Welcome to Stratford upon Avon...
the hometown of William Shakespeare.
It was in this small market town that Shakespeare was born...
and it was here that he retired at the end of his life...
to die, on St George's Day...
a day that was coincidentally his own birthday.
As you might expect, Stratford is now at the very center...
of what you might call, the "Shakespeare Industry".
The Royal Shakespeare Company has its headquarters here.
The world renowned Shakespeare Center...
is custodian of countless irreplaceable Shakespearean documents...
and the Shakespeare Institute is one of the leading centers...
for the study of Shakespeare, in the world.
We shall be drawing upon the resources of all three of those institutions...
to bring you what we hope will be, a useful...
and valuable insight into the work of the man...
who has been justifiably described as the greatest playwright of all time.
Macbeth is the story of a Thane of Scotland...
who allows himself to be persuaded by a combination of natural...
and supernatural forces...
to murder the King in order to gain the throne for himself.
This sets in motion a frenetic series of events...
which culminates in the death of everything which is dear to Macbeth...
and finally leads to his own unhappy end.
This is the work of a playwright at the height of his powers.
It was written comparatively late in Shakespeare's career...
and he had by this time, largely abandoned...
the more formal verse of earlier plays like Richard II.
The writing style has evolved into a mature style...
which is less structured and more expressive.
In fact, by the time Macbeth was written in 1606...
rhyming couplets were used by Shakespeare very infrequently...
and then only to mark the end of a scene.
I was fortunate enough to play the role of Banquo...
in the film you are about to see...
so in a small way, I feel qualified to pose a few questions...
concerning a man I feel I know very well.
I say man, rather than character...
because it is a mark of Shakespeare's genius...
that his creations come to life so completely...
that we do feel we know them almost personally.
To lead us off on "Macbeth", with it's theme of the supernatural...
we asked Dr. Robert Smallwood of the Shakespeare Center...
and Professor Stanley Wells of the Shakespeare Institute...
just how Shakespeare's contemporary audiences...
may have reacted to the depiction of witchcraft.
After all, we're dealing with a society...
which was very different to the one which we know today.
A lot of fuss is made about Elizabethan audiences' response to the witches.
If you really push me I don't much care...
how Elizabethan audiences responded to the witches.
If we can only understand the play Macbeth...
by doing a huge amount of research into Elizabethan beliefs...
and Elizabethan laws about witches, then the play is a historical document...
and not a work of art.
It's Johnson, isn't it? Who says that Shakespeare...
was not of an age but for all time and I profoundly believe that.
I think what Shakespeare wants from the witches...
is a kind of theatricalization of the idea of temptation.
Poison venom, sleeping got...
Boil thou first i'the charmed pot.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
The witches are always a problem for modern audiences and modern directors.
They are too liable to become pantomime figures...
with their odd properties of dead thumbs and that sort of thing...
they cast into a cauldron.
Finger of birth-strangled babe...
Ditch delivered by a drab...
There were varied attitudes to witchcraft in Shakespeare's day...
just as there are in our own. You can't talk in any sort of overall terms...
on the Elizabethan attitude to witchcraft...
but we might, for instance, take as an example the attitude of James I...
the king at the time that Macbeth was written...
who himself had written a book before he was king of England...
when he was still king of Scotland, about witchcraft, "Demonology"...
in which he shows that he believed at that point in witchcraft.
This would have made the witches, I think...
a more powerful, imaginative symbol...
in Shakespeare's time than they are easily seen to be nowadays...
which is why modern directors often have to find...
more modern equivalents for the witches in a sense.
It could be argued that the most popular play...
that Shakespeare wrote was "Macbeth".
It is certainly the most frequently performed of the tragedies.
It is also the most accessible. The plot is simple and easy to follow...
the action is fast paced and gripping in its intensity.
Some critics have argued that despite its popularity...
this is actually one of the most superficial of the tragedies.
Whereas King Lear, written shortly after Macbeth...
has been described famously as the "great Stonehenge of the mind"...
there remains the suspicion that, in some circles...
"Macbeth" is not considered to be one...
of the intellectual heavyweights of the Shakespearean cannon...
and possibly, we could be dealing here with a work...
which is more concerned with action rather than the intellectual content.
For my part, I am sure that's not the case...
but it is a question that bears closer examination.
I think Macbeth certainly is a thriller.
It's one of Shakespeare's shortest plays, most violent plays.
It's one of Shakespeare's most concentrated plays. It's a play...
without any kind of sub-plot at all...
and its movement is extraordinarily rapid...
from the inception of the idea of killing Duncan...
to the final awful consequences of the road that takes Macbeth along.
