Staging Power in Shakespeare ’ s Macbeth

1. Staging Power in Shakespeare’s Macbeth Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 2014

2. William Shakespeare • English playwright and poet • Born early 1560s, died in 1616 • Born in Stratford-upon-Avon (small town in Warwickshire) • In Early 1580s, he moved to London: acting in/writing for the theatre

3. Theater in Shakespeare’s Time • Shakespeare wrote his play roughly between 1590 and 1613 • Theater as a secular and commercial entertainment in a cosmopolitan city • Theaters aroused criticism from their very inception (Theatre-makers stigmatized as vagabonds, “masterless men”)

4. Theater in Shakespeare’s Time • They were places that encouraged the mingling of different classes (blurring of class boundaries) • Women’s parts were played by young boys until the late 17th century (blurring of gender distinctions) • The works we now consider high art were viewed as popular entertainment at best and a source of social and moral corruption at worst.

5. GLOBE THEATER (1598)

6. GLOBE THEATER

7. ELIZABETHAN ERA (1558–1603)

8. Jacobean era (1567–1625) The reign of James VI of Scotland/James I of England

9. The Tragedy of Macbeth (1606) • Set in medieval Scotland. • The bloody rise to power and tragic downfall of the general named Macbeth. • Macbeth is Scottish nobleman, the Thane of Glamis. He is made Thane of Cawdor for his bravery in battle. • Macbeth becomes King of Scotland after murdering the previous king, Duncan.

10. MACBETH • A particularly balanced and symmetrical structure. • Begins and ends with battles, both of which conclude with the death of a treacherous Thane (lord) of Cawdor. • In the middle of the play: a ceremonial banquet in which is disrupted by the ghost of Banquo. • Recurring images—for example, the thread of references to blood and bloodshed that runs through almost every scene.

12. Agency and Equivocation • The mystery of Macbeth’s will to commit murder • The ambiguous representation of his agency • The complexities of the relationship between his desires and their enactment • (Equivocation: The use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself) • (Doublespeak: language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words)

13. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

14. Macbeth’s reaction to Duncan’s murder • “Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had lived a blessed time; for, from this instant, there’s nothing serious in mortality; all is but toys, renown and grace is dead; the wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees is left this vault to brag of.” (Act 2, scene 3)

15. two possible interpretations • Macbeth is giving a public performance, making the noises he’s expected to make after king’s assassination. • Macbeth has realized that his own “renown and grace” are dead. And the situation (lamenting the death of his king) allows him to declare this without revealing himself.

16. the status of the witches? • They’re referred to by Banquo as the “weird sisters.” • Weird: the word derives from the Old English, wyrd, which means fate. • Are they instruments of fate, or are they indeed the actively evil instruments of darkness running their own intervention in human lives?

17. Macbeth: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee—I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. 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? I see thee yet, in form as palpable as this which now I draw. Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going and such an instrument I was to use.”

18. Sovereignty and Theatricality • Macbeth’s attempt to establish his position as sovereign through a public, theatrical display of hospitality (the banquet scene) • Macbeth’s inability to act as a proper host • His isolation through Banquo’s ghost • His failure to remain socially and visibly related with his subjects

19. Sovereignty: supreme authority within a territory • A holder of sovereignty derives authority from some mutually acknowledged source of legitimacy —a divine mandate, hereditary law, a constitution, etc. • Of all the ‘‘arts,’’ theater most directly resembles politics: the assemblage of people in a shared space

20. Renaissance sovereignty • Theatricality is a constitutive feature of sovereign authority. • “Elizabethan power depends upon its privileged visibility. As in a theater, the audience must be powerfully engaged by this visible presence and at the same time held at a respectful distance from it” (Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets”).

21. Elizabeth I's (Theatrical) Royal Progresses

22. hospitality and sovereignty • In Macbeth, theatrical sovereignty is linked to hospitality. • hostis: host and stranger; also the root of the word “hostility.” • hospitality and hostility share the same origins.

23. ghosts and sovereigns • In the dinner party, it is not the spectacle of Macbeth-the-monarch which takes center stage, but rather, the Ghost of Banquo, Macbeth’s most recent murder victim. • Macbeth is the only one who sees Banquo’s Ghost--he is at once distinguished and isolated by what he sees.

24. Gender Politics in Macbeth • The question of what it means to act in a “manly” (or “womanly”) fashion is constantly under negotiation in Macbeth. • Lady Macbeth: a powerful, alarming, evil figure? • Her vulnerability in the context of the conventional gender roles in which she has to operate. • Her isolation in a male dominated world.

25. Lady Macbeth: The raven himself is hoarseThat croaks the fatal entrance of DuncanUnder my battlements. Come, you spiritsThat tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,And fill me from the crown to the toe top-fullOf direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.Stop up the access and passage to remorse,That no compunctious visitings of natureShake my fell purpose, nor keep peace betweenThe effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,Wherever in your sightless substancesYou wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night,And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the darkTo cry “Hold, hold!”

26. “Manly” action • Lady Macbeth redefines “manly” action as ruthlessly keeping one’s promises, however morally problematic they might be. • She claims she would do anything she had sworn to do (even if it involves the destruction of a nursing baby). • To be a real man is not only to destroy the feminine in oneself, but also the possibility of producing anything feminine.