Shakespeare on screen : Macbeth 9791024000381, 9791024000411

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Shakespeare on screen Macbeth

Shakespeare on screen Macbeth

Edited by Sarah HATCHUEL Nathalie VIENNE-GUERRIN and Victoria BLADEN

Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre

Other works on Shakespeare by the same publisher: Hatchuel Sarah and Vienne-Guerrin Nathalie (eds.), Shakespeare on screen: Hamlet, . Hatchuel Sarah and Vienne-Guerrin Nathalie (eds.), Shakespeare on screen: The Roman Plays, . Hatchuel Sarah and Vienne-Guerrin Nathalie (eds.), Shakespeare on screen: The Henriad, . Hatchuel Sarah and Vienne-Guerrin Nathalie (eds.), Television Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Michèle Willems, . Hatchuel Sarah and Vienne-Guerrin Nathalie (eds.), Shakespeare on screen: Richard III, . Hatchuel Sarah and Vienne-Guerrin Nathalie (eds.), Shakespeare on screen: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, . Gheeraert-Graffeuille Claire and Vienne-Guerrin Nathalie (eds.), Autour du Songe d’une nuit d’été de William Shakespeare, . Sorbonne Scholars (dir. Pierre Iselin), Concert autour du Songe d’une nuit d’été de William Shakespeare, . Willems Michèle (ed.), Shakespeare à la télévision, . Willems Michèle, Maquerlot Jean-Pierre et Willems Raymond (eds.), Le Marchand de Venise et Le Juif de Malte: Texte et représentations, . Willems Michèle, La Genèse du mythe shakespearien (-), .

Tous droits de traduction, d’adaptation, sous quelque forme que ce soit, réservés pour tous pays. Composition : TypoTEX. © Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre,  Rue Lavoisier –  Mont-Saint-Aignan Cedex purh.univ-rouen.fr ISBN : 979-10-240-0041-1

In memory of our dear colleague, Bernice W. Kliman, a pioneer in Shakespeare on Screen studies.

Contents

Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin Preface ................................................................................................................. 13 Dominique Goy-Blanquet Phantom of the Cinema: Macbeth’s Ghosts in the Flesh ................................. 23 Warren Chernaik “Instruments of Darkness”: Witches and the Supernatural in Four Versions of Macbeth.......................................................................................................... 39 Pierre Kapitaniak Witches and Ghosts in Modern Times Lost? How to Negotiate the Supernatural in Modern Adaptations of Macbeth .......................................... 55 Susan Gushee O’Malley Macbeth’s Witches: Nurses, Waitresses, Feminists, Punk Gore Groupies ...... 71 Victoria Bladen Weird Space in Macbeth on Screen................................................................... 83 Pascale Drouet “Look how our partner’s rapt”: Externalizing Rapture in Orson Welles’s Macbeth (, )......................................................................................... 109 Charles R. Forker Symbolic and Thematic Impoverishment in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth ...... 123 Boika Sokolova “Horrible imaginings”: Rupert Goold’s Film Adaptation, a Macbeth for the Twenty-First Century ......................................................................................... 151 Adele Seeff Shakespeare in Mzansi ....................................................................................... 173 Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin Claude Barma’s Macbeth (): Shakespeare and the Hybridity of the French “dramatique”.......................................................................................... 205 Anne-Marie Costantini-Cornède

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Contents “. . . [M]ethought/ The wood began to move” (..-) or Whatever Happened to Witches and Woods in Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (), Alexander Abela’s Makibefo () and Mark Brozel’s Macbeth (): Film Style or the Poetics of Displacement............................................. 229

William C. Carroll Fleance in the Final Scene of Macbeth: The Return of the Repressed............. 263 Andrew Fleck “A Barren Sceptre” (..): Generation, Generations, and Destiny in Maqbool and Global Adaptations of Macbeth................................................ 281 Gayle Allan Home Sweet Home: Visual Representation of Domestic Spaces in Macbeth . 301 Courtney Lehmann Happily Never After? Women Filmmakers and the Tragedy of Macbeth...... 323 Jennifer Drouin “Get a Look at Your Wife’s Beautiful Cones”: Lady Macbeth’s Stone Butch Blues and Rural Second-Wave Feminism in Scotland, PA.............................. 333 Elinor Parsons “Struts and frets”: Physical Eloquence in Vladimir Vasiliev’s Macbeth ......... 367 Patricia Dorval Macbeth in André Barsacq’s Le Rideau rouge (): Mise en Abyme and Acoustic Porousness............................................................................................ 381 Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin “Is this an umbrella which I see before me?”: Columbo goes to Scotland Yard 399 Jennifer Barnes Art not without Ambition: Stardom, Selfhood and Laurence Olivier’s unmade Macbeth................................................................................................ 413 José Ramón Díaz Fernández Macbeth on Screen: An Annotated Filmo-Bibliography.................................. 433 Abstracts.............................................................................................................. 515 Notes on the Contributors .................................................................................. 535

Preface

Victoria BLADEN, Sarah HATCHUEL, Nathalie VIENNE-GUERRIN This addition to the Shakespeare on Screen series, Macbeth, originated with a seminar at the  World Shakespeare Congress in Prague, which brought together an international panel of scholars. A preliminary issue was why a play so closely associated with one particular nation—Scotland—had been adapted in so many different cultures. What is it about Macbeth that is capable of extending beyond Scottish contexts and speaking globally, locally and “glocally” to filmmakers and audiences? What attributes of the play render it so aesthetically and ideologically versatile and open to alternative interpretations? The Prague seminar invited responses to the diverse international range of Macbeth screen adaptations, diversity reflected in the comprehensive filmobibliography to this volume, compiled by José Ramón Díaz Fernández. We encouraged a range of approaches and issues to explore, including: how Macbeth is transformed (textually, aesthetically and ideologically) when adapted for the screen; what particular adaptations reveal about the cultural contexts (sometimes postcolonial) of its setting and production; how the playtext, plot or themes interact with national ideologies and representations; how Macbeth on screen has been influenced and shaped by previous theatre productions; how the female characters of the play are represented in various cultures; and how the supernatural aspects of the play interrelate with the “magical” aspects of film. The circulation of seminar papers raised further questions. Does the extensive adaptive reframing of Macbeth suggest the paradoxical irrelevance of the original play? Furthermore, given the radical alterations Macbeth undergoes in some screen versions, the question arises—at what point does a film not constitute an adaptation but rather one with an allusive relationship with Macbeth? What is clear is that constituting a version of Macbeth is not dependent, paradoxically, on retaining Shakespeare’s language. Filmmakers have found other ways of conveying the language of the playtext through their filmic iconography and inventive script dialogue. The articles in this volume respond to many of the questions Macbeth raises in stimulating and innovative ways, exploring and drawing examples from various screen and television adaptations. As with other volumes in the series, our aim is not to try and present a definitive account of Macbeth on screen but rather to offer readers and viewers a comprehensive range of approaches to the play on screen worldwide and stimulate further questions, critical debate and dialogue. After exploring the evident topic of the supernatural elements—the witches and the ghost—in the films, the essays move from a revisitation of the well-known, or should we say “canonic”, American versions, to an analysis of more recent

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Anglophone productions and to world cinema (South Africa, France, Asia, etc.). Questions of lineage and progeny are broached, then extended into the wider issues of gender. Finally, ballet remediations, filmic appropriations, citations and mises-en-abyme of Macbeth are examined, and the book ends with an analysis of a Macbeth script that never reached the screen. In accounting for the popularity of Macbeth on screen, its supernatural dimension is a significant factor, as many of the papers in this volume evidence. The papers of Dominique Goy-Blanquet, Warren Chernaik, Pierre Kapitaniak, Susan O’Malley and Victoria Bladen explore different facets of the play’s supernatural and uncanny elements, cognisant that the medium of film is ideally suited for presenting the supernatural aspects of Macbeth. As Goy-Blanquet’s article notices, the stage direction “Enter the Ghost of Banquo, and sits in Macbeth’s place” (..) provides no obstacles for the filmmaker. In the ghostly medium of film, with a range of special effects available, the stage direction “seems an invitation to create airy nothings, use their imagination”, in contrast with a theatre director who must deal with “the actor in the flesh”. Decisions need to be made about whether Banquo’s ghost will be constituted by an actor’s body or whether Macbeth will simply act in response to nothing. Goy-Blanquet considers the treatment of Banquo’s ghost in various screen adaptations of Macbeth: Orson Welles’s (), Kurosawa’s Kumonosu-jô (Throne of Blood, ), Roman Polanski’s (), Trevor Nunn’s (), Alexander Abela’s Makibefo () and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool (). There is, as Goy-Blanquet points out, an inherent parallel between Banquo’s ghost and the actor on screen since the latter is “the celluloid ghost of himself, even more of a puppet in the hands of the manipulator who can choose to make him wholly transparent, there and not there from one shot to the next”. Film thus is inherently uncanny and an ideal medium for exploring the supernatural. One of the questions that the weird sisters give rise to is to what extent are they demonic or simply mediums of Fate? As Warren Chernaik observes, in Macbeth “the three witches are liminal figures, inhabiting the uncertain borderline between solid material reality and the unlicensed imagination”. His article explores the depiction of the weird sisters in four versions of Macbeth: Welles, Polanski, Kurosawa and Nunn. In Welles and Polanski, he observes, the witches are particularly prominent. Welles’s witches are depicted as forces against Christian order and similarly in Polanski’s, the atmosphere is predominantly dark and violent. Polanski’s ending envisages no return to order; rather a circularity of violence is suggested with the interpolated scene of Donalbain’s visit to the witches’ cave. By contrast, Chernaik finds that Kurosawa’s weird woman is not an embodiment of evil. In the world of Kurosawa’s Macbeth, an analogous context for Shakespeare’s feudal medieval Scotland is found in samurai Japan; in this world “the supernatural is no less real than the quotidian”. In Nunn’s adaptation, Chernaik observes, the supernatural is rendered believable through the strength of the performances of the actors. The supernatural is primarily an emotional and psychological phenomenon, rather than an external, material reality. Susan O’Malley’s examination of the weird sisters was inspired by Rupert Goold’s adaptation (which began as a successful  stage production before being recreated as a DVD in ), with the witches as demonic nurses, maids and waitresses, whose presence is greatly magnified, in comparison with Shakespeare’s

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playtext. Goold adds them to many scenes such that they constitute a constant, malevolent presence. O’Malley considers the central idea of reader response theories, that meaning is not inscribed in a text but the result of a dialectic between text and its reception, in order to ask what meanings Goold’s choices produce. Are the weird sisters of Shakespeare’s early modern text deprived of their power in postmodern contexts such that they “need to be transformed”? In considering the afterlives of the weird sisters in contemporary film adaptations, O’Malley also looks at the depiction of the sisters in the versions by Nunn and George C. Wolfe’s film of the New York Shakespeare in the Park production (). She argues that the power of Goold’s reinvention draws from the filmic codes of horror films, playing on the anxieties of human vulnerabilities and generating fear in an entirely different way to the concept of the witches in early modern culture. Pierre Kapitaniak also examines how the supernatural has been negotiated in contemporary productions and begins by comparing their aesthetic depiction. He argues that a pattern can be discerned in that whereas in most twentieth-century film adaptations the witches are depicted stereotypically as “old and ugly crones”, more recent directors have opted for witches that are “much younger and more attractive and such choices usually accompany a modernisation of the setting as the films transpose the Scottish medieval plot”. The supernatural elements remain a significant dimension; however early modern folkloric beliefs in magic are translated, in these modern contexts, to contemporary interests in “the uncanny and the paranormal”. Kapitaniak focuses on Geoffrey Wright’s  adaptation, set in Melbourne, Australia, Brandon Arnold’s  version, which presents a postapocalyptic mise-en-scène and Goold’s version, with its totalitarian aesthetic. Like O’Malley, Kapitaniak observes the way that in transposing Shakespeare’s witches to contemporary contexts, directors’ choices have been “reshaped according to recognizable genre elements that these films borrow from or belong to”. By drawing on horror codes, is the power of the weird sisters diminished, or is it a way of reinvigorating the shock value that the weird sisters must have had for Jacobean audiences? One of the questions arising from the weird sisters’ ambiguity is where they exist and come from. Victoria Bladen’s article explores the different spaces that the weird sisters have been associated with in various screen adaptations, drawing examples from different cultural contexts. She considers instances of the sisters’ association with natural space, supernatural dimensions, peripheral spaces and inner, psychological spaces. Bladen also argues that screen directors, taking their cue from the potential in Shakespeare’s language, often magnify the presence of the sisters such that they seem to loom larger than the size of their ostensible part in the playtext. The pervasive effect of the sisters is such that it may be useful to think of this in terms of “weird space”, an uncanny dimension that encompasses but extends beyond the actual figures of the sisters themselves. Pascale Drouet’s and Charles Forker’s papers provide fresh insights on two of the most well-known twentieth-century American film versions—by Welles and Polanski. Drouet focuses on Welles’s interpretation of the moment immediately after Macbeth has received the prophecies of the weird sisters (..) when, as Banquo observes, Macbeth is “rapt” in the implications of the predictions. This observation functions as an internal stage direction and presents particular

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challenges for directors and actors—how to represent and externalise an inner process, Macbeth’s mental absorption. Drouet analyses how Welles seeks to make the internal state of Macbeth’s psyche visible and material for his audience. She explores Welles’s choice of black-and-white aesthetics and the allegorical conflict played out between the old pagan world and Christianity, a mirror of the central protagonist’s psychomachia. Drouet analyses the director’s filmic techniques to argue that Welles creates a “tactile” “haptic space” of close-range vision, rather than an “optical space” of long-distance vision, in order to convey Macbeth’s lethal rapture. Forker’s article reconsiders Polanski’s Macbeth, arguing that the adaptation in fact impoverishes the thematic richness and symbolic complexity of Shakespeare’s playtext. Forker explores a range of visual motifs and aesthetic choices by Polanski, observing the recurrence of particular symbols such as the circle, which points to the circularity of political violence in Macbeth. Forker observes that Polanski’s “materialist and nihilist” vision was conditioned by the director’s background as a Holocaust survivor and his suffering of personal tragedy with the murder of his wife. However this vision, Forker argues, is antithetical to Shakespeare’s conception of the play as a Jacobean tragedy because it effaces the deep spiritual crises that the Macbeths experience and severely diminishes Shakespeare’s tension between free will and determinism. Moving to an exploration of more recent Anglophone productions, Boika Sokolova’s article highlights the ways in which Macbeth adaptations can be read in the context of political events and the violent histories of the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. She focuses on Rupert Goold’s adaptation, which employed the original cast and followed the mise-en-scène of the  theatrical production, presenting a chilling Stalinist-era atmosphere. Sokolova examines some of the effects employed by Goold, looking at the ways that the creation of fear and depiction of violence is indebted to codes of horror and sci-fi. She examines in particular the influence on Goold of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining () and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (). Like O’Malley’s and Kapitaniak’s, Sokolova’s work emphasises the way in which a Macbeth adaptation is not only in dialogue with Shakespeare’s playtext but also often with other screen productions, filmic codes and the violent realities of a film’s contemporary cultural context. Critics such as Mark Thornton Burnett have advocated for a more global approach to Shakespeare on screen and the need for critical attention to be focused beyond the UK-US axis, work highlighted in his Shakespeare and World Cinema. 1 The ethos of the Shakespeare on Screen series, including this volume, responds to this need, aiming to “de-centre” Shakespeare. While many of the papers provide fresh insights on well-known and commercially available screen versions, several of the papers also consider versions that are less well known and sometimes difficult to access. What are some of the displacements of time, space and context that are present in Macbeth adaptations on screen? The versatility of Shakespeare’s

1. Mark Thornton Burnett, Shakespeare and World Cinema, Cambridge University Press, .

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play is evident in the vastly different contexts that directors have transported and transposed the world of Macbeth to. Adele Seeff’s work explores a unique and popular televisual event in South Africa, Shakespeare in Mzansi (), a series that included two versions of Macbeth: Entabeni and Death of a Queen, the scripts for which utilised African languages, thus translating Shakespeare in new ways. Seeff’s article explores how Shakespeare is reinterpreted through a local lens in these adaptations, the playtext intersecting with aspects of African mythology, gender politics, language, history and race in a post-apartheid world. While incorporating local elements, such as African language, the films also engage with international filmic codes. For example, Entabeni uses the vocabularies of film noir to interpret the murky domestic horrors of Macbeth. Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin explore a  French television adaptation of Macbeth by Claude Barma, to date little known outside France. They analyse how the codes of the French TV “dramatique” in the late s interpreted and transformed Shakespeare’s Macbeth while also providing a political lens through which to interpret France’s colonial war with Algeria and the latter’s shift to the Fifth Republic. They consider the form of the “dramatique” as it was developed specifically for French television and the various mediations of Shakespeare’s text, which was translated by Jean Curtis and adapted for the stage by the Théâtre national populaire in the s prior to Barma’s filmed version in . Hatchuel and Vienne-Guerrin highlight the ways that Barma’s  version oscillates aesthetically between the various media of literature, theatre and film. They argue that ideologically, while the work produces an intimate vision centred on the central protagonists, it also invokes a far wider political range of implications, in relation to the war in Algeria. Anne-Marie Costantini-Cornède compares the film style and poetics of displacement in three different versions. Whereas Mark Brozel locates his  version in contemporary Scotland, shifting time, rather than place, Kurosawa and Abela make radical shifts of context—to medieval samurai Japan and traditional Madagascar respectively. Costantini-Cornède observes that whereas Brozel opts for more direct modes of representation, Kurosawa and Abela “often resort to blurring and distancing effects or subjective Time (Crystal)-Images that partake of a poetics of suggestion, thus creating a visual mode of indirection”. She examines how the different film styles, through their aesthetic strategies, engage with the symbolic economy of Shakespeare’s playtext and the imagery created through his language. By comparing strategies and stylistic devices (mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound and editing) in several key passages, the article illuminates the directors’ interpretations in ways that range in focus from individualised aspects of the character of Macbeth, as in Brozel’s work, to the more “universal” reflections of Abela’s and Kurosawa’s interpretations. Screen adaptations of Shakespeare can create intriguing dialogues between historical contexts of the early modern play and contemporary interpretations. William Carroll’s paper focuses on the figure of Fleance, crucial to the mythology of Jacobean politics, according to which James I was thought to be a lineal descendant of Banquo and his son Fleance. Carroll outlines the Jacobean history and mythology surrounding Fleance, who was supposed to have escaped to Wales,

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according to Holinshed’s Chronicles, when his father Banquo was murdered. However, as Carroll explores, many film versions “obscure or even reverse the play’s succession politics in the final scene of the play, by depicting Fleance’s ‘return’ to witness Malcolm’s ascent”. Carroll argues that Fleance’s return, which suggests the circularity of the violent politics of Macbeth, has “become the default staging in modern film, stage, and operatic productions”, a significant departure from Shakespeare’s playtext and the historical sources that he drew from. Andrew Fleck focuses on the work of Asian directors, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood () and Bhardwaj’s Maqbool, to explore the tension in Macbeth between the power of prophecy and anxieties over royal fertility. Fleck explores the ways that both directors have departed from Shakespeare’s text in terms of plot and motivation. Kurosawa’s childless Washizu (Macbeth) initially nominates the son of Miki (Banquo) as the heir to Spider Web Castle as a political tool to secure Miki’s allegiance, before Asaji (Lady Macbeth) thwarts this by announcing her pregnancy. Likewise Bhardwaj deviates from Shakespeare’s playtext by making Nimmi (Lady Macbeth) the concubine of Abbaji (Duncan). Fleck highlights how politics, reproduction and gender politics intersect in the worlds of the play, Shakespeare’s early modern context and in the worlds of Kurosawa’s and Bhardwaj’s films. Fleck argues that while these Asian adaptations present variations on Shakespeare’s plot, they maintain analogous themes of the violence inherent in patriarchal politics, and the intersection of prophecy and progeny. Gayle Allan’s article prolongs this analysis of gender issues in the play, in relation to the notion of space. Allan focuses on domestic space in Macbeth as the site of violence and central to the identity of Lady Macbeth. As Allan observes, “clearly ‘home’ is the key dramatic space in Macbeth, and not a very safe one”. Stage adaptations generally only show the interiors of the various castles invoked in the play—Glamis, Forres, Dunsinane and Fife—and often conflate these spaces. Although film technically offers a wider range of options to depict exteriors and interiors, Allan traces the persistence of conflating the sites of Glamis, Forres and Dunsinane, following theatrical practice. She also finds that the film depictions of the Macbeth castles primarily fall under the category of the Gothic, the hybrid neomedievalist genre and style emerging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for which Shakespeare’s Macbeth was a significant precedent. Courtney Lehmann starts with the question critic Jean Howard asks of genre— whether “particular genres construct distinctive and discrete imagined geographies, and what does it mean, historically, if they do?” Lehmann’s article explores the politics of gender and place in the work of five female directors: Katherine Stenholm’s  adaptation, Penny Woolcock’s Macbeth on the Estate (), Allison LiCalsi’s Macbeth, The Comedy (), Nina Menkes’s The Bloody Child () and Netty van Hoorn’s Growing up with Macbeth (). Lehmann argues that in film, “an aesthetic and cultural sphere driven and defined by genre”, Shakespeare is essentially placeless because paradoxically he is both closely associated with particular genres but also often considered a writer whose work is only worthy of great (male) auteurs: Olivier, Welles, Kozintsev and Kurosawa, whose work “defies recourse to ostensibly banal, generic classification”. The work of these five female directors, Lehmann argues, redefines tragedy as a geographically and gender-specific place. These films focus on disenfranchised populations in different