So certainly it's a thriller, also in one very technical sense...
in that it almost all takes place in the dark.
There is no play of Shakespeare's that is more a night play than Macbeth.
My husband!
I have done the deed.
Didst thou not hear a noise?
I heard the owl scream and the cricket's cry. Did not you speak?
- When? - Now.
- As I descended? - Aye.
Hark! Who lies i'the second chamber?
Donalbain.
This is a sorry sight.
It is a thrilling and exciting story...
but it is a lot more than that too.
It's a play that works on many levels at once...
and the reason why it is regarded as a great play, I suppose...
rather than just a good melodrama...
is the way that it does explore...
more fundamental aspects of the human condition.
One cried 'God bless us! ' and 'Amen' the other;
As they had seen me with these hangman's hands.
Listening their fear...
I could not say 'Amen' when they did say 'God bless us'.
- Consider it not so deeply. - But wherefore could not I say 'Amen'?
I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen' stuck in my throat.
These deeds must not be thought after these ways;
So, it will make us mad.
Macbeth is accompanied in the early part of the play by my character...
a fellow warrior and noble of Scotland, called Banquo.
While Macbeth takes the path into darkness and evil...
Banquo remains true to the noble qualities and loyalty...
which we can see is in him.
Critics often comment that Banquo is the mirror image of Macbeth...
the Macbeth that could have been, had he stayed on the right path.
It is a topic that hopefully repays some detailed examination.
Banquo might almost be seen as a conscience figure for Macbeth.
He is important, partly because in the opening episode...
in which he and Macbeth are first seen...
Banquo and Macbeth come on together...
both of them are presented with the same temptation...
but Banquo is the one who does not yield to temptation.
As the play goes on...
Banquo retains this symbolic function...
as a sort of counterpoint to Macbeth, as his conscience...
in the sense that Macbeth has to kill Banquo, kill his conscience...
before he can go on to commit the crimes of the rest of the play.
Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis...
all as the weird women promised;
and I fear thou playest most foully for't.
We haven't any idea at that point...
that Macbeth is going to move against Banquo.
He has said nothing to the audience whatsoever...
but the audience immediately hearing Banquo...
thinks this man is a danger to Macbeth...
and Macbeth we have taken into our confidence.
It seems to me that the audience thinks of the idea of killing Banquo...
before we know that Macbeth has thought of the idea of killing Banquo.
You can't totally kill conscience. Murder is not enough...
so that Macbeth still retains...
within himself the capacity to be moved by Banquo...
even after Banquo has died. The conscience is still partly there...
and that's why the banquet scene is such a powerful...
and moving scene as it is, I think.
The relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth...
alters dramatically by the time Macbeth has committed the last of his crimes.
She descends into madness, while he appears to be gathering strength...
and resolve to, in his words, "try the last".
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the early part of the play...
are portrayed as an ideal married couple.
My dearest love...
Duncan comes here tonight.
- And when goes hence? - Tomorrow, as he purposes.
Not in any very modern domestic sense...
but Macbeth has Lady Macbeth as...
somebody who wishes what she regards as good for him...
she thinks it would be a good thing for him to become king...
and in fact also for her to become queen...
and she supports her husband in a totally loyal...
and devoted way.
We will proceed no further in this business.
He hath honoured me of late...
and I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people...
which would he worn now in their newest gloss...
not cast aside so soon.
Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself?
Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now to look so green and pale at what it did so freely?
A very usual way of playing the relationship, these days...
is of Lady Macbeth using her sexuality as a kind of bribe...
to Macbeth to get him to kill Duncan, as it were, for her.
'When thou derst do it, then thou wert a man', she says...
with an implication that one sees, I don't think it's the only way to it...
that if he doesn't kill Duncan for her then...
their sexual relationship will be concluded by her.
From this time such I account thy love.
Art thou afeard to be the same in thine own act and valour...
as thou art in desire?
Wouldst thou have that which thou esteem'st the ornament of life...
and live a coward in thine own esteem, letting I dare not wait upon I would...
- Like the poor cat i'the adage? - Prithee peace.
I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.
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.
Nor time nor place did then adhere, and yet you would make both.
She wants Duncan killed but needs his physical strength to get it done.
He, in a sense, also wants to kill Duncan.
We see that in the soliloquies with which he responds...
to the witches prophecy that he will be king.
He wants that power very, very badly...
but he has the physical strength of doing it obviously because...
