on the individual.
They might die and make him feel sad. They might put him in prison. They might make fun of him. Ginger, rodent. One might or might think the third is the supernatural or metaphysical world, a category that includes God, the devil and God and devils, intermediaries, magicians and witches. So when Burton is trying to work out why stuff happens in his case, why melancholy happens, there are three possible groups of of of reasons why they might happen.
And in Burton's analysis, they have equal claims on our attention. Okay, so someone who's starting to believe in hereditary in heredity as a as a cause of melancholy still believes in which is the stars too much garlic. All these things exist in the same realm of possible possibility. And I think we could set out the question of agency and Macbeth in broadly similar terms.
Is this a story about an individual, a tragic story we tend to think of tragedies about as being people who direct their own fate? Is this a story in Macbeth in which Macbeth willingly or unwillingly directs the action of the play? Is this a story in which he is acted on by other people? Is he passive and shaped by the people around him? Or is this a story in which he is populated by supernatural forces beyond his control?
Although these possibilities can't really be simultaneously true in that if you have a world view which agrees with one of them, you probably have to dismiss the other two. So even though they can't be simultaneously true, I think the play does seem designed to set them all out at the same time to set out the idea that Macbeth is in control of his fate, to set out the idea that other people are, and to set out the idea that there is a supernatural force at work in this play.
All of these are set out as possible causes, and I don't think the play answers which one is primary. Now, we could look at this question of agency in a different way. On the 17th of May 2010, the Evening Standard carried a headline, Macbeth Gets Away with Murder in All Star Trial. This is the article in a final twist that would make Shakespeare turn in his grave. Macbeth and his wife have been found not guilty of murdering King, Duncan and Banquo.
This was the verdict of a one night only mock trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, in which the case against the couple was examined, with actors playing the defendant's judge and key witnesses. Former Spook's star Matthew MacFadyen and Shameless is Maxine Peake played the couple. Macbeth pleaded diminished responsibility while Lady Macbeth claimed she was coerced. Toby Stephens, Toby Jones, Roger Lloyd Park and Martin Shaw were also involved.
Now, in some ways, as philosophers have pointed out, the question of agency is a question of responsibility and therefore a question of blame and punishment. This trial, this mock trial of the Macbeth's earlier this year and a whole genre of other similar amateur investigations of the play that you can very easily Google. These are all concerned with a version of agency who is to blame for what happens. Or to put it another way. Can we get Macbeth off the charge?
Online message boards seem united in the idea that the best hope of acquittal for Macbeth is to blame Lady Macbeth. And that, as we will see, has been often the critical reaction to the reported trial I just mentioned goes for a defence of diminished responsibility, i.e., Macbeth is not in control, is not a responsible agent.
A nice comic story by the American humorist James Thurber, called the Macbeth murder mystery, also plays with this trope, bringing the genre of the detective story in which the question of who done it is literally key to Macbeth. And I think that helps us the same methods, a different kind of who done it. This is from Thurber that the story is that somebody who doesn't know Shakespeare has but but loves murder mysteries, has read Macbeth and they're being asked what they thought of it.
Tell me. I said, did you read Macbeth? I had to read it. You said there wasn't a scrap of anything else to read in the whole room. Did you like it? I asked. No, I did not. She said decisively in the first place. I don't think for a moment that Macbeth did it. I looked at her blankly. Did what? I asked. I don't think for a moment that he killed the king. I don't think that Macbeth woman was mixed up in it either.
You suspect them the most, of course. But those are the ones that are never guilty or shouldn't be anyway. I would suspect they are suddenly Macduff, she said promptly. Good God! I whispered softly. Oh, Macduff did it all right, said the murder specialist. Oh, Kupwara would have got him easily. How did you figure it out? I demanded. Well, she said I didn't straight away. At first I suspected Banquo. Then, of course, he was the second person killed.
