Part 3 (1/2)
but it is not correct to say:
”EYES, look your LAST!
ARMS, take your last EMBRACE!”
which every Romeo persists in saying to-day; and this method of duplicating emphasis, being used by all the actors throughout the whole play, the time taken up in speaking it is at once doubled. Hence the need for excessive ”prunings.”
To sum up the arguments: Shakespeare's dramatic art, which is unique of its kind, cannot to-day be properly understood or appreciated on the stage for the following reasons: (1) Because editors print the plays as if they were five-act dramas, which they are not; (2) because actors, in their stage versions, mutilate the ”fable,” and interpolate pictorial effects where none are intended; (3) because, also, actors use a faulty and artificial elocution, unsuited to the poet's verse. These causes, combined, oust Shakespeare's original plays from the theatre, and impose in their place pseudo-cla.s.sical dramas which are not of his making, nor of his time. To remedy this evil it is necessary to insist that the early quartos alone represent Shakespeare's form of construction and his method of representation, and that for the purpose of determining the text these same quartos should be collated with the first folio, with occasional reference to modern editions. Cheap facsimiles of the quartos as well as the folio should be accessible to actors, and from these an attempt should be made to standardize stage-versions of Shakespeare's most popular plays, and these stage-versions should be the joint work of scholars and actors.
Perhaps what is important for the general public to recognize is that the acting-versions of Shakespeare's plays, the interpretation given to his characters, and the actor's ”readings” have altered but little during the last two hundred years, so that the performances given on the stage to-day are chiefly founded upon traditions which never came into touch with Elizabethan times. More and more, therefore, must it be realized that if an actor wishes to interpret the plays intelligently, he must shut his eyes to all that has taken place on the stage since the poet's time, turning to Shakespeare's text and trusting to that alone for inspiration.
THE CHARACTER OF LADY MACBETH.
_I should never think, for instance, of contesting an actress's right to represent Lady Macbeth as a charming, insinuating woman, if she really sees the figure that way. I may be surprised at such a vision; but so far from being scandalized, I am positively thankful for the extension of knowledge, of pleasure, that she is able to open to me._--HENRY JAMES.
The introduction of women players led to one of the evils connected with the star system. So long as boys acted the women's parts there was no danger of any woman's character being made over-prominent to the extent of unbalancing the play. But when Mrs. Siddons became famous by her impersonation of Lady Macbeth, it may be contended, without prejudice to the talent of the actress, that the character ceased to represent Shakespeare's point of view. This is the more to be regretted in view of Mrs. Siddons' confession that her personality was not suited to the part.
There was, besides, another drawback unfortunately in that, during the eighteenth century, the part of Lady Macduff dropped out of the playbill, thus removing from the play the one person in it whose presence was necessary for the proper understanding of Lady Macbeth's character. The appearance of Lady Macduff on the stage affords opportunity for the reflection that Duncan's murder would never have taken place had she been Macbeth's wife. Yet she, too, has shortcomings to which she falls a victim, for when the a.s.sa.s.sins are at her door she exclaims:
”Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now I am in this earthly world, where to do harm Is often laudable; to do good, sometime, Accounted dangerous folly: why then, alas!
Do I put up that womanly defence, To say, I have done no harm?”
Now, admirable as this reflection is from an ethical standpoint, it is not appropriate to the moment, and in Lady Macbeth's eyes it would have been ”dangerous folly” to talk moral plat.i.tudes at such a time. In fact, if the mistress of Inverness Castle had been placed in Lady Macduff's cruel position, it is more than likely she would have had the courage and the energy to save her own life and those of her children from the fury of Macbeth. Nor is it inconceivable that if Lady Macbeth had married a man of stronger moral fibre than her husband, she might have lived a useful life, loved and respected by all who knew her. And yet, unhappily for both women, neither Macbeth nor Macduff were fine types of manhood.
