Amph The Shakespeare Discussion Thread: "Anonymous"

Apparently it was okay, if not as awesomely groundbreaking as everyone made it out to be.

Rogue, I'd take issue with that 'everything'. Though I agree on principle. However, I'd love to see an Othello where Iago is played as mixed-race - being white to the Venetians and black to Othello, and so trusted by everyone.

Or - this one only came to me recently - a version set in colonial-era Australia; the colonists needed Aboriginal guides, because the country's pretty inhospitable, so cast Othello as the mistrusted but indispensable 'general' to a bunch of English colonists and voila. Roderigo would obviously be a convict (some stupid crime like stealing a handkerchief) and, who knows, maybe Iago too; a man who claims to have wholly repented for his offence and is given a trusted place in the colony's administration . . . but not too trusted, because he has to liaise with the filthy natives. Okay, maybe I've thought this through a little too far, but it's got potential

 

Othello's supposed to be a Moor, so he's an Arab, or so I always thought. Though the point is his cultural displacement, I suppose.

 

The term 'Moor' tended to be used pretty much indiscriminately, although the word originated to mean North African (I'm wondering if it's cognate with 'Morocco' and 'Maurus' [Latin, 'of Morocco']).

Queen Elizabeth I once expressed her discontent at "the great number of negars and blackamoors that are crept into the realm", which suggests that there was some kind of distinction worth drawing between 'negro' and 'Moor'. But again, some of Iago's insults seem to imply one image, some the other.

Othello's usually been played as, well, 'black', rather than Arab, for whatever reason. Although before the advent of genuinely black actors, Arab interpretations were far more common; I guess it was easier just to get a tan and wear a turban than black up fully . . .

 

I suspect the reason that Olivier's "Othello" isn't much shown these days is that he does it in blackface, which is politically incorrect with a vengence these days.

 

It's not one of his better films either, and it's quite dated. Orson Welles did a pretty good Othello film as well. Othello is close to Hamlet and R&J for being one of the most frequently filmed and adapted of Shakespeare's plays.

 

"MacBeth" not so much, but on the stage, and I guess on the screen, too, it's considered unlucky.

I can remember only two: Polanski and Kurosawa.

 

Much of Polanski's version is very hard to look at...he definitely went for
a hard-core, gritty realism that includes nudity and lots of blood. It doesn't
come across as a big-budget film at all.

I've never seen Kurosawa's THRONE OF BLOOD.

 

Now I remember a third one, directed by Welles, with Jeannette Nolan (!) as Lady Macbeth.

 

The play has a very manichean and machiavellian plot; it lends itself well. It's been adapted as a gangster picture of the forties (Joe Macbeth, which I've been chasing for a couple of years now), a story about cutthroat restauranters (Scotland, PA) and probably a few others I'm not aware of.

Polanski's version, which I haven't yet seen, was made after the Sharon Tate murder; most critics agree that the film's graphic violence and somewhat brutal nature comes from that experience.

The Welles version is a pain really; Welles and Nolan are neither one very good. They both seem to have moments where they get lost in the lines and forget what they're supposed to be saying. Easy to do, but it takes me back to Pacino's argument about Shakespeare: most of the time the reason the audience doesn't get it is because the actors didn't get it first.

You can't, in other words, understand what the actor is saying when they don't understand it themselves and I got that feeling several times, most notably in the Banquo's ghost scene; Welles seemed to have utterly lost his compass in that scene.

It's odd, but the only scene in the Welles version that comes close to working is the scene where Ross informs MacDuff of the fate of his wife and children. The acting in that scene is pitch perfect, underplayed and deeply emotional. That devestating line is delivered perfectly: Malcolm urges MacDuff to plot revenge against MacBeth. MacDuff says simply, "He has no children." There is then no way to visit upon him the kind of pain he has visited on MacDuff; it's the pinnacle of the film. The way the MacDuff character keeps asking, "All? Did you say all?" is brilliantly played; a man grappling with reality and unable to grasp it.