That was good right there. That part, the person you suspect of the first murder should always be the second victim. Is that so? A moment now. Macbeth is the play of Shakespeare's in which in some ways we know most clearly who did it. We watch. We more or less watch him do it. That's what the play sets up right from the start. But the fact that it is susceptible to these literals versions of whodunit, I think does engage in a different way with the question of agency that the play explores.
So equivocally one answer to who done it is it is very straightforward. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in some way have done it. But still the question remains circling around the play. Who really did it? What? What wages agency. Where does the responsibility lie? Let's try to set this out a little bit more clearly. And I we'll try and do that by thinking about the way Macbeth unfolds, the way the play begins.
You'll remember that the first scene of my class introduces the which is weird speech rhythms accompanied by thunder and lightning. They seem to know what's going to happen when the burly is done, when the battle's lost and won and they some bristly and ominously arrange to meet with Macbeth. Does that mean they will they know where my breasts are going to be or are they able to draw him to them? Is their power therefore the power of prophecy or of direction?
In the next scene, we discovered the aftermath of the battle. A bloodied captain tells the king of the bravery of Macbeth and Banquo and the treachery of the Thayn of Cordel. This is a scene following straight on from the scene of the witches. It's a scene which seems to establish a world of human agency in the same situation, a battle some men behave in a cowardly way. Some men behave in a in a brave way. And that seems to be because of the kind of men they are.
The cowardly ones are punished. The brave ones are rewarded. The king orders caudal to be executed and that his titles should be given instead to Macbeth. It's a very clear human causal world where human behaviour is rewarded and punished by human agents. Scene three comes back with a more extended scene with the witches in witch into witch, Mount Macbeth and Banquo enter.
Does the fact that they find the witches rather than vice versa suggests that they are in control or have the witches set up this encounter? The witch is prophesied to Macbeth about his future greatness. Thane Aslam's Thane of court or King Hereafter to Macbeth. The attribution thane of Cawdor is impossible. The Thane of court.
Our lives are prosperous, gentlemen, but we know because of the scene we've just witnessed and with it the dramatic irony, which is so constitutive of Shakespeare's working methods. We know that the fate of CAUDAL has been stripped of his title by the King because he was a coward. So we know there is a human reason why the same danger of Cordeaux is up for grabs. The witches here know something that we already know. When we knew more than them, we were ahead of them in knowing this information.
Maybe that makes them seem less powerful to us. Whereas they seem creepily omnipotent to Macbeth, particularly when having suggested that he will become Thane of Cawdor and ultimately King messengers immediately arrive from the King to greet him. Thane of Caudal to Macbeth. This makes the gap between prophecy and enactment fright frighteningly slender. But to us that is actually a gap between command. The King's words in Act one, scene two and fulfilment.
The delivery of that message in the next scene to Macbeth, which is that's to say, seem to interpose in a chain of human actions rather than direct actions themselves. But on the other hand, we also know something that Macbeth doesn't. They'd already arranged to meet him on the heath. Maybe they are in control after all, in these three opening scenes. Then Shakespeare sets up one major aspect of the dilemma of agency.
The play goes on to explore. Is Macbeth in control of his actions or are which witches now, too? Filmed versions of the opening of the play may help clarify what's at stake in this question, which is so explicitly posed here in these opening scenes, is a films by Orson Welles in 1948 and by Roman Polanski in 1971, both quite widely available. But I'm going to describe how they work.
Anyway, Orson Welles begins his film with a shadowy image of three shapeless witches bent over a cauldron placed on top of a crag in a swirling, surreal landscape. And the film opens with this, them speaking in extremely dodgy Scots accents, the famous lines from four one double, double toil and trouble. And they list some of the monstrous ingredients of the potion over an extreme clip close up of the cauldron bubbling away.
So the witch Mattel, for much later in the play is brought right to the beginning in Welles film lines from Act one, scene one to patched into this scene. So as they speak, they're to meet with Macbeth. The witches hands complete their moulding of a clay figurine from the contents of the cauldron.