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cultural contexts to “rework the concept of tragedy as a means of creating alternative and indeed ‘imagined geographies’ whose coordinates are disturbingly real”. Jennifer Drouin explores aspects of gender and transgenderism in her article on the adaptation Scotland, PA () directed by Billy Morrisette. She argues that paradoxically the adaptation is more conservative than Shakespeare’s original in terms of Lady Macbeth’s transgenderism. Drouin explores the radical female masculinity of Lady Macbeth through the lens of Leslie Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues (); she then argues that this facet of the Lady Macbeth figure is effaced and sublimated in Scotland, PA which sets Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a society where second-wave feminism has apparently failed to effect social change and has not resulted in gender equality. The Lady Macbeth figure, Pat, is confined to traditional domestic roles and spaces by the male characters in the play, and forced into a limited construction of gender identity. Macbeth thus in this adaptation serves as a vehicle to highlight social stagnation and a lack of progress in gender roles in small town society; Scotland, PA invites its audiences to critique, rather than endorse, the restrictive gender norms operating in this cultural context. Shakespeare continues to be an author whose work is translated into multiple mediums. Elinor Parsons’s article examines a screen record of the Bolshoi Ballet’s production of Macbeth, choreographed by Vladimir Vasiliev in . Vasiliev’s is the only ballet version filmed and released commercially. The medium of film captures an ephemeral work, a particular performance of Macbeth, rendering it a more enduring work available for detailed analysis. Parsons considers the ways that aspects of the choreography and performance—body positions, emotions, costume choices—interpret Macbeth and some of the intriguing departures from the playtext that this interpretation creates in terms of structure and gender. She highlights the importance of gesture and how Vasiliev’s version evidences the power of a nonverbal approach to Macbeth; aspects of Shakespeare’s imagery, themes and character relationships can be conveyed without verbal language. Patricia Dorval, Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin are interested in how Macbeth functions within an embedding fiction and the implications of appropriation and mise-en-abyme. Dorval examines the  French film Le Rideau rouge (The Crimson Curtain) directed by André Barsacq, the stage designer and stage director. Set inside a Parisian playhouse, the film’s narrative is centred on a theatre company which is staging Macbeth. Events and relationships between the principal actors and the director of the theatre company begin to mirror the plot of Macbeth and Barsacq’s use of mise-en-abyme facilitates a complex interrelationship between the embedding and the embedded fictions. Dorval focuses on the soundtrack and the acoustic choices made by the director, such as rendering the soundtrack of the extradiegetic world mute while the dialogue of the intradiegetic world penetrates the visual narrative. These techniques, Dorval shows, render the boundary between the intradiegetic and extradiegetic worlds porous. Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin continue their interest in Shakespeare on television with their exploration of an episode of Columbo— “Dagger of the Mind”. They examine the tension in the episode between the twentieth-century American TV series and the early modern world of Macbeth, asking: “what does Macbeth do to Columbo, and what does Columbo do to

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Macbeth, especially in a British context that clashes with the usual setting of the US series?” Like Dorval’s analysis of Barsacq’s Le Rideau rouge, Hatchuel and Vienne-Guerrin’s article examines how the two fictional worlds interpenetrate and resonate with each other. In this process there are some intriguing changes such as the transformation of the “dagger of the mind” to the very British motif of an umbrella! Finally, after considering the wide range of Macbeth adaptations and appropriations, we turn to a film that was never made, Laurence Olivier’s Macbeth, various draft screenplays for which were rediscovered by Jennifer Barnes in the British Library. In her article, Barnes considers the interplay between the draft screenplay documents, Olivier’s autobiographical writing and the construction of the relationship between Olivier and Vivian Leigh in media discourses. The pair had starred together in the theatrical production of Macbeth in  at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and would have paired up in the film adaptation. Barnes traces the ways that the character relationships in Macbeth informed the construction of the relationship between Olivier and Leigh, which has implications for how we read Olivier as a “Shakespearean star text”. Barnes examines how Olivier appropriated his cinematic body, his Shakespearean body on screen, in order to construct the “I” of his autobiography and explores how the unmade film works in dialogue with this process. At the World Shakespeare Congress, one of the questions we debated was whether the word “universal” was useful or problematic in relation to Shakespearean film adaptations. Is Shakespeare universal because his plays are adapted everywhere, or is Shakespeare not universal because his plays need adaptation, needing to respond to new cultural contexts? In this regard, the distinction made by Carol Chillington Rutter in the Penguin edition of Macbeth is useful; she suggests that we can “see every Shakespeare play as a set of parallel texts. One of them is an object, the other an organism”. 2 A Shakespearean play is both an object fixed in time and a fluid, organic entity that remains unfixed. Using this idea we can think of Macbeth as both an “object” with specific historical contexts, one that is not universal and that remains alien and opaque in many ways, and as a script, “a radically incomplete text” which “contains instructions towards something that is never written down”, 3 even though versions of this fluid entity are captured in various theatrical, televisual and filmic performances. This radically incomplete text continues to enable and inspire dialogues with Shakespeare in a diverse range of cultural contexts and this volume explores and contributes to this ongoing dialogue. Our hope is that the papers gathered here will not only provide valuable insights but inspire further questions and debates in the future. We wish to express our gratitude to all the participants in the original Prague seminar for making it such a stimulating and enjoyable event and to the contributors of the current volume for their efficient cooperation in the process of editing and publishing their work. 2. Carol Chillington Rutter, “Introduction”, in Macbeth, ed. George Hunter, London, Penguin, , p. xxxiv. 3. Ibid., p. xxxiv-xxxv.

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We would also like to thank the University of Le Havre (GRIC, EA ), the University of Montpellier and the CNRS (IRCL, UMR ), the PURH for their renewed trust, the editorial board of the Shakespeare on Screen Series (Mark Thornton Burnett, Queen’s University of Belfast; Samuel Crowl, University of Ohio; Russell Jackson, University of Birmingham; Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire; Mariangela Tempera, University of Ferrara, and Michèle Willems, University of Rouen) and the International Shakespeare Association, notably Martin Procházka, for organising the  World Shakespeare Congress. Our love and thanks also to Ian Bowman, Serge Guerrin and Monica Michlin, for their support and practical assistance that have contributed to the work of this volume. Quotations from Shakespeare’s works are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition. General Editor: Stephen Greenblatt; editors: Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York, W. W. Norton, .

Phantom of the Cinema: Macbeth’s Ghosts in the Flesh

Dominique GOY-BLANQUET “Enter the Ghost of Banquo, and sits in Macbeth’s place” (..). A theatre director, unless he disregards the Folio’s stage-directions, is tied with the actor in the flesh, who will be clearly visible to all, though on stage only to the main protagonist, while the rest of the cast must pretend not to see him. Here, one might expect film to free its authors from the constraint of the live body. “Enter the Ghost” seems an invitation to create airy nothings, to use their imagination. The film actor, in any case, is but the celluloid ghost of himself, a faint trace on the tape, as easy to deal with as the apparition of “an armed head” (..), even more of a puppet in the hands of the manipulator who can choose to make him wholly transparent, there and not there from one shot to the next. Macbeth, with its walking shadows, may well be the most metacinematic of Shakespearean works. To Claude Beylie, discussing Orson Welles’s adaptation, “The cinema is only, then, the shadow of a shadow, printed upon the wall of a cave, the ragged garments of a clown ludicrously agitated before the light of a projector”. 1 How a filmmaker deals with his ghosts will provide a key to his reading of the play and his interpretation of the world it is set in, a key to its moral universe. The choices offered to him are to re-create a society where the supernatural is part of everyday life, or to make credible the intrusion of the irrational in some version of modernity. To convey a sense of the sacred, reconcile extant lawlessness with the torments of a guilty conscience in a godless world, he may borrow from ritualized societies around the world, Samurai culture or Western religious kingship, in a more or less distant past. How distant will usually set the tone for the mode of relation to the supernatural. The Antandroy people who made the cast of Makibefo had never seen a film before, let alone a television set. An RSC Macbeth addresses spectators who have studied the play at high school, and theatre critics who have seen it umpteen times. Discussing the treatment of Banquo’s ghost at various times, in various cultures, through half a dozen films by Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, Trevor Nunn, Alexander Abela and Vishal Bhardwaj should help us explore an element which seems so alien to modern societies, and yet attracts an uncommonly large range of filmmakers. The alleged universality of Macbeth must reside in the features common to all film versions. In all those examined here, some exterior voice of unknown 1. “Macbeth or the Magical Depths”, in Focus on Shakespearean Film, ed. Charles W. Eckert, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, , p. .

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origin takes a reputedly honourable warrior off his course by prophesying that new honours will be thrust upon him. As ulterior events confirm part of the prophecy, this apparent truth of the oracles inebriates him and his wife with new dreams of grandeur. Together, under her strong impulse, they plot the death of a liege lord while he is their host, throw suspicion on his innocent guards and kill them, then cast responsibility for the crime on the king’s heir, who flees to safety, and take the crown. There remains to eliminate all real or feared enemies. Thus Banquo is killed, but returns in some ghostly shape to haunt Macbeth during a dinner party. Macbeth goes to question further the prophesying spirits and returns with a sense of safety that does not affect his wife. He grows increasingly ruthless while she grows increasingly tortured with memories of the deed, desperately rubbing her hands to remove invisible bloodstains, and eventually committing suicide. Macbeth’s enemies rally around his castle. He finds himself alone but, still assured of his invincibility, he fights Macduff, who dispels the enigma of the spirits’ riddling speech and kills him. The elements of nature reflect the turmoils of souls and society with their violence. All except the unrelievedly sun-baked Makibefo make lavish use of rain and winds. There ends the list of common features. The extent of Shakespeare’s text kept in the film scripts varies, from near integral versions, like Trevor Nunn’s, to the minimal dialogues of Kurosawa. Several have soliloquies delivered in voice over, beginning with Orson Welles, or, like Abela, entrust it to a story-teller. All borrow other items from the original play, though not all the same ones: intangible dagger, moving forest or hallucinatory shows of future kings. Only Nunn keeps Malcolm’s testing of Macduff with his pretended vices. The murder of Duncan is performed in full view in the Polanski and Abela versions, while Welles and Kurosawa keep it off screen and film the anxiety of the waiting spouse. Several films have a theatrical background. Orson Welles was twenty-one when he first directed Macbeth on stage. Trevor Nunn kept the original cast of his  RSC production, and turned it into a film without pictures, apart from those drawn by the text, using the conventions of the stage to dispense with any kind of illustration.

1. Textual sources Shakespeare deliberately moved away from his sources in order to heighten the sense of transgression. There is no model of righteousness in Holinshed’s Scotland; indeed the chronicle stresses the repetitive element of crime that one sees at the core of Kurosawa’s film. Duncan (-) is the heir of violence, the son of Malcolm II (-) who had killed a rival prince to take the throne, and eliminated others to ensure Duncan’s succession. Before their time, King Duff’s assassination was followed by strange phenomena that would feed chains of enduring images: For the space of six moneths togither, after this heinous murther thus committed, there appeered no sunne by day, nor moone by night in anie part of the realme, but still was the

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skie couered with continuall clouds, and sometimes such outragious windes arose, with lightenings and tempests. 2

Monstrous sights were seen in various parts, horses eating their own flesh, a sparkhawk strangled by an owl, of which “all men vnderstood that the abhominable morther of king Duffe was the cause heereof”. The chronicler expresses no scepticism either about the “strange and uncouth woonder, which afterward was the cause of much trouble in the realme of Scotland”: a meeting with three women in wild apparel, “resembling creatures of elder world”. The common opinion had it they were “the goddesses of destinie, or else nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science, because euerie thing came to passe as they had spoken”. As for Duncan, he is gentle enough but no holy man, too lenient for sovereignty, slothful and cowardly, whereas Macbeth, who embodies the other extreme with his “cruell nature”, stands for a while as the realm’s strong safeguard. Nor is Banquo a righteous man, but Macbeth’s accomplice in the murder of Duncan. After Banquo’s death, “nothing prospered with the foresaid Makbet”. The prophecies, heard from “a certeine witch”, 3 come to fruition according to the book, but Macbeth is spared the return of Banquo’s vengeful ghost, one of Shakespeare’s embellishments. The presence of the ghost, confirmed by the stage direction of the Folio, is further attested by Simon Forman’s Bocke of Plaies and Notes therof per Formans for Common Pollicie,  April : at supper with his noble men Macbeth regrets the absence of the noble Banquo: And as he thus did, standing up to drincke a Carouse to him, the ghoste of Banco came and sate down in his cheier behind him. And he turninge About to sit down Again sawe the goste of banco, which fronted him so, that he fell into a great passion of fear and fury, uttering many wordes about his murder, by which, when they hard that Banco was Murdred, they Suspected Mackbet. 4

Next to record on paper the presence of the ghost would be Füssli, 5 whose haunting pictures so deeply stirred the romantic imagination, and the works of William Blake, before both artists inspired other painters, theatre and film directors with their images of nightmare. 6 In Chassériau’s painting, 7 the ghost is a white haloed figure that could be a twin of Kurosawa’s.

2. Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, ed. Sir Henry Ellis, London, J. Johnson, , vol. V, p. . 3. Ibid., p. , -, , -. 4. Simon Forman, Booke of Plaies, in William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. II, ed. E. K. Chambers, Oxford University Press, , p. . 5. Johann Heinrich Füssli, Macbeth consulting the vision of the Armed Head (, Folger Shakespeare Library), . 6. See, for instance, the dossier of Heiner Müller’s Macbeth at Comédie de Saint-Étienne, October , illustrated by Füssli’s Macbeth and Banquo in company with the three witches (-). See also Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination, Tate Britain exhibition, February-May , with essays by Martin Myrone, Christopher Fraylong and Marina Warner, Tate Publishing. 7. Théodore Chassériau, Macbeth sees the Ghost of Banquo (, musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims), .

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2. Orson Welles,  The “Voodoo Macbeth” opened in April  at Lafayette Theater, Harlem, with a cast of black actors, and was followed by a national tour. 8 As part of John Houseman’s Federal Theatre Project, its aim was to provide work for local people, and enhance community pride. 9 According to the records, approximately , people turned up outside the theatre on the first night. The only surviving footage of this production is of the last scene. A brief commentary explains the aim of the project, the cultural development of the community through the combined efforts of musicians, artists, writers and actors, setting America’s feet “on the road to a brighter future”. Welles stressed a loose analogy with historical events in the Haiti of Emperor Christophe: the scene was moved there from Scotland “but the spirit of Macbeth and every line in the play have remained intact”. 10 The weird sisters were voodoo doctors led by a male Hecate, in a jungle complete with drums, chanting and dances, Negro masks and colourful costumes. The final duel, fought under the gleeful eye of the weird sisters, began with pistol shots and ended very properly with swords, thus enabling Macduff to cut off the tyrant’s head. Hecate, not Malcolm, commanded the cutting of branches from Birnam wood. The production ended with the lines “Peace! The charm’s wound up” (..), here delivered by the tall naked figure of Hecate who rose ominously behind the sisters. 11 Many features of this production, and some traces of voodoo rituals, remain in the film, which more or less follows the script cut for the stage: as Bernice W. Kliman asserts, “the supernatural pervades both productions”. 12 Both show a world under the sway of evil powers. In the opening scene, the Weird sisters plunge their hands into a boiling mess that streams all over the screen, and extract matter that they mould into a coarse voodoo doll. From the onset, the film shows them at odds with the world of early Christianity, symbolized by the recurrent motif of Celtic crosses, answering their forked staves, and the appearance of a “Holy Father” who solemnly asks the kneeling army of Duncan to “renounce Satan”. During the Confiteor, we hear in voice over Lady Macbeth’s plan to drug the guards, and Macbeth’s scruples. It seems difficult to agree with Anthony Davies’s view that there is “no cinematically strong Christian statement in the film”, that the Christian element “has an historic rather than a philosophical function” and that dramatically it is “something of a loose end”. If Macbeth’s metallic “blisters” 13 or his wife’s invocation to the cloudy night do visually connect them with the boiling cauldron,

8. The Federal Theatre Project Negro Unit’s production of Macbeth, . 9. See Wendy Smith, “The Play that Electrified Harlem”, Civilization, January-February , p. -. 10. In We Work Again, a film produced in  by Pathé News and the Works Project Administration. 11. Bernice W. Kliman, “Orson Welles’s  ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth and Its Reincarnation on Film”, in Macbeth (Shakespeare in performance), Manchester University Press,  [], chapter , p. -. 12. Ibid., p. . 13. Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays, Cambridge University Press, , p. -.

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the association takes its meaning from its antagonism with a clearly set norm, both in the text and in the visual imagery. The Prologue evokes a conflict between Christian law and agents of chaos who use ambitious men as their tools. Soon the fight of light and darkness descends to gloomy caverns and labyrinths that seem an extension of Macbeth’s interior world. This Macbeth, bathed in nightmarish onirism, is to Richard Marienstras a “theatre of the subconscious, the interior debate transposing itself, like a glove turned inside out, onto the whole picture”. 14 From the moment the leading couple meet, they stand in the shadow of death, framed between a hanged man in the background when they first embrace, and the corpse of Seyton hanging from the rope of the alarm bell after the suicide of Lady Macbeth. Welles keeps a fair portion of the text, but reallocates lines or their destination with great freedom. Thus “Something wicked this way comes” (..) is spoken early in the film and marks out Macbeth as possibly evil from the start. The sisters exist independently of him, of course, but do not exhibit unequivocally magic powers apart from their prophesying gifts. Yet successive hints recall manipulative forces that seem stronger than himself: the tantalizing dagger swiftly passes before the eyes of the voodoo doll before the picture blurs, coming in and out of focus several times as he tries to seize it. The whole climate ties up heaven and earth in dramatic clashes. All that is visible during the second encounter with the witches is a show of moving clouds over a dark sky. Banquo’s soliloquy “Thou played’st most foully for’t” (..) is told aloud to Macbeth, leading on to his murder. Echoes of his accusation are heard to resound in Macbeth’s mind, repeated requests to “Fail not our feast” (..), and the promise “I will not, I will not, I will not” (..). Come dinner time, it is plain that there is more to the ghost than guilty imagination: a shadow covers Macbeth’s face before we see what he sees—Banquo sitting opposite at a table suddenly void of people, a clear indication that the form is not wholly without substance, not just a figment of a mind diseased. At the end, the doll’s head is cut as his own falls: neither Macduff alone nor Christian conscience has won this duel. The weird sisters, facing the castle at some distance, have the last word, as in the stage production: “Peace! the charm’s wound up”.

3. Akira Kurosawa,  Kumonosu-jô opens on a bare landscape and a memorial pillar indicating the place where the castle once stood. What we will now see is in retrospect: the whole film is a flashback where all is pre-written, as in a play, the characters drawn and manipulated without much hold on their fate. The spirit of the forest 15 we see spinning his yarn weaves their story as fatally as ancient Parcae. Strange sounds and derisive laughter surround the riders in the forest, lightning acts as a messenger from beyond and leads them to its evil genius.

14. “Orson Welles, interprète et continuateur de Shakespeare”, Positif , March , p. . 15. To see pictures: and .