The Kurosawa version is brilliant; Kurosawa the very same year did a stellar adaptation of Gorky's Lower Depths. In that one, he kept every line of dialogue; in Throne of Blood, he keeps none of them. He jettisons the entire play, keeping only the framework. But it's an eerie film and Mifune is brilliant, all shivering intensity.

Isuzu Yamada is transfixing; I can't imagine a better Lady Macbeth than her. She's utterly still at times, like a statue; at other times, her face seems to almost fracture along the lines. It's one of the greatest female performances in cinema history and one that isn't mentioned nearly often enough.

The play itself is one of Shakespeare's best; there's a great moment just before Banquo's murder: Banquo remarks to his son "It may rain tonight." The murderer steps from concealment, says, "Let it come down," and strikes the fatal blow. I've always considered that the original action hero quip, albeit here it's a villain. But a beautiful line.

It's much more of a horror story than many of Shakespeare's plays; it's horrifying on a very base level. When Lady MacBeth remarks on the fact that she would be willing to pluck her nursing child from her breast and dash its brains out if it would mean success and wealth, well, you get the picture. And the visions Macbeth sees under the influences of the witches are quite dark. And, of course, "Damned spot" has forever entered the lexicon.

For me, though, the culminating moment is that stunning "life's but . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound a fury, signifying nothing" diatribe, Shakespeare at his most bitter and nihlistic.

 

I never knew why Welles made so many Shakespearean plays since he wasn't really suited to the roles (with the obvious exception of Falstaff).

"Macbeth" is a great play, but it's supposedly terribly unlucky, viz: (from Wiki)

"The Scottish play and The Bard's play are euphemisms often used for William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Saying 'Macbeth' inside a theatre is often considered taboo, as it is thought to bring on the curse associated with the play. The lead actors themselves are referred to as "Mr. and Mrs. M." or a variety of different names. The euphemism is so named because Macbeth is set in Scotland. Another variation of the superstition forbids direct quotation of the play while within a theatre.


Related rituals
There are a variety of traditional rituals used to ward off evil when the play is mentioned, such as turning three times, spitting over one's left shoulder, swearing, or reciting a line from another of Shakespeare's plays, often "Angels and ministers of grace defend us," (Hamlet 1.iv), or "Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you" (The Merchant of Venice, 3.iv). When the name of the play is spoken in a theatre, tradition requires that the person must leave, perform one of a number of rituals, and be invited back in. This was parodied in the TV series, Blackadder.


[edit] Origins
Productions of the play are said to have been plagued with accidents, many ending in death; the play does include more fight scenes and other such opportunities for accidents than does the average play. According to legend, this dates back to the original performance of the play, in which prop daggers were mistakenly swapped for real ones, resulting in a death.

Those who believe in the curse of Macbeth claim its origin to be in the three Witches, who in the play are said to be casting real spells. It has also been suggested that the inclusion of the character Hecate, frequently cut from productions of the play due to questions about her part's authorship, will intensify the effects of the curse.

The popularity of the superstition might also be related to its mild hazing aspect. Veteran actors might relate some tale of woe that they witnessed personally due to someone invoking the curse, lending credibility and immediacy to the tale.

One commonly believed origin is that Macbeth, being a popular play, was commonly put on by theaters in danger of going out of business, or that the high production costs of Macbeth put the theater in financial trouble. An association was made between the production of Macbeth and theaters going out of business. Not to mention, "That Scottish Play" was - and is - a real crowd pleaser, so acting companies short on cash would put up the show, in hopes of raking in more money to keep themselves from going out of business."

 

Cue irate PM to those with editorial power. It's "Macbeth". Not "MacBeth", which is a transatlantic corruption to make it look 'more Scottish' . . .

. . . er. Okay.