A climactic, rousing piece of music introduces the credit sequence and the next images of Macbeth and Banquo galloping through the same misty landscape, cutting to the witches by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this may comes. So Wells cuts the entirety of Act One scene to Shakespeare's discussion of the battle. That means that the witches deliver their prophecies and are driven away when the messengers arrive who bring news of Macbeth's elevation to the thayn them of caudal.
But that's the first we know of it the film, because the discussion of why that's happened in one two has been cut. The badge of office is taken from the neck of the wretched prisoner and passed to Macbeth, whose asides are delivered as voiceovers against a close up of his troubled face. As with any text, and there are a number of ways to interpret Welles direction here. But one result of his catching and arranging seems to be that the witches have more power.
They make an image of Macbeth from that cauldron as if he is their creature. The film is sometimes called the Voodoo Macbeth, and it certainly makes use of a little a kind of figurine of a person to which things can be done, which have consequences to the physical body of that person. The clay model of Macbeth is used by Welles later in the film, including a striking cut away from Macbeth to the image of the figurine right at the moment when Mark Duff cuts his head off.
So what happens is that the head of the figurine is cut off. It is on camera, not the head of Macbeth himself. By omitting the scene, which explains the rational political reason for Macbeth's promotion, the rational political reason is that he has been a brave and loyal warrior, whereas the thane of Cawdor has been a traitor. News of his elevation comes as a surprise in Wells film. The audience does not have prior knowledge as it does in Shakespeare's play.
And thus, perhaps we share with Macbeth a sense of the which witches power in wells its film. They predict something and immediately it happens. So Wells is answer I think would have to be. It is the witches who make things happen. If we were to compare this version of the opening scenes with that of Roman Polanski, Roman Polanski, we can see some interesting differences of emphasis.
Polanski places the first, which seen as a kind of prologue, separated from the rest of the film by the opening credits sequence. A pink dawn lightens on a damp beach. The tide is out. And on the sand, a group of three women dig silently in the wet ground, performing a ritual burial of a noose under disserved arm, which holds a dagger. They speak the lines of Act one, scene one. The atmosphere is heavy and mysterious, but there's none of Welles's melodramatic mist or shadows.
As the credits run, we hear the noise of battle. Horseback charges, the clash of swords. Men shouting. The scene opens to the up to the aftermath of the battle on that same stretch of beach. The soldiers move amongst the dead. One casualty stirs only to be brutally clubbed to death in the sand. The king arrives on horseback with a fanfare to hear the news of the battle. Cordeaux is brought in bleeding.
The king uses his sword point to tape a chain of office from him and to hand it to his messengers for delivery to Macbeth. A moody close up of Macbeth in front of the gallows. Being prepared for Korder isn't quite the image of the triumphant image of Balón as bridegroom that we've heard about. He and Banquo are sheltering from the rain when they hear the witch is singing and go and seek them out.
The witches don't seem particularly interested to see them, and they deliver their prophecies in a very offhand way. Now the keynote of Polanski's film is Violence and Blood. A.C. Bradley wrote that Macbeth leaves a decided impression of colour and that colour is the colour of blood. And in these opening scenes, Polanski steeps the palette in red from the dawn sky to the file of blood sprinkled on the witches burial.
The wounded face of the captain. The blood on the back of the soldier being club to death on the beach. The King's pennants decorated in her Valdek red. In this, we might think Polanski translates the dominant mood of Macbeth's language. The word blood and it's cognates appear more than 40 times in Macbeth. It's much the most frequently. It's the play which is most frequently used. So we might say that Polanski is trying to translate that linguistic texture into the visual palette film offers.
But what's interesting here is that this is a violence strongly associated with the world before Macbeth kills the king. Sometimes a rather sentimental view of Macbeth prevails, in which the murder of Duncan is the act which sets everything in the kingdom at odds.
But prolonged Polanski shows us a world, by contrast, which is entirely built on the valuation of male violence, one in which Duncan's power, as well as Macbeth in turn relies on the violent, relies on violence, not on some sense of right. In this, it seems that for Polanski, the witches have rather less influence, even while they're presented as less explicitly supernatural than they are in Welles version.
