Showing posts with label Robert Burton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Burton. Show all posts

Saturday, 18 February 2017

A ramble around some themes in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth (work in progress)

A gradually proceeding ramble around some themes in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

18 February

A ramble around some themes in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth


NB This image from the First Folio, and the one below, is not necessarily from the Digital facsimile of the Bodleian First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, Arch. G c.7










Maybe other matters in the play (clues, some might call them* ?) give us pause here...

 Before Gaetano Donizetti and the later era of opera, it had had ‘mad scenes’ in the works of such as Hasse and Handel : are we so taken by Lady Macbeth’s madness, as the nurse and doctor overhear, that we do not question why she remarks about ‘so much blood in’ Duncan, but take it all as one guilty, bloody stuff ?


Yet that cannot be right. Having drugged the guards’ possets (Act II, Scene 2), she specifically says (having just doubted Macbeth, who has in fact ‘done the deed’, and, hearing him, assumed that the guards have awoken) Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t*. Yet why, at this same time, this tenderness of feeling, which but stifles a lack of it in wishing to kill instead of Macbeth (as if already doubting him) ?

 [James Thurber cleverly works with this¹, but] Lady Macbeth’s thought-patterns are so quicksilver that, often enough, we may not slow them down, but take them at the very level of the face value, which the drama itself distrusts / urges us to distrust². Back at Act V, Scene 1, is where we encounter the image of washing ‘this filthy witness from your hand’, but it is hard on the heels of it, here, that she realizes that all has not gone to plan, and – only when Macbeth refuses – does she have to go again into Duncan’s chamber³ :

Why did you bring these daggers from the place ?
They must lie there. Go carry them and smear
The sleepy grooms with blood.



Does this set of three lines seem, despite it all, terribly controlled - the words of someone who might have done all this before... ?

What is Duncan's age, on any reading of the play, at this time, and is it right to assume that Lady means Duncan, when she remarks who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him ?


End-notes :

 ¹ James Thurber makes play with this and other points in the text (in ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’, collected in The Thurber Carnival), but, at that level, we may not need to operate. (The piece first appeared in The New Yorker (p. 16 of the edition dated 2 October 1937), as linked here.)

² […] Where we are,
There’s daggers in men’s smiles. The near in blood,
The nearer bloody.

Donalbain (Act II, Scene 3)


³ Both seeds of the sleep-walking scene at the end of the play have now been sown, because, before returning with ‘hands of your colour’ and saying A little water clears us of this deed, she rationally seeks to dismiss what Macbeth says, first with Consider it not so deeply, and then [when his mind is still rooted in his recent experience], with :

 These deeds must not be thought
After these ways. So, it will make us mad.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)