I saw Rufus Sewell play Macbeth in Sheffield, about eight or nine years ago now. It was a pretty stripped-down version of the play - plain red stage, whizzy lighting, minimalist costumes - but what I unfortunately remember is that Sewell had a bad cold, was very hoarse for a lot of the production and blanked completely at one point. I felt so sorry for the poor guy.

The play, of course, is a masterpiece. Even if the witches were interpolated by Thomas Middleton, they're still iconic Shakespearean figures, and Lady Macbeth is one of the few Renaissance-drama women to thoroughly upstage her man. Macbeth's a superb part with the right actor . . . but Lady M is like nothing on earth.

I've seen a recording of the RSC in-the-round production with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench (sorry, Sir Ian and Dame Judi ) as the couple; extraordinary. That's the production I think of when I read the play - either that or Polanski's film, which we watched in class when we did Macbeth in Year 10 Awesome stuff, but I do wonder how on earth the English teachers got away with showing it to a class of 14-year-olds.

I'll hopefully be going to the new RSC production later this year.

EDIT: The Blackadder 'Macbeth' episode is pure genius.

EDIT #2: Thanks Zaz

 

Guilty of the capital B.

I don't know that Lady Macbeth upstages Macbeth at all. Yes, she goads him to it, but once he gets going, he appears to have few qualms about it--he is a natural beast. She, however, goes mad from fear and remorse, and eventually commits suicide. She has the ambition, but not the stomach; he has the stomach, and he acquires the ambition.

It's based on a real situation, though in fact at that time two house alternated on the Scottish Throne, and Duncan was actually killed in battle, and Macbeth was not a usurper. Macbeth then ruled for 17 years, and was apparently a good king (the word 'lenient' is used). He was succeeded by his stepson, Lulach (Lady Macbeth's son), who was subsequently dethroned by Malcolm Canmore, Duncan's son. Interesting government style. Anywary, Shakespeare may have written Lady Macbeth this way because she had royal blood herself.

Or because her real name was Gruoch. And no, I'm not joking.

 

A great play. A lot of blood and gore, but its real power is in Macbeth's psychological deterioration. He longs for power but it comes at a price - he can be king, but his line will never flourish. It will be Banqou's children who will establish the future line, a line which is dramatically realised by a hallucinatory series of 'future' ghosts which parade before Macbeth. No wonder Macbeth should in the end despair at the transitoriness of life; he is, like an actor who 'struts his stuff', destined only ever to play the role of King, a role which will vanish in th'instant. The 'seeds of time' hold nothing for him, but this is something he only fully understands at the end. It is Shakespeare's weirdest play - not only for the 'weird sisters', but also its main distortions of reality. Once Duncan is murdered, the night lasts forever and Macbeth, who 'murders sleep' when he kills the king in his bed, indeed does not sleep, and Lady Macbeth is incapable of sleeping, ending her story in somnambulent guilt. It is also, perhaps, the most fun of Shakespeare's tragedies - as bleak as it is, the play is never as despairing as King Lear or Hamlet. It is full of action, of murders and conspiracies, full of big theatrical ideas. The witches were so popular that Shakespeare's company filched scenes from a Thomas Middleton play The Witch to give audiences more of what they wanted. But they were not just shrew businessmen, they were good politicians as well. Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's 'Jacobean' plays, in that (like Measure for Measure and King Lear) its subject matter was directly inspired by the new King James I, who had taken the throne in 1603, patronised the company Shakespeare was in (so Lord Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men) and finally entered London to be crowned in 1604 - just a couple of years before Macbeth's likely composition. James I was fascinated by witches and had even written a book on them. Even more political, he was a Scottish King - the first Scottish king of England and the architect of 'Great Britain.' He traced his line back through Banquo and the parade of future kings are meant to be his ancestors.

 

I'd still say that Lady M is the more interesting character in purely stage terms. It's so rare to see a Shakespearean woman who's as guilty as her male counterparts - the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Tamora in Titus Andronicus, or Cymbeline's queen, or maybe Cleon's (?) wife in Pericles, and they're all relatively minor characters. Except maybe Tamora.

