The Book Stacks

(Not long ago, I made mention of a friend who is a huge fan of Shakespeare and defender of his name. Well, it turns out that she is currently in a production of The Scottish Play, and, as Shakespeare is an author and his plays appear in book form, she offered to write up some of her observations on the play for my blog. Thanks for the guest post, Eideann!! Oh, just so you know, her production is being done kabuki-style…and the costumes were designed by a mutual friend.)

Macbeth
A View from Behind the Curtain

By Eideann

I’m not a doctor, but I play one on the stage . . . in Macbeth during the month of July this year at the Sacramento Shakespeare Festival.

I have read Macbeth and I have seen the show, but participating in a production of it has given me an entirely different perspective on the play. Hearing the dialogue over and over again brought things out that I had missed before, and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts.

It’s tempting to consider the character Macbeth to be simply an evil man who seized opportunities that came his way. To think that he started out evil makes his behavior comprehensible, and allows us to disregard any possible parallels to our own ways of thinking.

Yet, in the early scenes, he comes across as a man of conscience, a man of honor. People speak well of him, and he expresses himself with wit and sense. Then come the three witches, predicting great things for both Macbeth and Banquo. Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, will gain another title and become Thane of Cawdor, then he will become king. Banquo will not be king, but his descendants will one day rule. Both men make light of the prophecies once the witches have gone, but then one of the king’s men arrives and announces that Macbeth has been granted the title, Thane of Cawdor, thus opening up a new path to Macbeth.

To make a long story short, Macbeth decides, at the urgings of his wife, to kill the king and take the crown. After all, the prophecy says he’ll have it, why not take it sooner rather than later? What I find fascinating is something he says after he has murdered the king, when he is pretending to have just seen the dead body for the first time. “… for from this instant, there’s nothing serious in mortality. All is but toys …�

It has been said many times that once someone has committed his first murder, the second is easier, as if once that line is crossed, it becomes easier to cross each time thereafter. With Macbeth, Shakespeare seems to address that theme. Yes, Macbeth is a soldier, and has killed men on the battlefield, but that’s a far cry from murdering a man as he sleeps in the guest room of one’s own house. Almost immediately thereafter, Macbeth kills the two men that he and his wife have framed for the crime. It is an extremely foolish move, and causes suspicion to fall upon Macbeth from more than one quarter. But now that Macbeth has killed, he seems to have truly come to believe that “there is nothing serious in mortality.�

From that moment forward, he sees all the people around him in terms of toys, of puppets to be used or discarded at his whim. In our production, that includes even his wife, whom he treats as an extension of his own desires from then forward. In the end it extends to himself. “I have lived long enough,� he says in Act V, “my way of life has fallen into the sear.� It’s as if taking that one life, the king he swore oaths to and has served, has made all life less valuable to him.

For those who are local to Sacramento and who are interested, here is the Shakespeare Festival website. http://www.sacramentoshakespeare.net/

Shakespeare, Macbeth, Sacramento, Shakespeare Festival