Lady Macbeth is one of the most compelling and famous
characters created by William Shakespeare. She has become a byword for a strong
woman behind a man, pushing him towards nefarious ends. The Macbeths are often
seen as a sexy, powerful couple, bonded by their evil plotting. To summarize an
analysis given in an interview by Laurence Olivier, Lady Macbeth is on a
downward track from power ending in tragedy, while her husband is on the rise
and their journeys cross each other at Duncan’s murder. Something about these
interpretations rings false when compared against the characters’ cue scripts.
Over a couple of blog posts, we will examine the cue scripts
of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to dig into their relationship and their characters
to better understand why these characters hold such a sway over our
imagination. Today we begin with Lady Macbeth.
When we first meet Macbeth’s anonymous wife, her words are
not her own. She reads a letter recounting events that we, the audience,
already know. When we are introduced to a character, we see their true selves.
If they are not as they appear, Shakespeare has them tell us. Deceptions in his
plays occur between characters while the audience is always complicit in the
lie. However, Shakespeare does not give us a true Lady Macbeth in her opening scene. Instead he gives a
regurgitation of what we have already witnessed on stage. Lady Macebth is a
parrot, exposition. Nothing about her is revealed.
Throughout Shakespeare’s work, language is character: how
one speaks and the way one’s text works is how we truly know his creations.
What do her first words, her first thoughts, tell us about Lady Macbeth? They
offer an excellent example of how language can be used to shape character.
‘Glamys
thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
What
thou are promis’d:’
Her first line is nine beats long (Glamys being pronounce
‘glamz’), and the thought runs into the next line of pentameter. What is
interesting here is that there is one word that would fill the first line, making
it a full 10-beat line, and completing the thought. Instead there is a one beat
pause. She could say: ‘Glamys thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be king.’
In this instance, we would see a woman in control saying
what she means, but we do not. Instead, there is the impression that she cannot
bring herself to say the word. There is a pause, trepidation. She continues to
question her husband’s ability to do what needs to be done to reach the goal of
which she herself cannot speak. There is never a consideration that he may be
able to earn the crown legitimately, but that Macbeth must ‘catch the neerest
way.’
The first action she takes, is to ask for supernatural,
metaphysical help. At this point in the play, this choice does not indicate the
strong woman that she is popularly portrayed to be (we cannot say that this is
uncharacteristic of her, because we do not know that much about her):
‘…Come you Spirits,
That tend on mortall
thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the
Crowne to the Toe, top-full
Of direst Crueltie:
make thick my blood,
Stop up th' accesse,
and passage to Remorse,
That no compunctious
visitings of Nature
Shake my fell purpose,
nor keepe peace betweene
Th' effect, and hit.
Come to my Womans Brests,
And take my Milke for
Gall, you murth'ring Ministers,
Where-ever, in your
sightlesse substances,
You wait on Natures
Mischiefe. Come thick Night,
And pall thee in the
dunnest smoake of Hell,
That my keene Knife
see not the Wound it makes,
Nor Heaven peepe
through the Blanket of the darke,
To
cry, hold, hold.’
The language of Lady Macbeth’s request to darker powers may
offer a glimpse of the person she was before taking this step because she asks
for attributes she does not possess and to become something she is not. She
would not ask to be unsexed unless she felt that her femininity was a
liability. She begs to be filled completely with ‘direst Crueltie,’ an
attribute she must not already have. ‘Stop up th’accesse, and passage to
Remorse’ tells that she believes her conscience to be an obstacle. She prays
that it becomes dark enough that she cannot witness her own actions and that
Heaven, her religion, does not stop her. If this is what she wants, we can
infer these are qualities she does not see in herself. She believes herself to
be a woman without cruelty, filled with mother’s milk and full of remorse who
is afraid to think that she is capable of the actions she considers.
Throughout her cue script, Lady Macbeth’s entrance cues give
us information that contradicts the image of the strong demanding woman. Her
first cue is ‘…a peerless Kinsman.’ She is not named here, and while the word
‘peerless’ does appear it describes a ‘Kinsman,’ not woman. This may be a
reason why even before she asks for a transformation, Lady Macbeth is portrayed
as sexless. If the emphasis is put on ‘peerless’ then she is the prime example
of a Thane’s wife. Other words in the character’s cues include ‘delicate’ and
‘t’other.’ She is never named in her entrance stage directions other than
‘Lady.’ (Unbeknownst to an actor using cue scripts, no character ever states
her name. Without a name there are psychological limits on how well the
audience will ever be able to know Lady Macbeth.)
Over the next several scenes after Macbeth’s return we watch
Lady Macbeth control, belittle, manipulate and berate her warrior husband:
‘…looke like th'
innocent flower,
But
be the Serpent under't.’
‘Was the hope drunke,
Wherein you drest your
selfe? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now to
looke so greene, and pale,
At what it did so
freely? From this time,
Such I account thy
love. Art thou affear'd
To be the same in
thine owne Act, and Valour,
As thou art in desire?
Would'st thou have that
Which thou esteem'st
the Ornament of Life,
And live a Coward in
thine owne Esteeme?’
‘I have given Sucke,
and know
How tender 'tis to
love the Babe that milkes me,
I would, while it was
smyling in my Face,
Have pluckt my Nipple
from his Bonelesse Gummes,
And dasht the Braines
out, had I so sworne
As you have done to
this.’
‘But screw your
courage to the sticking place,
And wee'le not fayle:’
‘Infirme of purpose:
Give me the Daggers:
the sleeping, and the dead,
Are but as Pictures:
'tis the Eye of Childhood,
That feares a painted
Devill.’