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Instead of weird but possibly human sisters, Kurosawa features a decidedly non-human luminous vision that powerfully establishes a world of supernatural forces. When it vanishes, as if suddenly lifted by a gust of wind, they look around in vain for traces of this elusive spirit, and thus discover piles of skulls, bones and broken helmets around his bamboo cabin. After this amazing encounter, Washizu and Miki ride on back and forth in the fog, as if wholly lost, or bound in a magic circle, trying to cross an invisible obstacle. At last, when the mist clears and the castle comes in sight, both feel they may indeed have slept, though they could hardly have shared the same dream. The whole film, as Jean-Baptiste Lenglet brilliantly shows, is itself a ghostly object, with the evanescent quality of dreams, in which the characters mill around searching their way. 16 They move like shadows in shrouds of mist that lure, mislead and eventually swallow them. The Noh style of acting strengthens the theatricality of the show we watch. Miki tells Washizu he knows the truth, but will support him, thus betraying his own ambition. His ghost has the shortest part—two brief flashes revealing a white shape—but perhaps the most commanding of the series examined here. Washizu first recedes in a corner and begs him to leave, then, when the ghost reappears a second time, slashes the air impotently with his sword to try and destroy the vision. He is sharply reproved for his timorousness by his wife Asaji, who had ordered the killing. The frontier between reality and fantasy is porous, as their fearful conscience increasingly distorts reality in the characters’ eyes, and drives them to more paranoid bloodshed. Miki’s translucent figure at the ceremonial dinner seems to duplicate the spirit of the forest, while a ghostly black one startles the fierce Asaji into a terror equal to her husband’s. But her “ghost” is alive: it is the dark shape of the murderer who brings in Miki’s head, wrapped in a white bundle. Reality itself grows fantastic. When Washizu returns to the forest, similar shapes are summoned before his dazed eyes to perform a show of warriors who encourage him to fight and be bold, gruesomely echoed by the surrounding piles of skulls and helmets. When trees appear to move as in a dream, they are in fact the army of his enemies. But before they reach him, the prophecy is fulfilled in an even more unpredictable way, as his own soldiers encircle him in a web of arrows; this alternative version of the moving forest plays up the theme of the title, Cobweb Castle. What seems the most ominous sign, near the conclusion, is also a natural phenomenon: a nightmarish flight of crows, that have been dislodged from their habitat by the deforestation, invade the castle. Nature is again distraught—pouring rain, fierce winds and lightning. All signs of human life have disappeared at the end, but the evil spirit who spins the story lives on. Haunting words are chanted: “See what remains of the dreams of men. The obsessions that held them in thrall still resound in the place. Men of yesterday, men of today, nothing has changed”. 17 Memorial pillar, fog and wind, desert landscape and shrill tune repeat the initial sequence in reverse order, while the castle fades to grey.

16. Jean-Baptiste Lenglet, “L’expérience du désastre: étude de l’espace dans Le Château de l’araignée d’Akira Kurosawa”, mémoire d’étude, École nationale des beaux-arts de Paris, November . 17. DVD Criterion Collection. Subtitles translated by Minda Hoaglund and Donald Richie.

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Kurosawa resolved to shoot on Mount Fugi “because it has precisely the stunted landscape that I wanted. And it is usually foggy. I had decided that I wanted lots of fog for this film”. 18 The camera was never allowed to get close to the characters, even in passionate scenes, Kurosawa recalls: there must be no searching of their intimate thoughts or motivations; lust for power and fear are their prime movers. 19 He saw parallels between Scotland’s heritage of violence and the century of civil war in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Japan, the Senkogu Jidai (Age of the country at war), with its rival clans, treachery and murder prevailing in the absence of a national political power. Yet Kurosawa’s “sense of apocalypse” is “not of the XVIth century but of now”, Stephen Prince observes; he “gives us battles filtered through his perceptions as a XXth-century artist well acquainted with the large-scale slaughters of his own time,” repeating senseless patterns of bloodshed. 20 Where the other Macbeths experience chimeras and live surrounded by superstitious beings in a palpably rationalistic world, the heroes of Welles and Kurosawa move in a world where no clear distinction appears between what they see or imagine and what actually is, in which accordingly, the human will, the possibility of choice and ethics, have little place.

4. Roman Polanski,  Polanski’s Macbeth is an introspective, brooding procrastinator who, were it not for his wily childish spouse, might endlessly defer the deed. Polanski, like Kurosawa, stresses the permanence of evil. Like Nunn’s, his weird sisters are unquestionably human. Before the credits, they dig a hole, bury a hangman’s noose, a severed arm and a dagger, and then seal it with blood and spit. Where Kurosawa’s spirit vanishes before our eyes as if lifted in the air, these three beggar women simply turn a corner and “disappear” behind a stone wall. The fantastic element is provided by Macbeth’s visions, whether in sleep or hallucinatory trance, to which the spectator is invited. We even share in the last swirling vision registered by his severed head as it goes up on a pike. Polanski uses film to show everything there is to show, including what happens off stage, like the gory murder of Duncan, and translates metaphors into material objects. An actual bear-baiting anticipates Macbeth’s final image. A shining silver dagger moves in front of him like a missile, pointing towards a closed door, intangible when he tries to take hold of it. He dreams that Fleance takes his crown and pierces his neck with an arrow, till the caressing hand of Lady Macbeth on his neck shakes him awake. Later, as she sits in a trance, we actually see the drops of blood appear on her hands, then vanish. The banquet scene evokes Leonardo’s Last Supper, and its traitor. Macbeth is not worried when invited to join his smiling thanes at a table that seems full to him, 18. Akira Kurosawa, “A Personal Record: Kurosawa and I—Donald Richie, ” in Akira Kurosawa: Interviews, ed. Bert Cardullo, Jackson, University Press of Mississipi, , p. . 19. Ibid. 20. Stephen Prince, “Throne of Blood: Shakespeare Transposed”, The Criterion Collection,  May , . Incidentally, Ariane Mnouchkine would draw a similar parallel on stage between medieval England and feudal Japan, and similarly turn Richard II into a timeless fable of bloody usurpation.

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until the man sitting at the place they show him reveals a face covered in blood, its twenty gashes exhibited, then morphs to a greenish distortion, and chases him around the room. Here Polanski adds one animal to the play’s rich bestiary, a hawk perched on Banquo’s wrist. 21 Macbeth rushes to the sisters’ shelter and bursts in on a witches’ sabbath, a crowd of naked old women. He is given a drink from their cauldron and made to bend over its surface, where he sees reflected in zooming images a birth by Caesarean section, the apparitions of ., Duncan’s sons, the bleeding Banquo, and a line of kings holding mirrors, down to the eighth, a laughing Fleance, who sits enthroned. When he awakes by the empty cauldron, all are gone. Polanski makes significant additions to the original text, inventing causal links and systems of echoes. 22 Lady Macbeth, naked in her sleepwalking scene, is visibly associated with the witches’ sabbath of moments earlier. The most striking innovation is the part given to Ross: a minimal presence in the play, he becomes a full character with his own drama. From the moment he parts ways with Macduff to go to Scone (..), he becomes Macbeth’s henchman, plays Third Murderer, then guides the execution of his own acolytes, opens the gates to Macduff’s castle for the killers, and is subsequently disgusted when Macbeth rewards Seyton instead of himself. All that follows is tainted with hypocrisy; his compassionate report of the slaughter to Macduff, and the defectors’ belated support for Malcolm. It is Ross who picks up the bloodied crown from Macbeth’s severed head, wipes it quickly and hands it to Malcolm. Whatever grace may have hovered over Duncan’s Scotland will not return. References to the Holy king of England and his healing powers are cut in the dialogue, as is the long debate between Malcolm and Macduff; the only normative speech left is Banquo’s on honour. Guilty visions haunt the protagonists, suggesting they do have a conscience, yet without any tangible effect on their behaviour. There is not the least sign of redemption or renewal at the end. In the last images, a limping Donalbain stealthily leaves the castle and rides under heavy rain in search of the weird sisters, foreshadowing Richard III.

5. Trevor Nunn,  Critics had proclaimed Nunn’s  Macbeth at The Other Place the best since the Laurence Olivier-Vivien Leigh production of . 23 His television version for ITV raised equally enthusiastic praise as the quintessential Macbeth, a “benchmark in the play’s theatre history”. 24 It was branded as the most genuinely British, implying no doubt the concept of an authentic Shakespeare, when it was broadcast in fifteen countries around the world. Philip Casson, the Thames Television director, took pains to recreate the experience of the theatre. The viewers see the action as if they were also on stage: the soliloquies are spoken facing the camera, 21. 22. 23. 24.

See pictures: . See script at . See Roger Warren, “Theory and Practice: Stratford ”, Shakespeare Survey , , p. -. Michael Mullin, “Stage and Screen: The Trevor Nunn Macbeth”, Shakespeare Quarterly ., Autumn , p. -.

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directly to them. The film is treated as a ritual re-enactment of the play. There is no simulation; even the special effects, thunder sheet and lightning, are done in full view of the audience, with claustrophobic nearness. In the stage version, Macbeth swung a lamp himself to cast moving shadows on the “Out, out, brief candle” (..) passage. In the film, he briefly stands in a red spotlight when first greeted by the king’s party. The actors sit and watch when they are not performing: “The sense of peering in at a corrupting ritual was thus strengthened by a double spectatorship, and became central to the emotional quality of the emotion”, Dennis Kennedy notes; but he points to a weakness of the TV film, which he finds less moving, “precisely because the cinematic effect of close-up and intimate intensity seem rather ordinary on the small screen”. 25 On film, the conditions of a small acting space become artificial and strained. At the opening, the weird sisters stand in the centre of a lit circle while a priest-like Duncan fervently prays on the edge—two parallel sets of superstitious practices. Candles, chanted litanies only vary with the intent of the faithful. The film is bathed throughout in a religious atmosphere, an ancient world of crude black magic, drawn between exorcism and satanism. Yet neither appears to have any tangible effect, other than the awakening of hidden desires. The atmosphere is predominantly dark, with gold and blood the only touches of colour; dim lights, fog, and smoke are emitted, presumably from an unseen chimney in Duncan’s bedroom. We never see what the protagonists see, only the emotions reflected on their faces. Macbeth follows the movement of an imaginary dagger with his eyes, puts out both hands, as if to seize it by its extremities, then rolls up his sleeve in a very practical manner to do the deed. After the murder, we have a close-up of his bloodied hand, moving like a wave of “Neptune’s ocean” (..). The banquet scene begins with a parody of the communion rite as Macbeth offers a chalice-like cup around to his guests. Nunn’s is the only version in which no ghost enters; all we have is Macbeth’s fierce reaction. With the camera on him all the time, at the “sight” of Banquo’s ghost he suffers the same kind of epileptic attack as the disabled witch who mouthed the prophecies. He leaps and growls like an animal, running after an invisible antagonist who seems to move around with the ease of immaterial bodies. Banquo’s second assault causes him to foam at the mouth and collapse in Lady Macbeth’s arms. His visions at the witches’ abode are drug-enhanced. Their cauldron, candles and litanies are items in a black mass mirroring the communion ritual. They hold coarse dolls on sticks to represent the apparitions, make Macbeth drink of their brew, and put a bandage over his eyes as they psalmody “Show, show”. Again, we get no sight of these shows. Like the dagger, or the ghost’s movements, all are figments of his drugged mind. Only the dolls remain when he wakes. These objects he clings to as talismans are even more of a lure than his delusions, a false tangible proof of his safety. He holds and caresses them through the following scenes, until he stabs the crowned one when Macduff reveals his untimely birth. There are no traces of supernatural interference, no agents from beyond. The characters stand in a void, alone responsible for whatever happens. 25. Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, Cambridge University Press, , p. -.

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6. Alexander Abela,  Makibefo returns to the black and white of Welles and Kurosawa, with far sparser means. Alexander Abela wanted to capture the very essence of Macbeth and make it universal when he went with a minimal crew to Faux Cap, a fishermen’s village at the extreme south of Madagascar. 26 Probably he had not read Laura Bohannon’s short story, “Shakespeare in the Bush” (), in which the anthropologist heroine begins with the creed “that human nature is pretty much the same the whole world over”, yet significantly fails to find common grounds of interpretation with her audience when she attempts to tell them the story of Hamlet. 27 The Antandroy are an ancient tribe of warriors with a great sense of “pride, honour and tradition”, the final credits tell us. An implicit parallel with the situation between Scotland and England is referred to in the private talks of the filmmaker with Anne-Marie Costantini-Cornède, for these people are “the only ones who are proud, not bowing to the French”. 28 Various critics have accused him, if not of actual racism, at least of acute eurocentrism. 29 On  May , the leading couple, Noeliny Dety and Martin Zia, having arrived from their village where television and electricity were unknown, walked up the steps of the Cannes festival hall to see the premiere of their film, and were later invited to the United States. In Abela’s optimistic view, their five weeks’ salary provided the actors with much needed means of survival. He tells a triumphant story of the crew’s return visit to Faux Cap, when thousands of people came from miles around to see the film with much laughter and emotion. By the time the film was distributed, Abela was somewhat less sanguine: admittedly the shooting had created lasting disturbances in the village, and thoroughly upset some of the actors’ lives. 30 What the Antandroy actually understood of Macbeth can only be guessed at. What the film crew understood of their culture seems even less. In Madagascar generally, the dead are very much part of everyday life. The cult of the ancestors and its highlight, the Famadihana (turning of the bones), is the occasion of general 26. “Capturer l’essence même de Macbeth et la rendre universelle par l’image plutôt que par le dialogue représentait pour moi un défi unique”, Alexander Abela, in “Makibefo: Un film d’Alexander Abela d’après Macbeth de William Shakespeare”, Blue Eye Films Productions, London, Epicentre Films, , p. -. 27. Bohannon’s anthropologist believes at first that “at least the general plot and motivation of the greater tragedies would always be clear—everywhere—although some details of custom might have to be explained and difficulties of translation might produce other slight changes”, , p. . 28. “Les seuls qui sont fiers, non soumis aux Français”, interview with the filmmaker on  May , quoted in “Shakespeare à l’écran: Makibefo d’Alexander Abela, un exemple extrême d’appropriation culturelle” by Anne-Marie Costantini-Cornède, LISA e-journal ., , p. -. 29. See, for instance, Philipp Hinz, “Shakespearean Ventriloquisms: Sound, Sight, and Spectacular Exoticism in Makibefo”, Wissenschaftliches Seminar Online , , . See also Olivier Barlet’s review of the film in Africultures , October , . 30. Au cinéma Le République, Paris XIe , avant-première le mardi  octobre  à  heures en présence du réalisateur.

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feasting, during which the bodies are exhumed, given a dance around the village and wrapped in fresh shrouds (lambadena). The signal for it may be a dream, when the defunct complains to one of his offspring that he is cold. In the south, the Antandroy are particularly renowned for their mastery of divination and their elaborate funeral rites, yet Makibefo makes hardly any use of their beliefs and practices. We are informed by the credits that the zebu ox which is slaughtered during the murder of Bakoua was sacrificed in honour of their European guests, but not that the zebu is a privileged mediator between earth and heaven. The Aloala carved poles we see planted on the beach at the opening have been taken out of their context and natural environment: they usually stand over tombs, protected by wood railings, and sculpted with motifs recording the lives of the deceased. The ostensible ethnicity is fake, since the team had to recreate traditional materials and tools that the fishermen no longer used. So much for the universality of Macbeth, as disputable as Bohannan’s Bush Hamlet. The minimal dialogues are in the local dialect, eked out with introspective soliloquies from the text, and a few added commentaries by the story teller, the only professional actor in the cast. 31 A prologue posits ambiguous gods, and sums up the moral dilemma of the hero: In a land washed by the ocean, a tribe lived among sands and crushing winds, under a noble king whose subjects were good and true, none more than Makibefo. In company of a trusted friend, he was asked to bring back a fugitive, and on the way he met a witch doctor who told him King Danikany was good but weak, his son merciless. A time would come, as sure as the tide, when harmony would no longer reign. The witch doctor, looking deep in Makibefo’s eyes, saw that the gods had singled him out as future leader, and drew the ancient symbol of the favoured one on his head band. He proved to be the teller of truth. Macbeth began to believe he was a man destined for greatness. His wife too had understood the ancient symbol, that her husband was blessed by the gods, and urged him to overthrow the king. Macbeth knew the truth of his wife’s instances, but he knew too once he had committed the ultimate treachery, there would be no turning back, the blood that would be washed from their hands could not so easily be washed from their souls.

Here the story teller opens an old Folio before he announces “This is a tale of damnation”. He reappears at intervals to read the characters’ thoughts from this book. Welles’s was the only version Abela claims he agreed to see before he began the shooting. Abela takes pains to show his leading character is truly filled with the milk of human kindness, offering coconut milk to his prisoner Kidoure and putting ointment on his wound in the first sequence, whereas Welles gives no such indication. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, an old man stands before him, chanting and handling pebbles, ties up a band round his arm, draws a sign on his forehead, and prophesies Malcolm will kill their prisoner despite his father’s will: “what he will lose you will gain, and king you shall be”. When Bakoua orders him to “Get back with your lies”, the old man disappears as swiftly as he had materialized; a snake runs away in the sand. “Can devils speak true?” Makibefo wonders in voice over when Danikany’s son disregards the order that the prisoner shall be spared.

31. Gilbert Laumord, from Guadeloupe.

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Yet it takes much prompting from his wife to resolve him. Thrice she tries to draw a sign on his forehead which he resists until he gives in, Caesar-like, at the third attempt. It is she who stands with a knife pointed over Danikany’s heart and prepares to stab him, but Makibefo takes the knife from her and does the stabbing himself in close shot. The murder of Bakoua is intercut with the slaughter of a zebu. Bakoua’s ghost, all smeared in white stuff, is visible before Makibefo sees him seated in front of him, then standing at his back, then again before him, and tries to chase him away. With minimal dialogue exchanged, the dehumanizing process is shown through actions, as Macbeth grows increasingly cruel, calling on the fleeing Makidofy to turn round and watch the murder of his family on the beach. The tragedy announced in the prologue, of a man singled out by the gods for a mission, though his private conscience tells him the required deed is wrong, dwindles into a rather flat script recalling the main events of the play, without visual substitutes for its metaphoric power and thoughtfulness. While Makibefo visits the witch doctor, Lady Makibefo is seen holding a pointed dagger over an invisible victim and rubbing her hands, until she walks into the sea to her end. Since she gave no earlier sign of fear or conscience, we are left to wonder what may have reduced her to this state. Why conscience disapproves of what the gods have prescribed is not elucidated either. The doctor’s prophecy is restricted to a promise that Makibefo will be safe from anyone of woman born, his foresight inferior to the weird sisters’. His earlier metamorphosis into a snake is the only trace of magic or supernatural powers in the film. There is no memory of Birnam wood, no thunder or lightning and no dark night on this perpetually sunny beach. When Makidofy returns with the king’s sons to revenge, and reveals the nature of his birth, Makibefo’s last words, “I will not bow to Malcolm”, recall the prince’s earlier cruelty and disobedience as he removes Makibefo’s headband to put it on his own head.

