Rationale
Macbeth is an appealing play for both male and female twelfth grade high school students. The subject matter of the play is known to involve murder and violence, and at first glance, not much more than a man whose ambition got the better of him. We have in Macbeth what appears to be the ultimate man, one who knows exactly what he wants, a man of action. However, Shakespeare is capable of writing far more nuanced characters than that. I propose that we look at many non-linguistic issues of film to help illuminate the subtleties in the language of Shakespeare.
Macbeth is introduced to us before he ever appears on stage. This is a technique that Shakespeare often employs. We learn of Macbeth's "valiant," "brave," and "noble" virtues, his exploits on the battlefield, and of the admiration of his king before he steps foot onto the stage. The exploits of Macbeth in battle are vividly described. We learn that Macbeth unhesitatingly "unseam'd" the "merciless Macdonwald" "from the nave to the chaps," and with a bit of foreshadowing of future events, "fix'd his head upon [their] battlements." We learn that "brave Macbeth" killed so many that his sword "smok'd with bloody execution." We discover that, even when "shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break," and the opposition begins "a fresh assault," neither Macbeth nor Banquo were anymore dismayed than eagles are by sparrows, or lions by gentle rabbits. Thus they turn the tide of battle so completely, and vanquish their enemies so thoroughly, that "poor Sweno, the Norweyan lord" must beg to have their dead soldiers buried on Scottish soil.
"The narrative casts forth an image of Macbeth as an almost superhuman engine of destruction," says Derek Cohen. "The phrase 'carv'd out his passage' is no neutral description of warrior's progress, but a terrible image of bloody slaughter as Macbeth makes a corridor of bodies between himself and Macdonwald. The smoking sword speaks not only of the hidden demonism of the hero, but also the wrath with which he wreaks his righteous havoc" (Cohen 130).
As a result, we are thoroughly prepared to meet a man who is decisive, brave, undaunted by overpowering enemies — a man who knows what he needs to do and does it, and certainly a man who does not flinch from bloody acts. So it is with great surprise, perhaps astonishment, that we see this great man of the battlefield, this man among men, brought to his knees by the powers of "equivocation," manipulation, and persuasion by the women of the play. Or is that what has happened? Was it instead a form of permission for Macbeth to act out his ambitions already lurking in his heart? We have already heard about Macbeth's ambitions and thoughts so horrible that he wonders, "why do I yield to that suggestion/Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair/And make my seated heart knock at my ribs" (I, iii).
Scholar Dennis Biggins says that "Shakespeare carefully avoids portraying a Macbeth helplessly caught in the grip of irresistible demonic forces; the Weird Sisters' malice is evident in all their traffickings with him, yet nowhere are we shown invincible proof of their power over him" (256). Was this man, who fights so bravely on the battlefield, so weak and uncertain of his own actions once at home that he can be swayed with a well-constructed argument, or a trick of fortune telling? What comments is Shakespeare making about gender stereotypes of his time? What happens when a man or woman attempts to "o'erleap" the role that has been spelled out for them in society and go another way?
This curriculum unit will address these questions. Students will examine selected scenes from four screen adaptations of Macbeth: Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971), Orson Welles' Macbeth (1948), Men of Respect (1990), and Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957), or its more direct translation, The Castle of the Spider's Web. Each director has his own approach, visible in camera angles, lighting, sound, casting, omission and inclusion of Shakespeare's lines, and the addition of scenes never written by Shakespeare. We will examine Macbeth through the questions it raises about the nature of men and women. How are the witches and Lady Macbeth depicted? Who do they cast? How are they dressed? How do they sound and move? Students will view selected scenes of the women in Macbeth to enrich their discussions of Shakespeare's apparent attitudes. What is Shakespeare's original intent, and do the directors aim to be faithful to this, or do they alter the meaning of the play as written to suit a contemporary audience or personal point of view?