In his interpretation, then, it seems that Polanski turns Shakespeare's play to the sources from which Shakespeare took it. Last week, on a measure for measure, I was talking about the difficulty of bending the story, bending the story as a phrase from the epic phrase about playwriting, from the epilogue to Henry the Fifth. The difficulty of bending the story into a comic shape from which it seemed always struggling to escape.
And also I talked about the way in which the source is ending, in which Isabella and Angelo get married still makes its presence felt in Shakespeare's play, even where he is substantially rewriting that, ending the source. That's to say, retained a sort of ghostly hold over the material. And perhaps the same might be said of Macbeth. Shakespeare takes this story from Holland, Chadds Chronicles. So that's the source for his English. History plays.
And it's interesting to think how history and tragedy are interwoven in Shakespeare's imagination. What makes a what makes the story of the decline of a king, the sort of day Karzi best definition of tragedy from the mediaeval period, the downfall of a of a king? What makes that sometimes historical part of a process of continuity and change and sometimes tragic? The story at an end stop story which has no future beyond the decline of the individual.
So sometimes Shakespeare uses a kind of day Kassebaum structure as part of a historical sequence which is going to continue, which can sustain the downfall of an individual. And it turns its attention to other characters in the in the story. Sometimes he uses it as a completely tragic structure in which wants the once the prince has fallen. There's no interest in anything else in the play and no way of going forward. Here, Shakespeare turns the story the day, Kasie, big story into a tragedy.
But it's not, as we might expect, the tragedy of the king who is cut down. But that of his use upper. So Macbeth is the opposite of Richard the second. It's a Richard the second rewritten from the point of view of the challenger, not of the not not of the king. And so Shakespeare, I think, is revisiting some ground. He's already covered in history plays. My bet is a much better play looked at along side of history plays, I think, than alongside the so-called great tragedies.
And the way Shakespeare does this is to try to sacrifice the story he gets from the history of Scotland in the historical sources in Holland shed. Macbeth emerges as king of Scotland out of a violent dog eat dog world of different thanes jockeying for position and power. Duncan had done this in his term, but had now grown weak. Macbeth's rise, supported in the sources by Banquo, is the inevitable change of ruler in a society that has no principle of rule other than strength.
So the mightiest is this is the best. The strongest is the best in the Scotland historical Scotland that's being depicted in the in the sources. If you've seen the modernised television version of the play Macbeth on the estate, you might recognise this from there interpolated prologue to the story. So Macbeth takes power in the sources from a weakened warlord and has power taken from him in due course by another warlord.
He is not in the sources under Shakespeare makes him the regicide who takes the crown from a holy king? Duncan. Remember the description of Duncan's silver skin laced with his golden blood is a kind of saintly, almost sob more than human superhuman figure in that description. The regicide in Shakespeare's play is a crime against nature itself. The sense of moral outrage and disturbance in Shakespeare's play is entirely his invention.
And he turns his sources into a play in which rightful succession is interrupted by the terrible, ambitious agency of Macbeth. So Macbeth is a single person who upsets the way things ought to be. That's that's as a parable of individual agency in the resources. It is sorry in the play rather than as we get in. The source is a story of political instability in which might not write always rules.
I think there are no remainders and reminders of the world of the sources that politically unstable, violent world of the sources. It is still in Macbeth. And the vivid example, most vivid example, I think, is the description of Macbeth in the battle in Act one, scene two. Before we've even met Macbeth, the captain described his capacity for extreme ruthlessness from wanting to brave Macbeth.
Well, he deserves that name. Disdaining fortune with his brandy steel, which smoked with bloody execution. Like Vallas, Minion carved out his passage till he faced the slave, which now shook hands. No bayed farewell to him, to the unseemly him from the nave to the chops and fixed his head upon our battlements.