7. Vishal Bhardwaj,  Maqbool shows a totally different kind of exoticism. It is set in the present day in the Mumbai underworld, among a crime family, ruled by a Godfather, Abbaji Nahangir, enjoying all the benefits of technical modernity. Most of their time is spent shooting people between two large meals, in a world where the mafia runs the Bollywood industry, smuggles gold, owns the police, and makes or unmakes governments. Whichever party Abbaji backs never loses the elections, we are told. Although the credits announce that the film is based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, only the bare bones of the plot and part of its mental universe remain. Two corrupt policemen and amateur astrologers, inspectors Purohit and Pandit, play the part of the weird sisters. Their oft repeated creed is that “The balance of power is critical in this city. Fire must fear water”. One of them prophesies that Maqbool will occupy the place of the gang lord Abbaji within six months and be “King of kings” (this in English). Abbaji’s girlfriend Nimmi, in love with Maqbool, urges him to take the first place, and excites him to jealousy. Maqbool, an orphan who was adopted and raised by Abbaji when he was a child, now his gunman, feels gratitude for him

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but is further moved to act by the engagement of Abbaji’s daughter Sameera with Guddu, the son of Kaka/Banquo. Maqbool executes rival gangs and treacherous allies with equal poise, and does not scruple to carry on a passionate secret affair with Nimmi, but his desire to take Abbaji’s place gives him pangs of guilt even before he is persuaded to do the deed. So much firing has taken place already in and outside the family, so many corpses have fallen, that again, it is passing strange, in their world of unstable alliances, that the murder of one man, whom he claims to have served without benefit to himself for twenty-five years, should cause such scruples. When goats are slaughtered for the engagement feast, servants wash off the blood, but Maqbool sees it still on the pavement. After the deed, blue flashes show him haunted by images of Abbaji killed in bed with Nimmi, spattering her with blood. There is no sign of supernatural interference, no rule of law that the gangsters respect, yet they pray, observe holy days and ceremonial rites. They are pious, brutal and tearful. When Kaka is killed, his body is brought in, and we see the eyes of the corpse suddenly open, causing Maqbool to panic: “Take him away. . . He’s alive. . . Take him away right now. . . he’s opening his eyes”. “He’s dead. . . Look. . . Kaka’s dead”, the pregnant Nimmi vainly tries to reassure him, but is soon overtaken by similar delusions. She tries to rub off blood from her face when he takes her home after the birth of her child, scrubs the walls for stains he cannot see, smells their stench everywhere in the room, and has enough judgment left to reflect: “I am going insane, aren’t I? Miyan, was everything a sin? Our love was chaste, wasn’t it?” before she breathes her last. Their tortured relationship is the only theme explored in any depth, love the only human feeling that seems to survive in the general corruption. The would-be astrologers warn Maqbool an eclipse is expected in three days, but he has only Guddu and Riaz Boti/Macduff to fear. “Will I sink or sail?” he wonders. “Now, if the sea comes up to your house, then you’ll sink. . . obviously sink”. Indian Customs arrest the gang with their consignment on the edge of international waters, and the sea does come to the house, in the shape of policemen, whose chief dismisses the corrupt cops. Maqbool escapes hidden in their car. A hint of redemption appears in the maternity ward where he sees Guddu and Sameera tenderly pick up Nimmi’s baby. He drops his gun instead of killing Guddu as he was preparing to, then meets his fate at the hands of Boti, who shoots him as he leaves the clinic. The sweeping movement of the building confirms that we have been, from the moment of Abbaji’s murder, watching the action through his eyes.

8. Conclusion Shakespeare provides natural explanations for the moving forest, as does Kurosawa for the invasion of birds, and the hallucinations of a guilty conscience, but none for the more troubling phenomena that test the validity of the filmmakers’ construction. Banquo’s ghost is a translucent white shape, is a material shadow, is a bleeding threatening rotting body, is not there at all, is smeared with white paste, is a corpse who opens his eyes. Its manifestations last a few seconds, in most cases less spectacular than the reaction they set off. There is generally little doubt cast on

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the assumption that they are just hallucinations, although in several cases we see the ghost, or its shadow, before Macbeth does. Where Kurosawa finds equivalents for medieval Scotland in the past of Japan, and fully uses the historical, cultural and artistic codes of his country to create a consistent system of beliefs, Abela’s timeless beach and Bhardwaj’s very contemporary Mumbai make minimal use of the country’s traditional resources or history, and suppress all the matter of the play that will not fit into their scheme. Trevor Nunn draws on two antagonistic systems of belief and packs them up into one common lot of dangerous superstitions. Neither his nor Polanski’s nihilistic vision leave any room for transcendence, only for human thoughts and appetites. Welles and Kurosawa alone give evidence of a world beyond, of forces above or under the natural one, that take a hand in the spinning of men’s apparent choices. Is it a coincidence that those two richly symbolic films are also the most haunting? Macbeth comes to full awareness in Shakespeare’s final scene, with the revelation of Macduff’s birth, each part of the prophecies that supported his hubris having now found its accomplishment. The same perplexing question returns about the various versions that lay on men alone the weight of events. What is unexplained is the source of forebodings that must come from some superior knowledge, good or bad, of what lies in the seeds of time. Bad probably, clearly affiliated to medieval tales of the Devil’s nine questions. However ironical the answers to the prophecies are, there is no rational explanation for the fact that they do tell the truth in their twisted, evil way. What remains unexplored in the “rational” sceptical films and their implicit denial of transcendence is the inner spring of the guilt experienced after the deed. All that the characters of those different versions have in common is this ghostly conscience that is “embodied”, as it were, in Banquo’s resilient shape, even if their outside world has forgotten all difference between fair and foul. A conscience still mysteriously stirred today by the sisters’ “necromanticall science, because euerie thing came to passe as they had spoken”. 32

Bibliography Beylie Claude, “Macbeth or the Magical Depths”, in Focus on Shakespearean Film, ed. Charles W. Eckert, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, , p. -. Bohannon Laura, “Shakespeare in the Bush”, Natural History ., August-September , p. -. Chambers E. K., ed., William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. II, Oxford University Press, . Costantini-Cornède Anne-Marie, “Shakespeare à l’écran: Makibefo d’Alexander Abela, un exemple extrême d’appropriation culturelle”, LISA e-journal ., , p. -. Davies Anthony, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays, Cambridge University Press, . Holinshed Raphael, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, ed. Sir Henry Ellis, London, J. Johnson, , vol. V.

32. Holinshed, p. .

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Kennedy Dennis, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, Cambridge University Press, . Kliman Bernice W., Macbeth (Shakespeare in performance), Manchester University Press,  []. Kurosawa Akira, “A Personal Record: Kurosawa and I—Donald Richie, ” in Akira Kurosawa: Interviews, ed. Bert Cardullo, Jackson, University Press of Mississipi, , p. -. Lenglet Jean-Baptiste, “L’expérience du désastre: étude de l’espace dans Le Château de l’araignée d’Akira Kurosawa”, mémoire d’étude, École nationale des beaux-arts de Paris, November . Marienstras Richard, “Orson Welles, interprète et continuateur de Shakespeare”, Positif , March , p. -. Mullin Michael, “Stage and Screen: The Trevor Nunn Macbeth”, Shakespeare Quarterly ., Autumn , p. -. Prince Stephen, “Throne of Blood: Shakespeare Transposed”, The Criterion Collection,  May , . Smith Wendy, “The Play that Electrified Harlem”, Civilization, January-February , p. -. Warren Roger, “Theory and Practice: Stratford ”, Shakespeare Survey , , p. -.

“Instruments of Darkness”: Witches and the Supernatural in Four Versions of Macbeth1

Warren CHERNAIK In productions of Macbeth, the three witches have often proved an embarrassment. In the Restoration and in eighteenth and nineteenth century productions, the scenes with the witches were expanded, to include a considerable element of spectacle—with the stage directions “Enter Witches, Dance and Sing” before such non-Shakespearean lines as “Let’s have a Dance upon the Heath,/ We gain more Life by Duncan’s Death”. 2 William Davenant’s revised Macbeth (first performed in ) treated the witches as comic figures, complete with peaked hats and broomsticks, employing elaborate machinery to allow them to make their exits flying through the air. In productions until well into the nineteenth century, the witches were played by the comic actors (male) in a company, even where (as with David Garrick and later with John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons) the play’s principal figures were treated with tragic dignity. Nineteenth-century versions featured as many as a hundred “pretty singing witches”, in four-part harmony, interrupting the tragic action. 3 Later productions have sometimes toned down or eliminated the supernatural elements in the play, in an attempt at realism, or relied on spectacular scenic effects, following the earlier tradition. In our own day, the popularity of films and romantic novels about vampires and ghosts might suggest a widespread belief in the existence of one form or another of supernatural beings, or at least a willing suspension of disbelief, akin to that in Shakespeare’s time. The film versions of Macbeth by Orson Welles () and Roman Polanski () both give prominence to the witches, who in one way or another dominate the action. Polanski begins and ends his film with the witches, first in a dumbshow on a bare windswept beach and, at the end, with Donalbain making another visit to the witches’ cave, a further willing victim seeking power by infernal means. In the Welles film, the witches are overtly “instruments of darkness” (..). 1. I am grateful to Pierre Kapitaniak, Dominique Goy-Blanquet, Robert Watson, and Andrew Fleck for their comments on an earlier version of this essay at the World Shakespeare Congress in July  in Prague, and to Sarah Hatchuel, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, and Victoria Bladen for running the seminar so well. 2. The lines appear in the  Quarto of Macbeth and in Davenant’s adaptation, Macbeth, A Tragedy, With all the Alterations (London, ) at the end of ., after the discovery of the murder, or, in Davenant, in an added scene (.). 3. See Bernice W. Kliman, Shakespeare in Performance: Macbeth, nd ed., Manchester University Press, , p. .

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A voice-over at the beginning intones “Plotting against Christian law and order are the agents of chaos, priests of hell and magic, sorcerers, and witches”. The witches in Welles’s film are old crones, dressed in rags and not, as in some other versions, individually characterized: we never see their faces. In crowd scenes, the screen is filled with crosses, and a Holy Father, Welles’s invention, conducts a religious service adjuring Satan and his works, before he is killed by Macbeth’s spear. Welles’s film, which cuts Shakespeare’s text severely and has some very weak performances in the subordinate parts, burdening his actors with heavy Scottish accents, is notable for its expressionist photography, making literal the lines “Light thickens [. . . ] night’s black agents to their preys do rouse” (..; ). Though Welles’s Macbeth dominates the film, with endless close-ups, Welles’s face and delivery of the lines tend to lack expression, and his Lady Macbeth is inadequate, playing a femme fatale of Hollywood film noir in the manner of Joan Crawford. The film, like The Magnificent Ambersons (dir. Welles, ), had long passages hacked out of it by the distributors without Welles’s approval (they were restored later, and appear in the currently available DVD). The film has not generally had a good press, though its symbolic dream landscapes, avoiding all pretences at cinematic realism, were praised by French critics: Those cardboard sets; those barbarous Scots, dressed in animal skins, brandishing crosslike lances of knotty wood; those strange settings trickling with water, shrouded in mists which obscure a sky in which the existence of stars is inconceivable [. . . ] Macbeth is at the heart of this equivocal universe [. . . ] the very likeness of the mud, mixture of earth and water, in which the spell of the witches has mired him. 4

Forces of good are absent from Polanski’s film, which features a naked coven of witches in an extended cauldron scene and makes explicit links between a young, nubile Lady Macbeth and the weird sisters. There is little complexity or inner conflict in Jon Finch’s youthful Macbeth, who stabs Duncan on screen repeatedly, in a quasi-erotic frenzy, and engages in a protracted, brawling sword fight with Macduff at the end, concluding with a shot dwelling lovingly on his severed head. Unlike Welles, Polanski, in this technicolor film, adheres to the conventions of realism, with a good number of domestic scenes involving ordinary, unheroic life among the peasantry living on the periphery of Macbeth’s castle. The three weird sisters are individualized, two old and one young (and evidently deformed), but they fit within the general realist framework, in their poverty and marginality. In some ways they are like Mother Sawyer in the Jacobean play The Witch of Edmonton, who chooses to summon up demonic forces because she is scorned as a hag by her neighbours. 5 Living in a cave in a kind of alternative society (the cauldron scene features a chorus of thirty or so witches, enjoying the ceremony), the witches in this film are devotees of demonism, without being in any sense supernatural beings. Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (), which takes demonic possession seriously, presents its devil-worshippers as ordinary middleclass citizens, outwardly appearing pillars of the community. As in that film and 4. André Bazin, quoted in Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays, Cambridge University Press, , p. -. 5. See William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, The Witch of Edmonton (), in Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, Manchester, Revels Plays, .

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in Polanski’s Chinatown (), there is no restoration of order at the end, no “the time is free”. 6 In a characteristic touch, Ross is turned into a cynical opportunist who, as Macbeth’s henchman, acts as Third Murderer and is complicit in the murder of Lady Macduff, before switching sides: he defects to Malcolm, to whom he presents the crown after Macbeth’s death. In Shakespeare, the witches are liminal figures, inhabiting the uncertain borderline between solid material reality and the unlicensed imagination. Banquo asks, “Are ye fantastical or that indeed/Which outwardly ye show?” (..-), and Macbeth, later in this scene, is beset by “horrible imaginings [. . . ] whose murder yet is but fantastical” (..-). In ., the witches appear to Macbeth and the more sceptical Banquo, who remarks on their equivocal, puzzling status: “What are these [. . . ]/ That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth/ And yet are on’t?” (..-). Shakespeare clearly differentiates the reaction of the two soldiers, comrades in arms: though Banquo admits his own susceptibility to temptation, he resists it, recognizing that “oftentimes to win us to our harm/ The instruments of darkness tell us truths,/ Win us with honest trifles” (..-). In his encounter with Macbeth shortly before Macbeth’s “Is this a dagger” soliloquy, Banquo presents an alternative perspective, invoking religious and secular traditions that might provide constraints on behaviour: Merciful powers, Restrain in me the cursèd thoughts that nature Gives way to in repose. (..-) And shortly afterwards, when Macbeth suggests that an alliance between the two men “shall make honour for you” (..), Banquo responds, cautiously: So I lose none In seeking to augment it, but still keep My bosom franchised and allegiance clear. (..-) In the banquet scene, the apparition of Banquo’s ghost is visible only to the terrified Macbeth, and not to Lady Macbeth or the guests at the feast. Much of the effectiveness of the scene comes from the contrast between the hollow formulae of hospitality and civility and the shocking, self-accusatory violations of propriety by Macbeth, trapped in his private nightmare. Lady Macbeth refuses in this scene, as in her earlier claim that “a little water clears us of this deed” (..), to admit the existence of any reality beyond the material: “When all’s done/ You look but on a stool” (..-). To her, surrender to the phantoms of the imagination is shameful, unmanly; the realm of the fantastical is entirely separate from solid, evidential reality, and should be kept at arm’s length, avoiding its dangers. This is the very painting of your fear; This is the air-drawn dagger which you said Led you to Duncan. (..-) 6. See E. Pearlman, “Macbeth on film: Politics”, in Shakespeare and Politics, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander, Cambridge University Press, , p. -.

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Banquo’s ghost, like the “dagger of the mind” (..) in Macbeth’s soliloquy, raises problems in production. In Polanski’s literal reading, the dagger is “palpable” (..), a glittering piece of cutlery just beyond Macbeth’s reach on screen, and the ghost, suitably pale and blood-streaked, provides an element of spectacle, following the conventions of horror films. 7 The Folio stage directions read “Enter the Ghost of Banquo” and, later in the scene, “Enter Ghost”, suggesting that in the original production by the King’s Men the actor who played Banquo appeared on stage as a visible ghost. Later productions, however, have sometimes presented the ghost as an embodiment of Macbeth’s guilt-ridden imagination, following the hint of Macbeth’s “I have thee not, and yet I see thee still” (..) in the earlier scene. In Trevor Nunn’s  production, the banquet scene was especially powerful, as Ian McKellen, writhing like a victim of demonic possession, conjured up a spectral presence, making the invisible visible. As McKellen said in interview: It was done the right way, the only way that makes sense, which is that he doesn’t exist [. . . ] The only person who sees the ghost is Macbeth. Nobody else does. If you want to have the ghost appearing onstage, everybody has to act that they can’t see him. But we in the audience can see him, so what’s wrong with all these people, are they mad? [. . . ] In fact there’s no ghost, just as there was no dagger, they’re in his imagination. 8

As Stephen Greenblatt has argued, in Shakespeare’s day, the existence of witches, the extent of their powers to do harm and their status as supernatural beings were “a subject of contestation”. 9 A belief in the real existence of witches was widespread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If a spiritual dimension, a world invisible to sense, existed, Sir Thomas Browne argued in , then witches, creatures of this supernatural realm, had to exist: It is a riddle to me [. . . ] how so many learned heads should so far forget their Metaphysicks, and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures, as to question the existence of Spirits. For my part, I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are Witches: they that doubt of these, do not only deny them, but Spirits; and are obliquely and upon consequence a sort not of Infidels, but Atheists.

However, according to Browne, not all who professed to be witches, and used “sorceries, incantations, and spells”, were actually witches, holding intercourse with devils: “I hold that the Devil doth really possess some men, the spirit of

7. See Neil Forsyth, “Shakespeare the illusionist: Filming the supernatural”, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson, Cambridge University Press, , p. -. 8. Ian McKellen, in Julian Curry, Shakespeare on Stage, London, Nick Hern Books, , p. -. For a different perspective on the Nunn production, and this scene in particular, see Dominique Goy-Blanquet’s essay in this collection. On ways of staging the banquet scene, with the ghost visible or not to the playgoers, see Alan C. Dessen, Rescripting Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, , p. -; and, on presence or absence of the ghost in film versions, see Sarah Hatchuel, “‘Prithee, see there! Behold! Look!’ (..): The Gift or the Denial of Sight in Screen Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth”, Borrowers and Lenders , , , accessed  April . 9. Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare Bewitched”, in New Historical Literary Study, ed. Jeffrey Cox and Larry Reynolds, Princeton University Press, , p. .

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Melancholly others, the spirit of Delusion others”. 10 In trials for witchcraft during this period, alleged witches were charged with two kinds of crimes, one secular and one religious: doing actual harm to man or beast, and entering into a pact with the devil, “the renunciation of God and deliberate adherence to his greatest enemy” in the hope of receiving powers by which a witch could wreak “supernatural vengeance on her enemies”. 11 According to William Perkins’s Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (), a witch “renounceth God himself, the King of Kings, she leaves the societie of his Church and people, she bindeth herself in league with the devil”. 12 Witches, according to such beliefs, were literally “instruments of darkness”, worshippers of the devil, able to summon up malign “spirits” (..) that in their “sightless substances [. . . ] wait on nature’s mischief” (..-). In the “unsex me here” soliloquy (..-), Judi Dench in the Trevor Nunn production visibly recoiled, as if physically assaulted, as she called up these spirits from below the earth. The inquisitors’ Malleus Maleficarum () sought to give “the solidity of palpable truth” to the demons of the imagination, claiming evidential reality for something that could by definition never be proved to exist—an actual, literal contract with the father of evil: It is useless to argue that any result of witchcraft may be a phantasy and unreal, because such a phantasy cannot be procured without resort to the power of the devil, and it is necessary that there should be made a contract with the devil, by which contract the witch truly and actually binds herself to be the servant of the devil, and this is not done in any dream or under any illusion, but she herself bodily and truly cooperates with, and conjoins herself to, the devil. 13

Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft () is one of several works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that attempt to draw a sharp distinction between the realms of fact and imagination. According to Scot, claims of witchcraft were likely to be delusory or fraudulent, “meere cousenage” or the product of a “humor melancholicall” in individuals “full of imaginations”: “illusions are right inchantments”. 14 Scot conceded that there were people who, hoping to do injury to their neighbours, sought recourse to spells and sorcery, but he denied that such practices had any efficacy: My question is not (as many fondly suppose) whether there be witches or nay; but whether they can do such miraculous works as are imputed to them [. . . ] 15 If all the divels in hell were dead, and all the witches in England were burnt or hanged, I warrant you we should not faile to have raine, haile, and tempests [. . . ] I for my part have read a number of their conjurations, but never could see such divels of theirs, except it were in a plaie. 16 10. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Other Writings, ed. Frank L. Huntley, London, Dent, , p. -. 11. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, , p. . 12. William Perkins, quoted in Stuart Clark, “Inversion, Misrule, and the Meaning of Witchcraft”, Past & Present , , p. . 13. Heinrich Kremer and Jakob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, quoted in Greenblatt, p. ; . 14. Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, quoted in Sydney Anglo (ed.), The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, , p. ; p. ; and in Greenblatt, p. . 15. Thomas, p. . 16. Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, quoted in Greenblatt, p. .

