A take on Lady Macbeth by a US actress

Some great stuff in this thesis - And while I don't agree with much of it, there is useful background and it oulines many of the key decisions needed to make it real. I've only put in the first part.
What I very pleased is that Tara has so generously made this excellent resource available for everyone.


http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04132005-093708/unrestricted/MacMullen_thesis.pdf
THE ROLE OF LADY MACBETH
IN SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH:
A PRODUCTION THESIS IN ACTING by Tara MaMullen (see her on imdb.com - she's working!)

The role of Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Macbeth was selected as a thesis project in the fall semester of 2004. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a written record of the actor’s interpretation and creation of the character through the rehearsal process. It contains five parts: an introduction, a character analysis, a daily actor’s journal, a physical score, and a conclusion.


The character of Lady Macbeth is one of the most confusing and intriguing in all of Shakespeare’s works. No definitive Lady “M” has been agreed upon. Directors and actors cannot even agree as to whether or not she is a prominent character, as she disappears after the banquet scene not to reappear until the infamous sleepwalking scene.
In this analysis of the role of Lady Macbeth, the focus is first on historical and critical views of Lady Macbeth.

Three versions of Lady Macbeth have been considered notable since John Rice originated the role opposite Richard Burbage in 1606. These actresses are Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, and Judi Dench. The interpretations and the possible textual basis for the choices follow.

In 1785 Sarah Siddons played Lady M to her brother John Kemble’s Macbeth. Siddons was said to have been the only woman who could ever play this role. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, very tall and statuesque. The 18th century Shakespeare scholar William Hazlitt said of Siddons, “We can conceive of nothing grander. It seemed almost as if a being of superior order had been dropped from higher sphere to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance. Power was seated in her brow, passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine. She was tragedy personified.”

Siddons choice made Lady Macbeth a ruthlessly ambitious woman who dominated her husband. Her brother’s Macbeth was said to have been in a constant state of blindly rushing towards and from his ambitions. Siddons countered this by being absolutely firm and even masculine in her desires. She became the strongest of the pair.

Hazlitt said, “She is a great bad woman, whom we hate, but whom we fear more than we hate.” This fear came from her utter steadiness. Textual basis for this choice could come from any of the following pieces of text:
Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear
And chastise with the valor of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crowned withal.
(1.5. 28—33)
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty.
(1.5.47—50)
Leave all the rest to me.
(1.6.86)
Infirm of purpose.
Give me the daggers.
(2.2.68—69)
What beast was ’t then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man.
(1.7.53—58)
Are you a man?
(3.4.70)
Lady Macbeth seems to know that she will need to coax him into performing the murder of Duncan; and she is right. The choice can be made that she has taken the position as leader of the clan. She decides what needs to be done and she “chastise[s] with the valor of her tongue” every fear and doubt Macbeth has about performing that deed. The choices made by Siddons of masculinity and steadiness seem to be found in Lady Macbeth’s famous “unsex me” speech. She demands the forces of evil to neuter her, to free her of gender, and the frailty of womanhood. Lady Macbeth, often, in the script, takes charge of the situation. Siddons read this to mean Lady Macbeth was in charge at all times. She chose to make Lady Macbeth the dominant figure in the
relationship. More evidence for Lady M’s dominance may come from her constant questioning of Macbeth’s manhood. It is the strike she makes most often to push him into action. Macbeth falls for it every time. Again, it seems as though Siddons chose to believe that it is a constant part of their relationship.

I find the trouble with these choices to be many. If she is in fact the strength, the man, in the relationship, why does she ask spirits for resolve and strength? Why does she not perform the murder herself? And the biggest flaw I find is in the famous sleepwalking scene. She ends Act 3 scene 4 by sending Macbeth to bed. This action is clearly not the problem; she is still domineering, still the stronger partner. She then disappears for almost two full acts. We hear little of her and when she re-enters she has lost her mind. The audience can infer that she has been overcome by guilt or the need for secrecy, or that her relationship with the devil himself has become too much. This strong woman falls too far by Act V scene ii without any explanation. In my mind, Shakespeare would not have left us with a pillar of strength returning once more as a woman unloosed without taking the opportunity to tell us how. It seems as if we would need some show of weakness from the strong Lady for us to believe she could end up here.