Another idea which needs to be cleared out of the way is that of the unusual enormity of Lady Macbeth's crime in contriving the death of a man who was her guest. Shakespeare's audience knew that a sovereign was never immune from a.s.sa.s.sination. Queen Elizabeth's life became the mark for a.s.sa.s.sin after a.s.sa.s.sin. Moreover, the Catholics contended that ”good Queen Bess,” by beheading Mary Stuart, had murdered a woman who was her guest and who had come into her kingdom a.s.sured of protection. There was something childish about Duncan's credulity in face of the treachery he had already experienced from the first Thane of Cawdor. In a monarch whose position was open to attack from the jealousy of his n.o.bles, Duncan's conduct showed an almost incredible want of caution. In fact, it was his unguarded confidence which brought about his death. No onlooker in the Globe playhouse ever thought the murder of this King at Inverness to be an improbable or unusual occurrence. And this inference suggests another of even more importance, namely, the period in which Shakespeare's tragedy is placed. When the poet-dramatist demanded that his actors should hold the mirror up to Nature, it was not the nature of the Greeks, nor of the Romans, nor of the early Britons that he meant. The spirit of the Italian Renaissance, with its humanism and intellectuality, had taken too strong a hold upon the imagination of Englishmen to allow of their playgoers being interested in the puppets of a bygone age. Shakespeare had no need to look beyond his own time to find his Lady Macbeth. There were many women still existing who were uninfluenced by the didactic teaching of the Puritans and their love of moral introspection. Queen Elizabeth herself was an instance. As the historian Green points out, we track her through her tortuous maze of lying and intrigue until we find that she revelled in byways and crooked ways, and yet was adored by her subjects for a womanliness she, in reality, never possessed. And this love of shuffling and lack of all genuine religious emotion failed utterly to blur the brightness of the national ideal. Or, to take her rival, Mary Stuart. The rough Scottish n.o.bles owned that there was in her some enchantment whereby men were bewitched. ”Her beauty,” writes Green, ”her exquisite grace of manner, her generosity of temper and warmth of affection, her frankness of speech, her sensibility, her gaiety, her womanly tears, her manlike courage, the play and freedom of her nature ... flung a spell over friend or foe which has only deepened with the lapse of years.” And yet this piece of feminine fascination visited her sick husband, Darnley, in his lonely house near Holyrood Palace, in which he was lodged by her order, kissed him, bade him farewell, and rode gaily back to a dance within two hours of the terrible explosion which deprived him of his life, a murder that was attributed to Bothwell, and at which Mary herself may easily have connived.
And so it was with Lady Macbeth. Murder, to those who were not injured by it, was no crime in her opinion, and excited neither terror nor remorse.
She was to the last unconscious of being criminal or sinful. Her life was the playing of a red-handed game by one who thought herself innocent. For this reason she could walk placidly through any evil she contemplated. She knew that her persuasive power over men lay in her womanliness, and that in this there was nothing compromising. Unlike her husband, her face betrayed no moral conflict. The Puritan spirit had never penetrated her own nature. Whatever her outward religion might be, she was at heart a materialist, not from conviction, but from shallowness, due to the absence of all the higher powers of reflection and imagination. Banquo is dead, and therefore she knows that it is impossible for him to come out of his grave to torment his murderer. It is only necessary to wash the blood from her hands, and that will clear away the consequences. Even the ”spirits,”
to which her husband has alluded; those which she mockingly invokes to her feminine aid, have no reality to her, because they have no material whereabouts. So that her husband's talk about conscience and retribution is unintelligible to her. She knows that what he would do ”wrongly” he would like to do ”holily,” because she has heard about the Ten Commandments; but these things have no meaning for her, they do not come within her experience. With her limited outlook, the beginning and end of everything necessary for her husband's success in life is that he should be practical, inventive, and never appear embarra.s.sed.
The most marked feature, then, in Lady Macbeth's character is her femininity, and Shakespeare dwells upon this trait throughout her career.