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Where Scot and other sceptics, subjecting claims of secret infernal pacts and sexual intercourse with incubi and succubi to examination by the “rule of reason” and common sense, sought to erect a barrier between fantasy and reality, plays like Macbeth present that boundary as porous, permeable. The challenge Macbeth presents in performance is how to make the supernatural real to the audience. The world of equivocal appearances in Macbeth is one where the creations of “the heat-oppressèd brain” can be made “sensible/To feeling as to sight” (..-), affecting the audience as well as those who are “rapt” (..) and shaken in the presence of the supernatural. Two versions which, though differing from one another in their approach, made the supernatural elements of Macbeth convincing, contributing to the overall tragic effect, were Trevor Nunn’s  stage production, restaged for television in , and Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (). Nunn’s Macbeth, with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, is a chamber production designed for a confined, intimate space, without scenery and with minimal props. It was first performed at the Other Place in Stratford, a bare barn of a building seating under  spectators, and moved to the Donmar Warehouse, equally small and bare, in London. The televised version, with the same cast, directed by Philip Casson in collaboration with Nunn, sought to find “ways in which television could recreate the experience of the theatre”, with soliloquies addressed directly to the audience and the camera positioned so that viewers could see the action as if they themselves were onstage. 17 The production was conceived as an ensemble, with a cast that had worked together for a long time—McKellen said that “what was good about it was not my performance, it was everybody’s performance”—and it sought to portray “a believable society of civil servants and soldiers”, rather than providing a platform for two stars. In this version of the play, according to McKellen, “the witches were very clearly ordinary [. . . ] people going about their business [. . . ] a little family of people who were in touch with things beyond themselves”; 18 Nunn conceived of them as literally a family, with a grandmother, mother, and daughter, each individually characterized. 19 Though there is no sense in this production of the supernatural as a realm existing objectively, outside the human mind, the production includes a strong element of ritual, often of a quasi-religious nature. The cauldron scene, for example, is presented as a Black Mass (contrasting with earlier shots of a white-clad Duncan, with a long white beard, at prayer, muttering mea culpa), while, in mimed action, the witches perform some ghastly “deed without a name” (..). In the stage version, the action takes place within a circle, with the actors remaining onstage, outside the circle, when not involved in a particular scene; in the television version, the circle is visible at the beginning, but not later. Both the stage and televised versions “depended on the audience accepting its non-illusionistic framework”: as Nunn said, “it was quite obvious to the audience that it was a performance, a celebration or an enactment of something,

17. Michael Mullin, “Stage and Screen: The Trevor Nunn Macbeth”, Shakespeare Quarterly , , p. . 18. McKellen, in Curry, p. . 19. Ibid., p. .

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and it was happening in a defined space. It certainly wasn’t happening on a blasted heath or in Inverness”. 20 One difference in this production was its characterization of Duncan as saintly but ineffective, even helpless against the overwhelming power of evil, as manifested in the witches and, eventually, in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In Welles, Duncan was scarcely characterized at all, other than as a primitive warrior wearing a bearskin costume; and in Rupert Goold’s  production with Patrick Stewart as Macbeth, filmed for television in , Duncan was a gruff military leader, not visibly different from his fellow warrior Macbeth. In the Goold production, set in a th-century totalitarian state (Stalinist, where Welles’s Macbeth, like his  stage production of Julius Caesar, had fascist trappings), the witches played a prominent role, but were stripped of any supernatural qualities, providing ironic commentary on the action. They were nurses in a military hospital (nurses who preferred to kill their patients rather than alleviate their sufferings) and later served as waitresses at the banquet. Their opening scene was cut entirely, and if the action appeared to be in a kind of hell, there was no glimpse of an alternative, any more than in the Polanski film. Nunn’s production presented a Duncan who clearly lived up to Macbeth’s description in a soliloquy that presents all the reasons why, as his kinsman, subject, and host, he should abhor the murder he is contemplating: Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off. (..-) In Holinshed, Duncan is no such paragon, but negligent and “slouthfull”, with “too much of clemencie”, whereas Macbeth, “a valiant gentleman”, is one who, in some ways, “might have been thought most woorthie of the governement”, and for ten years is a more effective ruler than his predecessor. 21 The colour scheme of Nunn’s production, with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in black, Duncan in white, brings out the recurrent imagery of darkness and inversion of the natural order associated with the “secret, black, and midnight hags” (..). As Ross says, in a scene of choric commentary following the murder, often cut in production: Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act, Threatens his bloody stage. By th’ clock ’tis day, And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp. Is’t night’s predominance or the day’s shame That darkness does the face of earth entomb? (..-)

20. Mullin, p. ; . 21. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles (), quoted in Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir, Arden nd series, London, Methuen, , p. -.

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His interlocutor, an Old Man, replies, “’Tis unnatural,/ Even like the deed that’s done” (..-). One traditional view of Macbeth, less fashionable now than fifty or sixty years ago, sees the play as in some ways homiletic, presenting the evil consequences of the “violation of the natural order” 22 in the overthrow of a “holy King who represents the stable decencies of the traditional sovereignty”. 23 Peter Hall, in programme notes for his  production, described Macbeth as “the most Christian play Shakespeare ever wrote [. . . ] The text is littered with echoes of the authorised version of the bible, biblical images, and [. . . ] Macbeth himself is conscious of damnation in a way in which no other Shakespeare hero is”. 24 The weird sisters, in such a view, are Satanic agents, representatives of misrule, in a play which reaffirms godly magistracy against demonic magic, in keeping with the principles set forth by James VI and I in his Daemonologie (). 25 None of the productions discussed in this essay treats the play in these terms, as fundamentally conservative in its ideology. There is no divine right of kings in the Nunn production, in which the forces of order are feeble and ineffective. As well as presenting Duncan as unable to walk two steps without support, Nunn includes the “English” scene, omitted in many productions, where Malcolm gives a convincing account of the reasons why he is unfit to be king and might turn out to be another Macbeth. In Nunn’s version of the play, the supernatural is primarily emotional and psychological, a “dagger of the mind” (..) or a ghost with “gory locks” (..) that are projections of the demons within. The weird sisters, prophetesses and tempters, are able by their “supernatural soliciting” (..) to unleash forces within Macbeth, hitherto hidden, which, Macbeth says, “make my seated heart knock at my ribs/ Against the use of nature” (..-). In propelling him toward the murder of Duncan and, later, encouraging him to be “bloody, bold, and resolute” (..), wholly committed to evil, they appeal to his transgressive desires: as he says in addressing the spectral dagger, “thou marshall’st me the way that I was going” (..). In the Nunn production, even the witches themselves are partly the prey of subterranean impulse: the youngest of the three, gifted with second sight and evidently epileptic, utters her prophecies in pain. Neither Welles nor Polanski makes much of Lady Macbeth’s terrifying “unsex me here” soliloquy (.): Welles has his Lady Macbeth intone the lines lying provocatively on a bed. Judi Dench, in contrast, brings out the vulnerability of Lady Macbeth, as she conjures up forces

22. L. C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”, Explorations, London, Chatto & Windus, , p. . 23. John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature, London, Faber, , p. . According to L. C. Knights, in Macbeth, “the society and the political order [. . . ] are represented as supernaturally sanctioned” (p. ). 24. Hall’s programme notes quoted by Gareth Lloyd Evans, “Shakespeare and the Actors”, Shakespeare Survey , , p. . 25. See Clark, p. ; -. It has been argued that, in its emphasis on “the fear of a world without sovereignty”, the play was directly influenced by the writings of James VI and I, and even was written to be performed before the King. See Peter Stallybrass, “Macbeth and Witchcraft”, in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, , p. -; and Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth, New York, Macmillan, .

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she knows to be evil, invading her body as in demonic possession. Ian McKellen says of her performance: What you get with Judi, and with the best actors, is a pumping heart and blood, coursing through the veins, living in the moment, terrified or ecstatic, whatever is required. And able to turn on the emotions like a tap. 26

In both the stage and televised versions, the stripped-down chamber production, free of the distractions of elaborate scenery and costumes (the total budget for scenery, costume, and props was ), allows for performances of great emotional intensity, encouraging the involvement of the audience. In Dench’s sleepwalking scene and in McKellen’s banquet and cauldron scenes, the inner demons were given outward expression, made real. Most versions of the cauldron scene, in which the weird sisters, through their magical powers, summon a series of apparitions for Macbeth, use the episode as an occasion for spectacular scenic effects. Polanski’s version of this scene, with Macbeth drinking the contents of the witches’ cauldron, presents the apparitions as a hallucinatory, drug-induced vision, a bad LSD trip, shown to the viewer in vivid pictorial detail. In the Nunn production, we do not see the apparitions, any more than we see the spectral dagger or the blood-soaked ghost of Banquo. The witches play an active role in the scene, in stripping off Macbeth’s outer garments and anointing him with mystic symbols, in a demonic parody of a religious ceremony. But we see the scene from Macbeth’s point of view and, as in the banquet scene, Macbeth’s visceral reaction is overwhelming. Shaking all over and foaming at the mouth, McKellen’s Macbeth is consumed by “horrible imaginings” (..), the monsters of the mind, evoking with great intensity the tragic emotions of pity and fear. 27 Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood takes a very different approach to the supernatural and to theatrical or cinematic tradition. The Forest Spirit, associated throughout with fog and the impenetrable forest, is a supernatural being, recognized as such by Washizu and Miki (Macbeth and Banquo). Early in the film, the two Samurai warriors, lost in the fog, ride through the forest for what seems to be an endless time, until they come upon the Forest Spirit, a mysterious, androgynous creature, singing tunelessly and seated at a loom. Though she tempts Washizu, Kurosawa does not present her as an embodiment of evil. As Kurosawa says in an interview, “the Japanese tend to think differently about such things as witches and ghosts”, denizens of a world both natural and supernatural, alluring and frightening, but neither good nor evil. 28 In addressing the two warriors, with prophecies more or less parallel to those in Shakespeare’s play (telling Washizu that he shall advance to become lord of the castle, and Miki that his son will hold the same position), the Forest Spirit delivers a warning as well as holding out the promise of great things. The Forest Spirit, a ghost-like apparition, remote and virtually expressionless, tells Washizu, “You humans! Never will I comprehend you [. . . ] You are afraid of your

26. McKellen, in Curry, p. . 27. On the performances of Dench and McKellen in these scenes, see Mullin, p. -; and Kliman, p. -. 28. See Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, rd ed., Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press, , p. .

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desires”. 29 After she vanishes into the swirling fog, we can see a pile of bones next to the place where her hut stood, a reminder, as in Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci, of previous victims. More than in Macbeth, where Macbeth chooses evil freely, aware of the consequences, there is a sense here of a pattern repeated, reinforced in this scene by the inexorable motion of the loom. The film begins and ends with a chorus chanting, as mists fill the screen: Behold, within this place Now desolated stood Once a mighty fortress. Lived a proud warrior Murdered by ambition, His spirit walking still. Vain pride then and now will Lead ambition to kill. 30 Throughout Throne of Blood, the world of nature, symbolized by the forest, is contrasted with the rigidities of the rule-bound world of man, exemplified by the fortress, which Washizu and Miki are pledged to defend, the object of man’s futile ambition. The title of the film in Japanese may be translated as The Castle of the Spider’s Web, and in subtitles the two, incompatible yet linked, are called “Cobweb Forest” and “Cobweb Castle”. Trained as a painter, Kurosawa composed his “fortress” scenes in strict rectangular patterns, with an emphasis on the horizontal: “I gave strict directions about the poses of the characters. If the actors moved into an incorrect position, the balance of the picture was broken”. 31 The severe formality of the approach provides a distancing effect, adding to the sense of inevitability. Kurosawa commented on his technique: There are very few close-ups. I tried to do everything using full-shots. Japanese almost never make films this way and I remember I confused my staff thoroughly with my instructions. They were so used to moving up for moments of emotion and I kept telling them to move back. 32

Scenes in the forest, presented as a labyrinth, are sometimes shot through a network of branches, both trapping and excluding the two Samurai. At one point, lost in the forest, Washizu shoots an arrow into the fog and trees, and the two hubristically claim they will “break through” with their arrows or spear. In a stunning scene toward the end of the film, a flock of birds invades Washizu’s castle, as an eruption of the world of nature Washizu seeks to dominate or keep at bay. In the second scene with the Forest Spirit, equivalent to Shakespeare’s cauldron scene, the prophecy—equivocating “double” words (..), “lies like truth”, as in Macbeth (..), promising a false security—is that Washizu will remain invulnerable unless the forest itself moves against him. Kurosawa eliminates the 29. Quoted in Richie, p. . 30. Ana Laura Zambrano, “Throne of Blood: Kurosawa’s Macbeth”, Literature/Film Quarterly , , p. -, esp. ; see also Richie, p. . 31. Kurosawa, quoted in Roger Manvell, Shakespeare and the Film, New York, A. S. Barnes, , p. . 32. Kurosawa, quoted in Richie, p. .

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second and third prophecy; and the moment when the forest actually seems to move provides another powerful visual effect. The suggestion here of nature’s revenge against proud, vain man is the fulfilment of a pattern of imagery running through Kurosawa’s tightly structured film. The film’s most celebrated moment, where Washizu is transfixed by vast numbers of arrows from his own men, combines several strands of imagery: the wooden arrows returning to their origins in the forest, serving nature rather than man; the humbling of the ambitious warlord’s pretensions; and the final rebellion, through self-interest, of the common soldiers that Kurosawa has shown, in several choric scenes, discussing the prospects of their masters. What Kurosawa has done in this film is to find a Japanese equivalent for the feudal society depicted in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and cinematic equivalents, in sometimes wordless scenes, for the central moments in Shakespeare’s play. The society in Throne of Blood is both rigidly hierarchical (with servants prostrating themselves before their masters) and militaristic, rewarding self-seeking violence: in such a world, the film suggests, every Samurai wants to rise by killing his lord. There are differences between the society “during the period of the civil wars in Japan” (when, as Kurosawa remarks, “plenty of incidents like those portrayed in Macbeth” occurred), and that in Shakespeare’s play. 33 The name “king” does not appear in Throne of Blood, but, without any centralized court rule, rival warlords struggle against one another: in Throne of Blood, Duncan’s equivalent, who seized power by murdering his predecessor, is threatened not only by his ambitious lieutenants, but by a neighbouring warlord, with troops poised to invade. Maqbool (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, ), an impressive recent Bollywood version of Macbeth, which like Throne of Blood transplants Shakespeare’s play into the conventions of an entirely different society, makes Duncan a powerful warlord in the Mumbai Mafia and Macbeth and Banquo his henchmen, and strips the play of any supernatural element, and of any emphasis on ethical norms being violated. 34 In Throne of Blood, as in the feudal Scottish world of Macbeth, ideals of honour, loyalty and service, under the Samurai code, are supposedly the basis of the society, though frequently betrayed in practice: He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, Who should against his murderer shut the door, Not bear the knife myself. (..-) Or, as Macbeth says to Duncan, hypocritically, “The service and the loyalty I owe,/ In doing it, pays itself” (..-). The conventions underlying the film are those of the Noh theatre, especially in the portrayals of Washizu, his wife Asaji, and the Forest Spirit, with a masklike stillness and extreme, ritualized stylization. According to Kurosawa, the performances of Toshirô Mifune and Isuzu Yamada were modelled on Noh masks 33. Kurosawa, quoted in Manvell, p. ; see Zambrano, p . 34. In Maqbool, the figures corresponding to the weird sisters are corrupt policemen.

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he showed the actors, of a warrior and a woman undergoing “an unearthly feeling of tension”: “First of all, the Noh has the mask, and while staring at it, the actor becomes the man whom the masks represents”. 35 Asaji, in particular, except in the moment when Washizu, offscreen, is murdering his lord, remains unnaturally still, with a mask-like expression, often at variance with the words she is speaking. At the moment of the murder, Asaji suddenly erupts in a frenzied dance, as though she has been possessed by the spirit of Washizu, acting out the murder vicariously. 36 In Shakespeare’s play, Lady Macbeth is “equated with [. . . ] the unholy family of the witches” in a number of ways, as malign forces, trafficking with spirits, who are disruptive of the traditional verities, proponents of disorder. Kurosawa uses the conventions of Noh drama to make the symbolic equation of Asaji and the Forest Witch even more explicit: according to one critic, they “function as a single character through most of the film”. 37 Noh is ritual drama, with its masks, stillness, relatively toneless, uninflected manner of speaking, and even its characteristic sound effects prescribed and conventionalized, remote from any Western theatrical traditions. In the Forest Spirit, the dead-white colouring and the lack of emotion or expression add to the sense of otherworldliness, whereas with Asaji, paradoxically, her mask-like stillness heightens dramatic tension. In the scenes between husband and wife, the pent-up, explosive violence of Toshirô Mifune’s Washizu, breathing heavily, grunting, and erupting into frenzied movement, is contrasted with Asaji’s apparent calmness. Visual images of horses, galloping or trembling in response to supernatural terrors, are associated with Washizu throughout the film. Again and again, Kurosawa finds visual equivalents for the key moments in Macbeth. Kurosawa leads up to the murder of Washizu’s lord with a long, wordless scene in which, after Washizu, motionless, sees visions of blood on the walls and floor of the room, Asaji hands him a long spear, virtually compelling him to take the initiative. In the banquet scene, the guests enact the empty rituals of courtesy and hierarchy, until Washizu, on seeing the ghost of Miki, leaps frantically around the room, slashing at the air with his sword, in paroxysms of terror. 38 In recent years, there have been a number of studies of witchcraft and the supernatural in Macbeth written from a feminist perspective. What most of these studies have in common is that they take the disruptive, transgressive potential of female power seriously, and that, like the Kurosawa film, they identify Lady Macbeth and the witches in their effect on the susceptible Macbeth. One difference between the weird sisters and Lady Macbeth is that the witches are entirely free of any “compunctious visitings of nature” (..), the “access and passage to remorse” (..): they are already unsexed, their blood made thick. In the play’s

35. Kurosawa, quoted in Manvell, p. . 36. See Davies, p. . 37. Zambrano, p. . On the ways in which Lady Macbeth and the witches are linked symbolically, see Stallybrass, p. -; and Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, London, Routledge, , p. -. 38. On the horses as “immediately responsive to the same supernatural terrors as Macbeth”, see Manvell, p. -.

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symbolic contrast of blood and milk, they are wholly committed to blood. 39 Several recent productions emphasize Macbeth’s childlessness. One production, directed by Adrian Noble with Sinead Cusack as Lady Macbeth, taking a hint from the apparent discrepancy of “he has no children” (..) and “I have given suck” (..), presents Lady Macbeth as grieving over the death of a child. Though Kurosawa omits the scene with Lady Macduff and her son (.), both Polanski and Nunn make much of this scene, with its doomed precocious child, and of the contrast between the good mother, in a cosy domestic setting, and a Lady Macbeth who stifles any nurturing instincts. 40 Kurosawa has Asaji encourage Washizu to kill Miki and thwart the prophecy that Miki’s son will become lord by telling him that she is pregnant, and then has her lose the baby and remain childless. In the Shakespeare Retold version directed by Mark Brozel (), Ella (the Lady Macbeth figure) is presented as devastated by the loss of a child; as Keely Hawes (Ella) says in interview, this “makes her more accessible to a contemporary audience”. 41 One strand of ideological feminist criticism of Macbeth sees the play as misogynist, a “legitimation of the hegemony of patriarchy”, expressing “the patriarchal fear of unsubordinated women”. 42 Understandably, no production of the play, stage or film, has taken this hard-line stance, though in different ways the Nunn, Polanski, and Kurosawa versions present Shakespeare’s play as “an arena of ideological contest more than one of ideological legitimation”. 43 In production, it is possible to call into question conventional ideas of kingship, of order and disorder, of the relationship of the visible and invisible worlds, and—as Lady Macbeth does in a biting exchange with her husband—notions of masculinity, manly fortitude: Macbeth I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.

39. On the witches’ language as devoid of moral sensibility, guilt, or remorse, see Dympna Callaghan, “Wicked Women in Macbeth: A Study of Power, Ideology and the Production of Motherhood”, in Reconsidering the Renaissance, ed. Mario di Cesare, Binghamton, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, , p. -; and Adelman, p. -. 40. For an interview with Sinead Cusack about the  production, see Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices, London, Women’s Press, , p. -; and, for a commentary on this production and others, see Carol Rutter, “Remind Me: How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”, Shakespeare Survey , , p. -. 41. See Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, London and New York, Routledge, , p. . The film version directed by Geoffrey Wright () begins with Lady Macbeth grieving at the grave of her dead child. 42. Stallybrass, p. ; . 43. Callaghan, p. . An extreme version of ideological criticism is Diane Purkiss’s hostile account of Macbeth, contemptuous of Shakespeare as a servant of patriarchy, pandering to debased public taste in its “exploitative sensationalism”. Witches in this argument are real women, with real life experiences, and their “female voices” are “suppressed” in Shakespeare’s play: see Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History, London and New York, Routledge, , p. -.