‘My Hands are of your
colour: but I shame
To weare a Heart so
white.’
All of this comes after Lady Macbeth seeks the aid of dark
forces. Much is made of the metaphysical in this play as it pertains to
Macbeth, but how does it affect his wife? At his point in the play Macbeth’s
dealing with the witches was unsolicited, they came to him, but Lady Macbeth
sought them out. Is her strength then a result of ‘Spirits / That tend on
mortal thoughts?’
Once the murder of Duncan is concluded, this bullying
aspect of Lady Macbeth dissolves, and where before she pushed Macbeth to bloody
thoughts she now tries to pull him away from them. Given that the first several
scenes of the play illustrate how bloody his acts are on the battlefield, this
seems to be a more likely role for Lady Macbeth to play in her home life – but
we never see them on a normal day.
‘Gentle my Lord,
sleeke o're your rugged Lookes,
Be bright and Joviall
among your Guests to Night.’
Keep in mind as well, her request to the dark forces
concluded with the murder of Duncan. Once he is assassinated, the contract has
ended. She is troubled by the influence she held over her husband. In a rare
moment alone with her thoughts and the audience, Lady Macbeth slips into a
rhyme, the first and only that she has for herself and the audience as she
questions what she has done:
‘Nought's had, all's
spent.
Where our desire is
got without content:
'Tis safer, to be that
which we destroy,
Then by destruction
dwell in doubtfull joy.’
This is the only time she second-guesses what she and her
husband have done.
It is often posited that the Macbeths are one of the only
happily married couples in Shakespeare’s canon. But the language of her text
does not reflect this supposition. When speaking to Macbeth, his wife uses
‘thou’ or ‘thine’ (a display of physical closeness) only eight times, and never
after he goes off to kill Duncan. She says ‘we,’ ‘us’ or ‘our/s’ only five
times. At one point when discussing the murder, she asks, ‘What cannot you
and I performe upon / Th' unguarded
Duncan?’ (emphasis mine). Her language separates herself from her husband even
at the same time she is pushing him to commit a murder they planned together.
In none of her exchanges, most importantly those with her
husband, does Lady Macbeth finish another person’s rhyme, and she only has five
internal rhymes (two of which were touched upon above). Two of these are to her
husband, but have the appearance of the theatrical convention of buttoning or
highlighting an important thought:
‘Which shall to all
our Nights, and Dayes to come,
Give solely soveraigne
sway, and Masterdome.’
‘Onely looke up
cleare:
To alter fauor, ever
is to feare:
Leave
all the rest to me.’
Both of these come at the time when she is convincing her
husband that they should kill the king.
Lady Macbeth does have a number of short lines, the
majority of which either begin or end her exchanges with other characters, or
are single lines. This either means that she has action or pauses at the
beginning of her lines, or she is completing someone else’s line, illustrating
a dependence on other characters – dependence because the lack of rhyming shows
no special affinity with those Lady Macbeth shares lines. One would expect more
intimacy in the language expressing a happy marriage. The evidence of contented
matrimony must reside in the interpretations of performers, because there is
little evidence of it in the text.
Everyone familiar with The Tragedie of Macbeth remembers Lady Macbeth’s iconic sleep walking scene.
The image of her in her nightgown with a candle, trying to rub bloodstains from
her hands is indelibly stamped on the mind. The way that the scene is written
makes it a theatrical coup (often in our unrehearsed cue script workshops The
New Renaissance Theatre Company uses it to illustrate how well the rules of the
technique work to block a scene in the moment and how a scene that many people
think they know can be drastically different and new).
Sometimes it is referred to as her mad scene, only the
word ‘mad’ is never used to describe her, although she does warn her husband ‘These
deeds must not be thought / After these wayes: so, it will make us mad.’ Neither the
Doctor nor the Gentle Woman who witness her sleep walking ever says that she is
mad. The Doctor comments that walking in her sleep is a ‘great perturbation in
Nature.’ Nobody else sleep walks in Shakespeare’s plays. Claudius and Gertrude,
as guilty as they are never walk in their sleep. Lear and Ophelia both go mad,
but never sleep walk. This particular characteristic seems to be reserved for
special circumstances (possibly those marked by the supernatural?).
It is perhaps these special circumstances that foster
interest in the character of Lady Macbeth. Many portrayals of her character
show the audience a strong and demanding woman, the power behind the throne,
the driving force or engine and something has always felt wrong about it. In
some places she does push him, but given the manner of her introduction, she
does not seem like the kind of character that would be so assertive towards a
husband who is known for his battlefield brutality. In A Midsommer Nights
Dreame, Theseus introduces us to his
warrior wife, Hippolyta, with the phrase: ‘I won thy love doing thee injury.’
They met in conflict. There is no mention of such a relationship between the
Macbeths, which would be an important dynamic for the playwright to set for the
audience given the nature of the play.
Questions of supernatural influence on Macbeth must also
be asked of his wife. Remember, the first thing that she does is ask for
metaphysical help to aid her in making her husboand do what is necessary to
become King, even to do it herself. We are never told (explicitly) if she gets
that help. Perhaps she does, and that is why once murder is committed, we see a
shift in her character as she comes back to her more normal state of being. But
Shakespeare never lets us see what the Macbeths were like. It is the equivalent of listening to one half of a
phone conversation. We have no definitive way to judge these characters, and
therein lies the attractiveness of this play. If the Macbeths were like
this, then they were always capable of
their crimes. If the Macbeths were like that, then the witches and darkness have power in the
play. Perhaps this couple was always on this track, but we can never
know, and so these questions make this play
and these characters dynamic and compelling.
Lady Macbeth
Gabriel Cornelius von Max (1885)