Background
The world that Shakespeare has created in Macbeth is a world of men and women living with gender stereotypes: crossing them, fighting against them, and the blurring of roles. Interestingly, according to Holinshed's Chronicles of Scotland, the inspiration for many of Shakespeare's plays, we learn that in the days of the historic Macbeth, once the actual King of Scotland, women were not kept in a quiet, weak, uninvolved role. We learn from Carolyn Asp that "Holinshed actually writes of this period that 'in the daies also the women of our countries were of no lesse courage than the men; for all stout maidens and wives. . .marched as well in the field as did the men, and so soone as the armie did set forward, they slue the first living creature that they found, in whose bloud they not onlie bathed their swords, but also tasted thereof with their mouthes"(158). Shakespeare, on the other hand, creates a world where it is unnatural for women to fight. In Act IV, scene iii, Ross is explaining to Macduff how bad things go under the rule of Macbeth, so bad in fact, that "your eye in Scotland would. . .make our women fight." Asp believes that "this comment suggests that Shakespeare took liberties with his source in order to create an artistic world in which he could examine male and female stereotypes"(158).
Men and women do have differences, to be sure, and Kimbrough refers to these differences as "infinitesimal." The differences really exist not in the body, he says, but in the mind, and by Shakespeare's era, the separation between men and women had become "an absolute division of humanity, not into subtypes of one species, but into separated types, each treated as if it were itself a separate species" (175). The separate species of the male was on top, women below. Shakespeare examines these strict distinctions in his plays. Women dress as men, as just one example, who were really boys playing women. He enjoys the opportunity to examine human nature, and clearly, he can see the reality beyond the roles played by men and women - the each is capable of the characteristics and strengths of the other. "Shakespeare sensed that humanhood embraces manhood and womanhood. Shakespeare sensed that so long as one remains exclusively female or exclusively make, that person will be restricted and confined, denied human growth. . .his works move toward liberating humanity from the prisons created by inclusive and exclusive gender labeling" (Kimbrough 175).
Although both the men and women of Shakespeare's Macbeth are important, the focus of this curriculum unit is the women of the play: Lady Macbeth and the witches. Macbeth may appear at first to be a stereotypical, uncomplicated man, and will become more complex later on; Lady Macbeth, however, reveals her complicated personality from the start.
Lady Macbeth
Lady Macbeth is one of the strongest women in all of Shakespeare's plays. However, consider how she must contend with the role of women in her world. In order for Lady Macbeth to carry out her plans, she feels she must pray that the gods "unsex [her] here." Even then, it is not her intent to carry out the murder of Duncan herself, but to spur on her husband to "catch the nearest way." "And the irony of this attempt to masculate herself is highlighted by the fact that she was trying to be the 'good and dutiful' wife of the newly emerging middle-class culture, trying to 'better' her husband" (Kimbrough 187).
Shakespeare's Scotland is a warrior society with little place for women. "Women are subordinate to men and divorced from political influence because they lack those qualities that would fit them for a warrior society"(Asp 158). We have already seen how Macbeth's first entrance into the play follows his brave actions on the battlefield.
In Macbeth, and elsewhere in Shakespeare, as in Elizabethan literature in general, to be 'manly' is to be aggressive, daring, bold, resolute, and strong, especially in the face of death, whether giving or receiving. To be 'womanly' is to be gentle, fearful, pitying, wavering, and soft, a condition often signified by tears. That machismo was a positive cultural virtue in Shakespeare's day is what gives point to Lady Macbeth's strikes against her husband. Indeed, the play opens and closes with ceremonial and romantic emphasis on brave manhood. In the beginning, such is the theme of the description given of 'brave Macbeth' by that 'good and hardy soldier' whose 'words become thee as thy wounds. /They smack of honor both.' (Kimbrough 177).
Lady Macbeth is not aligned with the stereotypes in Shakespeare's Macbeth, but nonetheless she must contend with them from both inside and outside herself. Asp outlines many examples of ways that the characters of Macbeth cannot overcome their male/female stereotypical roles. Despite Lady Macbeth's desire to be more like a man for the task at hand, she proves to be still the weak female when it comes to the actual deed. She needs wine to maintain her courage. As she says, "That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold" (II, ii). She jumps and starts at every sound saying, "Hark! Peace! It was the owl that shriek'd" while waiting for her husband to return from his murderous act. She thinks of killing Duncan herself when she has the daggers in her hands, but holds back, saying, "Had he not resembled/My father as he slept, I had done 't"(II, ii). The speech of both Macbeths is "staccato," demonstrating the fear they are both feeling at that moment.