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Warren CHERNAIK Lady Macbeth 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. (..-)

In a wittily provocative essay, Terry Eagleton brings out the disruptive potential in Macbeth, suggesting ways in which the play’s representation of witches and the supernatural undermines conventional pieties: Positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches. The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognizes the fact, and however much the critics have set out to defame them. It is they who, by releasing ambitious thoughts in Macbeth, expose a reverence for hierarchical social order for what it is, as the pious self-deception of a society based on routine oppression and incessant warfare. The witches are exiles from that violent order, inhabiting their own sisterly community on its shadowy borderlands [. . . ] In this sense the witches figure as the “unconscious” of the drama, that which must be exiled and repressed as dangerous but which is always likely to return with a vengeance. 44

Something of this sense of the witches as a society’s unconscious, bubbling up through the attempts to contain it, and revealing the fissures in a hierarchical, militaristic society, is hinted at in Throne of Blood and in Polanski’s deeply sceptical film. Psychoanalytic criticism like that of Janet Adelman, with its emphasis on the construction of masculinity and on Macbeth’s ambivalent response to female influences, 45 is to some extent reflected in some recent productions, including Nunn’s version of /. In its detailed attention to the fluctuating relationship of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and in its presentation of the forces of darkness as primarily internal, psychological, rather than external, this production of Macbeth is alert to the play’s disturbing, unsettling aspects. In their different ways, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Trevor Nunn’s stage and television version present a self-contained dramatic world in which “function/ Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is/ But what is not” (..-), and where the supernatural is no less real than the quotidian. These two versions of Macbeth differ greatly from one another and from Shakespeare’s play in their treatment of the supernatural. In Shakespeare, writing in a society in which the existence of “divided and distinguished worlds [. . . ] the one visible, the other invisible” 46 was widely accepted, the weird sisters were recognizable as “instruments of darkness” (..), within an overall religious framework, where the forces of good and evil were at war. It is not likely that any th or st century production or adaptation of Macbeth will share these assumptions. In the bleak universe of the Goold and Polanski versions, evil exists, in the form of cruelty, ambition, and the willing service of military or political masters, without any real hope of redress: 44. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, , p. . 45. See Adelman, p. -; and Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare, Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press, , p. -; -. 46. Browne, p. .

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the quotidian universe is a kind of hell, and there is no prospect of heaven. Welles retains a vestigial religious framework, setting it in a primitive, pre-Christian world in which the black magic of the witches is patently more powerful than the feeble attempts of a Holy Father, marching along with the masses of Scottish warriors clad in animal skins, to counteract their influence. Of all these versions, only Nunn and Kurosawa treat the weird sisters and the ghost of Banquo, as Shakespeare does, as liminal figures, straddling the borderline between the real and the imaginary. For Ian McKellen’s Macbeth, unable to trust the evidence of his senses, the demons of imagination, “proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain” (..), are more real than anything in the everyday world. In Throne of Blood, Kurosawa presents a world in which nature and the supernatural (seen as continuous, indistinguishable, in the figure of the Forest Spirit) exist independently of the futile strivings of human agents, mocking their hopes and pretensions.

Bibliography Adelman Janet, Suffocating Mothers, London, Routledge, . Anglo Sydney, ed., The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, . Browne Thomas, Religio Medici and Other Writings, ed. Frank L. Huntley, London, Dent, . Callaghan Dympna, “Wicked Women in Macbeth: A Study of Power, Ideology and the Production of Motherhood”, in Reconsidering the Renaissance, ed. Mario di Cesare, Binghamton, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, , p. -. Clark Stuart, “Inversion, Misrule, and the Meaning of Witchcraft”, Past & Present , , p. -. Curry Julian, Shakespeare on Stage, London, Nick Hern Books, . Danby John F., Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature, London, Faber, . Davies Anthony, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays, Cambridge University Press, . Dessen Alan C., Rescripting Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, . Eagleton Terry, William Shakespeare, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, . Evans Gareth Lloyd, “Shakespeare and the Actors”, Shakespeare Survey , , p. -. Forsyth Neil, “Shakespeare the illusionist: Filming the supernatural”, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson, Cambridge University Press, , p. -. Greenblatt Stephen, “Shakespeare Bewitched”, in New Historical Literary Study, ed. Jeffrey Cox and Larry Reynolds, Princeton University Press, , p. -. Hatchuel Sarah, “‘Prithee, see there! Behold! Look!’ (..): The Gift or the Denial of Sight in Screen Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth”, Borrowers and Lenders ,  . Kahn Coppélia, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare, Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press, .

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Kidnie Margaret Jane, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, London and New York, Routledge, . Kliman Bernice W., Shakespeare in Performance: Macbeth, nd ed., Manchester University Press, . Knights L. C., Explorations, London, Chatto & Windus, . Manvell Roger, Shakespeare and the Film, New York, A. S. Barnes, . Muir Kenneth, ed., Macbeth, Arden nd series, London, Methuen, . Mullin Michael, “Stage and Screen: The Trevor Nunn Macbeth”, Shakespeare Quarterly , , p. -. Paul Henry N., The Royal Play of Macbeth, New York, Macmillan, . Pearlman E., “Macbeth on film: Politics”, in Shakespeare and Politics, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander, Cambridge University Press, , p. -. Richie Donald, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, rd ed., Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press, . Rutter Carol, Clamorous Voices, London, Women’s Press, . —, “Remind Me: How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”, Shakespeare Survey , , p. -. Stallybrass Peter, “Macbeth and Witchcraft”, in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, , p. -. Thomas Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, . Zambrano Ana Laura, “Throne of Blood: Kurosawa’s Macbeth”, Literature/Film Quarterly , , p. -.

Witches and Ghosts in Modern Times Lost? How to Negotiate the Supernatural in Modern Adaptations of Macbeth

Pierre KAPITANIAK 1. Introduction: A busy decade for Macbeth The first decade of the twenty-first century manifests an impressive increase in Shakespearean adaptations for the screen. I had first spotted this abundance when working on Hamlet for the Shakespeare on Screen series, scoring thirteen different screen adaptations between  and  (though not all intended for the silver screen), 1 and I reached a similar conclusion when looking at Macbeth’s fate in the same decade. With no fewer than twenty versions, 2 the Scottish play seems to be Shakespeare’s most adapted play in the cinema, and that does not include the numerous screen adaptations of Verdi’s opera. Just as in Hamlet’s case, the acceleration at the turn of the century is quite evident when compared with the two previous decades: there were eleven adaptations of Macbeth in the s and six in the s. What these two most popular plays for Shakespearean adaptation have in common, beyond their quality as major tragedies and famous monologues, is their supernatural element which seems of significant appeal to modern directors and audiences, for it is neither The Tempest, nor Othello, nor Romeo and Juliet, nor any of the comedies, that can boast of so many film versions nowadays. The two tragedies are part of the world’s literary heritage and modern pop culture, and with the development of the movie industry, since the s, increasingly exploiting sex and violence for commercial gain, it is unsurprising that 1. For an outline of various Hamlet adaptations see my earlier article: Pierre Kapitaniak, “Hamlet’s Ghost on Screen: The paradox of the Seventh Art”, in Shakespeare on Screen: Hamlet, ed. Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, Publications des universités de Rouen et du Havre, , p. . 2. Thus: Leonardo Henríquez, Macbeth-Sangrador (); Klaus Knoesel, Rave Macbeth (); Billy Morrissette, Scotland, PA (); Greg Doran (); Allison L. LiCalsi, Macbeth: The Comedy (); Michael Roes, Someone Is Sleeping in My Pain: An East-West Macbeth (); J. Bretton Truett (); Bryan Enk (); Bo Landin & Alex Scherpf (); Robert C. Bruce (); Greg Salman, Mad Dawg (); Vishal Bhardwaj, Maqbool (); Geoff Warren Meech, Macbeth : This Time, It’s Personal (); Mark Brozel, ShakespeaRe-Told Macbeth (); Michael T. Starks (); Geoffrey Wright (); Nicholas Paton (); Grzegorz Jarzyna, Makbet (); Brandon Arnold (); Rupert Goold ().

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this tale “full of sound and fury” (..) should be seen as one of the most bankable of Shakespeare’s plays for cinema producers. Macbeth’s dramatic potential for cinematic sequences of sex and violence provides the perfect inspiration for directors specialising in genre films, and interested in transposing the Scottish regicide context into many diverse modern filmic genres, including the gangster film (Ken Hughes, William Reilly, Greg Salman, Geoffrey Wright, Nicholas Paton), post-apocalyptic Mad-Max-like films (Michael Bogdanov, Brandon Arnold) or even domestic restaurant tragedies (Billy Morrissette, Mark Brozel) and a James Bond film—Macbeth  (Geoff Warren Meech). In all these modern adaptations and rewritings of Macbeth, one can notice a shift in representing the supernatural on screen, which can be roughly dated to the turn of the century. Most, although not all, twentieth-century film adaptations took a rather “traditional” approach to the witches, depicting them as old and ugly crones (Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, Trevor Nunn and Jack Gold). 3 The more recent directors have opted for witches that are generally much younger and more attractive and such choices usually accompany a modernisation of the setting as the film transposes the Scottish medieval plot. Yet this modernisation neither discards the witches’ supernatural powers, nor eliminates them from the plot. Rather, these adaptations negotiate the magic that the three weird sisters confer on the play in accordance with twenty-first century beliefs or interests in the uncanny and the paranormal and pursuant to the enduring interest in horror and gore genres in the past decade. The present paper will focus on three recent adaptations of the tragedy in which such negotiations are particularly relevant from the point of view of generic requirements, namely Brandon Arnold’s (), set in a post-apocalyptic no man’s land, Geoffrey Wright’s (), set in a drug-dealing Melbourne gang war, and Rupert Goold’s (), set in a Stalinist dictatorship and aligning with the codes of war films.

2. Teenage mutant witches in a Mad-Max wasteland One of the explanations for the increase in filmic versions (though not for the specific choice of Macbeth) is the digital revolution, which has made it relatively easy, accessible and cheap to shoot films with a minimal budget, as well as to broadcast them, via the internet (in streaming or on YouTube), rather than through the traditional circuits of cinema distribution. This cultural shift is a relevant context for Brandon Arnold’s adaptation. Arnold, a filmmaker and teacher at East Hollywood High School in Salt Lake City, shot Macbeth in  with a cast of students. 4 Its aesthetic is in the style of George Miller’s Mad Max () and is

3. Being old and ugly is not necessarily incompatible with attraction or a sexual dimension to “crone” witches. As Charles Forker observed at the Prague seminar, one of Polanski’s witches is a young woman and “highly sexualized”. At the same time, she is pictured as mentally deficient which renders this “sexualisation” problematic. 4. After this first Shakespearean project, Brandon Arnold carried on with Much Ado About Nothing () and is currently working on Hamlet.

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influenced by Michael Bogdanov’s post-apocalyptic version (). Though the film is an amateur production, it is valuable to examine the way it negotiates the supernatural elements of the play within the chosen generic framework for the film. The first scene especially achieves an effect of surprise and originality in depicting the three witches (played by Devon Tropp, Kelly Rice and Sadie Velasquez). In a landscape of windy desert and barbed wire, inside an old, decrepit shed in the middle of nowhere, three rather young and far from ugly girls (although one of them wears a sort of mask which deforms her traits and suggests her skin is peeling off) manage to seem weird, either insane or ill. They wear rugs, are dishevelled and move in a strange way. Their facial expressions are rather dull, or even retarded, and their words are quite difficult to make out without a sound knowledge of the playtext (and indeed the film adds subtitles for these passages). The uncanny effect that the scene produces on the viewer arises from the fact that it was shot in reverse and played backwards. To achieve that, the witches’ dialogue must have been recorded phonetically (maybe using a reverse playing of the soundtrack) and then dubbed on to the film in reverse mode, so that the words are back into normal sequence, though quite distorted.

Plate : Brandon Arnold’s Macbeth (). The elements which create the sisters’ weirdness are indebted to horror genre clichés as well as to those of the post-apocalyptic genre. Among the former, backmasking (recording a speech backward), first introduced by the Beatles, has been for several decades associated with the devil and Satanism, 5 and it was a regular feature of hard-rock bands to include backmasking in their songs. Reverse speech, with its Satanic associations, is thus a perfect medium for the prophetic 5. Before the twentieth century, backward speech had traditionally been associated with Satan, and in the Renaissance period, saying a prayer backwards was a typical feature of witches’ Sabbaths and devil’s conjuring. See Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (): “Within this circle is Jehovah’s name,/ Forward and backward anagrammatized” (A-Text, ..-, ed. David Bevington, Doctor Faustus and other plays, Oxford University Press, , p. ). I would like to thank Charles Forker for pointing out this reference.

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witches. 6 It is not the first time that reverse recording has been associated with Macbeth’s witches: Leonardo Henríquez’s Macbeth-Sangrador () staged a witches’ Sabbath in ., in which the three witches danced to a tune sung backwards. In Arnold’s film, this first scene has a symmetrical construction starting and ending with an inside view of the shed illuminated by the outside daylight. In fact, upon closer analysis, it appears that it is not the whole sequence that was shot in reverse, but only the second part, the first being filmed normally. It thus transforms this first apparition into a visual palindrome. The witches’ costumes are indebted to the Mad-Max aesthetic, as is the film as a whole. The film presents a chaotic world with no industrial production, in which people survive on what they can find or make themselves. The action takes place in some kind of North American Indian reserve (or rather wasteland) and the battles, that are given a thorough development, combine the use of guns with numerous improvised weapons, from swords to gardening tools. In such a context, the depiction of the witches’ faces suggests another apocalyptic element: one of the witches especially seems to have skin problems, presumably due to the radioactive consequences of a nuclear disaster. This is emphasised by the systematic use of extreme close-ups of the witches’ faces. The other two scenes in which the witches appear share some of these elements. All three scenes of the sisters are shot in specific colour filters: the first one in bluish hues, the second in brown and the last in red/yellowish. The reverse shooting and backmasking are used in the subsequent scenes, as are the close-ups. Yet in the last scene (.), the witch who has a damaged face is veiled, and when it comes to the final prophecies, their voices are replaced with normal, but clearly male, ones. This last scene takes place inside a deep cave in the middle of a wintry forest and opts for a more traditional lighting from below (reminiscent of the usual cauldron scenes in other productions). By comparison, the treatment of Banquo’s ghost (played by Jeremy Higley) is quite devoid of any original device. In ., he is shown simply sitting at the table, his throat covered with blood. The only supernatural element alerting the audience is a low buzzing sound that accompanies the apparition and returns in . when the witches conjure up his ghost again for the prophecy. Thus the old crones of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, commonly depicted as such in twentieth-century productions, are replaced here by much younger figures, post-nuclear mutants, no longer old and ugly, though one of the reasons for such a change might be accounted for by the student cast of the project, who are all teenagers.

6. A contemporary analogue of this belief is David John Oates’s pseudo-scientific reverse speech theory, according to which human speech, when reversed, produces hidden messages indicative of an inner truth. See Oates’s official website ().

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3. Angry young sluts in Melbourne underworld In the earlier Australian production of Macbeth by Geoffrey Wright (), starring Sam Worthington 7 in the lead role, the play is set in a gang war over the control of drugs in Melbourne, inspired by a real gang war that traumatized the city a few years before. The adaptation is indebted to the gangster genre, with the traditional elements of gun fights, disco clubs and wealthy villas. Accordingly, Wright offers three weird sisters akin to the genre codes, which he justifies as follows: “If you want to lead a gangster astray, use a nubile young thing; it made absolute internal sense to us. You add a few drugs, you add a little booze, you get your teenage girls doing their business and hey presto, you’ve got a gangster led astray very quickly”. 8 As Amanda Kane Rooks has observed, the whole film’s emphasis is on sexuality, and especially the way sex may be used for wielding power either by withholding it (Lady Macbeth) or by overusing it (the witches). 9 As in Arnold’s version, the witches appear three times and Hecate’s scene is cut, but in Wright’s treatment of the witches, there is a clear progression from one scene to another, retracing the whole process of the witches’ seduction of Macbeth. In ., the first glimpse we get of Wright’s witches is that of young schoolgirls (played by Chloe Armstrong, Kate Bell and Miranda Nation) desecrating a graveyard, breaking statues and tagging tombstones in a hysterical frenzy, while Macbeth and his wife visit their young son’s grave. Only Macbeth spots the three schoolgirls from a distance, while Lady Macbeth (Victoria Hill) is sobbing over the tombstone. In ., after the battle, and while Banquo is throwing up in the toilets, Macbeth puts on the music and adds dry ice to the dance floor of the club. The three girls, this time in sexy dresses, dance with him, chat him up and disappear after a final kiss, once again as if it were just a dream, since Macbeth runs into Banquo, who has not seen anything. In ., one of the witches, stark naked, comes to Macbeth’s bedside to wake him up and take him to the kitchen, where the cauldron scene is acted out by three naked witches, before they finally make love to Macbeth in another room of his house, lit with hundreds of candles for the occasion. The excessive sexuality of the young adolescent witches is one of the dominant features of the film. As Rooks aptly observes, Geoffrey Wright’s sexual witches “flout the conventions of ‘appropriate’ femininity” just as the “bearded” and ambiguous hags in Shakespeare’s times did. 10 As in Arnold’s version, there is a reference to the cross-gendered nature of the witches as they speak some words of the prophecies in . in a throaty male voice. 11 The play thus enacts a whole process of seduction from first sight eye contact to final physical intercourse, with the witches portrayed as active seducers and 7. Worthington later became world famous for his part in Avatar (James Cameron, ). 8. , published  September . 9. Amanda Kane Rooks, “Sexualized Evil in Geoffrey Wright’s Macbeth”, Literature/Film Quarterly , , p. -. 10. Ibid., p. . 11. Such a voice is also a common feature of horror films, widely popularized by William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (). I would like to thank Victoria Bladen for this suggestion.

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Macbeth as a passive victim of their “charms”. Yet Wright’s film is not the first adaptation of Macbeth to use sexy young witches: Klaus Knoesel’s Rave Macbeth () set the tragedy in a rave night-club, and Knoesel’s universe is very close to Wright’s as he depicts drug-dealers struggling for power within a gang led by Hecate. Although the film is a loose adaptation of the tragedy with modern dialogues, the witches play a similar role, seducing and making love to Marcus (Macbeth), notably in a scene whose aesthetic choices are quite similar to Wright’s. Another version, shot in Venezuela by Leonardo Henríquez—Macbeth-Sangrador ()—is set in nineteenth-century South America where Maximiliano joins a band of thieves (or bandidos) and struggles for power; this version also portrays the three witches as young, beautiful and naked women. Although the chosen period and the aesthetic choices of Sangrador are different from Wright’s, it is quite intriguing that the Venezuelan naked witches have animals tattooed on their skin, just like their Australian counterparts. Though I could not find any trace of the borrowing in Wright’s interviews, who only acknowledges his debt to Asian cinema, the influence seems beyond a simple coincidence.

Plate : Leonardo Henríquez’s Macbeth-Sangrador (). At about the same time as Geoffrey Wright, Nicholas Paton was shooting his own version of Macbeth, similarly set in a London underworld with Anthony Head (made popular through TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer [Fox, -] and Merlin [BBC, -]) in the role of Duncan, portrayed as a godfather figure. 12 Unfortunately, the film, which was to be released in , was blocked by Head’s 12. “Tony plays Duncan as a spitting, cigar-chomping criminal leader, with a soft Glaswegian accent that can turn in an instant from warm and affectionate to fatally menacing [. . . ] The murder of Duncan reflects the loss of the last of the old-school gangsters as a new generation rise to power, a generation without the same moral sensibilities and rules of conduct as Duncan’s—much as Brando’s Don Corleone is ousted by a younger more reckless generation in The Godfather”: interview with Nicholas Paton, .

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Plate : Geoffrey Wright’s Macbeth (). refusal to shoot additional takes. Nevertheless, the few pictures and the trailers that are available online show that the witches are young attractive women.

Plate : Nicholas Paton’s Macbeth (). Such choices are arguably dictated by the genre of the gangster film. Thus all three directors opted to foreground sexuality as the distinctive feature of their modern witches. Wright’s treatment evokes the idea of sexual fantasy; it is unclear whether the witches are only a figment of Macbeth’s imagination, particularly since Wright eliminates any other witness, Banquo included. From the first scene, Wright makes it clear that the Macbeths are on drugs, and it is especially insisted upon in the nightclub where Macbeth is seen to take ecstasy and drink alcohol. This impression is further suggested by the way Banquo’s ghost is treated in .. Unlike

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many versions, here there is no physical presence of the ghost (Steve Bastoni); it only appears in the mirror that hangs next to Macbeth’s seat. The unreality of the ghost is emphasised by the staging of its second apparition when he is seen strangling Macbeth in the mirror, while the guests see only Macbeth writhing in his chair.

