Staging Power in Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar
HUM 102 2014
William Shakespeare
• English playwright and
poet
• Born early 1560s, died in
1616
• Born in Stratford-uponAvon (small town in
Warwickshire)
• In Early 1580s, he
moved to London: acting
in/writing for the theatre
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”)
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.
GLOBE THEATER (1598)
GLOBE THEATER
ELIZABETHAN ERA (1558–1603)
Jacobean era (1567–1625)
The reign of James VI of Scotland/James I of England
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.
•
•
•
•
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.
Agency and
• The mystery
of
Macbeth’s
will
to
commit
Equivocation
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)
“Fair is foul, and foul
is fair.”
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)
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.
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?
• 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.”
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
• 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
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”).
Elizabeth I's (Theatrical) Royal Progresses
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.
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.
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.
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 topfullOf 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
“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.