King Duncan's reply. Oh, Valiante cousin worthy gentleman makes clear that he approves Shakespeare's Macbeth is at this point like his avatar in Hollin shed a man who has gained power through extreme violence. What changes is not that he becomes violent. It's not that violence enters the peaceful world of Scotland. It's rather that that violence is turned against rather than for the sovereign. In this, we might think that Macbeth does not mean the witches.
I've already described the story that Shakespeare tells us as a parable of individual agency in which one person's unwillingness or refusal to be to stay in his allotted place overturns the natural order. In Holland shed, the witches play a very minor role, and it's largely the role of prophecy. Those are very, very interesting picture of the witches in Holland Shared, which is an illustrated book.
Well worth having a look at where they're three very neatly dressed to the sort of chuda ladies or Mennonite mediaeval ladies. They're not a tall hags or no war or those kind of which witchy signifiers that they're that they look quite different from what we might expect. So they play a role of prophecy of RA, rather a minor role of prosit prophecy. They know what will happen. Shakespeare has developed their role for the play.
And we also think that Middleton has added further to that the scene with Haggerty's taken from Middleton's play The Witch. And that suggests that the witch scenes are popular and enjoyable on the stage and that the more witch material that can be put into the play,
the better. DIAM Perkis has written compellingly about how the Macbeth witches are palimpsest of different witch beliefs, the equivalent perhaps of those incompatible lines of arguments and analysis in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, with which we began, the witches identified themselves as having rather limited powers. The punishment of the husband Sayler husband of the woman who would not share her chestnut's, for example, that day, which you say that the they'll his ship can't be lost.
They can't kill him. He's gone to see the tiger, the ship, the tiger. They can't do anything really serious to him. But they're going to make some really bad weather. That's pretty much what they say. Though his bark cannot be lost yet. It shall be. Tempest tossed. So they've got a limited amount of influence and a rather different sphere of influence, one might think, from the government of a country. Strikingly, there is no return for the witches at the conclusion of the play.
They open it, but they do not, in Shakespeare's text conclude it. Although many productions, including both the films I just mentioned by Polanski and by Welles, reintroduced them at the end. That Shakespeare does not make suggests that they are not active agents, but passive predictors of how things will turn out and that things do turn out the way they are predicted is sufficient. They don't need also to be there. And in any case, perhaps we should not take the witches to literally.
It's often asserted that the early modern theatre left long behind it mediaeval forms of Psycho Maciek Theatre p. S y c h o m a c h i a. The psycho mark here Psychosomatic Theatre saw the play's characters representing not complete and separate individual human beings, but qualities or personifications, giving the whole drama the sense of taking place within a single mind pulled in different directions.
We're always told that this form of theatre was abandoned by the newly realist psychological models of the early modern stage. I'm not sure that this is entirely true, that we did leave behind, that the early modern stage does leave entirely behind psychometric theatre.
Or rather, I think it's the case that, as Shakespeare writes, we can see him experimenting with different ways of creating character through dialogue and through a soliloquy, to be sure, but also through foils and duplications and perhaps by splitting a single psychology between different figures on the stage. In this reading, we could see Argo as a part of Othello or Laertes as a part of Hamlet or the witches of Macbeth.
They the witches speak out his ambition. They make it audible and therefore they're extremely important in a in in a drama. How would we know what Macbeth wanted? If no one speaks it on the stage and what the witches do is to speak that for him. Perhaps we should think of them less as separate agents and more a strange internal voices which direct his actions, which are externalised on the stage in some sense for our benefit as as as a model of psychological projection.
OK. So so far, I've spent a fair amount of time on the play's opening, largely because it establishes a number of ways in which agency is questioned and problematise between the human and the supernatural realms are not going to see much more of the witches after the first 20 minutes of the play. So it's a very active sense way of setting up the dilemma. The dilemma of agency right at the beginning of the play. And those questions, it's important to acknowledge, have all been raised before.