Plate : Geoffrey Wright’s Macbeth (). In a genre which is not usually open to supernatural phenomena, Wright chooses to relegate the witches and ghosts to the realm of the unconscious, of fantasies that dwell only in Macbeth’s folly.

4. Sickening nuns in godless tyranny No doubt influenced by such recent films as Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (), set in a fictitious Fascist world of the s, Rupert Goold’s Macbeth, starring Patrick White, transposes the Scottish world into a late s Stalinist regime. Unlike Arnold’s or Wright’s, this film is not an original cinematographic project, but a translation into the film medium of a successful theatre performance that premiered in May . In order to keep up with the spirit of the initial performance, and despite many outdoor scenes, the setting for the majority of dialogues is limited to the underground corridors of mid-twentieth century bunkers and castles. The Communist setting ostensibly precludes the supernatural dimension. In a universe where religion is the opiate of the people, the weird sisters, in a clever pun, 13 turn into three nurses (played by Lara Rees, Niamh McGrady and Polly Frame), of cold and disquieting beauty. Their costumes, reproducing the green 13. Nurses in Britain are still referred to as “Sisters”.

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and white outfit of nurses during World War II, together with the use of a halo or background of illuminating light in several scenes, reminds the spectator that these nurses are a sinister inversion of the religious traditions of the profession.

Plate : Rupert Goold’s Macbeth (). In Goold’s version, both the evil represented by the three nurses and the antagonistic forces of Christendom are set against the nihilistic world of Macbeth’s godless communist state. This is made quite clear in . when Malcolm (Scott Handy) prays in a chapel during his dialogue with Macduff (Michael Feast). Goold opposes two blocks: the righteous White Russian Christian faction and the evil Red Soviet Communist regime, Macbeth’s ambition fittingly espousing a Stalin-like cult of personality. Although it does not ensue that the witches/nurses side with the “right” faction, their role in this context is quite problematic as they are creatures of a religious world that gradually takes its hold over Macbeth and his godless regime. The final departure of the nurses is made in a cross-shaped blue/white halo that might align them with the godly forces that stand behind Malcolm. Ambiguous as such a vision may be, it seems that what Goold is trying to depict is the failure of the Communist regime to eliminate religion; thus both evil and good forces triumph over an atheistic, godless dictatorship. The religious imagery is further developed in the use of the elevator, regularly going down with Macbeth, Banquo (Martin Turner) or Lady Macbeth (Kate Fleetwood). It is a direct way to evil and then to hell, and the final shot of Macbeth and his wife going down in it after their deaths confirms its symbolic role. As if to make the link even more obvious, the witches are seen to vanish from the elevator before it starts moving at the end of .. Further evidence that religion is at stake in Goold’s reading of Macbeth is in the fact that the three nurses are omnipresent throughout the play, assuming the role of a near chorus. Although, as in most twenty-first century adaptations, . is deleted here, the witches appear in many more scenes than the three initial ones left in the text (namely ., ., and .). They help the cooks in the kitchen in ., while

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Plate : Rupert Goold’s Macbeth (). the feast for Duncan is being prepared, and offer a threatening presence, notably through the use of their carving knives, underlined by freaky music. In ., the nurses wait on the banquet table serving wine and the dishes, and when Banquo’s ghost is about to appear, Macbeth’s seat is first occupied by the three nurses. When they leave the seat, one of the nurses discretely teases Macbeth. In ., the three nurses bring the body of Lady Macbeth on a gurney to Macbeth and then depart. Once Macbeth has finished his monologue and learnt about Birnam, the three nurses return to take Lady Macbeth’s body away. Finally in ., they appear to Macbeth during his duel with Macduff, and he sees them right at the moment when he says “enough” (..), here taken out of context and expressing his surrender both to Macduff and to the witches. Indeed, the editing suggests that it is this vision, more than the realisation of the prophecy, which causes Macbeth to yield to his impending death. Once Macbeth is dead, the nurses leave the room in a flash of halo-like white light. This overwhelming presence of the witches is combined with a realistic presentation of these supernatural agents. From the start, they are shown supposedly administering emergency care to a wounded soldier, but once left alone with him, they rip his heart out in a cruel ritual and incantation, a carving knife replacing the medical instrument in their hand, and a blinding light descending on them from above—a parody of a pagan sacrifice. When they next meet Macbeth and Banquo, once again they hold instruments whose role is diverted from their initial significance. Thus the amputation saw that one of them holds in her hand becomes a threatening tool of a twisted serial killer, rather than the life-saving instrument of a nurse. As for the final prophecies, those are accomplished in the morgue, and the nurses actually make the dead speak the prophecies for them, sometimes manipulating the corpses (and Macbeth) like puppets, and sometimes switching to guttural male voices. At the end of the film, the last shot that is seen, before Macbeth and his wife descend to hell, is that of the empty morgue, in which the

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Plate : Rupert Goold’s Macbeth (). witches performed their weird ceremonies. It provides the perfect closing frame since the play starts with the witches bringing the wounded soldier in on a gurney. Thus again the stereotype of the old crone has been discarded, replaced by younger figures, although without foregrounding sexuality. Instead Goold emphasises their unsettling power by subverting the nurturing role of nurses, indebted to the horror genre.

5. Conclusion: Foul is definitely fair What conclusions can be drawn from these three quite diverse examples? What strikes us most is the change in depicting the witches themselves. Opting not to pursue the “old crone” version of the witches is, of course, not an invention of the twenty-first century. Before the turn of the century, some versions had already staged young and attractive witches, like Arthur Allan Seidelman’s (), but such characterisations were rare. Since , directors of Macbeth have generally depicted younger and often more physically attractive, albeit unsettling, witches. This is true of productions that follow Shakespeare’s playtext such as: J. Bretton Truett (), Bryan Enk (), Bo Landin (), Michael Starks (), Nicholas Paton (), and the three productions I have focused on here by Wright, Arnold and Goold. The pattern is also true of looser adaptations such as Leonardo Henríquez’s Macbeth-Sangrador (), Klaus Knoesel’s Rave Macbeth () and Billy Morrissette’s Scotland, PA (), which replaces the witches with two hippy boys and a pretty soothsayer girl. While there are some exceptions to this pattern, such as Mark Brozel’s (), which depicts the witches as rubbish bin men, or Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool (), where the witches are policemen, on the whole the pattern is consistently in favour of younger, potentially attractive, female witches. This pattern is also reflected in

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recent theatrical practice: Lynne Collins (Colorado Shakespeare Festival, ), Ann Ciccolella (Austin Shakespeare, ), Brewhouse Young Theatre Company (Taunton, ), Charles Fee (Hanna Theatre, Great Lakes Theater Festival, Cleveland, ), Joe Hanreddy (Adams Shakespearean Theatre, Utah, ), Kelly Johnston (White Rabbit Theatre, NY, ), and Tower Theatre Company (Paris, ). 14 I would also anticipate that the latest version of the play, Macbett (The Caribbean Macbeth) by Aleta Chappelle, scheduled for , is quite likely to stage young and attractive voodoo witches. One last question remains: why should twenty-first-century directors suddenly transform the witches into young and pretty figures? The three versions I have analysed offer some evidence that reshaping their witches is affected by the recognizable genre elements that these films borrow from or belong to. At the same time, these arguments do not always successfully account for such a choice. Interestingly, despite the predominance of younger female witches, all three of the films I have analysed use a male guttural voice for some of the witches’ lines, reproducing one of the most repeated gimmicks of the horror genre (a genre that is very popular with the young generation). This accords with the suggestion in the playtext that emphasises the gender ambiguity of the weird sisters, that “should be women” (..; emphasis added). In Wright’s case, although there are seldom old women in gangster films, the rules of the genre do not exclude any such character. Rather, the wild schooluniformed adolescent apparitions remind the audience from the start of another genre—that of high-school horror films. This genre was triggered by the success of Brian De Palma’s Carrie (). Though many of such slasher movies focus on students or schoolgirls being the victims of sadistic killers or revenging ghosts, or both (see the Nightmare on Elm Street series in the s), the genre took a different turn in the s, under the influence of Japanese popular cinema, when the evil character becomes the schoolgirl, like John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps (), a vampire high-school movie probably influenced by the successful TV series Buffy the Vampire slayer. However, the closest inspiration for Wright’s witches might well be sought in Andrew Fleming’s The Craft (), a film depicting three schoolgirls who practise witchcraft. 15 Also relevant is that Wright, before Macbeth, had directed a Hollywood teen-horror flick, Cherry Falls (). Similar genealogy might be found for the more serious version by Rupert Goold. The very profession of the witches in that film and their coldness and cruelty may be traced back to trends in the horror sub-genre focusing on hospital and nurses. Hospital horror has always fascinated directors, whether in psychological thrillers

14. Grzegorz Jarzyna’s Macbeth () also follows this pattern, although he departs from the general trend to cut Hecate and her scene (whether as a consequence of recent Shakespearean criticism that seems to have decided in favour of Middleton’s additions or simply to make the length closer to the usual -minute format. This successful version (which toured Europe after an initial venue in Poland) replaced the three witches with a femme-fatale Hecate, as attractive as all other witches over the past years. Another version that retains the character of Hecate is Leonardo Henríquez’s. In Macbeth-Sangrador, Hecate is a middle-aged plump witch, who first comes to chide the three young witches at ., but then stays on during the prophecies of . and returns after the scene to remind Macbeth to beware Macduff. 15. Subsequently, Andrew Fleming directed a hilarious high-school comedy entitled Hamlet  ().

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like Samuel Fuller’s Shock corridor () or Milos Forman’s One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (), or more uncanny films like Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom (Riget) serial (), or straight horror films like Chuck Russell’s A Nightmare on Elm Street : Dream Warriors (), in which Freddy Kruger changes into a sexy nurse in order to trap and kill a teenager. In this scene, the long hospital corridor in shades of green is reminiscent of Goold’s, and furthermore, once the teenager is tied to the hospital bed by the nurse/Freddy, a deep pit leading into the flames of hell is revealed beneath the bed.

Plate : Chuck Russell’s A Nightmare on Elm Street  ().

Plate : Rupert Goold’s Macbeth ().

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Another central element of Goold’s staging—the elevator—might also be interpreted as a reference to horror film stock. The prop has triggered a whole sub-genre from Dick Maas’s De Lift (), later remade as Down (), to M. Night Shyamalan’s Devil () and, of course, there is the blood-flooding lift in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (). 16 Goold himself has acknowledged such works as among his main sources of inspiration: “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, The Private Lives of Others, Downfall and The Shining were the four films that influenced Macbeth”. 17 Born in , Goold also belongs to the generation that watched such films as Nightmare on Elm Street in their teens. This quick survey of last decade’s adaptations of Macbeth reveals a certain taste for rejuvenated and beautified witches, whose imagery and symbolism is influenced by years of the paraphernalia of various horror films, which provide Macbeth directors with a spectacular language of excess, lust and blood. It is also interesting to note how the inventiveness surrounding the witches is seldom matched by the way Banquo’s ghost is treated in those same films, as if reflecting the secondary importance of this supernatural element (after all merely reproducing a similar scene in Hamlet) when compared with the imaginative power of the weird sisters. The playtext itself gives the witches much more importance and effectiveness than is left for the banquet’s apparition, and from the start of the play’s career, Thomas Middleton had chosen to build on the witches’ scenes, adding songs as well as the character of Hecate, for the revival of the play by the King’s Men in . 18 Four centuries later, the fact that prophesying witches are still more appealing to a modern audience than remembering ghosts might be a sign, as Pascale Drouet suggested, “of a post-post-Freudian age in which enticing immediacy and effortlessness have the edge on demanding introspection to understand who you are and where you may be going”. 19 Perhaps again, indebtedness to popular filmic genres might account for such a difference. I have argued elsewhere that the most successful ghost films in recent years were those that played on the absence of visible representation, rather than on the profusion of special effects. 20 Quite understandably, therefore, directors wishing to shoot Macbeth find less inspiration for creating sensational scenes with Banquo’s apparitions, unless they dare venture into the realm of zombies. . . a possibility that might not be as inconceivable as it seems, given the cultural frame of the forthcoming Caribbean Macbeth by Aleta Chappelle.

16. The Independent aptly described Goold’s Macbeth as “Soviet state-meets-The Shining down in creepy dungeon of a kitchen”: Paul Taylor, “Adventures in Theatreland: Plays get serious again”, The Independent,  September . 17. Interview by Rachel Halliburton, Time Out,  September . Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall () recounts Hitler’s last days in his bunker and no doubt provided Goold with a model for the underground corridors of his Macbeth. 18. See Gary Taylor and Inga-Stina Ewbank, “The Tragedy of Macbeth: A Genetic Text”, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford University Press, , p. -. 19. Unpublished written exchange in preparation for the “Shakespeare on Screen: Macbeth” seminar at the th World Shakespeare Congress in Prague (July ). 20. Kapitaniak, p. .

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Bibliography Bevington David, ed., Christopher Marlowe; Doctor Faustus and other plays, Oxford University Press, . Halliburton Rachel, “Interview with Rupert Goold”, Time Out,  September . Kapitaniak Pierre, “Hamlet’s Ghost on Screen: The paradox of the Seventh Art”, in Shakespeare on Screen: Hamlet, ed. Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, Publications des universités de Rouen et du Havre, , p. -. Rooks Amanda Kane, “Sexualized Evil in Geoffrey Wright’s Macbeth”, Literature/Film Quarterly , , p. -. Taylor Gary and Ewbank Inga-Stina, “The Tragedy of Macbeth: A Genetic Text”, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford University Press, , p. -. Taylor Paul, “Adventures in Theatreland: Plays get serious again”, The Independent,  September .

Macbeth’s Witches: Nurses, Waitresses, Feminists, Punk Gore Groupies

Susan Gushee O’MALLEY

[. . . ] the witches and evil spirits in Macbeth are predominantly elemental—they command and sometimes even embody the weather. Mary Floyd-Wilson 1

The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognizes the fact, and however much the critics may have set out to defame them. Terry Eagleton 2

Within Macbeth’s representation of the witches, there is profound ambiguity about the actual significance and power of their malevolent intervention. If the strange prophecies of the Weird Sisters had been ignored, the play seems to imply, the same set of events might have occurred anyway. Stephen Greenblatt 3

[. . . ] Shakespeare refuses any such direct solutions, insisting that the menace and the pleasure of witchcraft as a spectacle lies ultimately in its destabilizing inscrutability [. . . ]. The witches of Macbeth are a low-budget, frankly exploitative collage of randomly chosen bits of witch-lore, selected not for thematic significance but for its sensation value [. . . ]. These all-singing, all-dancing witches bear about as much relation to the concerns of village women as The Sound of Music does to women’s worries about childcare in the s. Diane Purkiss 4

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The idea for this paper arose after seeing the Rupert Goold production of Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in  and after studying the  film version of the Goold production for television in which the Witches are nurses, in addition to scullery maids and waitresses. Why did Goold make this choice? How did Witches as nurses and servants function in the production? Was his choice effective or perhaps chosen only for “its sensation value”? What did it say about Witches, nurses and today’s audience? If meaning, according to Stuart Hall, is not inscribed in a text but is the result of a dialectic, between the text and those who receive it, 5 or among the play, the director and audience, what are the possible meanings of Goold’s choice? Have the Witches, as simply witches, lost the power that they might have had in the early modern period such that they need to be transformed into something else? Do “the witches exist [only] to be interpreted” in Marjorie Garber’s words, 6 and, if so, will each interpretation reflect and resonate with the culture of the majority of the spectators in the audience? To attempt to answer these questions, in addition to Goold’s production, I will look at the staging of the Witches in three other productions of Macbeth: Roman Polanski’s film of Macbeth (), in which the Witches (played by Noelle Rimmington, Maisie MacFarquhar and Elsie Taylor) are part of a coven, to which Donalbain returns at the end of the play; Trevor Nunn’s stripped-down adaptation of his  version of the RSC Macbeth for Thames TV (in which the not very powerful Witches are played by Marie Kean, Judith Harte, who also plays the Gentlewoman, and Susan Dury, who doubles as Lady Macduff); and George C. Wolfe’s  film of the production for the New York Shakespeare Festival, which depicts very young Witches (played by Midori Nakamura, Latonya Borsay and Ann Reeder), described by Ben Brantley as “punk gore groupies, scavenging for souvenirs”. 7 In Polanski’s Macbeth, 8 about   of the text of Macbeth is cut. Lines - in ., including Banquo’s line, “You should be women,/ And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/ That you are so” (..-), and the Hecate scene (..), omitted in the four productions under discussion, are cut. The film opens with a startling pink orange sunrise on a northern Scotland beach on which the three witches appear. 1. Mary Floyd-Wilson, “English Epicures and Scottish Witches”, Shakespeare Quarterly ., Summer , p. . 2. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, , p. . 3. Stephen Greenblatt, quoted in Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England, New York, Cornell University Press, , p. , note  from “Shakespeare Bewitched”, in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds, Princeton University Press, , p. -. 4. Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations, New York, Routledge, , p. . 5. Stuart Hall, quoted in Richard Johnson, “What is Cultural Studies Anyway?”, Social Text , Winter, -, p. -. 6. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All, New York, Anchor Books, , p. . 7. Ben Brantley, “So Steeped In Blood: A Couple on the Edge”, New York Times,  March , p. . The Theatre on Film and Tape Archive located at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center has videos or DVDs of the productions at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, an excellent resource for scholars. 8. The film was sponsored in part by Playboy’s Hugh Heffner.

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Two of the Witches are old and the third, who is mute, is young, a kind of apprentice witch. One of the older Witches uses her long cane, which cuts across the shot of the scene to inscribe a circle that the other two Witches dig out in order to bury a noose with a severed arm clasping a dagger on which blood is poured (see Plate 11).

Plate : Three Weird Sisters in Polanski’s Macbeth (). Could this be the symbolic burying of war and competitive violence that permeates the Scottish throne or do the Witches perpetuate this chaos and violence? In Shakespeare on Film, Jack Jorgens observes that the opening shots of Polanski’s Macbeth are among the best in films of Shakespeare’s plays; 9 Kenneth S. Rothwell describes Polanski as “a James Joyce with a camera”. 10 The Witches walk slowly down the beach, one of the old Witches separating from the other two, and a fog descends. Before Banquo (Martin Shaw) and Macbeth (Jon Finch) meet up unexpectedly with the Witches in ., we hear moaning, coughing and eerie singing emerge from the Witches’ cave amidst the rainy, foggy weather. The scene begins with Macbeth unknowingly echoing the Witches in ..: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (..). The older Witch, with the black cap with cut-out ears, is rubbing ointment on the back of the younger Witch, described by Jorgens as “possibly pretty under her rags and stringy hair”. 11 Lindsey Scott describes Polanski’s Witches as nurturing and caring in contrast to the “bloody violation of the male bodies”. 12 The Witches hail Macbeth with their predictions, but when Macbeth charges them to speak more, the young Witch provocatively flips up the front of her skirt and runs into the Witches’ cavern, that looks like a dungeon in the ruins of an old fortification. In ., when Macbeth, riding a white horse, seeks out the Witches in a dense fog to learn more, he is pulled by the young naked Witch into her cave where a coven 9. Jack J. Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film, Maryland, University Press of America, , p. . 10. Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen, New York, Cambridge University Press,  [], p. . 11. Jorgens, p. . 12. Lindsey Scott, “Nothing and Nakedness in Polanski’s Macbeth”, Shakespeare Survey , , p. -.

