Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’the world,
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!
(3.2.1–9)
In the twenty-first century we sit and witness the tragic farce of this man reduced to nakedness and at the mercy of a violent storm. If he takes off everything, as did G. Wilson Knight as an 85-year-old actor in the 1970s, and Ian McKellen, somewhat younger, in 2007, there is a danger of distracting the audience. Through Lear’s stripping off of his clothes, audiences are being challenged to witness the breakdown of the stability of the self and the social context that sustains it. In the end, the body is primarily natural, not social, and therefore, once rejected by society, divorced from an identity within society, all that remains as a yardstick for judgement is Nature: the body outside the institutions of society, the body that will die and decompose, the naked body that on the scaffold and gibbet of Elizabethan and Jacobean England was literally ‘torn apart’. How this is achieved, without modern-day sniggering or offence, is a challenge for any director or actor, but does that matter?
Key idea
A distraught king crying out against madness and a blind man, Gloucester, later farcically throwing himself from a non-existent cliff, contribute to a sense of the ludicrous fragility of a reality that no longer inspires belief. Each event, and each character, is part of a dramatic discourse at the heart of which there appears to be nothing except illusion and disorder, and an irrationality that informs human conduct. Lear appears to conform to a familiar definition of absurdity: abdicating, forced onto an inclement heath, taking off his clothes in a storm, trying to find out who he is.
In the play Shakespeare confronts social perceptions of reality. If Lear constructs a reality that ultimately collapses, so do Regan and Goneril, so do Gloucester and Edmund, and so, in a curious way, does Cordelia. This is a domestic affair but at the same time it is not a family affair. All the characters are frustrated, more or less, in their individual attempts to resolve satisfactorily the problems that they either make for themselves or that they encounter. The result is that the play offers us a raw expression of the agony of what it can mean to be human in an inward, self-harming society driven by vicious ambition and cruelty.
The recognition scenes
Shakespeare provides three recognition scenes. The first is one between ‘the mad’ Lear and ‘the blind’ Gloucester, which concludes with these lines:
If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.
I know thee well enough, thy name is Gloucester.
Thou must be patient. We came crying hither:
Thou knowst the first time we smell the air
We wawl and cry.
(4.6.171–6)
The second is when Lear wakes in Cordelia’s arms:
LEAR Pray do not mock me.
I am a very foolish, fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less;
And to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
…
Do not laugh at me,
For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.
CORDELIA And so I am, I am.
(4.7.59–63, 68–70)
In these two he deliberately frustrates our expectation of closure, since neither of them is allowed to close the play satisfactorily. The strained frustration of the dramatic structure is thus an indication of the dark chaos of human experience that remains once the social and political context of what were formerly Lear’s identity, mind, sanity and kingdom have been taken from him. There can be no neat solutions to the dilemma for which he has himself been responsible, and we can say the same is true, in a less extreme form, of Gloucester.
A third recognition scene is to follow at the end of the fight between Edmund and the disguised Edgar, when Edmund asks who it is that has ‘slain’ him. But even this recognition, which concludes the subplot, does not arrive in time to prevent the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. The play, therefore, concludes with a curt statement that acknowledges the prevailing sadness that demands attention, while at the same time recognizing the difference between the link between ‘feeling’ and truth and the superficial demands on an imposed utterance:
The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
(5.3.322–3)
It is precisely this conflict between what is felt and what ought to be done that cannot be resolved, largely because there is a gulf between signification (the capacity of language to express a stable reality) and reality itself. Gloucester, too, is dead and so are Cornwall, Regan and Goneril and all for nothing, for the impotence of office. Even the Fool, the touchstone of reality, has been hanged.
Spotlight
In King Lear, despite anagnorisis, the triple recognition scenes can provide no catharsis. Indeed, in allowing the action to lead to an inevitable and unavoidable conclusion, Shakespeare departed significantly from an anonymous earlier play, King Leir, which was one of his principal sources. Perhaps he had even acted in that earlier play with the Queen’s Men. In it, Cordelia and Lear survive and live happily together, but this is not a conclusion possible for Shakespeare’s play, in which he takes his audience to the abyss both structurally and thematically and forces us to contemplate its darkness, where possibly there remains a glimmer of light to be detected in the context of the artistry of the play that has just been performed.
If this is still regarded as a great play – which has not always been the case – I would venture to suggest that it is precisely because of the way Shakespeare pushes the action well beyond his own established rules of dramatic art. In deliberately frustrating and straining his structural template, testing it to its limit, he demonstrates his confident belief in his artistic abilities, as the greatest artists in music, literature, painting, sculpture and, today, the electronic media invariably do.
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Macbeth (1606)
Equivocation is at the core of Macbeth, posing questions and challenges for the audience on a level that goes beyond character and informs the historical context of the play.