Anyway, my point is that the part of Lady Macbeth is a huge prize for any actress. In terms of Shakespearean classic-value, it's kind of the equivalent of wanting to play Hamlet.

In a nutshell. Oh, and the mention of Lulach reminded me of Rogue's post earlier, referring to the scene where Lady M claims she would hold to her oath even if said oath was to kill her own child . . . do the Macbeths of the play have children? She says, I think, at one point "I have given suck", but there's also MacDuff pointing out that Macbeth is childless.

So did the kid die? Or is Lady Macbeth referring to a child from a previous marriage? Or was Shakespeare simply not cross-checking his text? (I know which one of those I'd go for )

I knew that. It's become one of those 'Fun Facts' that get put into every damn kid's Shakespeare ever. Consequently, it's now practically general knowledge. Well, at least here. And for a fairly narrow value of 'general'.

He also wrote a book denouncing the evils of "the devil's drug" - tobacco. If only he could have been so insightful about the witches.

Indeed. Shakespeare wrote as much to keep his patrons happy as anything else; The Merry Wives of Windsor was a commission for Elizabeth I, who wanted to know what happened to Falstaff, and the deposition scene in Richard II was rarely staged in Liz's reign because it was deemed subversive. Unsubtle flattery of James I was entirely in character for a working playwright . . .

Unlike Ben Jonson, who satirised the Scots and was locked up. Twice, as I recall.

 

Actually the sources differ on whether the Macbeths had children. One source says they had two sons, but Lulach became king because in those days kings generally needed to be adults. And apparently Malcolm Canmore married Gruoch after he killed Macbeth, at least for awhile, possibly because of her royal blood. This is before he married St. Margaret.

 

It's always hard to know how far Shakespeare or any author are deliberately flattering a patron, or simply surfing the tide of public interest which was undoubtedly stimulated by James' accession. Some of Shakespeare's most apparently James-flattering plays can easily be read as critical works. Measure for Measure famously plays with the 'disguised monarch' theme that cropped up in many plays written in 1604 (the first proper year of James' reign, though technically he became King in 1603) in the wake of stories about James going in disguise amongst his people. It is also stuffed full of the kind of political theory James had written about, and seems to mimic an act of mercy when James had given 11th-hour pardons to a small band of people who had conspired to overthrow him. Yet Shakespeare's Duke Vincentio - the 'James' figure in Measure -- is a very problematic character, he is manipulative and insecure. Even a play like Macbeth has its counter-readings, especially as its central story has many echoes of James' own family history (his father was murdered and his mother married the murderer ...), and the play ends with an English invasion of Scotland!

However, it is undoubtedly true that Shakespeare more directly engaged with James than he ever did with Elizabeth. Many of his works seem to show Shakespeare siding with the Essex faction and a good deal of it seems to be implicitly critical of the old queen. Sadly, it is a myth that Elizabeth commissioned Merry Wives, but it is not a myth that Richard II caused some controversy when it was staged just before Essex's attempted coup, apparently at Essex's behest. Whether the deposition scene was staged is not known, but it was missing in the play's first publication. The Queen does not seem to have taken much interest in theatre after her own company, the Queen's Men, folded. It's often said that Shakespeare and his company regularly performed at court every Christmas, which they did - but this is misleading, because Christmas entertainments were varied and the Queen could choose from any number of entertainments in a given evening. It was therefore a complete surprise to the King's Men when, during Christmas 1603, the new king (their new patron), attended every single court performance. No wonder they made sure the following year that they had as many plays to please the king as they could muster!

The politics of patronage was part of the reality of being a playwright and playing company in the period. It was illegal to perform without the protection of a patron. There were conflicts - Lord Hunsden, who was the Lord Chamberlain before James took over the company's patronage, was actually one of the private citizens who blocked his own company's attempts to move into an indoor theatre in the Blackfriar's precint.