In the first place, no one at Inverness Castle suspects that she is accessory to the terrible crime. Macduff is distressed at the mere thought of telling her what has happened. The woman who would have been trampled under foot in the courtyard on that eventful night, if the truth about her had been known, becomes the centre of immediate anxiety when she faints, or feigns to faint, to rescue her husband from a perilous position. Duncan could not find words to express his delight at her charm as a hostess. The guests at the royal coronation banquet grieve that she should be exposed to a trying ordeal through her husband's extraordinary behaviour. The doctor who overhears her dying confessions is a ”mated” and ”amazed” and incredulous at the thought of her self-implications. One voice speaks of her with harshness, and it is that of the son of the murdered King, and then only at the close of the play. If, again, we turn to her own reflections, it is always her woman's weakness which she dreads may defeat her purpose. Murder is something foreign to her temperament; the details are ugly and revolting; the sight of blood may unnerve her. She can do the crime herself if she can accomplish it without seeing the wound the dagger will make; but she evidently imagines that her husband, who has killed men in battle, can do it better, and this conviction becomes a moral certainty when she is confronted with the pathetic figure of that trusting, white face, with its whiter hair, so like her own father's. When the fatal moment arrives she cannot meet her husband in her normal mood, but has recourse to the wine-cup, not because she shrinks from the notion of murder, but from dislike for the details of the operation. She has, besides, all the little partialities of a woman who delights in the beauty of the innocent flower and in perfumes of Arabia. Then the thought of being a Queen and wearing a real crown is an intense delight to her.
Macbeth knew of her weakness for finery when he sought her approval of the deed; it was his bribe for her help. And women of Lady Macbeth's temperament do not care to be disappointed of their pleasures. To break promise in these matters, she tells her husband, is as cruel as it would be for her to kill her own child, that being a crime of which she is incapable, for she is a devoted mother.
Nor must the marked contrast between her att.i.tude before and after the crime be overlooked. At its inception, murder is a mere means to an end, which creates no misgivings in her mind. She sees ”the future in the instant,” a future which gives her ”the golden round,” and bestows on her husband ”sovereign sway and masterdom.” But no sooner is the crime committed than her optimism fails her, for her husband seems no nearer to ”masterdom” than he was before. After the coronation there comes her tragic reflection that the murder was a mistake. Unfortunately for her, it was worse than a mistake; it was a blunder for which her husband deposes her authority. No longer does he listen to her counsels, and although she has not lost any of her charm or her womanliness, her spell over him has gone for ever. Never again can she say, ”From this time such I account thy love,” but merely e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es, ”Did you send to him, _sir_?” No such cruel awakening was in store for her husband. He knew from the first that his crime must bring retribution and arouse the anger of the G.o.ds; but she, for her part, foresaw no harm and no consequences. It is the shock of her failure which paralyzes her power for further action. She is not repentant, because she is unconscious of having sinned, and to the last she is at a loss to understand why murdering an old man in his bed has divorced her husband's affection from her, and turned him into a bloodthirsty tyrant. Her brain is not big enough to take in what all these things mean, and under strain of anxiety and disappointment her mind gives way. This, then, is the Lady Macbeth that Mrs. Siddons identifies as ”a character which, I believe, is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other s.e.x, fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile. Such a combination only, respectable in energy and strength of mind and captivating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless as Macbeth.”
There is no portrait in Shakespeare's gallery of women more generally misunderstood than this one, the reason, perhaps, being that the poet has not been credited with the desire or experience to draw a type of woman so obviously disingenuous. But no one can read Shakespeare aright who thinks that the men and women who live in our age do not resemble those who lived in his time. Not until we read the Lady Macduff scene carefully can we grasp the kind of woman Shakespeare had in his mind. Then it will be evident that the real criminal in the play is Macbeth, whose conscience warns him that ”unnatural deeds beget unnatural troubles,” and who, against his better judgment, allows himself to be influenced, out of connubial love, into an action of which he knows his wife to be incapable of foreseeing the consequences. When disaster follows, we can set up that ”womanly defence” for her and say, ”she meant no harm.” There is no such appeal possible for her husband, who is condemned from the first out of his own mouth.
Shakespeare, it must be remembered, wrote the play of ”Macbeth” probably about 1605, when the Globe actors were still competing with the children at Blackfriars, who, with their fine music, gorgeous costumes, and ”candlelight,” attracted the well-to-do people of the town. In this tragedy, therefore, Shakespeare revives interest in the Faustus legend, once so popular at a rival house. The notion that man could set himself up in opposition to the Deity was due to the teaching of the Reformation. If man could defy the supremacy of the Pope, might he not challenge also Omniscience Itself? Having once tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, Faustus will not rest until he can know all, can do all, and dare all:
”Till swoln with cunning of a self-conceit, His waxen wings did mount above his reach, And, melting, heavens conspir'd his overthrow.”
And Hecate prophesies of Macbeth that--
”He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear His hopes 'bove wisdom, grace, and fear; And you all know security Is mortals' chiefest enemy.”