Macduff arrives, discovers the murdered Duncan, and awakens the household. Lady Macbeth enters feigning outrage by the disturbance, and Macduff replies with concern for her gentle nature as a woman, "O gentle lady, /'Tis not for you to hear what I can speak:/The repetition, in a woman's ear, /Would murder as it fell" (II, iii). In fact, he is correct to be concerned, because shortly thereafter, she is overcome by the news of murder. It is not Duncan's death that overwhelms her womanly sensibilities, but the news that Macbeth has gone beyond their plan and murdered the chamberlains who had been "mark'd with blood" of Duncan. Macbeth admits, "That I did kill them" (II, iii), and Lady Macbeth exclaims, "Help me hence, ho!" (II, iii) as she faints, Macduff requesting, "Look to the lady" (II, iii). Despite her attempts to go beyond her own gender, in the end, she proves that she remains a "lady."
Derek Cohen states, "The equation of manliness with violence, a truism in the criticism of Macbeth, has a curious double edge. It is from Lady Macbeth that Macbeth himself takes his images of manliness. His fears and scruples, his anxious dependence on his wife's opinions bespeak a sensitive 'femaleness' in his own nature which is visibly belied by her brutality. We are left in gender limbo"(133).
So Shakespeare seems to have deliberately chosen to examine what happens when a man or a woman departs from sexual stereotypes. In the case of Lady Macbeth, we see the tragic result of one who pushes for the ultimate act of violence, in a manly fashion, not able to predict the "manliness" she will unleash in her husband, or the distance it will create between herself and her "partner in greatness."
Women as Forces of Evil and Lady Macbeth
Women are a dangerous presence in Macbeth. According to Stephanie Chamberlain, fear of the power of women was a strong force in early modern England. Women could wield control over patrilineage in ways men could not. Women could be unfaithful in marriage, thus changing the lineage, and a husband could be duped into raising another man's child. Women could pass on traits, both wanted and unwanted, through nursing, rearing of children, and neglect of children. It was feared that women would commit infanticide. Chamberlain tells us, "Perhaps no other early modern crime better exemplifies cultural fears about maternal agency than does infanticide, a crime against both person and lineage"(3).
Coursen suggests, in fact, that the story of Adam and Eve underlies the entire play. He says, "The myth vibrating beneath the surface of Macbeth is of the original myths - that of the fall from a state of grace" (375). When she says, ". . .look like the innocent flower, /But be the serpent under't (I, v), he believes that "The serpent suggests the deception which slithered into Eden to tempt Eve," and that "Lady Macbeth here is the tempting serpent and, of course, is also the deceived" (376).
In Act I, scene seven, we see Lady Macbeth acting as the ultimate temptress. She skillfully pulls out all the stops to manipulate her husband. When Macbeth informs his wife that "We will proceed no further in this business" (I, vii), she impugns the ultimate definition of manhood, his sexual prowess, when she replies, "Art thou afeard/ To be the same in thine own act and valor/As thou art in desire?"(I, vii), and then almost immediately questions whether or not he would choose to "live a coward." He replies, "I dare do all that may become a man" (I, vii), feeling he must defend himself against her accusations. She does not stop there. First she acts as if the idea originated with Macbeth and not herself saying, "What beast was't then/That made you break this enterprise to me?" (I, vii) and adds, "When you durst do it, then you were a man" (I, vii). She continues to wheedle seductively, saying, "And, to be more than what you were, you would/Be so much more the man." (I, vii). Next, in the very same speech, Lady Macbeth utters the cryptic lines stating that, rather than back out of this promise to kill Duncan, she would sooner take "the babe that milks me:/I would, while it was smiling in my face, /Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums/And dash'd the brains out" (I, vii).
When Macbeth responds with, "If we should fail?" (I, vii), we see that she had indeed succeeded in convincing him to go through with the murder of Duncan after all. And she is not through yet. She has the entire plan worked out, and all her husband must do is follow instructions. Macbeth is so in awe of his wife's power and force at that point that he states that she should "Bring forth men-children only;/For thy undaunted mettle should compose/Nothing but males" (I, vii). Apparently, Macbeth feels he must prove his manhood to his wife even though seemingly all of Scotland has acknowledged his bravery and courage. By the end of a scene like this, what man could stand up to such a woman?