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of approximately twenty-five nude, mostly older, women are preparing the potion in the boiling cauldron and chanting against a background of cacophonous music provided by the Third Eye Band. Normand Berlin comments, “Nudity in a young woman (whether witch or Lady Macbeth) is pleasing to the eye: nudity in old hags, with breasts hanging and shapes distorted, is offensive, grotesque, disgusting”. 13 To me, however, the scene shows a coven of Witches working together to prepare their brew in response to Macbeth’s demands that he will drink to foresee the future. They are not satanic or supernatural but working Witches with some, although limited, powers. Bernice W. Kliman suggests a feminist interpretation: the community of Witches laugh together and cooperate; they are united against Macbeth and the competitive, warrior society he represents. They are not concerned with making themselves pleasing to men but working together to foretell, and possibly disrupt, the future. 14 The Witches feverishly concoct for Macbeth a potion for him to drink presented in a gold chalice. After greedily drinking, Macbeth hallucinates—remember this is —by looking into the cauldron and seeing the reflection of Fleance, a knife cutting a womb with a baby “untimely ripped”, a man in armor that Macbeth kills, and a snake crawls out of, Donalbain and Malcolm clapping and mocking Macbeth and saying he cannot be defeated until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, Banquo on the throne, Banquo with a knife in his back, and the progression of future Scottish kings without Macbeth, seen through a mirror that Macbeth smashes. Macbeth passes out and the Witches disappear. He wakes up alone with raindrops dripping on him through the roof of the Witches’ cave. To understand Polanski’s Witches, it is important to put them in the context of his production. According to Jorgens, “The film projects a much darker view of human nature than does the play”. 15 Roger Ebert states, “This is certainly one of the most pessimistic films ever made”. 16 It is an extraordinarily violent film, or in Berlin’s words, “the film seems to revel in gore”. 17 We see Macbeth repeatedly stab Duncan, with blood gushing out of him, after being awakened by Macbeth’s entry into the bed chamber, graphically illustrating Lady Macbeth’s “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (..-).

13. Normand Berlin, “Macbeth: Polanski and Shakespeare”, Literature/Film Quarterly ., Fall , p. . 14. Bernice W. Kliman, Macbeth (Shakespeare in Performance), Manchester University Press, , p. -: “The alternative, feminist vision, essential if the production is not merely misanthropic, belongs to the cooperative society of the witches [. . . ]. They are a community, and for all their filth and poverty, they are self-reliant and care for each other [. . . ]. The film, which was produced at the beginning of the women’s movement, reflects the moment in history when women, to free themselves from sexist society, avoided makeup and bras”. 15. Jorgens, p. . 16. Roger Ebert, “Review of Macbeth”, ,  January ; first printed in Chicago Sun-Times. 17. Berlin, p. . Kliman states that “Although Polanski rubs our noises in violence, the film continually exhibits a curious restraint” and cites numerous examples such as not seeing the King’s grooms killed or the murder of Lady Macduff (p. ).

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Interestingly, Polanski’s Macbeth is not a tragic figure; 18 in fact, many of his lines are cut. He and Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis) are very young, a controversial casting decision for Polanski. Kenneth Tynan, who worked on the script with Polanski, said “it makes nonsense to have Macbeth and Lady Macbeth performed by -year-olds and menopausals. It’s too late for them to be ambitious”. 19 Macbeth’s motivation to kill Duncan seems to be his anger at Duncan’s choosing Malcolm to succeed him, Malcolm who had not proven himself in battle and who vaunts his new position to Macbeth by insultingly making Macbeth fill his own goblet with wine. There is no sense that order will be restored with the crowning of Malcolm, an unsympathetic character, or in Jorgens’s words, “We sense no moral awakening”. 20 Donalbain’s seeking out the Witches is a fitting ending to Polanski’s Macbeth. We see him dressed in black, riding his white horse to the Witches’ cave, to seek out their predictions for his future. The suggestion is that the violence will go on. The film ends with Donalbain inside the Witches’ cave, but we see only his horse waiting restlessly for him while the film credits scroll over the scene. Perhaps the Witches will predict his rise to power through continued violence, but within this blighted, violent society, these not very frightening, working Witches do not have the power to cause the violence, only to predict it. In ., they only prophesy that Macbeth will become king, not that Duncan will be murdered. In Trevor Nunn’s  stripped-down production of Macbeth with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, 21 the Witches appear even less powerful than Polanski’s Witches. The TV production begins with what looks like an overhead star pattern that soon becomes the actors standing in a circle casting shadows outward. Organ music plays forcefully. The camera moves from one face to the next, beginning and ending with the Witches, who move into and crouch in the center of the stage. All of the actors sit on crates looking into the center of the small circle with a diameter of only twenty feet; all of the action takes place within the circle, so everyone can see everything, although this was more obvious in the stage production than in the television adaptation that focuses on close-ups of the action in the circle. Costuming is simple, 22 and stage props are limited to a golden robe and crown for the Scottish king, a small coronet for Lady Macbeth, three paper-maché baubles

18. Ebert: “No effort has been made to make Macbeth a tragic figure”, ,  January ; Kliman, “he [Macbeth] is not the tragic figure of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”, p. . 19. Mark Shivas, “They’re Young, They’re in Love, They’re the Macbeths”, New York Times,  February , p. . Quoted in Jorgens, p. . 20. Jorgens, p. ; . 21. Critics proclaimed the Trevor Nunn  stage production first performed at the small Other Space theatre in Stratford the best since the Laurence Olivier-Vivien Leigh production at Stratfordupon-Avon in , Michael Mullin, “The Trevor Nunn ‘Macbeth’”, Shakespeare Quarterly ., Autumn , p. . According to Marvin Rosenberg, only  pounds was spent on the  stage production, “Trevor Nunn’s Macbeth”, Shakespeare Quarterly ., Spring , p. . 22. Macbeth wears black leather and boots; Malcolm wears a white cable-knit turtleneck sweater that accentuates his youth, and Lady Macbeth a close-fitting long dark dress with an austere head covering that hides her hair. Richard Ingrams thought that the costumes were “ridiculous” and “poor Judi Dench [. . . ] had to wear a duster around her head like a char lady”, The Standard,  January , n.p., quoted in Rothwell, p. .

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on sticks for the Witches’ prophesies, a minimalist cauldron with one candle on either side, and various objects, such as a thumb, to put in the cauldron and a metal chalice, from which Macbeth drinks the witches’ brew. In ., First Witch (Marie Kean), who is the oldest, presides and is helped by the second Witch (Judith Harte). The youngest Witch (Susan Dury), who sees the future most clearly (she knows Macbeth will soon appear), drools and vomits, and appears often with her mouth half open. 23 Ian McKellen saw the Witches in this production as a three-generation family: grandmother, mother, and daughter. 24 In contrast with the close fitting cap that Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff will wear, Witches two and three have wild, unkempt hair. The play opens with the Witches loudly keening and holding hands, with thunder crashing in the background. The shots of the Witches are cut with a very old frail Duncan dressed in white and praying while organ music plays loudly. The juxtaposition of prayer and church music with the witches’ ritual makes it appear satanic. Although only about  percent of the lines of Macbeth are cut in the Nunn production, a number of lines are cut from ., which makes . follow quickly. The Witches continue to chant and prepare the cauldron brew while the oldest Witch sticks pins in a doll that represents the husband of the sailor’s wife that she is revenging for not giving her chestnuts. After they deliver their prophecies to Macbeth and Banquo, Macbeth demands to know their source and thrusts his sword at the Witches, whereupon they disappear. In both the Polanski and Nunn productions, the Witches, it seems, are not necessary for Macbeth to kill Duncan, although in the Nunn production the Witches’ prophecies appear to have more effect on Lady Macbeth than Macbeth. Judi Dench’s Lady Macbeth is not particularly evil: the Witches have said her husband will be king, Duncan is very old and frail, and her husband wants to be king, so she thinks why shouldn’t he claim his due? For her, the Witches are a “metaphysical aid” which seems to have already crowned him (..). Marvin Rosenberg describes Lady Macbeth in the Nunn stage production as “not inherently wicked: loving her husband, wanting him to realize a dream, she thought, fearfully, ‘Perhaps to kill—once. This once’”. 25 In ., the Witches’ incantation of “Double, double, toil and trouble” to the music of Gregorian chant makes it feel like a black mass, a perverted religious ritual. 26 There is a loud knocking and Macbeth, dressed in a long leather trench coat and looking like a hoodlum, enters and joins the circle of the Witches. After he directs the Witches to answer him, they disrobe him, leaving around his neck a black scarf that they will later use to blindfold him. With gray slime, the Witches make the sign of the cross on Macbeth’s back, chest, and forehead and give him drink from the cauldron in a battered metal chalice whereupon 23. Michael Mullin describes the Third Witch as “a crazed, demented young woman, [who] seemed to possess second sight; her trancelike statements guided the others” (p. ). 24. Julian Curry, Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles, London, Nick Hern Books, , p. ; . Warren Chernaik discusses this in “Instruments of Darkness: Witches and the Supernatural in Four Versions of Macbeth” in this volume. 25. Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth, Berkeley, University of California Press, , p. . 26. According to Frank Marcus, Sunday Telegraph,  September , “The atmosphere was that of a satanic initiation rite”, quoted in Mullin, p. , note .

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Macbeth swoons. 27 While Macbeth rests his head against the breast of the oldest Witch, the three Witches, warning him of what to beware, present him with three baubles—frightening paper-maché dolls on a stick—that represent a figure with a large toothy mouth, a fetus/baby with eyes, and a king with a crown, distorted face, and sword (see Plate 12).

Plate : The Witches entice Macbeth (Sir Ian McKellen) with voodoo dolls, as they paint symbols on his body, in the RSC production directed by Trevor Nunn (). When Macbeth curses the Witches, they bring the candles close to his face three times, blindfold him, and blow out the candles; Macbeth writhes in terror as he, but not the audience, sees Banquo and the progression of future Scottish kings. When Macbeth comes out of his trance, he is clutching the three baubles and is surrounded by his men. For the rest of the play Macbeth clutches and talks to the baubles 28 as if they could protect him against the Witches’ prophecies. Trevor Nunn’s Witches are dramatically effective but not powerful instruments of Macbeth’s fate. Bernice Kliman says, “at most [they descend] to malicious mischief”. 29 The production is focused on the extraordinary acting of Ian McKellen’s Macbeth: his initial consuming relationship with his wife, their crime and his disintegration. The cauldron scene is frightening because the camera is relentless in its close-ups of the writhing, tormented Macbeth clutching at his baubles. George C. Wolfe’s  multicultural production of Macbeth, one of the few Shakespeare plays that he directed for the New York Shakespeare festival, cast Alec Baldwin as Macbeth and Angela Bassett as Lady Macbeth (see Plate 13).

Plate : Alec Baldwin and Angela Bassett as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, in Macbeth directed by George C. Wolfe, New York Shakespeare Festival ().

27. Mullin suggests that the witches’ brew may have “something psychotropic”. The apparitions “express the modern horror of psychopathic dementia, not demonic evil” (p. ). 28. Mullin describes the baubles as “voodoo dolls” (p. ); Kliman calls them his “juju dolls” (p. ). 29. Kliman, p. .

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The very young Witches are played by African-American LaTonya Borsay, Japanese-American Midori Nakamura and Caucasian Ana Reedan. Although the performances were sold out, the production received almost uniformly bad reviews. 30 In ., Wolfe’s witches emerge with a bloody soldier from under the stage through a trap door. The three, dressed in black pants, somewhat sexy tops, and heavy boots, with black smudged faces, deliver their lines seated on top of the soldier, and then disappear through the trap door. In ., Macbeth, dressed in black leather and carrying Banquo piggyback onto the stage, confronts the Witches that are standing behind and below the raised stage with their arms outstretched. The Witches play all of their scenes down low, close to the floor of the stage, which makes them appear not very powerful. Although Baldwin becomes more comfortable in his acting after he murders Duncan, in ., he seems ill at ease with a disjunction between his speech and body movements. Angela Bassett is a very sexy, evil Lady Macbeth with a powerful voice that enunciates well but has little sense of iambic pentameter. In ., the open trap door doubles as the cauldron beside which the weird sisters kneel and writhe. Two of them take puppet-like dolls from the cauldron/trap door while the third gyrates in a crab position. Thunder sounds as the first ugly puppet, “beware Macduff” (), is presented to Macbeth. A baby doll with a bloody umbilical chord follows; the third is a puppet king dressed in white and wearing a crown. When Macbeth asks to know more, there is a clap of thunder, the witches disappear, and a voice from below, perhaps the witches’ “master,” says “Seek to know no more” (). Macbeth sees the show of the eight kings and Banquo reflected at the back of the stage on a large mirror that is one of the few props of this plain, but effective, set by Riccardo Hernandez. Ultimately the witches in the Wolfe production aren’t effective: they are too young, they are not scary, and they play too close to the floor. The production does not build emotionally as it begins at a too intense emotional pitch. Bren Brantley states that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth “are never close to cool conspirators. Their nerves are hamburger before any ghastly deed is done, and hamburger they remain”. 31 The witches in Rupert Goold’s Macbeth (Lara Rees, Niamh McGrady, and Polly Frame, who doubles as the Gentlewoman) are young, scary, inhuman, robotic nurses who kill the Captain in their charge as the film begins; they also assist in preparing and serving food in Macbeth’s castle. They are not differentiated in age or looks except one wears glasses. There is no caring for one another as the witches do in the Polanski and Nunn productions, no nudity or sexuality among the witches

30. Don Shewey’s review, “Scots on the Rocks”, states “This is a relentlessly drab Macbeth [. . . ]. Baldwin is leaden and overly naturalistic—De Niro comes to Dusinane—while Bassett is simply over-the-top highstrung, and overemphatic—Eartha Kitt goes to Juillard”, Advocate , April , , p. ; Brantley called it “relentlessly intense and relentlessly uninvolving” (p. ); John Simon says it is an “ill-stared revival” and the witches “though untalented, they’re very cute”, New York,  March ; however, Linda Armstrong, in Amsterdam News, a newspaper based in Harlem, praised the production: “Shakespeare’s language seemed to come so naturally from Baldwin and Bassett and it was coupled with the precise emotion of the moment”,  March , n.p. Bad reviews, of course, do not preclude valuable critical consideration of the choices that a director makes. 31. Brantley, p. .

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as in the Polanski or Wolfe; these witches are terrifying. Their inspiration comes more from the horror films One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (dir. Milos Forman, ), featuring Nurse Ratched, and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (dir. Peter Greenaway, ), specifically the torture scene in the hospital, than from previous Macbeth productions. The implication is that Goold decided that witches no longer have the same potential power as they may have had in /. Instead of omitting the witches, he chose to reinvent them, playing upon our vulnerabilities. 32 The witches/nursing sisters in Goold’s Macbeth are not confined to three scenes: they appear in ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., and . which implies that evil is everywhere. 33 The witches first appear in ., with the bloody Captain lying on a gurney fresh from battle. They are dressed austerely in nurse’s uniforms with aprons and nun-like head coverings. They wear surgical masks that they remove to speak. One of the nurses carries a hacksaw throughout the production. After the Captain has haltingly related Macbeth’s bravery, one nurse injects him in the neck whereupon he goes into spasms and immediately dies, a monitor indicating that his heart has stopped (see Plate 14). Another nurse cuts out his heart with a knife, puts it in a drip bag attached to a moveable intravenous machine, dresses it with an overcoat and wheels it down a long corridor into the room where they meet Macbeth and Banquo and announce their prophecies. The witches leave by means of an industrial elevator in the back, from which Macbeth will be pushed by Macduff to his death. The next appearance of the witches is in the Macbeths’ kitchen where they are preparing the feast for King Duncan. The kitchen appears to be attached, through 32. Goold says his inspiration came from The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (dir. Peter Greenaway, ), The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, ), Downfall (dir. Oliver Hirshbiegel, ), Nightmare on Elm Street (dir. Wes Craven, ), and The Lives of Others (dir. Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck, ), “Theatre Youthful director Rupert Goold talks theatre and drama”, Afterhours,  July , ; Charles McGrath, “Dramatic Power Couple: Theater Is Their Castle”, New York Times,  April , Section E, p. . Janet Adelman supports the idea of the decreasing power of witches: “The witches may of course have lost some of their power to terrify through the general decline in witchcraft belief [. . . ]. They tend to become as much containers for, as expressions of, nightmare”, Suffocating Mothers Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest, New York, Routledge, , p. . At the same time, contemporary belief in witchcraft still holds sway in some sectors of society. Fear of witchcraft is evidenced by the censorship of the Harry Potter novels for their teaching of witchcraft. Cedarville High School in Arkansas required parental permission for students to check out Harry Potter novels. “The three [school] board members who voted to restrict access to the Harry Potter books shared a belief that the books promoted a particular religion of witchcraft, and all three board members disapproved of witchcraft and the occult. Their votes for the restriction were motivated, in part, by their antipathy to witchcraft.” This was overturned in Counts v. Cedarville School District. See Todd A. DeMitchell and John J. Carney, “Harry Potter and the Public School Library”, Phi Delta Kappa ., October , p. . Tyrone Guthrie cut the witches in a  British production because he did not want to imply that the witches had an influence on Macbeth’s career, Rosenberg, p. . 33. “the presence of the witches in virtually every scene effectively conveyed a depressing but profoundly perceptive insight—evil is everywhere, not just out on the heath, but all around us, and it is forever threatening to bring us down, to lead us, as it does Macbeth, to perdition”, “Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth: Two Views—Marguerite A. Tassi, ‘Arrestingly Contemporary’ and J. W. M., ‘The Elevator and the Smoke’”, The Shakespeare Newsletter ., No. , Winter , p. .

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Plate : “What bloody man is that?” (..). Two of the witches/nurses kill the Captain by lethal injection in Rupert Goold’s Macbeth ().

a series of long, low ceiling, dimly lit claustrophobic corridors, to the hospital that is attached to a torture room that is attached to a morgue, a kind of hell’s kitchen. None of the play takes place outside except for films of battles from Stalinist Russia. Stephen Greenblatt describes Anthony Ward’s set as “brilliantly sinister”, that manages to convey the sense that all spaces in the play are the same: the camp hospital is the morgue is the torture chamber is the witches’ cavern. Inverness, Fife, Dunsinane, and, for that matter, England are all virtually indistinguishable in their sordidness and their menace, epitomized in the rear freight elevator that, as in a horror movie, repeatedly arrives bearing a nightmarish cargo. 34 In the kitchen the nurses/witches are hacking rabbits and birds for the evening’s feast. The “temple-haunting martlet” (..) is deleted but reappears as the bird under the butcher knife of one of the witches. 35 The witches also serve at the banquet where the murdered Banquo appears to Macbeth, dance with the guests, and watch Macbeth’s disintegration. The witches’ scene in the morgue (.) has drawn the most criticism. The scene begins with each of the three nurses on top of a twitching body laid out on three gurneys. Each body revives enough to speak the apparition’s lines while the witches do a rap version of “Double, double, toil and trouble” (; ; ). 36 The witches 34. Stephen Greenblatt, “In the Night Kitchen”, The New York Review,  July , p. -. Goold’s elevator is reminiscent of the terrifying elevator of blood in The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, ). 35. Greenblatt calls attention to this in “In the Night Kitchen”. 36. John Heilpern said it “hover[ed] on the edge of kitch”, “Patrick Stewart Stars in Rupert Goold’s Slasher Scottish Play”, The Observer,  February ; Ben Brantley, “Though their first apparition is a shiver-maker, I grew weary of these weird sisters, especially when they started prophesying in rap”, “UrbanEye: Macbeth at BAM”, New York Times,  February , ; Jonathan Ivy Kidd said the “techno rap [. . . ] brought to mind the genocidal rage-inducing media experiments performed on monkeys in the recent zombie film  Days Later”, Theatre Journal ., December , p. .

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place their hands on Macbeth’s hands and vanish, leaving him to see a succession of Scottish kings. The witches appear again when they wheel out the dead body of Lady Macbeth and watch impassively as Macbeth recites his “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech (..-). The witches are also present to watch Macduff kill Macbeth. In conclusion, Rupert Goold reinvents the witches in his production of Macbeth as instruments of horror; their power is not so much in prophecy as in embodying the omnipresence of evil and in evoking the terrifying atmosphere of a horror movie. One could argue that the traditional witch no longer has the power in our imagination that they once had. Goold’s witches are not the more domesticated witches in the productions of Roman Polanski, Trevor Nunn or George C. Wolfe’s stagings of Macbeth. Goold’s very modern witches/nurses/waitresses move beyond these witches and are used for their sensation value to shock us by evoking the culture of the horror film and a sense that there is no catharsis, no redemption. These witches have little to do with th/th century witches or even with tragedy. They play upon our vulnerabilities in wielding the hypodermic needle or the hacksaw of the horror movie.

Bibliography Adelman Janet, Suffocating Mothers Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest, New York, Routledge, . Armstrong Linda, “Baldwin, Bassett Are Electric in ‘Macbeth’”, Amsterdam News .,  March , n.p. Berlin Normand, “Macbeth: Polanski and Shakespeare”, Literature/Film Quarterly ., Fall , p. -.

Brantley Ben, “So Steeped In Blood: A Couple on the Edge”. New York Times,  March , Section E, p. . —, “UrbanEye: Macbeth at BAM”. New York Times,  February ,