The figure who was probably taken most of the flak for what happens in the play is even introduced. That figure is, of course, Lady Macbeth. The idea that Lady Macbeth takes over Macbeth and makes him act has been a compelling one and one which often brings criticism into an apparently willing participation with the play's own fear of women and a female power.
We probably all know the outlines of this argument that in calling on devilish spirits when she reads Macbeth letter telling her about the witches and using highly charged metaphorical vocabulary about suckling children, nobody would have written a lot of analysis of Lady Macbeth. You wouldn't realise that this is just a figure of speech. Usage hasn't actually dashed any babies, at least not so far as we know.
And in demeaning maths, my best masculinity so thoroughly and in planning the murder so as to frame the grooms that in all of this, Lady Macbeth makes her unwilling husband go through with a murderous act, which is always really against his better judgement, that milk of human kindness that she herself recognises. Certainly, this is a cluster of activity by Lady Macbeth in the first half of the play. And it prevents it presents her as a powerful female agent.
It's striking the extent to which criticism has found this threatening. If we find Macbeth a misogynistic play, which is deeply distrustful of powerful women, we may see this as a further aspect of Shakespeare's direct address to the company's new patron, King James.
And therefore, the representation of Lady Macbeth, like the Scottish setting, like the whitewash recuperation of Banquo, whom James counted as his ancestor and who therefore had to be cleared of any wrongdoing in Shakespeare's telling of the story and the interest in witches for a king who, as we know, had written a work called demonology, these become all parts of the play's pitch for royal approval in the newly insignificantly homosocial world of James's court.
It's always, of course, impossible to know how plays almost always impossible to know how plays were received by their first audiences. But we do have, or at least we think we have an unusual contemporary account of Macbeth in early modern performance. The visit of the astrologer, a medicine man, Simon Foreman, to the globe in the spring of sixteen eleven. Simon Foreman writes about his visit to the to the theatre in terms that have been very problematic for critics.
And it's certainly a source that should use with some caution. For example, he begins by saying that Macbeth and Banquo are riding through the forest. It's quite hard to think how that really worked on the stage. Doesn't seem like a description of a of a staged play. But what other things Simon Foreman really enjoys about bang, about about Macbeth is the scene where the ghost of Banquo sits in Macbeth seat at the banquet.
This is this is the bit from his notebooks. The next night, being at supper with his nobleman, whom he had bid to a feast to the witch. Also, Banquo should have come. He began to speak of Noble Banquo and to wish that he were there. And as he thus did, standing up to drink a caroused to him.
The ghost of Banquo came and sat down in his chair behind him, and he turning about to sit down again, saw the ghost of Banquo, which fronted him so that he fell into a great passion of fear and fury, uttering many words about his murder. By which, when they heard that map that Banquo was murdered, they suspected Macbeth. The most vivid part of the play for Foreman. Interesting. It was a very interesting focus on a very particular element of business.
Why is it that Banquo is a Macbeth's Macbeth chair? Why isn't he in his own? Why isn't he in his own seat? Which would seem much more compelling in certain ways. Earlier, though, in his account, Simon Foreman suggests usefully for what I'm trying to argue today, both that Macbeth is responsible for killing Duncan and that Lady Macbeth is. This is what he says. And Macbeth contrived to kill Duncan and through the persuasion of his wife, did that night murder the king in his own castle.
Macbeth contrived to kill Duncan and through the persuasion of his wife, did that night murder the king in his own castle. Foreman's sense here that Macbeth, contrived by active verb given to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth persuades may suggest a confusion about agency from the very start of the reception of this play, very much like the one we are exploring, the murder of Duncan thus becomes overdetermined. It has too many rather than too few agents.
But Foreman may also suggest a kind of synergy in this, which is Shakespeare's only portrait of an operative adult marriage in process. Is at the best of the only couple, really we see. So his relationship and his marriage is dealt with in any detail at all.
Separating out who does what may therefore undo what Shakespeare may be trying to present a passionate folly, Adir, perhaps committed by a partnership in which separating out culpability misreads the dynamic of what has been written saying as readers often do. I don't think Macbeth would have done it if she hadn't goaded him into it is, of course, to mistake this literary artefact for a real event, which could have turned out differently.