Duncan is an old man, or normally portrayed as old...
he's got the physical ability to do it but...
actually he doesn't have the willpower to do it without her...
so they absolutely need each other for this first phase of the play.
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.
If we should fail?
We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking place...
and we'll not fail.
But it's a relationship that breaks down.
After the murder of Duncan...
it begins to go, Macbeth seems to feel it's necessary to act on his own...
and Lady Macbeth fades out of the picture.
From the moment the deed is done...
Macbeth is off stage twelve lines...
and he comes back, in his own words...
'with his eternal fate sealed'.
Twelve lines to seal your eternal fate.
He comes back and from that moment they are not talking the same language.
I mean, he's talking about Macbeth 'has murdered sleep'...
and that 'one cried sleep no more...
and the other answered and he couldn't say amen' and so on.
And then you get Macbeth saying things like...
'Oh there are two lodged together'...
like some little seaside landlady really, all of a sudden...
and he's in the wilds of self-destructive imaginings...
'a little water clears us of this deed'.
A little water clears us of this deed.
How easy is it then...
your conscious has left thee unattended.
Get on your night gown...
unless occasion calls and show us to be watchers.
To know my deed, to best not know myself.
No, no, they are not talking the same language at all at this point...
and of course the next time we see them together...
they are...
a very, very long way apart indeed.
Macbeth has conceived the idea of killing Banquo by this point...
and he tells Lady Macbeth not to bother about it.
There's comfort yet, they are ceilable.
What's to be done?
Be innocent of the knowledge dearest chuck...
till thou applaud the deed.
'Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck...
til you applaud the deed'. What a patronizing thing to say...
don't trouble your pretty little head about it, darling...
and a little bit after that...
he's dismissing everybody.
Let every man be master of his time, till seven at night.
To make society the sweeter welcome will keep ourselves to supper time.
Alone, then God be with you.
'We will be alone til seven at night...
til supper we will keep ourself alone'...
meaning get out of here as well you, Lady Macbeth...
as all these other superfluous courtiers.
But as the play goes on...
Lady Macbeth reacts imaginatively...
in a way which much more resembles the way...
in which Macbeth had worked in the earlier part of the play...
and this is the importance of the sleepwalking scene in the play.
Yet here's a spot.
She speaks.
I'll set down what come from her to satisfy my remembrance.
Out, damn spot...
out I say.
And the sleepwalking scene shows us the subconscience that Lady Macbeth...
we may assume, has had to suppress...
to clamp down on, in the earlier part of the play.
Go to, go to: you have known what you should not.
She has spoke what she should not, I am sure of that.
Heavens knows what she has known.
Here's the smell of the blood again.
All the perfumes of Arabia...
will not sweeten this little hand.
And she, in the sleepwalking scene...
is in the world of wild imaginings that he was...
asking questions like 'Who would have thought the old man...
to have had so much blood in him? '...
a question that comes for her three acts too late, I suppose...
otherwise they wouldn't have gone down the road...
that they have gone down.
It has often been said that Macbeth is the one exponent of evil...
for whom we nonetheless, still hold some sympathy.
We stay with Macbeth from the moment he meets the witches...
to his grisly end on the battlefield...
and despite the fact that he performs a series of wicked deeds...
we never quite lose our fascination for him.
It's a theme which has enthralled writers and critics over the years...
and it's one which is well worth examining in some detail.
They have tied me to a stake, I cannot fly...
But bear-like I must fight the course.
What's he that was not born of woman? Such a one am I to fear, or none.
Macbeth is certainly not a figure of unqualified evil.
In the first place, Shakespeare establishes him immediately...
he comes on as a great warrior and that in itself we, I suppose...
must regard as admirable.
It's not so easy nowadays to admire a person, perhaps, for being a killer.
In battle, and that's part of the moral complexity of the play...
that Macbeth is admired by people in his own society...
and by himself for being able to kill people in battle.
- What is thy name? - Thou'lt be afraid to hear it.
No, though thou call'st thyself a hotter name than any is in hell.
My name's Macbeth.
The devil himself could not pronounce a title more hateful to mine ear.
- No, nor more fearful. - Thou liest, abhorred tyrant!
With my sword I'll prove the lie thou speak'st.
Thou wast born of woman.
Macbeth certainly is tempted to do something evil...
but he knows it's evil. He's a man of moral scruples.
It's true that those scruples are eventually overcome...
but Shakespeare shows us very deeply into the mind of a man...
who is aware of evil, who knows what evil is...
who admittedly is dragged into committing evil...
but does so very much against what must be seen as his better nature...
so Macbeth is admirable in the sense that he is a morally aware figure.
