As I read my lines for the first time, I placed my concentration on getting a sense, an initial knowing, of who this lady might be. And I confess, as I said the words aloud, I shuddered at her evil ambition. Yet at the same time I was pleased, knowing that if the words and lines were said as they were meant, that if I could transform myself into this seeming monster (as at least she appeared to me in the first half), that the impact I could make on an audience would be a considerable one, surpassing even, I imagined if just for a moment, anything Alexander had accomplished in his career.
Master Shakespeare, who seemed to be able with just a glance to discern my thoughts and emotions, cautioned me as we stopped work for the morning (he having other things to attend to and myself needing to hurry over to the Globe for the afternoon’s performance) to take care with one particular aspect of my playing the lady.
“It will be too easy, John, I think, to present the lady as pure evil. I would hope that you will be able to avoid that. Do not play her as a villain in one of Kit Marlowe’s dramas,” here he chuckled and gave me a look to see if I fully understood what he was saying, “or in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. Or even as you saw Burbage performing Richard III at Whitehall after the New Year. Burbage is as great an actor as I’ve seen and his Richard is everything I would want it to be, but Richard is a very different kind of character than that of Lady Macbeth. Richard exalts in his evil, he enjoys being evil and plotting, and even more to the point of what I am saying is that he shares his enjoyment of being evil with the audience. That is exactly what I do not want for the lady.
“Instead, John, what I want to see you do is this — personate her, play the role of Lady Macbeth, but not as someone who wallows and exalts in their own villainy. Play her instead with more subtlety, as someone who does not know that she is a villain. Play her as someone who convinces herself that what she is doing is good and right, but whose discovery by the end of the play that she is indeed a villain, and is indeed evil, is what drives her mad. Can you do that for me, John?”
I returned the next morning, when Shakespeare and I read through the last portion of the play and my last scene in which Lady Macbeth’s madness is made clear. Then we went back to the beginning, where with painstaking exactness I was slowly led through each of my major speeches.
“It is not a role of great length,” he told me as a way of reassuring me. “Poor Burbage has more than seven hundred lines to learn,” and here he gave me a wink, “which at his age will be no small challenge. You, John, have 259 lines, nothing for a boy with your prodigious skills at memorization. But I promise you this, each and every line counts for much. And as I have written Lady Macbeth to be played by you and only you, young John, I have attempted, despite the complexity of some of the speeches (and indeed, they are the most complex you have yet encountered) to make the phrasing well within your abilities.”
“So, John, let us begin again with the lady’s first speech, reading a letter she has been sent by her husband, Macbeth, telling her of the predictions of the Weird Sisters.
They met me in the day of success, and I have learned by the perfectest report, they have more in them than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire to question them further, they made themselves air, into which they vanished. Whiles I stood rapt in the wonder of it came missives from the King, who all-hailed me “Thane of Cawdor,” by which title before these weird sisters saluted me, and referred me to the coming on of time, with “Hail King that shalt be.” This have I thought good to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou mightst not lose the dues of rejoicing by being ignorant of what greatness is promised thee. Lay it to thy heart, and farewell.
“Note this, John. The letter is prose, which you should be able to read as it is like to your everyday speech. The lady is seen here for the first time reading aloud the final part of the message from her husband, since it is apparent he has already told her about his victory in battle, and apparently as well, about the Weird Sisters, the witches I promised you. Do you believe in witches, young John? I confess, I do not, but our King James does, quite strongly in fact. Indeed, he has even written a book on the topic, which is one of many reasons I have included them in this play. This speech should be quite easy for you to understand and impart to the audience, correct?”
Here I nodded, although I had my doubts but did not want to disappoint Master Shakespeare by saying otherwise.
“And so then, let us move on.
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature,
it is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness,
To catch the nearest way.
“This too should be fairly easy for you to speak, as well as to understand. When she says about her husband ‘Yet do I fear thy nature, / it is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way,’ what is it that she is concerned about?”
I hesitantly answered that I believed that she was wary of his willingness to do whatever it might require to take the next step to become king, and to do so in the fastest way; that he was, “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way,” meaning by this the fastest way to become king. And while I was uncertain that I was correct and that I was able to please him with my response, it was apparent that I did.
“That is a good place to begin your way of considering Lady Macbeth. Now, I’d like you to think carefully on these things as you learn this role and the last lines of this speech. Earlier in the play, Macbeth himself has suggested that he has previously considered the need to kill Duncan in order to advance his ambitions. And now Lady Macbeth has suggested the same thing. Have they discussed the possibility together? Have they arrived at the same conclusion separately? That is something for you to think about as you think about the character, and think as well on the last lines of her speech:
Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear,
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crowned withal.