Jonson got into trouble many times, usually for murdering people, but he was even more tied in to the Jacobean monarchy than Shakespeare, as he wrote the texts for several 'masque' entertainments (elaborate court spectacles) and was poet laureat.

 

In the play, I believe the Macbeths are childless; the remark by Lady Macbeth is, I believe, a hypothetical. Plus, as I recall, don't the Macbeths decide to give the heirship to Banquo's son. Because that was part of the prophecy to him.

This is, in fact, a driving motivation in the Kurosawa version (so I may be interpolating things into the original text that aren't there); the prophecy is that Banquo will be the father of a line of kings as opposed to Macbeth simply being a king. Thus the motivation to have Banquo and his son (though the son escapes) murdered.

I'm pretty sure that's all in the play. What isn't in the play, but is in Kurosawa's version, is that Lady Macbeth's madness is caused (finally) by a stillborn child. She's obvious pregnant toward the end of the film and then it is intimated that the child was stillborn. Thus, Kurosawa zeroed in on that whole subtext of the worth of the heir system as being key to the entire story.

And I'm shocked that no one has yet mentioned the nature of destiny/divine intervention in this story; Macbeth's fortunes begin to turn and one prophecy is fulfilled without his help, but he takes matters into his own hands to fulfill the second. However, he still thinks that he can short circuit Banquo's prophecy. One wonders about the logic there.

And it's seen as a terrific crime to murder the king; he is, after all, divinely ordained. Thus the terrific justice that must be meted to him. By fulfilling destiny, Macbeth flies against God. So is it destiny or no? One wonders, that's all.

But one reason that it's not so much a downer as some of Shakespeare's tragedy is the simple theme of 'chaos righted.' The curtain falls on a world where things are once again as they should be.

 

In some ways, it fufills a lot of the English views of Scotland; a brutish place full of thugs. Not that the English were terribly wrong about that, as Scottish politics was not for the faint of heart, since the throne commonly was won by the strongest of a group that had royal blood. The idea was to locate the strongest and best soldier in the lot, so it had a certain practicality. A king had to be able to defend the realm, which is why an underaged child rarely succeeded. But it also made for instability.

How much of the witches was original and how much was not?

 

Although James was little more than a year old when he became King of Scotland ...

The Hectate scenes are thought to be Middleton's.

 

i love that play and maybe i can get worked up to write a longer response later on i don't love it as much as i love hamlet, though, i prefer the hesitant over the overly thuggish. and i fell asleep during the kurosawa movie... well, my friend did, and i brushed my teeth (why is it that i remember these things so vividly?) to stay awake.

 

Odd that Olivier never tried the role on screen, I know he did it to great acclaim on the stage (with Vivien Leigh as Lady Macbeth).

Of the current crop of actors, who would you cast?

My choice: Liam Neeson

 

Ooh, casting . . .

I'd love to see Sean Bean play Macbeth. He's done a lot of theatre (my dad saw him play Romeo opposite Niamh Cusack in nineteen-eighty-something) and is getting to the right sort of age bracket for Macbeth now; I could really see him being able to show the shift from honourable warrior into ambition-fuelled murderer. He did it in FOTR, after all

As for Lady M, that's harder. Imogen Stubbs could do it.

EDIT:

I think I've suddenly gained psychic powers. Macbeth with Sean Bean, slated for 2008 no less. And Tilda Swinton as Lady M?

Hell yes. Hell yes. If in doubt, go re-watch Narnia.

 

I thought of him, and wondered if he was too young. Obviously not...

Like to see Cate Blanchett try Lady M.

 

Word has it that Olivier wanted to do a Macbeth film, but after Richard III his fortunes were too low for anyone to allow a Shakespearean film. He did do Othello after, but it was almost ten years, I think, so there may be some truth to it.

Sean Bean as Macbeth will own everybody. Quick, Nemesis, wish for someone to give me a million dollars! Let's keep this streak hot!

 

Emma Thompson for Lady M?