Is this a dagger which I see before me...
the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not and yet I see thee still!
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight?
Or art thou but a dagger of the mind...
a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable as this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going...
and such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o'the other senses...
or else wirth all the rest. I see thee still;
And, on thy blade and dudgeon, gouts of blood, which was not so before.
There's no such thing. It is the bloody business...
which informs thus to mine eyes.
There is everything to admire about Macbeth, I am sure.
He destroys himself, of course, but he destroys himself...
in a state of communication with the audience from beginning to end...
sharing with them at every stage...
his awareness of the consequences of what he is doing...
in language that is astonishingly alive theatrically...
extraordinarily engaging theatrically...
capable of measuring practically the heart beats...
of his own passion and involvement and emotion...
in the experience that he is going through.
Everything to admire in Macbeth...
in terms of his wonderful self-awareness...
a self awareness that doesn't leave him, even at the end of thejourney...
when the consequences of the road that he has taken...
leave him on the edge of the abyss.
This push will chair me ever...
or disseat me now.
I have lived long enough: my way of life is fallen into the sere...
the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age, as...
honour, love...
obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have;
but, in their stead...
curses, not loud...
but deep, mouth-honour...
breath which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not.
Seyton!
What's your gracious pleasure?
- What news more? - All is confirmed, which was reported.
I'll fight till from my bones, my flesh be hacked.
Give me my armour.
In order for a play to be categorized as a tragedy...
it is necessary that the hero be famous or of significant stature.
Secondly he must die because of a series of events...
which he himself has set in motion. There is a danger, therefore...
that tragedy in itself, might seem to be pessimistic by it's very nature.
It could be argued that if these plays culminate in the death of the hero...
that they are simply an exercise in doom and gloom?
The popular consensus is different.
There is something in this play which is unique and powerful.
Tis that noise?
Tis the cry of women, my good lord.
Finally, in that wonderful speech...
the 'tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow' speech...
a very symbolist speech, in that speech there Macbeth is...
expressing a sense of desolation, of meaningless...
which I am sure is not Shakespeare telling us that life is meaningless...
but it's showing the sense of meaningless...
that can come to somebody who has betrayed himself...
betrayed his better self so completely and absolutely as Macbeth has.
Wherefore was that cry?
The queen, my lord, is dead.
She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word:
Tomorrow...
and tomorrow...
and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day...
to the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays...
have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Out, out briefcandle!
Life's but a walking shadow...
a poor player...
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage...
and then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot...
full of sound and fury...
signifying nothing.
Macbeth is, of course, a play about individuals, it's about people...
but it's also a play about the fate of a nation, the fate of Scotland.
You have a sort of savior figure coming up...
in the figure of Malcolm at the end of the play...
so I don't think at all that Macbeth is a pessimistic play in total impact.
Of course, it's a tragedy, a tragedy involves death.
We are, to some degree at least, emotionally involved with Macbeth...
of course Macbeth is not the sympathetic hero that...
well, Shakespeare portrays for example in Hamlet and King Lear.
Therefore, the death of the tragic hero, the tragic figure...
may be welcome to the audience...
which would mean that although it's bad for Macbeth it's not bad for us...
in other words the play has, to a certain degree, a happy ending.
Really in my definition I don't think Macbeth is pessimistic in any...
profound sense at all. There is an awful sense...
of waste, of terror...
of fear about the play...
but Macbeth is absolutely clear...
as he contemplates the murder of Duncan...
that if he goes ahead with it...
he will destroy what he calls his eternal jewel.
I think Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most intense plays...
one of the most theatrically exciting and energized of his plays.
It's so quick, so fast, so inexorable...
in the progression...
from the first idea of power, get power by killing...
killing once, kill again, kill again, kill more, kill more...
and the person who begins entirely one of us...
takes us through the process...
of making those decisions that follow inexorably one after the other.
Once you have done a crime you need to do another to cover it up...
and I think the theatrical intensity in that...
the vividness of the relationship between Macbeth and the audience...
pulls you through those experiences...
in a way which, in a half decent production...
is extraordinarily exciting and involving...
and when Malcolm comes on at the end...
and dismisses the chap he'd just spend the evening with...
as a 'dead butcher' and his wife as 'a fiend-like queen'...
you say, uh, uh, you don't know the half. No, no, it was different from that...
it was more important than that...
it really took us through this experience...
and I think Shakespeare has put his finger on some very raw nerves indeed.
Blow wind, come lack.
At least we'll die with hardness on our back.