The Witches
Fear of women in early modern England is also evidenced by the accusations of witchcraft toward primarily women. "In the period 1300-1500 about two-thirds of all accused were women. A closer examination. . .indicates, however, that many of the male one-third were persecuted in the early fourteenth century, and by the end of this period the trials. . .show an overwhelming concern with women" (Anderson 172). The question is why were women the targets to such an overwhelming degree of this barbaric persecution, and why was this so readily accepted? Where were the defenders of women?
Anderson and Gordon point to the lowly position of women in the Middle Ages, "even in the earlier period of 'courtly love'" (Anderson 173). They quote Eileen Power when they say, "a fundamental tenet of Christian dogma was the subjection of women, while: 'The view of woman as instrument of the Devil, a thing at once inferior and evil, took shape in the earliest period of Church history and was indeed originated by the Church.'" (173).
The belief in witchcraft, therefore, was not new when King James took the throne of England in 1603. However, as in many things, Elizabeth took a moderate approach to their prosecution. King James, on the other hand, fancied he was an expert, wrote his own book on the subject entitled Daemonologie, and even participated personally in some witch trials (Best 1). A renewed and more enthusiastic persecution of witches was exported from Scotland along with their monarch. Between 1560 and 1707, somewhere between three thousand and four thousand five hundred had "perished horribly" in Scotland, more thanin England, despite a much more meager population (Anderson 176). One of King James' acts once he took the English throne was to "extend the death penalty" to many more accused witches than had been the case under Elizabethan law.
The English, however, never matched the Scots in these large numbers. In fact, Anderson and Gordon report a study by Notestein suggesting that "self-confident and independent women who increasingly appear in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century drama probably mirrored real changes taking place in all levels of English society" (177).
Do the women of Shakespeare's Macbeth reflect a set of conflicting opinions about women of his day? "The relative mildness of English witchcraft and witch persecution can, therefore, be attributed to the difficulties involved in translating an image derived from a sexual mythology which saw women as generically inferior and inherently evil into one which could appear credible to a society which saw women in a different light" (Anderson 181).
So we have a very conflicted image of women as source material for Shakespeare's Macbeth. On one hand, we have the text from Holinshed telling us that women were courageous and powerful members of the army in the Scotland of the eleventh century. On the other had, we have the women of Shakespeare's own time circumscribed to a very definite and subordinate role, while ever more independent women begin to appear. Simultaneously, and perhaps in part because of this, women are feared and persecuted, and seen as "inherently evil." Are the witches in Macbeth the ultimate personification of that much-feared independent woman? Wouldn't women of 2007 be able to relate to operating in a society filled with conflicted feelings?
Lady Macbeth, of course, has her husband, and she very solicitously refers to him as "My thane." Lady Asaji , in the Japanese version, is careful to say "My Lord" when speaking to Washizu. The superior position of the men must not be ignored if they hope to be at all persuasive. In Early Modern England, the patriarchal family was a value enforced from many directions, especially the Christian Church. Bever explains, "European male leaders considered patriarchal families to be the foundation of society. . . 'Assertive and aggressive' women challenged this order, and could be beaten by their husbands, punished for moral offenses ranging from scolding to adultery, or, at the extreme, burned for witch craft" (956).
The witches in Macbeth fly in the face of the patriarchal society. Early in the play, the witches seem to have no such male superior. Macbeth and Banquo meet three strange women on the heath with no man in sight. Or are they women? Banquo wonders this when he says, "you should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret /That you are so" (I, iii). So even their appearance sets them apart from normal women.
Prior to this we hear about one escapade of the witches who take revenge against a sailor's wife who would not share her chestnuts! What does the witch do? She goes after the woman's husband. "Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger;/ But in a sieve I'll thither sail, / And, like a rat without a tail, / I'll do, I'll do, I'll do" (I, iii). The other witches offer to send additional wind to help her. She plans to keep the sailor awake so that "Sleep shall neither night nor day/ Hang upon his pent-house lid;" (I, iii), and then proudly displays "a pilot's thumb" (I, iii). Shakespeare is letting us know a thing or two about these "weird sisters." What is his take on them? I would ask my students to speculate. They do not seem to be as malevolent as Macbeth will later become. We do not hear of brutal murders at their hands. Yet they are not dutiful wives or carefully chaperoned daughters. They are disorderly and disheveled, outside of society's norm, and worst of all, seem to enjoy that position.
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