garnered multiple awards in London and was nominated for six Tony awards in New York. In 2009 Goold became an associate director of the RSC.
At the end of the play Malcolm describes the Macbeths as a “dead butcher” and his “fiend-like queen”: but there’s got to be more to them than that, hasn’t there? In the case of Lady Macbeth in particular, there’s a long tradition of actresses wrestling with her human side (“Had he not resembled / My father,” and all that).
Nunn: In many ways,
Macbeth
concentrates thematically on the nature of evil, and therefore, the play is also, through the strands of the Banquo story and the Malcolm/Macduff story climaxing in the England scene, about the nature of goodness. But something else explains the
structure
of the play, and binds its many elements together; it is an examination of belief, or as we more commonly say, faith. The successful, highly regarded, trustworthy general Macbeth is inclined to believe the weyard sisters encountered on the heath, and equally clearly his comrade and friend Banquo is not. When the first element of the sisters’ strange prophecy comes true, Macbeth is persuaded entirely to believe in their prophetic utterances, to the point of writing to his wife about this “road to Damascus” revelation. She is obviously more than willing to be recruited to this belief, and thereafter she clings to it as extremely as a fundamentalist terrorist to religious validation.
Macbeth’s waverings endanger both him and his wife, to the point where his belief in the prophecies has to be revitalized if he is to go on. His return visit to the witches, indicating that, despite the bad news about Fleance, Macbeth is invulnerable, fuels the final section of the play, as the invading warriors imbued with the opposite (and very Christian) faith are carried along by their own certainties. The end comes in the form of a “bad joke” as the revitalized Macbeth realizes that the phrase “born of woman,” which will protect him against all-comers, doesn’t include a child entering the world by means of a primitive Caesarean. Macbeth’s next words, after taking in that his faith has been founded on a semantic quibble, are “I’ll not fight with thee.” His belief has dissolved, and with it his resolution, his invulnerability, and his sense of destiny.
Doran: Lady Macbeth is certainly not a “fiend-like queen.” I think she is driven to do something that she doesn’t allow herself to thinkthrough; she has a kind of myopia. Whereas Macbeth thinks rather a lot—too much, in a way—she suppresses her imagination. Lady Macbeth has only one very short soliloquy in the entire play, when she realizes that she has become queen at the cost of having blood on her hands:
Naught’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
’Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
I think she realizes that her husband no longer has any real use for her. At the end of the banquet scene she realizes that Macbeth has left her, he has moved on, and is going to continue to secure himself as king and eliminate his enemies. She seems to have no knowledge of his plans anymore. We discovered a moment whereby she picked up a candle to light her way to her bedchamber as she left the banqueting table and all the other candles went out; it was the influence of the three weyard sisters, who had been under the table all the time. In other words, Lady Macbeth is haunted by her conscience, and what Harriet [Walter] made clear in the sleepwalking scene is that here is a woman who has insisted that her husband do this terrible deed in order to get the crown, and then immediately finds both the emptiness of the role and also that her relationship with her husband has somehow diminished. And I think that is very poignant.
As for Macbeth as a “butcher,” the experience of watching the play is that you don’t feel Macbeth is just a ruthless
At the end of the play Malcolm describes the Macbeths as a “dead butcher” and his “fiend-like queen”: but there’s got to be more to them than that, hasn’t there? In the case of Lady Macbeth in particular, there’s a long tradition of actresses wrestling with her human side (“Had he not resembled / My father,” and all that).
Nunn: In many ways,
Macbeth
concentrates thematically on the nature of evil, and therefore, the play is also, through the strands of the Banquo story and the Malcolm/Macduff story climaxing in the England scene, about the nature of goodness. But something else explains the
structure
of the play, and binds its many elements together; it is an examination of belief, or as we more commonly say, faith. The successful, highly regarded, trustworthy general Macbeth is inclined to believe the weyard sisters encountered on the heath, and equally clearly his comrade and friend Banquo is not. When the first element of the sisters’ strange prophecy comes true, Macbeth is persuaded entirely to believe in their prophetic utterances, to the point of writing to his wife about this “road to Damascus” revelation. She is obviously more than willing to be recruited to this belief, and thereafter she clings to it as extremely as a fundamentalist terrorist to religious validation.
Macbeth’s waverings endanger both him and his wife, to the point where his belief in the prophecies has to be revitalized if he is to go on. His return visit to the witches, indicating that, despite the bad news about Fleance, Macbeth is invulnerable, fuels the final section of the play, as the invading warriors imbued with the opposite (and very Christian) faith are carried along by their own certainties. The end comes in the form of a “bad joke” as the revitalized Macbeth realizes that the phrase “born of woman,” which will protect him against all-comers, doesn’t include a child entering the world by means of a primitive Caesarean. Macbeth’s next words, after taking in that his faith has been founded on a semantic quibble, are “I’ll not fight with thee.” His belief has dissolved, and with it his resolution, his invulnerability, and his sense of destiny.
Doran: Lady Macbeth is certainly not a “fiend-like queen.” I think she is driven to do something that she doesn’t allow herself to thinkthrough; she has a kind of myopia. Whereas Macbeth thinks rather a lot—too much, in a way—she suppresses her imagination. Lady Macbeth has only one very short soliloquy in the entire play, when she realizes that she has become queen at the cost of having blood on her hands:
Naught’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
’Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
I think she realizes that her husband no longer has any real use for her. At the end of the banquet scene she realizes that Macbeth has left her, he has moved on, and is going to continue to secure himself as king and eliminate his enemies. She seems to have no knowledge of his plans anymore. We discovered a moment whereby she picked up a candle to light her way to her bedchamber as she left the banqueting table and all the other candles went out; it was the influence of the three weyard sisters, who had been under the table all the time. In other words, Lady Macbeth is haunted by her conscience, and what Harriet [Walter] made clear in the sleepwalking scene is that here is a woman who has insisted that her husband do this terrible deed in order to get the crown, and then immediately finds both the emptiness of the role and also that her relationship with her husband has somehow diminished. And I think that is very poignant.
As for Macbeth as a “butcher,” the experience of watching the play is that you don’t feel Macbeth is just a ruthless
Similar Books