The next famous incarnation of Lady Macbeth was performed by Ellen Terry in 1888, opposite Henry Irving. Ms. Terry is considered the first woman to break from the long standing interpretation of Lady Macbeth as set by Sarah Siddons, creating a very new and very controversial Lady M. Twentieth century film historian, Roger Manvell, author of Ellen Terry’s biography called her Lady M “humane and penetrating.” He said, “Love blinds her to all else but the fulfillment of her wishes and thus she allies herself to the spirits of evil ‘to prick the sides’ of his intent and help him to happiness.” And Garry Wills in Witches and Jesuits calls Terry a “pre-Raphaelite spectre who dooms [Macbeth] with her beauty.” As a Victorian sex symbol, Ms. Terry inspired John Singer Sargent to paint his version of Lady Macbeth with long plaits of floor length red hair holding a crown high above her head as if she were crowning herself.
Terry sought to understand Lady Macbeth more fully and wrote William Winter, an important American critic and friend, asking for assistance. She said, “Everyone seems to think MrsMcB is a monstrosity—and I can only see that she’s a woman—A mistaken woman-& weak- not a Dove- of course not- but first of all a wife.” (The emphases are Ms. Terry’s.) Not just a wife, but a good wife who struggles with and for her husband. She sees not only her own weaknesses, but she believes to see his as well.

Her new understanding of Lady M was still scheming and ambitious, but very feminine (in her own notes she underlines “very” and “feminine” double and triple times). Terry chose to be a devoted wife who did not know her husband well enough to see the evil that existed inside of him. Quite aware of her own weaknesses, she calls for help in the famous “unsexing” speech.
Terry made the choice that Lady M’s faint in Act II scene iii must be real. She says, “Strung up at first she relaxes when all seems safe and they swallow her husband’s masterly excuse.” Though many scholars believe the faint is to take focus off of Macbeth’s murder of the grooms, Terry’s choice was that Lady M has an emotional release; and in exhaustion, faints. This faint allowed the audience to believe more freely that Lady M, unlike in Ms. Siddons’ performance, has some touch of frailty that could grow into the hysteria seen later.

Some clues from the text which lead to the interpretation of a loving and devoted wife are:
Thou wouldst be great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it.
(1.5.18—19)
Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valor
As thou art in desire?
(1.7.43—45)
Why, worthy thane,
You do unbend your noble strength to think
So brainsickly of things.
(2.2.58—60)
I pray you, speak not. He grows worse and worse.
Question enrages him. At once, good night.
(3.4.144—145)

These references show a Lady Macbeth who cares deeply about her husband and sees not only his strength but some of his weaknesses as well (i.e. “without the illness” and “art thou afeard.”) She is concerned with his well-being (“you do unbend your noble strength”) and with his public personae (“Question enrages him.”) The text Ms. Terry may have focused on could lead to a woman who sees the struggle her husband is about to undertake. I do evidence that she has weaknesses. She says in Act II scene ii lines
11—12, “Had he not resembled my father… I had done’t.” I agree that it is a mistake to
not make their love very real. My problems are again many.
Ms. Terry was extremely worried about the audience liking her. Because of this she found a new level to Lady M that is often overlooked by actresses, but I think by making her ambition only for her husband she becomes less interesting. How many people are giving enough to kill a king in their home? And would Shakespeare write a woman so loving that she calls on demons and loses her mind? I believe also that playing so much on her frailty discounts all of the strength she does possess. She challenges his manhood. Is this the act of a loving and devoted wife who wants only for her husband’s happiness? Does the promise of bashing the brains out of a child come from a frail woman who is blinded by love of her husband? Terry gives us a side of Lady M that
seemed lacking in Siddons’ interpretation, but by pushing her too far in the other direction Terry undermines what is clearly written by Shakespeare. He gives us a woman who begs for cruelty and then uses it against the man she loves. She is a woman whose desire for power leads her to plot a murder of a king in her own home. Terry’s view, though valid in many ways, erases the complexities of Lady Macbeth that intrigue the audience.

In 1978, Dame Judi Dench played Lady Macbeth opposite Ian McKellen. Her most notable choice was to be Macbeth’s equal. She neither dominated him nor submitted to him. And like many Lady M’s before she clearly loved Macbeth. Critics have said of her RSC performance, Dench transforms “from cold, malevolent she-devil to sadly broken, guilt-ridden madwoman.” While calling upon evil forces to come to her aid she shows a little bit of humanity by getting frightened of what she is asking. Ms. Dench’s Lady M has been called a “barometer of guilt.” Macbeth’s (as well as her own guilt) are played out more in her actions than in those of her husband. She inhabited the choice that they are in this deed together.

Some textual references to this choice are:
Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is to full o’ th’ milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.