It isn't, but it is a question whose naivete I think the play encourages rather than disavowals. I think the play encourages us to ask whether Macbeth would have done it had Lady Macbeth not goaded him into doing it and can't possibly give us an answer because there isn't a counterfactual version of the story in which that doesn't happen. Like all those questions that we've been thinking about this term, it can only be asked and not answered.
Lady Macbeth particular characterisation, her active calling up of those spirits to unsexy her, her revealing use of the possessive, my battlements and her ongoing fascination for actors and critics. These all suggest a particular form of agency and activity on her part. But her collapse after the murderous events and her marginalisation, both from Macbeth further plots and from Shakespeare's, quickly erases the significance of her agency, Macbeth.
Judgement is of a dead butcher. The Macbeth who seems so. So Malcolm's judgement is of a dead butcher. The Macbeth one seems from the Nate to the chops and the fiend like Queen. But like so many of those figures, you might think of Fortum Brass or Octavius Caesar figures who step delicately onto the corpse strewn stage at the end of a tragedy. Malcolm's analysis is politicised, self-interested and fundamentally anticlimactic.
If Shakespeare asks the question of Lady Macbeth agency in the play, he seems to disavow an answer, as he could have done. He doesn't, for example, show her to be motivated by greed. She never once expresses the wish to be queen. For example, he doesn't show her to be unfaithful, as he does say Tamara in Titus Andronicus or all the adulterous women in contemporary domestic tragedies, a genre with which Macbeth shares many characteristics. These are available shorthands for female wickedness.
Greed, ambition and lust. None of which are attached explicitly to Lady Macbeth in the play. So like Macbeth. That's to say, I'd like the witches. Lady Macbeth has a claim to be the answer to the question. Who makes the things that happen happen? But the fact that there are so many other claimants keeps this question rather than its answers at the forefront. I want to finish with Macbeth himself. This is Macbeth at the end of the play.
When Lady Macbeth has died and the witches prophecies have begun to unravel, it's a famous speech of resignation and futility and one that uses a striking metaphor for lives. 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. Struggling here for an image. Macbeth, sitting on the stage in the Globe Theatre, lights on the image of the actor strutting and fretting.
It's a common enough trope in the period the so the so-called TARP from Monday. All the world's a stage. But the uncertainty about the tone of the metaphore is, I think, crucial to questions about agency in this period. And one of the reasons why the theatre is so popular, it offers itself as a kind of epistemology, a way of knowing, a way of understanding the world for its period. Who or what makes the things happen in the theatre?
Is it the physical bodies of the actors onstage moving and speaking to enact narrative and character? Is it the words penned by a playwright who may well be unknown to those who are watching? Is it the team of theatre personnel who make sure the play gets mounted? Is it in a more phenomenological sense, the audience who, by witnessing that things are happening, make them happen? A version of that old philosophical chestnut about the tree falling in the forest and being heard or not heard.
Questions of agency are intrinsic to the theatre and thus to the metaphor of theatre within the drama. Macbeth does not, of course, end with this speech. The script has further to go, and when Macbeth vows to die with harness on her back on our back, die with harness on our back, and he agrees to fight Macduff. Yet I will try the last. Is he now in control of his actions in the very last moments of his life?
Or is he merely working out a part that has already been written by which is prophecies, by historical, chronicle by audience expectations of tragedy by Shakespeare himself? I've tried to show that the question, but not the answer of agency is in a real sense the subject of its plot of this play, and that by thinking about it in relation to its sources, its cinematic iterations, its language and even its parodies, we can see how insistent and how unsettling is that interrogation.
Next week is my final lecture, and I'm going to be discussing The Winter's Tale. If these lectures weren't being recorded, my question would be double UTF. But it is more acceptable version. The question I have to ask about The Winter's Tale is why. Thank you.