The playwrights of the period were craftsmen who, like Shakespeare, understood how truth could be transformed into falsehood by insinuation, as in Othello, or by equivocation, the exploitation of the instability of language itself, as in Macbeth. Social control could be exercised and maintained through language – through, that is, the political control of language – as has been the case through the ages. The Roman historian Tacitus’ realization that, if you wished to bring down a political regime or country, you should first undermine its language, was as true in Elizabethan/Jacobean times as it was for the Romans and as it is for the present day.
What is a traitor?
In John Marston’s play The Malcontent (1603/4), the disguised and usurped Duke Altofronto asks Bilioso, a courtier, ‘What religion are you of now?’ The courtier replies, ‘Of the Duke’s religion, when I know what it is. What religion else?’ The incident brings into sharp focus religious uncertainties, the need for self-preservation, the professional hypocrisy of courtiers and their lack of integrity, all of which are indicative of the social anxieties prevalent in early Jacobean England.
Let us take, for example, the word ‘traitor’. By his control of the Church, Henry VIII allowed for a change of language to take place in which the words ‘heretic’ and ‘traitor’ became almost synonymous. The punishment, of course, might remain the same but traitor has a more secular, political force to it and is dependent on the government in power. It individualized the notion of treachery as an act directed against the monarch, but when the King was, as Henry VIII became, the head o
f the Church of England, the terms ‘heresy’ and ‘treachery’ were synonymous: to oppose the monarch was also to oppose the religious institution of which the monarch was the supreme head, and vice versa. It all depended, of course, on the religion of the reigning monarch. So while prominent Protestants were executed as ‘traitorous heretics’ under the Catholic Queen Mary, so under Elizabeth, who was excommunicated by the Pope, Catholics were regarded as traitors to the realm. Some of them then paid the price by being publicly ‘unseam’d…from the nave to th’ chops’ (Macbeth, 1.2.22) on the scaffold, just as the traitor Macdonwald is reported to have been killed by Macbeth on the battlefield.
Such hangings and evisceration continued with James, especially after the Gunpowder Plot (November 1605) was uncovered, in which Catholics had engaged in planning high treason in the attempt to kill the King and the whole of his government. As Catholics, the conspirators were ‘heretics’ but in their design to assassinate the King and his parliament they were also guilty of ‘treason’. But one of the linguistic devices that captured Catholics used to claim their innocence was to ‘equivocate’, and so another term, ‘equivocation’, acquired popular currency. Equivocation was a means of exploiting the instabilities of language in order to obscure the truth as defined by the State, and it was a favoured strategy of Jesuit dissidents.
The Old Testament commandment ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’ is only ‘false witness’ if it distorts or flatly contradicts the ‘truth’. Equivocation suggests that the ‘truth’ is unstable, allowing for more than one interpretation. Macbeth takes this problem a stage further to ask the following question: Can those in power create a situation in which language itself is abused in order to reverse the normal meanings of ‘good’ and ‘bad’? To do so would be to invert the normal order of things.
‘What is a traitor?’ Lady Macduff’s son asks. ‘Why, one that swears and lies’ is the reply:
SON And must they all be hang’d that swear and lie?
LADY MACDUFF Every one.
SON Who must hang them?
LADY MACDUFF Why, the honest men.
SON Then the liars and swearers are fools; for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men, and hang up them.
(4.2.46–7, 51–7)
The audience knows, of course, that in this case it is not Macduff who is the ‘traitor’, although he opposes the new king, Macbeth. At the end of the scene, the ‘Poor prattler’, as his mother calls him, is stabbed to death because he denies his father’s treachery; nonetheless, the First Murderer calls him ‘Young fry of treachery!’ (4.2.85). By this point in the play we are convinced that ‘fair’ has become ‘foul’ and ‘foul’ has become ‘fair’, thereby inverting normal moral categories.
Macbeth and interpretation
Macbeth was written in 1606 in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot and the executions of Catholic ‘traitors’ and priests and at a time when the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ were being undermined.
‘Shakespeare’s Macbeth – likely in repertory with (Jonson’s) Volpone at the Globe shortly after the resumption of playing after Easter (1606) – managed to do something…profound, registering deeper tectonic shifts taking place in Jacobean England…By early 1606, the fear was all too real that once equivocation took root, “in short time there will be no faith, no troth, no trust”. One of Shakespeare’s most powerful insights in Macbeth is that in so infected a climate…the good, along with the evil, embrace equivocation.’