“Imagine, John, the lady’s poisonous tongue in her husband’s ear, pouring forth her venomous thoughts and ambitions, pushing him on to commit an act of murder that he himself is hesitant to perform. Consider all that this tells you about her nature and her willingness to be as ruthless as necessary to push him to overcome that which keeps him from seizing the crown, what she calls — and I must shamefacedly admit that I am rather proud of this image — the ‘golden round.’” At which point, to my utter bemusement, he gave me a grin brimming with pride at what he had written.
I was, I admit, starting to feel overwhelmed. Master Shakespeare was in such a state of excitement that his explanation was beginning to be lost on me. But as he continued, I did my best to follow along and hoped that when I read the play again myself at a later time, it would begin to make sense.
“Now, on to the third speech, given, as you know, when the lady has received word from her husband informing her that King Duncan will be arriving that night, presenting her and Macbeth, who will arrive home shortly before their guest, the perfect opportunity to … ‘catch the nearest way.’ Some of the language is, I know, complicated, and her thoughts are circling around what can only be thought of as a dark place as she envisions creating her own hell in her castle:
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you Spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood,
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse;
That no compunctious visitings of Nature
Shake my fel
l purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on Nature’s mischief! Come, thick Night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry “Hold, hold!”
“Think about it, if you will, like this, with the poetry and pretty language removed, with just its essence remaining:
“Even the raven, the black, evil harbinger of death that croaks the news of Duncan’s fatal entrance is hoarse, she says out loud. She — meaning you — closes her eyes and raises her arms up to the sky, calling on the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts to take away all that makes her feminine, meaning gentle and womanly, and instead to fill her completely full of the most dire cruelty. She calls on the spirits to make her blood thick to prevent her from feeling the slightest bit of pity, so that no natural feelings of goodness or humanity can get in the way of her evil scheming.
“She then puts her hands on her breasts, summoning those same spirits to remove their nourishing milk and fill them instead with gall most bitter and poisonous. Keep in mind the very fact that she is summoning spirits to provide assistance; consider whether that provides a link, a commonality between her and the witches. She calls on the thick darkness of night to shroud and keep her hidden with the dunnest or murkiest smoke of hell, a smoke so dark that the knife she uses will not be able to peer through it to see the wound it makes, so dark and murky that not even the light of heaven will be able to peer through it to cry out for her to stop! Stop!”
When he paused to catch his breath, I took a deep breath myself, wondering whether I’d be able to portray such a monster in a way any close to believable. But then I recalled to myself Shakespeare’s words of the previous day, not just his words of trust in me, but his words advising me to think of her as someone who does not know or think of herself as evil.
Thinking of her in that manner, it seemed to me, made her actions more understandable. She was doing whatever she thought was necessary to achieve her goal for herself and her husband, and nothing else mattered, even, I slowly understood, the ideas of good and evil. It was something, as I thought about my own rapidly growing ambition to make my mark on the stage, that I could understand and even, if I pondered it deeply and honestly, feared taking place within me.
“Before you go off to the Globe and I go off to …” here he smiled again, “go off to whatever it is I must go off to, consider these things. In the speech we just discussed, take note of how I play with the sounds of words as I did with Arthur in King John. Hear how the hard sound of the letter ‘c’ bounces off with the softer sound of the murmuring ‘m’ which, if I can trust my own ear, will help to convey to the audience the sinister nature of her speech and of the lady herself.
“As well, think on this. Think about the darkness that permeates every moment of the play, from the darkness that the Weird Sisters introduce in the very first moments of the drama to the shadows and fog that envelop every moment thereafter. Think about the blood saturating the play, from King Duncan’s first lines referencing a “bloody man” to the battle scenes and beyond. By my own count I used the word more than forty times throughout the play. Macbeth envisions daggers covered with blood before his eyes. The lady is unable to clean Duncan’s blood from her hands during the sleepwalking scene, which we will go over soon.” And then, giving me a curious smile, he added, “This will be the moment in the play, John, that will prove your worth for all to see. Even brave Macbeth, after butchering his guest and king, finds himself covered, literally and metaphorically, in blood.
“These aren’t your lines, John, but bear them in mind while you think about the play.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green, one red.