(1.5.16—18)
But screw your courage to the sticking place
And we’ll not fail.
(1.7.70—71)
A little water clears us of this deed.
(2.2.86)

As his equal she is able to see what he may be unwilling to do, she steadies herself to be his support. Dench may have latched on to Lady M’s references to “us” and “we.” After the deed is put into motion, she speaks in terms of their togetherness. Lines such as, “These deeds must not be thought after these ways; so it will make us mad (2.2.37—38),” and the previously mentioned, “A little water clears us of this deed.”

My problem with Dame Dench’s choice is that she didn’t seem to use Lady Macbeth’s ambition as fully as it seems to exist in the text. She wants power. She does love her husband very much and is willing to help him, but when he refuses to go any further her desire for the throne wins over her love for her husband. She forces him to go through with the murder. She chides him and calls his manhood into question. She does not say to him, “Honey, I love you, and if you think it is best to back down, I’m with you.” She tells him to buck up and give her what he promised her. She certainly wants him there. He is not just a means to an end. But she will not let him break his promise.

She wants to be in power. They are equals, I think Dench is right in that choice, but she is adamant about one thing and that is becoming queen. The next bit of research I obtained is the critical analysis of Lady Macbeth made by several Shakespeare scholars. My main resources were Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary. I also pulled from dramaturgical references to Holinshed’s Chronicle and stories of the historical Macbeth.

Harold Bloom in The Invention of the Human brings up idea that informed and even translated directly into the creation of my Lady Macbeth. One common idea he presents is that Macbeth is her second husband. He claims that Macbeth is dependent on Lady Macbeth. I do believe that in many ways he is dependent. He comes to her first with the witches’ promise. He is lead by her insistence of their steps to power. His dependence on her also allows for a greater sense of loss for Lady M when he starts to exclude her from plans. If, after the murder, he no longer needs her, the steps to her decline seem clear. She has gone from his trusted, needed advisor to a wife who is purposefully being left out. Bloom refers to Lady Macbeth as “pure will.” The lack of will that Macbeth seems to have succumbed to is what makes Lady M so necessary to him, particularly early on. She lets her desire to be queen drive her and her husband to regicide in her home. It seems that Macbeth could not have gotten to that point by himself. He says that he had been honored and it wasn’t yet time to give up those honors, even though she is suggesting greater honors. The main ideas I took away from my reading included that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are the happiest couple in all of Shakespeare. He calls them, “…persuasive and valuable personalities, profoundly in love with each other.” This statement particularly informed my choices for Lady Macbeth. In this case, the idea that they loved each other seemed more useful than the idea that she was a mother figure for Macbeth, or that she needed him to achieve her political goals, or that it was a lust/sex based relationship. That being said, I do believe there are clear moments when each of these ideas are present. She has to scold him at times for being afraid and for getting upset. She does send him to bed, like a mother, after the disastrous banquet. Her need for Macbeth as her way into power is obvious in that she cannot gain power as a woman without a man. She needs to be married to man who can get her to the top. I believe she got lucky with a powerful man whom she also deeply loves. The idea of them as a sexual couple will lead me into the next author whose work influenced my choices for Lady Macbeth, Jan Kott.

In Shakespeare Our Contemporary, particularly the chapter entitled “Macbeth, or Death-Infected,” Jan Kott discusses a Lady Macbeth who is the man in the relationship. He sees her charge to murder as “…a confirmation of manhood, an act of love.” Kott talks about two people who are “sexually obsessed with each other” but who have suffered a “great erotic defeat.” While I do not know what textual evidence he has for this, besides the strong sexual language of their first meeting and the constant attacks on Macbeth’s manhood, I think the idea is a usable one. I put to use the idea that Lady Macbeth finds some kind of sensual gratification in the enacting of this murder. Also, I thought of times where Lady M does step up and become the “man.” She often puts herself in the position of power, telling Macbeth to “leave the all the rest to me,” manipulating him into agreeing to murder when he is clearly against it. On the other hand, I think there are times that she is just as obviously the devoted wife—she is the hostess and the first face for the guests to see, uses her womanhood against him just as easily as she challenges his masculinity, “I have given suck…”

The historical Lady Macbeth is a woman named Gruoch—Scottish women didn’t actually take the name of their husbands. It is known that this woman had a son by a first marriage. Unlike in Shakespeare’s telling, this son lived to adulthood and actually held the throne for a short period of time before being killed. The real “Lady Macbeth” killed her first husband. Gruoch actually had a claim to the throne, or she would have if she were a man. She was the granddaughter of King Kenneth III (a direct descendant of Kenneth MacAlpine the first king of the Scots) which would, if she were a male, have given the same right to the throne as Duncan and Macbeth.