Shapiro, J. (2015: 228–9)
As we have seen throughout our journey, there is a relationship created in drama between the writer, the performers and the spectators, who are part of a conversation through the agency of the text in performance or in reading. The historical circumstances of the text’s inception need, therefore, to be considered if that conversation is to be meaningful, even though a modern interpretation will impose modern meanings upon it, from current cultural perspectives. Religion cannot be far away from the discussion of Macbeth, nor can the fact that a Scottish king had recently ascended the throne of England, and that a significant political change had taken place with the movement from the Tudor to the Stuart dynasty. At this period monarchical power, whether Tudor or Stuart, was absolute and thus invited flattery. It may be that Macbeth was intended to flatter the new king, although Shakespeare’s method, as we will see, seems to have been much more subtle than mere ‘flattery’ would suggest.
‘Reading’ Macbeth
How do we today read or interpret Macbeth? The play appears to question the reduction of ’history’ to single organic narratives such as ‘the Elizabethan world picture’. Some contemporary criticism has set out to challenge the readings of liberal humanist critics who start from the position of a singular established universal ‘truth’ that prevails through history. Thus Alan Sinfield, writing in 1992 on Macbeth (in Brown, R. D. and Johnson, D. (eds) [2000: 130, 136]), challenged prevailing orthodox interpretations. For example, he points to the fact that Macbeth, in killing the rebel Macdonwald, is hailed as a great warrior by King Duncan, who calls him a ‘valiant cousin’ and a ‘worthy gentleman’, but when Macbeth kills King Duncan he is subsequently seen as a murderer.
Sinfield writes, ‘Violence is good…when it is in the service of the prevailing dispositions of power; when it disrupts them, it is evil’, and he argues that ‘Macbeth focuses on major strategies by which the state asserted its claim at one conjuncture.’ Sinfield argues further that, although certainly portrayed as ‘a murderer and an oppressive ruler’, Macbeth is, in effect, ‘one version of the absolutist ruler, not the polar opposite’.
Readings such as Sinfield’s, in the context of changing ideologies, notions of historical accuracy or universal truth, prompt the modern critic to challenge and review what has been hitherto regarded as critical orthodoxy.
Macbeth in the past may sometimes have been seen as an easier play to study than the other three great tragedies, but today it foregrounds the complexities of interpretation by asking questions about the definitions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as determined by society, by politicians or by anyone who tries to limit meaning. The play itself shifts its perspectives, working through a series of equivocations. In 1986 the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton was providing a very different interpretation of the Weird Sisters than conventional readings allow:
‘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. 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.’
Eagleton, T. (1986, 1987 p/b: 2), William Shakespeare. Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Later, Eagleton revised his view, arguing that the witches, in their negativity, display an abhorrence of the positivity of existence (Eagleton, T. [2010], On Evil. New Haven: Yale University Press), but his subsequent reconsideration illustrates the divergence of views within critical perception, even at times with a single scholar’s reading of the plays.
The murder of a Scottish king as a central concern of the play can also be read in two ways. The first is in accordance with a traditional literary orthodoxy, which would see the regicide as a potentially subversive, dramatic event and a challenge to the philosophy of the ‘divine right of kings’ that James I was known to support. This was the philosophy to which Claudius had appealed in Hamlet when confronted by the rebellious Laertes: ‘There’s such divinity doth hedge a king/That treason can but peep to what it would,/Acts little of his will’ (Hamlet, 4.5.123–5). A second reading is more subversive, in itself questioning the methods of King Duncan, and would seek to determine whether within the claim to ‘divine right’ there lurked a force that the King’s own militaristic regime actually encourages. It would also question the focus of ‘evil’ in the play in female characters such as the Weird
Sisters or Lady Macbeth.
Spotlight
The play here exposes equivocation. James I was a voyeur who used his power over his courtiers for his own vicarious sexual pleasure. Duncan is portrayed often as a holy man (as, for example, by Griffith Jones in the renowned 1976 RSC production), but another reading might suggest that he is the man who sends his thanes off to war while he looks on. Duncan says, ‘There’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face’ (1.4.11–12) but this, too, is an equivocal statement: from one perspective it asserts that you can never know what another person is thinking from looking at their face, thus reaffirming the existence of the hypocrisy and deception which permeates the play. From another perspective it also suggests that there is no need of an ‘art’ to find out what a person is thinking because it will show in the speaker’s face.
Hell’s gate
In the spring of 1606 the Jesuit priest Henry Garnet was executed for his supposed complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. One of the ‘main crimes’ levelled at the Jesuits (members of the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic order of priests) was that of equivocation, of saying one thing to disguise something potentially more incriminating. Indeed, at his trial, Garnet had attempted to justify the practice. Shakespeare alludes to Garnet as one of those entering the hell’s gate of Macbeth’s castle in the Porter’s scene:
Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O! come in, equivocator.
(2.3.8–12)
But, as James Shapiro points out, the person knocking at the gate is Macduff, who in the eyes of the audience is far from being represented as a traitor and even in the Porter’s quipping the equivocator has done so ‘for God’s sake’, which makes his fate ambiguous.
Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction Page 25