“Imagine that, John, being so covered in blood that not even the ocean itself can wash you clean. Macbeth has that sense from the moment of the murder. It will take your character, the lady, longer to see that she, too, is covered in blood, blood that cannot ever be removed from her soul and conscience.”
I shuddered here for a moment, seeing in front of me not only Lady Macbeth covered in blood, but the blood-covered beasts at the bear-baiting I had seen with Alexander. Were we really so far above them as I had thought?
“And not just the blood. Recall, John, when we first spoke of this play, when I told you that one of my reasons for writing it was to try to determine, or at least to present the question for the audience to consider, is the source of evil, in this case that of Macbeth and his lady, is it created by demonic forces outside themselves? Or is it something that is found within them? Is the living hell that they will experience and, indeed, unleash upon all of Scotland, created by the witches seen by Macbeth and the spirits called upon by Lady Macbeth, or is it their creation alone? And on that most cheerful of notes, we must part.”
And so we went through the play together each morning, talking about each scene, the lady’s lines and why she was saying what she was saying, where I should breathe and which words should be given emphasis, and what I should think about while reading and becoming the lady.
When we arrived at Macbeth’s doubts about the rightness of murdering the sleeping king, and when I read the lady’s lines, the lines I myself would be speaking, boasting of her capacity for cruelty, I shuddered:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.
I was unable and unwilling to believe that any woman would say such things about an innocent infant babe. But as I was becoming aware, as the play was teaching me, we as humans, especially when we lose God as the lady did when she summoned the evil spirits to her, are capable of any amount of cruelty.
But then as events unfold on the night of the murder, she proves incapable of performing the act herself, because as she tells her husband after laying out the daggers near Duncan’s sleeping body:
Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done’t.
Was this a seeming last gasp of her humanity, of her conscience holding on against the evil surrounding her? I was not altogether certain, but I knew it was something I would be able to hold tight to while playing her, to remind me that despite everything she still has some vestiges of conscience remaining.
We made our way painstakingly through the play as the horrors piled upon each other, as Macbeth ordered the murders of Banquo, of Lady Macduff, of one innocent after another, as fear and ambition drove him to such cruelty that even nature, after the unnatural murder of the king, began to rebel against itself. Owls killed hawks, and, most horribly, as man turned against man, horses turned against horses and began to devour each other.
By play’s end, the nightmare that was life in Scotland and Macbeth’s castle comes to an end. Macbeth is killed in battle, and Malcolm takes his rightful place on the throne. But before that event occurs, the lady has her final scene, one that in its own way is just as chilling as any before.
The lady’s gentlewoman-in-waiting is found talking to a doctor about her mistress’s nightly sleepwalking. She describes how the lady has a candle with her at all times to dispel the darkness while, most piteously, constantly rubbing her hands together as if to wash them clean.
As they comment, Lady Macbeth, unseeing, approaches and speaks:
Out, damned spot: out, I say. One; two. Why then ’tis time to do’t. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier and afeared? What need we fear? Who knows it when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? …
What, will these hands ne’er be clean?
…
Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh! Oh! Oh!
Despite the evil nature the lady has shown throughout the preceding drama, it was difficult to read these lines, much less speak them aloud without feeling some sense of pity for the suffering woman, driven mad by her role in the murders and her inability to wipe the blood and guilt off her hands.
These are Lady Macbeth’s last lines in the play. She never again appears upon the stage. Moments later, the audience, along with her husband, learns that the lady has died a most unnatural death. Whether she has fallen or thrown her own life away by leaping to her death is never made clear. To this day I still wonder if, as Master Shakespeare indicated when he spoke to me about the play that very first time, he himself was unsure of how it is that she dies.
I knew though that how I played this scene would be of the greatest import. If I was not able, through my movements and reading of those few lines, to bring the audience to pity and even tears for this most horrible of women, what Shakespeare was trying to show would be lost. The lady would prove to be a mere villain instead of a woman, seemingly no longer unsexed, who in a curious but real way ends up as a victim of her own acts of evil.
I was, I must confess, desperate to prove not only to myself but to Shakespeare, Heminges and the rest of the troupe that I could portray more than innocent young girls or small yet dramatic roles such as Queen Margaret. I could fully personate a complete character — one who has not just a single aspect to her being, but many. I could portray a woman who begins the play as one thing, but who, over the course of the drama, changes, not only because of the events that unfold throughout the play but who changes in her own person as well. And I must allow, although it perhaps sounds like a boastful display of pride in my own talents, I had the growing confidence that I would be able to do it, to bring Shakespeare’s creation fully to life.
I Was Cleopatra Page 9